CalvinDude.com

WARNING: This post contains graphic quotes from court testimony and is not meant to be read by children.

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It is impossible for the Left to get their priorities straight. This has been seen often in the court system where leftists victimize the perpetrator of crimes while accusing the victim of promoting the crime. Most recently, we can see this displayed in the hysterics leftist raise regarding the arrest of admitted pedophile Roman Polanski.

When Polanski was arrested in Switzerland on a 31-year-old warrant, Hollywood elitists went ballistic. A petition has been passed around the Zurich film festival stating, in part, that “Film-makers in France, in Europe, in the United States and around the world are dismayed by this decision.”

Dismayed that an admitted pedophile is arrested?

“It seems inadmissible to them that an international cultural event, paying homage to one of the greatest contemporary film-makers, is used by police to apprehend him.”

And I find it inadmissible that a party in Jack Nicholson’s home, paying homage to massive Hollywood egos, is used by a pervert to rape and sodomize a 13-year-old girl. Somehow, one of these “inadmissible” behaviors is not like the other.

Producer Henning Molfenter told The Hollywood Reporter:

There is no way I’d go to Switzerland now. You can’t watch films knowing Roman Polanski is sitting in a cell 5 km away.

Yes, poor Roman! He’s going through what some Polish film-makers have called a “judicial lynching” all because of something that happened back in the 70s. He’s the victim here. Not the 13-year-old Californian girl.

I mean, really, if you read the testimony of the 13-year-old, it is obvious that Roman Polanski was the true victim.

Q. What did you do then?

A. I went into the bathroom and started drying off.

Q. Did you see Mr. Polanski then?

A. Yes, he came into the bathroom.

Q. What happened at that time?

A. He asked me if I was all right, if my asthma was bad.

Q. What did you say?

A. I said that I wanted to go home because I needed to take my medicine.

Q. What did Mr. Polanski say?

A. He said, “Yeah, I’ll take you home soon.”

Q. What did you do?

A. I told him – I said that I wanted to get – I wanted to go home. I said, “No, I have to go home now.”

Q. What did Mr. Polanski say?

A. He told me to go into the other room and lie down.

…

Q. What did you do when he said, “Let’s go in the other room”?

A. I was going, “No, I think I better go home,” because I was afraid. So I just went and I sat down on the couch.

Q. What were you afraid of?

A. Him.

…

Q. What happened when you sat down on the couch?

A. He sat down beside me and asked if I was okay.

Q. What did you say, if anything?

A. I said, “No.”

Q. What did he say?

A. He goes, “Well, you’ll be better.” And I go, “No, I won’t. I have to go home.”

Q. What happened then?

A. He reached over and he kissed me. And I was telling him, “No,” you know, “keep away.” But I was kind of afraid of him because there was no one else there.

Q. After he kissed you did he say anything?

A. No.

Q. Did you say anything?

A. No, besides I was just going, “No. Come on, let’s go home.”

Q. What was said after you indicated that you wanted to go home when you were sitting on the couch?

A. He said, “I’ll take you home soon.”

Q. Then what happened?

A. And then he went down and he started performing cuddliness.

Q. What does that mean?

A. It means he went down on me or he placed his mouth on my vagina.

…

Q. What did he do when he placed his mouth on your vagina?

A. He was just like licking and I don’t know. I was ready to cry. I was kind of – I was going, “No. Come on. Stop it.” But I was afraid.

Q. And what did he say, if anything?

A. He wasn’t saying anything that I can remember. He was – sometimes he was saying stuff, but I was just blocking him out, you know.

…

Q. How long did Mr. Polanski have his mouth on your vagina?

A. A few minutes.

Q. What happened after that?

A. He started to have intercourse with me.

Q. What do you mean by intercourse?

A. He placed his penis in my vagina.

Q. What did you say, if anything, before he did that?

A. I was mostly just on and off saying, “No, stop.” But I wasn’t fighting really because I, you know, there was no one else there and I had no place to go.

…

Q. At any time did he ask you when your period was?

A. Yes.

Q. When was that?

A. While he was having intercourse with me.

Q. Did he ask you about being on the pill?

A. Yes.

Q. When did he say that?

A. At the same time.

Q. What did he say?

A. He asked, he goes, “Are you on the pill?” And I went, “No.” And he goes, “When did you have your period?” And I said, “I don’t know. A week or two. I’m not sure.”

