crazy man crazy

Math is certainly abstract in that numbers don’t really exist. You can have three ravens and three monkeys, but you can’t have a three. As long as you use the processes of addition and multiplication and exponentiation you are doing just fine, add two integers, multiply two integers, or take an integer to a higher power, you get an integer, and everything is fine.

It’s when you try to undo those operations that you get in trouble. If I have five ravens and you take away two then I have three and that is fine. But what if you take away five? Well that can’t really happen, but maybe it could sort of. Maybe I could owe you three ravens, that’s debt, something we understand, so then we admit the whole shadowland of negative numbers. They are not so bad, they look like the regular numbers except for that minus sign, and you can add and subtract and multiply them just like regular numbers. That thing where when you subtract a negative number you have to make it a positive, and when you multiply two negative numbers is a little odd, but if you just remember the rule and don’t think about it too much.

And you have to admit zero then, but that doesn’t seem like a problem, he seems like a regular guy, we have all known nothing for all of our lives. But then when you do division things get bad. It’s my contention as a former substitute teacher that kids don’t really begin to hate math until they come to fractions. Too add or subtract them you have to do all this multiplying and when you divide them you have to remember which one to turn upside down, and don’t even get me started with long division.

So it’s a lot more work, but if you are willing to do it and pay attention, everything still works. Until your old pal zero wanders into the lower section of the fraction and all hell breaks loose. Like satan summoned there stands infinity. No, no, the elders say, there is no such thing as infinity. You can think of any number and there is always one greater than that one, but that doesn’t mean there is infinity. Yes it does. Shut up!

There is always that thought that we understand the universe through logic, but what if it just appears that way, the way that the sun appears to circle the earth, and there is some other system that explains everything, but since logic is the only thing we know how could we ever understand anything else?

And what else could there be? Can you imagine a universe where 2 plus 2 equals three?

All the subatomic particles are like abstract entities, the only way we know them is through equations. An electron has mass. A photon is a particle, or a wave, depending on how you look at it, of pure energy.

If ISIS had just killed those guys, that would have been terrible, but that would be that. But because they beheaded them on YouTube we are marching off to war. We are expecting people who don’t like us to do things we want them to do. We are fighting on the side of the hated Assad and the distrusted Iranis, but we don’t admit it. It’s pure nuts. I like to think that my prez is just doing this to keep from getting clobbered in the polls and is intending to weasel his way out somehow. That is the best I can hope for.