Late At Night
So sometimes… late at night… I think about nearly improbable situations. It appears I am not the only one!
Now I say ‘nearly improbable’, since being a physicist, among other things I’ve learned it is possible to throw a ball throw a solid wall. It just would take near elevenity-million-billion tries (on average) to get one through. We later discovered the wall would crumble and the earth would die before we’d have time to make that many tosses at a given wall.
So besides the past, I think about the future, terraformed Mars (unterraformed is useless, I’d just die - end of exercise), an alien space ship, and just about anywhere else outside of here and now.
sloth said,
June 14, 2008
And as a trained statistician I would have to say that while it might be theoretically possible to throw a ball through a solid wall (without blasting a whole in the wall like a cannonball might) it’s not practically possible. That’s a very very very long way down the long tail of the distribution of possible outcomes of throwing a theoretically standard ball at a theoretically standard wall.
We should set that experiment up. Maybe get some grant funding.
I would also like to see what happens when an unstoppable force meets head on with an immovable object. I think this can happen in any reality where people hit each other with magically enchanted weapons. I like to believe that this reality exists somewhere.
I might like to visit it. As long as I have some pretty cool magical items or powerful magical friends that is.
I wouldn’t really want to be a peon in that sort of place.