Q. And what did he say?

A. He goes, “Come on. You have to remember.” And I told him I didn’t.

Q. Did he say anything after that?

A. Yes. He goes, ‘Would you want me to go in through your back?” And I went, “No.”

…

Q. What happened after he says, “Do you want me to – “ was it go through the back?

A. Yes.

Q. What happened then?

A. I think he said something like right after I said I was not on the pill, right before he said, “Oh, I won’t come inside of you then.” And I just went – and he goes – and then he put me – wait. Then he lifted up my legs farther and he went in through my anus.

Q. When you say he went in your anus, what do you mean by that?

A. He put his penis in my butt.

Q. Did he say anything at that time?

A. No.

Q. Did you resist at that time?

A. A little bit, but not really because – (pause)

Q. Because what?

A. Because I was afraid of him.

I must be pointed out that Roman Polanski pleaded guilty to statutory rape. In the above, we see that his victim told him “No” and to stop at every step of the way. And as we all know, “No means no.”

Unless you’re a famous Hollywood director.

Of course, that could move into a “he said, she said” type of event. Perhaps she did come on to him. But that ignores and important fact.

She was thirteen.

Some Polanski defenders have said she looked old for her age. At the time, the age of consent in California was 16 (it’s now 18). Suppose that his victim actually did look like she was 16. Polanski was 44 years old at the time. If you’re 44 years old and you’re having to wonder if the person you’re having sex with might be underage, that ought to be giving you warning bells.

In any case, since this unfortunate “event” occurred, Polanski has been forced to live in “exile” in France. And while that generally would be considered cruel and unusual punishment, his exile included multi-million dollar homes, a wife, children, an Oscar award, fame, and recognition for making slightly better crappy movies than the other crappy movies out there. The only real tragedy is that Polanski couldn’t pick up his Oscar in LA…

Sickening.

At root, this simple fact cannot be lost: Roman Polanski raped a 13-year-old girl. This is not in doubt—he admitted it. I don’t care if he found the cure for cancer instead of just making more money for Hollywood schlubs, he ought to be punished for his crime.

The fact that Leftists are making him into a victim shows just how morally incompetent they are.

In many recent blog exchanges, I’ve engaged Victor Reppert on the question of Calvinism and the problem of evil. During these exchanges, I have pointed out several times that Reppert never bothers to define what “good” or “evil” is, and I’ve also pointed out that there’s really no purpose in discussing “the problem of evil” if one does not define “evil” in the first place.

I would have thought that this would be sort of obvious, especially for Reppert who is a professional philosopher. Apparently, however, Reppert feels no need to actually define his terms—making it very easy for him to engage in sloppy thinking without even realizing it. After all, part of the reason we define terms is so we can spot ambiguity. If you work with an undefined “evil” then it can morph depending on how you feel, such that an opening paragraph and a closing paragraph in a philosophical argument use completely different meanings of the term “evil” and yet seek to come to a logical conclusion. Not defining the terms is, obviously, poor argumentation.

Since Reppert posted another article about Calvinism and the problem of evil without defining his terms, I pointed out once again that he had not bothered to define his terms. In this case we might give him some leeway since he merely reposted an older blog post; however, given the fact that I have asked for his definition several times, I think such leeway is ultimately unjustified. Since his lack of defining terms has been shown many times, he ought to define his terms before posting another thing on the problem of evil from any perspective.

Reppert decided to respond to my request that he define his terms. He decided to first attack my definition of “good” before attempting what he claims is a definition. Unfortunately, rather than actually interact with my entire argument, presented for instance when I examined the Euthyphro Dilemma or my post on the definition of evil, Reppert decided to use quotes from one comment made on this post.

Sadly, Reppert didn’t seem to read his own post, for his first question in response to what I had written was:

At the risk of becoming tiresome, I would have to ask what definition of God we are working with here?

The post I responded to was entitled: “Is there a moral obligation to worship a Calvinistic God? Or any other God for that matter?” Apparently, Reppert didn’t think that maybe I was responding to his first question.

