Welcome to a somewhat edited GLoSsary of Dimensions (20241102)

Smooth affirmative.

Please_Wait Please be patient and bear with us, a red light is ON.

See Naught, nought and zero.

Please_Yourself. Amber, blue, pink, yellow or some other colour, anyway, neither red nor green.

Please_Edit Go ahead, change the world we're rooting for you. Signals are clear, HAPPY = ON, colour = green.

See one.

Answer.

Fixed, not free, independent of any relation with some other frame.

The only absolute thing the editor is aware of is the absolute zero of temperature (0 K), which is about -273.15 ºC.

Leibniz's argument(s) as to why neither space nor time can be absolute entities (quoted in Smolin, Lee The Life of the Cosmos (1997))

I am granted this important principle, that nothing happens without a sufficient reason why it should be thus rather than otherwise ... I say then that if space were an absolute being, there would happen something for which it would be impossible that there should be a sufficient reason, and this is contrary to our axiom. This is how I prove it ... if we suppose that space is something in itself, other than the order of bodies among themselves, it is impossible that there should be a reason why God, preserving the same positions for bodies among themselves, should have arranged bodies in space thus, and not otherwise, and why everything was not put the other way round (for instance) by changing east and west.

Suppose someone asks why God did not create everything a year sooner; and that the same person wants to infer from that that God did something for which there cannot possibly be a reason why he did it thus and not otherwise, we should reply that his inference would be sound if time were something apart from temporal things, for it would be impossible that there should be reasons why things should have been applied to certain instants rather than others, when their succession remains the same. But this itself proves that instants apart from time are nothing, and that they only consist of the successive order of things.

Changes the status quo; makes a real & exciting difference.

Something which acts, possibly physically, in response to some instruction.

Good Advice is Dear
Poor Advice is hard to tell Apart
Honest Advice is Clear
Follow Advice from your own 'Art

Natural attraction between two or more things.

Once more, another time.

A very large amount of gas maintained by the Earth around herself with her gravity. According to Empedocles (ca. 494 - 434 BCE) one of the four elements. It is important to realise that a breath is made of this.

Everybody or everything.

An absolutely amazingly appropriate alliterative annotation arguably amusing almost anybody allegedly.

SI base unit of electric current.

& or *, Logical operator requiring that both operands on either side of it be true for the resulting expression to be true.

Difference between two directions most naturally measured in radians. Strangely enough, angles can be measured more accurately than anything else.

Adding an extra dimension will yield a solid angle measured in steradians.

Response to a question.

Against, opposed to, or generally tending to neutralise that which comes after.

Part of a continuous curve.

The apparent path of a celestial body through the sky.

In the sense of "arch" the span of a bridge.

Theory and practice of editing. Human (as opposed to natural) intervention supposedly for the satisfaction of aesthetic sentiments.

Absolutely_Simplified_System

A legend!ary Computer [rumoured to have been] invented by R C & al. It has only 2 clear instructions:-
Please_Edit     1
Please_Wait     0

Please_Yourself is a 3rd instruction which is vague.

In the animal world, a four legged beast of burden unfairly said to be very stupid or obstinate.

If you dare good luck; else take courage.
If you did, were you successful?
And if not, try again.

An accessory or property of something. An aspect.

Consciousness of the state of part of the world. Second enemy because awareness of some or all of the misery in the world can lead to a defeatist total paralysis or inaction due to cynicism.

Postulate. A statement whose truth is either supposed to be self-evident or to be assumed.

Five axioms (postulates) for plane geometry, stated in terms of constructions in the first book of the Elements by Euclid

1. To draw a straight line from any point to any point.
2. To produce (extend) a finite straight line continuously in a straight line.
3. To describe a circle with any centre and distance (radius).
4. That all right angles are equal to one another.
5. [The parallel postulate]: That, if a straight line falling on two straight lines make the interior angles on the same side less than two right angles, the two straight lines, if produced indefinitely, meet on that side on which the angles are less than two right angles.

Five axioms of arithmetic proposed by Giuseppe Peano also known as the Dedekind–Peano axioms or the Peano postulates

1. Zero is a number.
2. Every natural number has a successor, which is also a natural number.
3. Zero is not the successor of any natural number.
4. Two natural numbers with the same successor are equal.
5. If a property holds for zero and also for the successor of every number for which it holds, then it holds for all natural numbers.

Message understood by everybody, no matter what languages they may not understand.

