And kick and twirl and turn and jump

And jump and turn and twirl and kick.

Another of Zeno’s paradoxes today. I have no idea what the paradox is, but the book has pictures. The top line of dancers moves to its left. The middle line of dancers stays where it is. The bottom line of dancers moves to its right. They all end up aligned with each other. It might be some sort of paradox about relative motion or something to do with Zeno’s paradox about space and continuous vs. discrete space.

According to the book, the top line will’ve passed twice as many members of the bottom line (and vice versa, I assume) as it will’ve passed of the inert middle line of dancers. I think I can see what Zeno’s getting at. It seems to be like a question I’ve had about spinning disks. The further from the centre a point on a disk is, the faster it goes to complete a circuit. But that means that at the very centre of the disk, there’s no movement at all.

But in that case, the points on the edge of the disk are the same distance from the point of origin. With two lines of dancers, the distance would shorten and then lengthen as they pass the central point. The dancers at the end points will be the furthest from each other, but if both lines only have to line up with the end points of the middle line, they will still only move the same distance horizontally. There are really two axes of movement within space here. The dancers move physically along the x-axis while the spatial distance changes along the y-axis.

No, I don’t know what that actually means if anything.


I can’t turn the page.

Problem 30 is that I can’t, at least in Zeno’s limited conception of the matter, turn the page because, allegedly, I can’t pass through an infinite number of points in a finite amount of time. But in my universe, I can turn the page and do.

And we find that tomorrow’s problem is about the value of art.

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