But it’s actually even worse than that, for in that post in response to my previous comments Reppert had already said:

Of course the divine command theory has the problem of identifying God. The standard philosophical definition of God is a being who is worthy of worship in virtue of being omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good. But if “good” means “commanded by God” and “God” means a being who is, among other things, perfectly good, it looks like you’ve got vicious circularity here.

I note in passing that this paragraph is basically the entirety of Reppert’s current response to me too.

If Reppert had bothered to actually read my arguments that I had linked in my comments before the one Reppert pulled out to respond to now, he would have seen that I already addressed the issue of identifying who God is. In my Euthyphro post, I said:

Now one could argue, as the Moral Philosophy site did, that that means that God could command slavery, genocide, holocausts or any number of such things. However, God could not have done so, for then God would have a different nature then the one He has. A different God could have commanded those things and been morally good in doing so; this God (Who happens to be the real God) cannot do so.

Apparently Reppert thinks that when Christians talk about God, they might mean Moloch or Vishnu.

In any case, the God of the Divine Command Theory is pretty obvious to spot. He’s the God who gives the commands. I would have thought that to be self-evident.

Reppert then moves on to the only thing that resembles a definition (and sadly, he does think it is a definition). He writes:

In my view moral obligation is created by the fact that God creates us with an intended purpose which is identical to our good, in that we as humans flourish if we fulfill that purpose.

But this simply fails as a definition of good. This definition would not enable one to examine whether God Himself is good, for good apparently is fulfillment of the purpose for which God created us. Since God did not create Himself, nor did He have a creator, then under such a definition God cannot be good.

Secondly, such a definition of “good” is not equivalent to moral goodness. It is good of me to eat food when I am hungry, but it’s hardly righteous of me to do so. If this is what Reppert implies by the moral obligation portion, then this definition remains unsatisfactory, for it is certain that God designed people needing food, yet who would consider eating breakfast to be morally good? If, on the other hand, Reppert only intends to define only what moral obligation is here, then he’s got the cart before the horse for he is using the term “good” without defining it once again.

Thirdly, and quite damaging to Reppert, in order for us to use “good” in the above, we would have to know for what purpose God designed us. How would we know what that is…without God’s commands? But wouldn’t that make Reppert a closet Divine Command Theorist?

Fourth, and most damaging to Reppert, if God designed someone to be a vessel of wrath, then by the above definition Reppert has said such an intended purpose “is identical to our good,” in which case there is absolutely no reason at all for Reppert to disagree with double-predestination on the grounds that it’s evil. Even by his own (weak) definition above, fulfilling the purpose God intends for us is the definition of good. So when a reprobate fulfills his purpose and burns in hell, that’s good by Reppert’s above definition.

Note that at this point Reppert will be required to insert a qualifier. That qualifier will be: “No, it must be a good intention.” At which point it will be demonstrated that the “fulfilling one’s purpose” definition above does NOT define “good” at all because it already presupposes some other definition of good in “fulfilling one’s good purpose.”

Reppert continues:

Further, God acts in a way that is consistent with the pursuit of that good for all his creatures.

I shudder to think that Reppert seriously is asserting that if God does not act in a way that is beneficial toward man then God is committing evil (see next blockquote too). This is so obviously anti-Christian that I would think it absurd for a professing Christian like Reppert to think that God failing to live up to our goodness is what constitutes evil, rather than us failing to live up to His goodness. But sadly Reppert doesn’t give me confidence that he sees this problem, so I mention it here.

Continuing:

Our good is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, evil is what gets in the way of that.

But again, under such a view, good or evil is meaningless of God. At best, Reppert can only use this to try to establish relative good and evil amongst mankind, but he can never examine the problem of evil for none of his “definitions” of good and evil extend to anything that God can do.

Reppert says:

On Calvinist theory there is a large gap between what makes God’s character good, and what makes us good, a gap that cannot be explained in terms of a difference in God’s wisdom or knowledge.

Well, yes there is a gap because men are sinners and God is not, and therefore what “makes us good” is Christ’s righteousness imputed to us and our unrighteousness imputed to Him, which God does not need to be good.

But more specific to our current discussion, God is the standard of goodness; we are not. Yes, that makes a wide gap. But so what?