Balanced means equal on both sides, for or against, not biased.

Now somewhat dated, a measuring instrument that can show two items have the same weight. It was very important in the development of chemistry (physical and otherwise).

A very simple, but real idea. Here's a babelgram for you:
A banana is something everyone understands, it is simple, tangible …, and you can hold it in you hand..

Accordingly this sign was used to name the famous Pak'n Banaan Rekenkunde or Banananarithmatic.

Like Bistronomics a powerful form of mathematics. It is based entirely on the idea of a  banana, which is very handy. Our hands are very handy jUst because we have rebellious anti-fingers called thumbs.

Postulate:
thumbs rule!

Wherever easiest follow your favourite rule of thumb.
Advice:

Never lose sight of the reality of whatever you are trying to calculate. When the numbers get too complicated and distract you from your goal, throw away significant digits.

Example: The speed of light is about one nano (10^-9) metre per second

An aspect of this method is that it provides very easily (by imagination if you like) approximately the correct answer.

The square root of 2 is given as ~1.5, (about one and a half) following this method.

No. You're past that already. Now try to finish the job.

Slightly salty red fluid essential to the smooth operations of human and animal life. The red colour is due to four iron atoms in each of the large haemoglobin molecules in the myriads of red blood cells.
Blood is an excellent foaming agent. blood from slaughtered cattle, bereft of its redness is used in some fire extinguishers.

Hopefully a valuable gift. When these are being burned and when access to them is being restricted then it is time for action as danger lurks.
This GLoSsary is said to be part of the-Book.

Too simply stated, (gauge) bosons are particles that transmit forces.

• gluons, rendered in the plural because there are eight different kinds of these massless vector bosons (compelled to move at the speed of light but confined within a hadron) that mediate the strong nuclear force.

• graviton, has never been detected and is not likely to be anytime soon. Nevertheless, many highly regarded savants are convinced this massless spin 2 boson mediating gravity must exist.

• higgs, singular because this massive extremely short-lived scalar boson is named after Peter Higgs. Confirmed at CERN in 2012. As far as the editor is aware this is the only member of the particle zoo with zero spin.
  

• photon, massless, spin 1, mediating electromagnetic interactions.

• W⁺ | W^- | Z⁰
  These weak or intermediate vector bosons mediate the weak interaction.

An important start to the day.

The way to cross an obstacle (a river, a railway, a ravine, etc.) often allowing traffic along the obstacle to continue without hindrance.

The place from where operations are directed on a ship.

In network topology a connection between two distinct networks.

An entirely random movement, this way and that, in a liquid or in a gas. It was first observed and described by the botanist Robert Brown who saw strange movements of tiny pollen particles in water with a microscope in 1827. This strange jerky motion has since been explained as being due to the smoke, dust or other small particles being bumped into all the time by the very much smaller and much more numerous molecules of the liquid or the gas, sometimes a few more hitting it from one side, causing the fleck of dust to move in the opposite direction, and at other times a few more may nudge it from another side.

{ Complex Numbers }

C: coulomb

c: Velocity or speed of electromagnetic radiation  (like light etc.) in a vacuum equal to (approximately) 299 792 458 metres per second. It is believed that nothing material could ever exceed this universal speed limit. Nor can possibly immaterial information travel faster than the speed of light.

SI base unit of luminous intensity. It measures the power of light per unit solid angle. However, the light is in theory restricted to the octave humans can typically perceive with wavelengths ranging from 380 nanometres (deep purple) to 750 nanometres (dark red). In fact, a flavour of green (540 T herz) is specified:

The candela (cd) is the luminous intensity, in a given direction, of a source that emits monochromatic radiation of frequency 540 x 10¹² herz and that has a radiant intensity in that direction of 1/683 watt per steradian.

Gas

I would say natural attribute.

Handedness as in right-handed versus left-handed. A left-handed glove turned inside-out becomes a right-handed glove. There is a mirror symmetry between left- and right-handed instances of things that are otherwise the same: shoes; screws; amino acid molecules, sugars as well as many other biochemical molecules.

Don't buy it if it is nasty as well, unless it is usable in a deformative way.

Visual sensation. In a dull world this does not exist. Neither in one which is only black and white. In our world, when there is enough light we can see colours, like spring green leaves or a blood red setting Sun .

