Saturday 18 May 2013

Postultimate

It is here!
This product is not the same as its previous dozen predecessors.
…It is the Ultimate version.
The word ultimate is generally solely used for exaggerations: it means that there is nothing after it, so if a new product truly is ultimate it would mean either the manufacturers will go bust or there will be a catastrophic societal collapse where the manufacturing technologies will be lost. However, doomsday never comes, instead the version afterwards gets a new name… this would make it a “postultimate” version, which is quite paradoxical.
However, it is fully understandable concept and it turns out to be great for making ridiculously nerdy hyperbolae. Eg. "That new Justin Beber album is the postultimate in awesomeness." See?

Tuesday 19 February 2013

Unstoppable force?

In a very cerebral book I came across the "irresistible force paradox" (wiki: link) —okay, it was a Superman graphic novel, but still.
The paradox asks what would happen if an unstoppable force encounters an unmovable object.
Classically, the problem has no solution as the definition of each object violates the definition of the other.
Whereas, Kal-El's answer was they surrender, a rather witty, but nonsensical answer.
Another solution I can think up is that the unstoppable force are neutrinos, which don't interact much with matter, making them pretty unstoppable "force", but changing what the force is made of is cheating.
Maths has improved since classical times, we now have words for any big number (million, billion or even trimilliquinquigentisedecillion, i.e. 10^3519) and we now know that Euclid's did not get all his axioms right.  One such mathematical improvement is transfinite numbers. The underlying concept of Cantor's transfinite numbers is pretty powerful, namely infinite values can come in different sizes, with some infinities bigger than others.
So the above problem in this light is obvious, namely that as no finite force can stop the unmovable object, whereas no finite force can move the unstoppable force: the one that will win is the bigger transfinite value. Those silly Greeks, ae?