Reppert continues:

A native may believe that men in white coats bearing long needles are mean to little kids because he lacks knowledge that the men in the white coats possess, but the standard of goodness for natives and for missionary doctors is the same.

That is because both are human. Apparently, Reppert would put God under the Law, which was implemented as a tutor to bring us to Christ, as if God needed to be brought to Christ.

Reppert continues:

Piper seems concerned to respond to the charge that God’s interest in his glory makes him selfish, since selfishness is a vice amongst humans.

There’s a difference between the one who claims something as his own having not earned it and the one who claims something as his own after having earned it. As a liberal, Reppert will never grasp this. But to help others, the next time Reppert says, “I wrote C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason” I will point out that that’s a pretty selfish thing to say. Who cares if Reppert deserves the title of “the author of the book C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason“? It would be selfish to attribute it to him and not also to me.

Reppert said:

If I were to read on someone’s tombstone “He pursued his own glory single-mindedly throughout his life” I don’t think I would think I was looking at the grave of someone I wish I had known. Glory hogs in basketball don’t help the team win.

But once again Reppert reduces God to a mere man. He never considers that the reason God can be selfish for His glory is because God deserves glory for who He is, and because we are not God we do not have the same right to pursue our own glory.

But even worse, this trivializes what God does for us in the pursuit of His glory. He demonstrates greater love than we ever could by sending His Son to die for us while we are yet sinners; He shows mercy, justice, wrath, and love; He sends rain to the just and unjust alike. And Reppert is upset that God would do this for us with His own glorification—the very thing He most deserves—in mind?

Reppert says:

It seems to me that when you say God gives commands based on his nature, it is pretty clear that we don’t have obligations to reflect all aspects of God’s moral nature in our own conduct.

How could we? It’s pretty clear that no matter how much you love someone, you will never die a substitutionary death for them, imputing their unrighteousness to yourself while imputing your righteousness to them, so that you take upon yourself the sins of another so that they might live. Maybe that’s why God didn’t command it of us, but He did ask it of His Son.

Reppert continued:

We might be rightly wrathful when someone we love is raped, but we aren’t supposed to be looking for or artifically creating opportunities for us to exercise our attribute of being wrathful at evil…

Why look for artificial opportunities when natural occurrences abound? Secondly, so what? Again, we have already established that God’s nature is not ours and that He can do things that we cannot. Why insist that God must be a man rather than God?

Reppert said:

So while divine commands are supposed to be based on the divine nature, the kind of people we are commanded to be fails to fully reflect the character of God, and there are actions on the part of God which are deemed right which, if parallel actions are performed by humans, they would contravene the commands of God.

But this last clause is true no matter what position you take. God does do things that He has commanded us not to do. And the first clause is only a problem if God has commanded us to fully reflect His character. He has not done so. He has given us the commands which we are to follow, and we do not have any right to add to them. For an easy example, God doesn’t command us to take vengeance—He claims that as His own right. Engaging in vengeance surely is an aspect of character, isn’t it?

Apparently, I swim a lot faster when I’m ticked off. I didn’t time how long it took—I’m sure it actually took me longer than average to finish my swim today—but I know the times when I was mad, I was flying.

Why was I mad? Ah, good question. It has to do with the fact that they’ve decided to close all but one lane again. Yes, the ever loving circle swim. Yup, I got there and there was no one else swimming. I did one lap (50 yards) and there was another guy in there. By the time I got back after the second lap, three people in the lane with another waiting.

And the lane next to us…occupied by one kid who was failing his swim test, exactly as he had done roughly a month ago when he yet again took up the entire lane for 45 minutes to not pass his swim test. Seriously, I think the coach needs to recognize the kid can’t yet swim 500 yards without stopping and make him, you know, practice and stuff.

Anyway, that was the first time during my swim that I got miffed and pounded the everlovin’ out of the water at mach 3. The second time was after I got the lane back to myself, and a club came in and just decided that they wanted all three of the end lanes. Nevermind that on the other side of me there were…come to think of it, three lanes! Nope, they wanted the three lanes that included the one I was in and made me get out and head over to the one of the other lanes they could just as easily have used.