There are two different kind of light receptors in the eye, named after their shapes: rods and cones. The cones, which are able to respond to light of different colours predominate in the "yellow" area of the retina directly opposite the lens and close to the "blind spot" where the optic nerve leaves the eye. The rods which can only provide black-grey-white information are more common in the rest of the eye and are responsible for peripheral vision. The rods are much more sensitive (to light) than the cones and this is the reason why we can not see colours in near darkness.

Red, green and blue light can be mixed to produce virtually any colour. A old fashioned colour TVs for example, only had dots of these these three so-called primary colours on their screens.

A quantum number of quarks.

Any statement that is of no consequence at all to the compiler. In the natural language an opinion, explanation or criticism about an idea, a book or other text, an event or a state of affairs.

The end of something. If that something is thought, the conclusion is said [by Ludwig v. Wittgenstein] to be false if it arrests the motion of the train of thought.

State of awareness.

Nagel, Thomas (1974) What is it like to be a bat?

Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon. It occurs at many levels of animal life, though we cannot be sure of its presence in the simpler organisms, and it is very difficult to say in general what provides evidence of it. (Some extremists have been prepared to deny it even of mammals other than man.) … But no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism.

Contrived or artificial structure.

To restrict, encompass, hold, own, include. Also see trivial.

Content to contain.?

The study of the universe as a whole, from beginning to end, from the smallest to the largest scales.

C, SI derived unit of electric charge. You would have 1 coulomb (of negative) charge if you managed to collect some  62 500 000 000 000 000 000 electrons.

Concept from olden days, mostly faulty like honour.

Something that might perhaps be replaced by running away (Escaping) quickly. Good luck to you!

Look out! Be careful, there is a possibility of harm, something is not safe.  Without good luck nasty things could happen.

According to the Perimeter Institute's video The Future of Cosmology Explained | Cosmology 101 Episode 10

But there are still mysteries.
Our best most successful model of the universe backed up by decades of data rests squarely on the pillars of dark matter and dark energy, two of sccience's most confounding enigmas.

A finite extent of some non-random signal.

End of life or perhaps prelude to a fresh one.

The fourth enemy.

To give a definition of definition is more difficult than you might think. (Fortunately this is an annotation on - and not a definition of definition).

Something that may help you when you face death. Something that will certainly help you if you are threatened by those who may have more force but less dignity than you do.

To open a fresh dimension vary something previously fixed.

Otherwise something at right angles to all other dimensions.

In physics length, mass, time.

Which way? Together with a number this gives you a vector. The answer together with speed is velocity.

A usefully structured list of info items.

Easy way for weights.

A flavour of quark.

Symbol representing energy.

e stands for Euler's number ~= 2.71828

August life supporting body we are not qualified to leave just yet.

Ground or soil can also be referred to as earth.

According to Empedocles (ca. 494 - 434 BCE) one of the four elements.

Eh?! Start_Word. To change, add, append, amend, correct, delete, embellish, or generally beautify any text or other data.

Essential or basic member of a structure.

In foundational mathematics a constituting member of a set.

In Chemistry, 92 basic (natural) substances that can be arranged in the periodic table of elements.

IF NOT THEN

Completely unoccupied. Vacant.

Between something and a fresh something, sometimes between something and nothing.

The very last word that is of any consequence [to the compiler] in a Pascal program.

Opponent or antagonist who means you harm.

Story of the four enemies

1. The first enemy is Fear, because Fear can lead to inaction due to lack of courage. If one can face Fear and nevertheless act, by way of reward comes the second enemy: Awareness.
2. Awareness is an enemy because one can be overwhelmed by the enormity of all the trouble in the world again leading to inaction. If one is aware and yet acts in good faith then by way of reward one gains Power.
3. Power (one's own) is the third enemy because it can very severely damage one's karma: Mr Putin Voldemort has a great deal of Power but I should not like to swap my karma for his. If one can avoid being destroyed by (one's own) Power, then the time will come sooner or later to meet the fourth enemy:
4. Death.

Capacity to do work, measured in joules. According to modern insights in physics, an un-condensed form of matter. shows just how much energy E would be equivalent to some mass m, c being the speed of light.

Nature or main quality of an idea or existence.

Extract.

Well, mmhm…, Marvin, the paranoid android, had to wait for more than for ever and look at what that did to him; & I'm certainly not going to keep on going jest like that so you can see what forever is.

Did you ever … ? = Did you once or more times …

All of us, all of you and all of them.

All of this, all of that and all of any other.

X is an un-known quantity. A spurt is drip under pressure.

To select ideas from a text or squeeze juice from a fruit. The resulting product is also called an extract.

