woodenghost [comrade/them]

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2024

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  • “Oh, this’ll be the last time with you on a baseball field.”

    “Oh, don’t worry, there’s still plenty of thyme and I’ll have any thistle be dealt with first thing tomorrow.”

    “You’ll have what?”

    “I’ll tell our groundskeeper. He knows how to deal with them. You should hire him for your garden, you can see what marvelous work he’s done here.”

    “This’ll be the day. I can see it everywhere.”

    “Only until tomorrow.”


  • “Okay, nevermind, we’ll get back to it. For now, what’s that growing around second base?”

    “That’s a big dill.”

    “Well yes, obviously, it’s almost obstructing the field. But what herb could be such big a deal that you let it grow on a baseball field?”

    “It sure is.”

    “Never mind, we don’t have time for this. Can you get me back the time I lost on this bullshit?”

    “Oh, you want thyme? Then let’s go to third base.”

    “I just said, we don’t have time for this!”

    “Well that’s why we should go to third base. We have plenty of thyme, you’ll see!”

    “No we don’t, I just told you! We should head back to first base.”

    “Back to witch grass?”

    “I don’t care about grass, I just want to go back to first base.”

    “Yes. Witch grass grows around first base.”

    “I don’t care about which grass grows there, I’ll tell you what, you decide to which base we’ll go next, as long as we keep the time in mind and pass by the big deal on second base. So if we do that, we’ll get to which?”

    “That’s the first time you got it right!”





  • Math: here’s a theorem, if it’s proven, it’s true until someone finds an error in the proof or in the computer program or its compiler, if it’s a computer assisted proof and the compiler can never be proven not to be flawed (Turing). Or until someone finds an error in one of the assumptions or in their proofs. Or until the axiomatic system used is proven inconsistent and it can never be proven not to be inconsistent (Goedel). Or until you decide you need to work in a different system. Or technically if we stay in the system, but language or culture shifts and we change what we mean by the specific words and symbols used in the theorem.

    Even if it’s true, unless you’re a platonist, it’s not true in the sense that it corresponds to a factual state of affairs in the world (there are no triangles). It’s only true within the system you’re using, just like the sentence: “Sherlock Holmes lives in Baker Street” is only true in the fictional world of the novels by Arthur Conan Doyle. But in a more redundant way, because unlike novels, math statements are tautologies, reducible to a small number of axioms or axiom schemes, while novels don’t follow necessarily from, say, the table of contents.