I never swam 300 yards as fast as I did at that point.

Anyway, despite all that, and the fact that I know my arms are gonna kill me tomorrow (they already are starting up now), I got 2000 yards. Brining my total to 59,000 and leaving just 1,701,000 left to go.

Added another 2000 yards to my total today, bringing the grand total up to 57,000 yards of swimming and leaving me 1,703,000 to go before I hit my goal. That means I’ve got over 32 miles now, so I’m more than 3.2% of the way to my goal!

First off, the swimming update. I got 2000 yards today, bringing my total to 55,000 yards and leaving 1,705,000 to go.

Secondly, I’ll have to vent a little. Since last Friday, we’ve had a problem with one of the main programs we use at work. The result has been that we’ve been working at less than optimal capacity, although still functioning. During this time, I called the support folks who created the program about 15 times, and did not ever get a live person. Even worse, after the first robot, there wasn’t even an automated voice to complain to.

In addition to those multiple phone calls, I sent another dozen or so e-mails back and forth with one of the guys there. (BTW: he gave me his direct line, and I called it three times with no answer too.) Since they’re located two time zones away, he had me set up a program where he could remote access our server. He did that yesterday, said he thought he found the solution but wanted to test it on their virtual machine on his end first and asked for me to set up a meeting today. I did so. He poked around in our server today, and since I could watch what he was doing it quickly became apparent that he had no idea what that was. Indeed, his “solution” obviously…wasn’t.

I finally decided to go to lunch after an hour of watching him intermittently do stupid things with extended periods of him doing nothing intermixed. When I got back to the building with my lunch, turns out that the power in the building had gone off. It came on about an hour later and I had an email from this guy asking when I could set the connection back up. I told him what had happened and said I could do it then. No response.

So I finally went down to our MIS department and asked one of my friends there (the same one who’s gotten me hooked on Eve-Online, by the way, and he’s our local server guru) if he had any ideas about a different issue that was happening that I thought might be tangentially related to this current problem. Turns out that it wasn’t related, but in the process we began to poke around a few files, found a corrupted database, and he restored it. I went back to test our server and it seemed to start fine but then crashed, re-corrupting the database. So we got an older version of the file (by one day), then I got my former supervisor (who is now merely a co-worker) and said, “I don’t think this database has anything to do with what we’re actively using; it looks to me like a legacy database. Would you agree?” (Note: I didn’t put it in those words since he’s not a techie, but I’m also not at liberty to say exactly what I said due to work confidentiality, but this gets the gist across.) He did. So I said, “I think we’re fine if we go with a really old version of the database if we have to.” In the end, we didn’t—we just used the one-day-old version, but it’s still thrilling knowing that your problem is caused by something you don’t even use anymore.

In any case, at this point I had already figured out exactly what was wrong. Last week, one of our new people had problems with the software, and it turns out it was exactly the same problem that a person two years ago had when she was also a new hire. I was able to identify what the problem was two years ago and our help desk fixed it, but I couldn’t remember what the solution was since it had been two years. Thankfully our help desk logs all those calls, and they pulled up what they had done and fixed the new person’s computer. After that fix, these current problems started, and I theorized that one of the batches our new person had been working on before that computer was fixed was itself corrupt and it was causing the corruption of the rest of the database.

Since we knew which batches had been keyed by the new person on that day, we excluded them from the process the server was supposed to do; it fixed the problem with the server corrupting the database. Then, with backup copies of the database in hand so that we wouldn’t have to keep transferring them from the back-up tape, I worked through until I had found the specific batch causing it to crash and corrupt everything. We can’t repair that batch, but I even found a work-around that will leave us fully functioning with no adverse side effects.

It took just over an hour for me, with the help of two other coworkers, to do what our support couldn’t begin to touch in 15 phone calls, a dozen e-mails, and a wasted week. Yet I still don’t get paid techie money, and somehow I have a feeling we’re going to get billed from the support people even though we solved the problem for them and I personally think that means they should pay my paycheck this week.

So harrumph.

I know the other day I said that I planned to hit 30 miles yesterday. Naturally, since I mentioned something about it, it didn’t happen. My lunch ended up being very disagreeable with me, and since I didn’t want to cause an evacuation of the pool should something unfortunate happen, I didn’t go swimming.