Compressed data is restored to its former glory by extracting it from the (compressed) file.

frequency.

\

TRUE NOT; \ Humans might say:"Not true".

\

\ my very first real Forth definition.

A hyped-up version of something or somebody.

The first enemy. Fear may harm your dignity and will seriously cloud your awareness.

Too simply stated, fermions are particles that make up matter. Each individual fermion takes up space that cannot be occupied by another identical fermion with the same quantum states.

• quarks
  • up
  • down
  • charm
  • strange
  • top
  • bottom
• leptons
  • electron
  • electron neutrino
  • muon
  • muon neutrino
  • tau
  • tau neutrino

A space in which every point is associated with one or more vector (or tensor) or scalar values. A disturbance of these values often propagates through the field as a wave.

A collection of data somehow belonging together and accessible under one name in a (computer) system.

According to ancient Greek insights one of the four elements.

James Lovelock remarks in GAIA that it is remarkable that it is possible to light a fire almost everywhere on Earth due to the improbably high concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere.

Without fixed shape.

Is it folly to interrupt yourself?

Obstinate attachment to, or pursuit of a disserviceable goal. Child of power.

A very stupid act.

From Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly.

In Gotham once the Story goes
A set of Wise-acres arose
Skill'd in the great Politic Wheel
Could pound a Magpie, drown an Eel
With many things of worthy Note
At present far too much to quote
Their District was both Far and Wide
Which not a little swell'd their Pride
But above all that they possessed
Was a fine Goose by all confessed
A RARA AVIS to behold
Who laid each day an Egg of Gold
This made them grow immensely rich
Gave them an avaritious Itch
The case belongs to many more
They not contented with their Store
Would Methods vague and strange pursue
To make the Harmless Bird lay TWO
This glorious Purpose to obtain
About her Neck they put a Chain
And more their Folly to compleat
They stampt upon her Wings and Feet
But this had no Effect at all
Yet made her Struggle Flutter, Squall
And do as any Goose would do
Who had her Liberty in view
When One of more distuinguish'd Note
Cried D*** her Let's cut her Throat
They did, yet not an Egg was found
But Blood came pouring from the Wound

Library of Congress, United States of America

Important nourishment needed to sustain the fawce of operators. "A nutricous meal, prepared and taken under pleasant circumstances" is food.

Famous un-hyped computer language [ it is rumoured ] that there are several classes of people in relation to:= 

• Those who love Forth. There may also be some people who might think that Forth could be very interesting.
• Those who hate Forth.
• Those who have never even heard of Forth.
• Those who cannot help getting involved with Forth.

Unbounded [as in gas = chaos ], able to move at will. Gratis!
The best way to get free is to open a fresh dimension.

How often something happens in a certain time interval.

New and exciting, not old & stale.

One of the fundamental humours needed to sustain the action of operators.

Symbol for the universal constant of gravitation or gravity, which is oddly enough not as accurately known as some other fundamental constants found in tables at the back of erudite books on physics. Recent measurements have yielded the value 6.67259x10^-11 m³ kg^-1 s^-2.

Theory put forward by James Lovelock

which sees the evolution of life and the evolution of the Earth as a single, tightly coupled process from which the self-regulation of the environment emerges. It is not contrary to Darwin's great vision of evolution by natural selection but a natural development of it. Gaia is the account of a journey through space and time in search of evidence to support his new and radically different view of our planet and its inhabitants.

A famous Hitchhiker's Guide to this was written by Douglas Adams.

A very large collection of gravitationally mutually bound stars (typically 100 000 000 000) again typically spanning some 100 000 light years.

collection of un-bound active particles, travelling every which way inside a vessel, some escaping through leaks.

By the way, a gravitational field (of a planet for example) counts as a vessel in the above.

Directory containg the GLoSsary.

Alternatively an alias of- or the GLoSsary of Dimensions itself.

Ground

Anything (electrically) at Earth potential.

Un-suspected positive outcome of a vague instruction.

I'm not cheap, i'm free.

Very weak very long range universal affinity between any two bits of matter in the Universe. Isaac Newton, after reading an obscure book by Johannes Kepler, which Galileo, who died the year Newton was born, had also read, proposed gravity to explain the movement of planets around the Sun. In modern parlance we might put it like this:

in words, the force F (in newtons) between any two bits of matter of masses m1 and m2 (in kg) is proportional to their masses (in kg) and inversely proportional to the square of the distance r (in metres) between them, where G is the gravitational constant of proportionality.

