[QUOTE=Mindfield]
Have you ever seen a paper mache’ bust made of newsprint and paste before it’s all painted? That’s what this guy’s thought process looks like. It’s beyond stream-of-consciousness, it’s like all of his thoughts got horny and started humping the everliving crap out of each other in a giant twitching neuronal dogpile until this explosive tangle of verbal ejaculate spilled out onto his keyboard.
I’m going to discontinue this line of thought, because it frightens me.
[/QUOTE]
That’s an excellent description-you nailed it.
(Oh, and sorry for the double posts-I should have combined them, I don’t know what I was thinking.)
Or else the reply was so mind-shatteringly terrifying–an eldritch abomination of an e-mail, filled with uncanny non-Euclidean logic–that you’ve blotted the entire episode from your mind.
Has anybody pointed out to the guy that it’s almost never 24 hours between sunrises and sundowns? For instance, today to tomorrow, in Berlin, it’s 23:59 between sunrise and sunrise (8:14 to 8:13), and 24:01 between sundowns (16:12 to 16:13). This of course gets worse the closer you get to the polar regions, where there may be months between consecutive sunrises and sundowns…
Actually, I think he’s got a point. Different cultures define the start of day in different ways. In some, it’s midnight to midnight. In some it’s dawn to dawn. In some, it’s sunset to sunset. I don’t know if any measure noon to noon, though.
A long time ago I had an email exchange with Gene Ray over a similar topic. I had also argued that his selection of four was arbitrary and that one could add any arbitrary number of meridians and define days. Thus, using his logic, there was actually an infinite number of days in a day. I don’t remember what his response was specifically, but I think it was just that I’d been educated stupid and deceived by the one-day thing or whatever. I did at least get him to take his obnoxious proof that pi wasn’t pi where all he was really doing was using the value of pi/4 and then multiplying by pi and 4 to magically get the same answer. Really, I think it all just comes back to him have some kind of numerological obsession with the number 4.