Today, however, I got 1800 yards, which is 200 more than I needed for 30 miles. My total yardage is now 53,000 yards, with 1,707,000 left to go. 53,000 yards = 30.11 miles. *w00t*!!11!!!!eleventy!!1!

Back in November 2007, I watched the special edition of 2001: A Space Odyssey. At the time, I described the movie this way:

First of all, the movie is long and boring. There’s also some monkeys in it, a talking computer that gets disconnected, and it’s really long. Plus boring.

Other than that the movie was…well, underwhelming isn’t weak enough.

In addition to this rather apt description (if I do say so myself), I also mentioned something about the special commentaries they had:

Ask ten people and they’ll give you two hundred answers about what the movie is about. My favorite [is] Camille Paglia, a feminist whacko, who concludes that when Dave turns off HAL 9000, it’s really a depiction of a sociopathic man raping a woman.

I concluded: “if Dave’s killing of HAL 9000 constitutes a metaphor for rape, then the rest of the movie is a metaphor showing that if you leave a woman unsupervised for five minutes she’ll kill everyone on board the ship…”

So why do I bring this up? Because Camille Paglia has a column in Slate, and I’ve read it semi-consistently for about a year now. Despite her overt liberalism and being in the tank for Obama, I…I agree with almost the entirety of her latest column. She still won’t admit that Obama is the problem (it’s always his advisors who make mistakes, and never him for nominating such incompetent people), but the rest of the article savages Democrats. For the record, I even agree with most of what she says about Republicans, although really her paragraph about Republicans seems to be tacked on as an afterthought, as if she realized “Whoa, the leftist nutroots aren’t gonna let me get away with saying this unless I throw in at least SOMETHING about Republicans too.”

Here are some excerpts from her column (be sure to read the whole thing, linked above):

As an Obama supporter and contributor, I am outraged at the slowness with which the standing army of Democratic consultants and commentators publicly expressed discontent with the administration’s strategic missteps this year. … (Who is naive enough to believe that Obama’s [healthcare] plan would be deficit-neutral? Or that major cuts could be achieved without drastic rationing?)

…

At this point, Democrats’ main hope for the 2012 presidential election is that Republicans nominate another hopelessly feeble candidate.

…

An example of the provincial amateurism of current White House operations was the way the president’s innocuous back-to-school pep talk got sandbagged by imbecilic support materials soliciting students to write fantasy letters to “help” the president (a coercive directive quickly withdrawn under pressure). Even worse, the entire project was stupidly scheduled to conflict with the busy opening days of class this week, when harried teachers already have their hands full. Comically, some major school districts, including New York City, were not even open yet. And this is the gang who wants to revamp national healthcare? [Ed.--bold mine]

…

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.

…

Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it’s invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote “critical thinking,” which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms (“racism, sexism, homophobia”) when confronted with any social issue. The Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those clichés that it’s positively pickled.

There is much more there too. It’s hard to believe this is the same woman who obsessed over male genitalia in her review of 2001 (see here–the comparison of turning off HAL to a psychopath raping a woman begins around the 5:55 mark). I mean, after turning that entire movie into one sexist comment after another (sexist in the sense that the bone at the beginning of the film is a phallic symbol (see also: the ship in space) so everything is sexualized), she here points out that that is exactly what you get from academia.

Most of her article could have been written by a conservative. When a leftist feminist starts thinking this way, it doesn’t bode well for Democrats in 2010.

I got 850 yards before my foot cramped up on me. Thankfully, I can swim through a foot cramp easily enough although a leg cramp would probably drown me. The difference is that the foot cramp is the tendon tweaking out, while a leg cramp is the muscle itself. In any case, I finished my swim with the backstroke since I can do that without using my legs at all if I want to (and for some reason, when I’m getting feet cramps, I don’t want to use my legs at all!). So total today was 1,000 yards, bringing my grand total to 51,200 and leaving 1,708,800 left to go.

BTW, 51,200 yards = 29.09 miles. Thus, if all goes well tomorrow, I should hit the 30 mile mark. I only need 1600 yards to do it, and since I aim for 1800 as my lowest (to get a mile) then I should get it.

