to think about when smoking pot,
when crazy shit pops in your head,
filling up your zone of thought.
Zeno’s paradox is cool
to think about when shitting. Hey,
you really think those ancient Greeks
did not come up with it this way?
Zeno’s paradox is cool
to talk about with a geek friend:
philosopher, mathematician,
dude the fun will never end!
Zeno’s paradox should not
be used in court, don’t be an ass.
Don’t mention it in your sex trial,
or better yet – just don’t harass!
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For those unfamiliar with Zeno’s paradoxes, the dichotomy paradox states that a runner (not just any runner, Achilles!) racing on a track will never reach his destination. That’s because that in order to reach his destination, he must first reach half the distance to his goal. But in order to reach half his distance, he must first reach a quarter of his distance, and in order to do that he must reach 1/8th of his distance, and before that 1/16, and so forth. Since there are an infinite number of steps the runner has to make, he will never be able to achieve his task.
The resulting sequence can be presented as {1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, …}.
How do we resolve the paradox? Well, Zeno assumed that the sum of the infinite series that he presented is infinite. But today, thanks to calculus, we know that the above geometric series converges to 1 (here’s the proof). But Zeno lived in the 5th century BC, and math managed to handle these kind of convergence problems only in the late 19th century (thanks to Cauchy and Weierstrass). Before that, some other interesting solutions were proposed. The one which I found most interesting (*) is Hermann Weyl’s proposal, which stated that you cannot assume that any between any two points in space there is always another point.
(*) The reason I found it interesting is that when I myself sat to think of possible solutions to the paradox, this was the first one that I came up with 🙂
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Here’s another comic about philosophy.
And here’s another comic about sexual harassment.
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There are an infinite number of tasks that are needed in order to click that follow button on social media – Instagram or Twitter.
