[ExI] puzzle

spike at rainier66.com spike at rainier66.com
Sat Aug 1 22:33:20 UTC 2020


 

 

> On Behalf Of Mike Dougherty via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] puzzle

 

On Mon, Jul 27, 2020, 9:23 PM SR Ballard via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> > wrote:

Ah yes, the good old “it’s being filled with both air and water!”

 

>…Or the glass is already 50% volume with rocks or sand (small rocks) or mercury or any other displacement that prevents more than 50% water to fill the glass regardless of how much more water is available.

 

>…We could probably get spike to figure out how much energy it would take to completely separate the water via electrolysis at exactly the output of the faucet…  Mike

 

Mike, you are too kind, sir.  By the way you suggested separating the water (electrolysis) the energy requirement is indistinguishable from zero: you would separate water from sand or rocks by filtration, and water won’t mix with mercury.

 

I was reading way too much into BillW’s puzzle and proposed a number of absurdities.

 

However, having a coupla weeks away from the internet allowed me plenty of time to think up new ones.  Like crises, one should never allow perfectly good absurdities to go to waste.

 

The whole “glass half full” part was really causing me to go off on a tangent.  An actual glass at half its capacity is presented to the natural optimist and the natural pessimist, and you know what comments they will make, but if we take the pessimist and continued to fill to the top, perhaps she would then argue it is half full, since it was half empty before.  

 

Meanwhile, the natural optimist would view the glass under an enthusiastic faucet with its wildly churning and sloshing contents, and argue that it is full: as full as it is ever going to get.  So no worries, turn off the water, gurgle that down, put the glass under there again with the faucet full throttle, gurgle the second one down, two half glasses, done.

 

So it is all in the way you look at it I suppose, but we can perhaps come up with a kind of game or contest whereby we allow one to set the faucet at any flow rate, then shut it off suddenly, see who can get that glass closest to half its capacity.  Then we could do all manner of fun derivatives with that notion such as related events where we shoot for 60% capacity or maximizing the contents with the glass tilted at pi radians, call it the Glass Half Full Olympics.

 

Then the neighbors would make such comments as OK, that’s it, this quarantine crap hasta stop, spike is losing his damn mind.

 

I would argue to the contrary, but it would be to no avail of course.  It is the nature of psychoses: the more one claims to not have them, the more we convince others we do.  Most annoying is this.

 

Of all the things I missed while camping, it was the clever silliness found on this site, including the clever silliness I would have written had I not been camping away from it all.

 

Things feel different out there.  The wilderness isn’t experiencing a culture war.

 

spike

 

 

 

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