Since a commenter recently noted that Steve’s been writing almost all of the Triablogue posts of late, I figure I can post this one on the T-Blog even though I’m not quite sure there’s any practical apologetic use for it. On the other hand, it’s stuff that I find “wicked kewl” and therefore is interesting to me. But it’ll have a bit of math in it, so if you don’t like that, well I’m sure Steve will write something new shortly :-)

One of the questions that cosmologists have pondered is whether the universe is open or closed. An open universe would extend infinitely in all directions, whereas a closed universe would have a “boundary.” However, even a closed universe could still be infinite. If space was curved in such a manner that, just like you could always travel East on Earth and return to the point you started from, in the universe you could always pick a direction and travel long enough and you’d return to your starting point. In other words, you could travel infinitely in one direction yet always return to your starting point (this would assume space was curved in the fourth, or higher, dimension that we cannot physically see).

I have to admit that I have a strange attraction to these kinds of loops. I don’t know why, but they appear “pleasing” to me. And therefore I find it no surprise that I’ve discovered one such loop within numbers themselves. In other words, just as we could say that the universe is infinite yet closed because it loops back (assuming that theory is correct, I must add—by far this is not proven!), I say that numbers themselves are infinite and yet closed because they loop back on themselves too.

For a simple proof (simple in that it requires nothing more than algebra), consider the following.

1. The number 1 (one) is that number which has no factors other than 1.

This can be restated as:

1′. If a number n has only 1 as a factor, then n = 1.

This seems fairly straightforward to me, yet by the end of this you’ll see why it might be tempting to deny the above.

Now we need to give one other tidbit of information. I’ll explain it below (and note that because we are dealing with factors, by definition we’re only considering positive values and whole numbers, so all the numbers below are positive integers):

2. Let c be a factor of w.

3. Since c is a factor of w, the next integer greater than w that c can likewise be a factor of is w + c.

Since many people don’t like thinking with letters instead of numbers, let me give a concrete example. Let’s say that c = 7 and w = 21. 7 is a factor of 21, so (2) above is satisfied. (3) states that if 7 is a factor of 21, the next number greater than 21 that 7 could be a factor of would be 21 + 7, or 28. And this is obvious because 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, and 27 cannot have 7 as a factor. Indeed, (3) is really nothing more than restating the definition of a factor.

Now let my proof begin in earnest:

4. Let x be the product of all positive integers. That is x = 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x … x infinity.

5. Since x is the product of all positive integers, then x has all positive integers as factors.

6. Let a be a factor of x.

7. The next number greater than a than will be a factor of x is x + a.

8. Consider x + 1.

9. Let a = 1.

10. a is a factor of x + 1 (per (7)).

11. Therefore, 1 is a factor of x + 1.

12. Let a be greater than 1.

13. a cannot be a factor of x + 1 because the next greatest number than x that a could be a factor of is x + a (per (7)), and a > 1 (per (12)).

14. Therefore, 1 is the only factor of x + 1 (per (11)).

15. Therefore, x + 1 = 1 (per (1′)).

16. If x + 1 = 1, then x = 0 (algebra).

17. But(!) x = 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x … x infinity (per (4)).

18. Therefore, 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x … x infinity = 0.

Now the way that I see it, there are one of two options that mathematicians can take here. Either we can simply rule that when x is 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x … x infinity, then x + 1 is undefined (similar to the way that division by zero is undefined), or we can say that numbers themselves contain some sort of looping mechanism, wherein by the time you reach infinity (the infinity defined as the product of all positive integers), you “loop back” to zero.

You already know which way I’ll go because I like loops. :-) But there is more evidence. I think we can see the “loop back” when looking at a tangent graph. Since I don’t want to throw in Greek symbols here, assume that a is an angle: tan(a) = sin(a)/cos(a). So, whenever cos(a) = 0, tan(a) is undefined because of division by zero.

The tangent graph looks like this:

That’s with the classic orientation, where the origin (where the arms of the graph cross) is located at (0,0). You can tell that since the right-hand portion of the graph is running up toward infinity and the left-hand portion is running down toward negative infinity why there would be a sudden “jump” in the graph at pi/2 (since cos(pi/2) = 0). If the x value is just slightly less than pi/2, you have positive infinity, but if it’s just slightly more than pi/2 you have negative infinity.

Instead of assuming these things just go off to infinity, what happens if we assume that they “connect” at infinity and redraw the graph from that perspective? If I did it correctly (and since it’s late at night right now, I am subject to correction), you’d get something that looks like this:

For this graph, we’re looking at how it relates to infinity. Basically, what I did was assume that the graph “rolls over” at infinity, and made the horizontal axis the point where positive infinity and negative infinity intersect. In essence, you move the lower left to the upper right on the tangent graph and vice-versa. Naturally, the graph is horrifically distorted since it’s representing two infinities on the vertical axis—the lines would actually appear to be virtually synonymous with the vertical axis for most of the trip, with the hook out at the very end; but I think this is sufficient to at least give a faint picture. (Note: technically, the origin on this graph would still be undefined, since the origin in this view is the point where the division by zero takes place.)

In any case, note that this graph would continue in sequence, just like the tangent graph does. That means that you could print out a row of these figures. The interesting thing about them is that you can then take the top of the graph and “fold” it down so that the 0s appear on the same line (the graph would now be on a donut-shaped paper rather than a 2D screen). At this point, the line graphed would look continuous (bearing in mind that at the origin of each cross point (multiples of pi/2) the graph would still be undefined).

This would imply that the graph, represented flat on a 2D surface, takes on the characteristics of a bent 3D object. Though only two dimensions are present in the tangent graph, there is an assumed third dimension where the graph “rolls over” from positive to negative infinity. In this curved 3D representation, the graph no longer has an infinite jump from positive to negative infinity, but rather that jump is a mere point, more akin to switching from positive to negative numbers at 0.

In short, it would be a curved space of infinite length, curved in a higher dimension.

This might actually affect physics. If it is true that math on the number line itself assumes a higher dimension of curved “space” then one could question whether that means reality really is curved, or whether it means that our math will always make it appear to be curved regardless of what it really is. In other words, is the fact that the math involved in physics seems to indicate a curved universe the result of the way that the universe actually is, or is it because the only method by which we have of probing the universe on such levels is mathematically, and math itself is curved? To use an analogy, suppose you use a level and see that a board appears warped; is the board warped or is the level warped? If we define the level as being level, then the board is warped; but what if we begin to see evidence that the level itself shows a curve?

What I give form to in daylight is only one percent of what I’ve seen in darkness.

–M.C. Escher
(quoted in Gardner, Martin. The Colossal Book of Mathematics W.W. Norton & Company. New York (2001). p. 212)

And of course I can’t quote Escher without playing Escher’s World:

Lyrics by Steve Taylor:

Through the passing strange I fell
To the wide-eyed opposite
My agenda was hidden well
Now I don’t know where I left it

I woke up in Escher’s World today
My mother said it was okay

Up’s down, down is out, out is in
Stairways circle back to where you’ve been
Time falls, water crawls, are you listening?

Did you ever chase your tail
Through a maze of exit doors?
I have seen the light by Braille
I have blazed the road before us

We’re walking in Escher’s World again
Rise up you nimble-minded men

Birds roar, lions soar, sheep are cruel
Snails pace, papers chase, midgets rule
Stuffed shirts, status hurts, we ain’t foolin’
We ain’t foolin’, we ain’t foolin’.

Let the sequels have their day
Yeah, the remake’s on its way

We’re living in Escher’s world it seems
We’re wide awake within our dreams

Socks hop, lemons drop, butter flies
Tough wimps, sado-shrimps, mojos rise
Pips squeak, widows peek, are you surprised?

Oh, living in Escher’s world, oh.

We’re living in Escher’s world it seems
We’re wide awake within our dreams

Birds roar, lions soar, sheep are cruel
Snails pace, papers chase, midgets rule
Stuffed shirts, Ethel Mertz, we ain’t fooling

Socks hop, lemons drop, butter flies
Tough wimps, sado-shrimps, mojos rise
Pips squeak, widows peek, are you surprised?

Up’s down, down is out, out is in
Time falls, water crawls, are you listening?
|: Stairways circle back to where you’ve been :|