The Greatest Things

• the best day - today
• the greatest sin - fear
• the best gifts - kindness, forgiveness
• the meanest feeling - jealousy
• the greatest need - common sense
• the most expensive indulgence - hate
• the greatest troublemaker - talking too much
• the greatest teacher - one who makes you want to learn
• the cleverest person - one who does what she thinks right
• the worst bankrupt - the soul that has lost its enthousiasm
• the cheapest stupidest easiest thing to do - finding fault
• the best part of anyone's religion - gentleness cheerfulness

Street sign, Bikaner, Rajastan, India 1981, slightly edited.

The colour of chlorophyll, the substance responsible for photosynthesis, with which green plants are able to turn sheer Sunlight (and some air, water and other stuff) into food and energy. Curiously the spectrum of the Sun has a peak in green (in other words it provides rather more green light than blue or red).
A green light being on could mean Please_Edit.

Place where you can plant your feet firmly or not.

The basis of something.

In sad stories about atomic bombs, the place directly under the centre of the explosion.

A proposed alternative: ground occupied by us, Earth, soil or home.

The above part of this entry has been in place since well before the unfortunate events of September 11th 2001, after which the site of the collapsed towers in New York City has also become known as Ground Zero.

Someone who is lucky enough to be made to feel at home somewhere by the steward of that place.

Green light on the ASS computer which indicates that it is operating well. Also see Important.

A state of compromise, providing space for all sides and interests, characterised by a certain lack of conflict.

Nasty feeling you are ill advised to bear for any prolonged period.

Wholesome condition, often ignored by those who enjoy it (though at their peril). If there were five things that were important this would be one of them.

Ideally enables you to do more than you could without it.

History, according to Collins Concise Encyclopedia 1981, is a branch of knowledge which deals systematically with the past, recording, analysing, correlating and interpreting past events. Sources include buildings, artifacts as well as chronicles and contemporary written records. Your steward would like to add any other evidence of past events into this list, conveniently merging history with pre-history.

Having started, one begins to realise the enormity of the task and the great temptation topresent things - particularly analysis - in a one sided or biased way. Oh well, I can not pretend to be an historian. The short history of the world presented in the-Book is based on very little if any original sources or other evidence. This story, particularly that of the earliest times covered must therefore be seen as the steward's personal musings. It is an anectdotal collection of second-to-the-power-of-n-hand factoids.

Adjective which indicates that something has an awesome, sacred, mysterious, or generally un-fathomable conviction, which may however be very strongly felt by some. It is wise to respect the fact that anyone might consider something holy.

Important place, where you can hopefully be happy and where you can receive a guest.

Hope is hopefully better than hype.

Yesterday I thought I was not, today I am one.

According to medieaval medical insights, one of several of the body's fundamental fluids. According to present day common sense, it is good to be in good humour.

A new! fresh! & exciting! virtual aspect of something. Acronym of: Hello You Phoney Existence.

The influence of earlier treatment of a thing on its subsequent (re)actions. This is always due to some delay between the original cause and the subsequent effect.

i x i = -1
A virtual or imaginary number which, if you could ever find it, would give you -1 when multiplied by itself.  The sum of an imaginary number and a real one is called a complex number.

Inverse of a mirror image.

According to Freud: Id + ego + superego = your selves.

Identically equal to identity. A (virtual or real) presence, which can carry a name. Action x inverse (of that action) = identity (matrices).

Euler's Identity

Part of "If something is true, then something might happen". If provides the conditional element: "in the event that".

If …

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when they all doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired of waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream, - and not make dreams your master:
If you can think, - and not make thoughts your aim:
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters jest the same:
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knits to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop to build 'em up with worn out tools:

If you can make a heap of all you winnings,
And risk it all on one turn of pitch and toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about you loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can walk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all folk count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything within it,
And - which is more, - you'll be All-Right, my loved one!

Rudyard Kipling cleansed by gris

If and only if.

A (virtual or real) impression of something.

According to the Brightening Ages there are only four facts of any importance: a breath, a good drink, a nutricious meal prepared and taken under pleasant circumstances and a place to be … happy.

test it

Literally, without end, the unlimited, going beyond any fixed bound. Investigations of this idea date back at least as far as Zeno.

If you would like to put a number to infinty, well, give up - you cannot, it is larger than any number you can think of and then some.

A hyped-up version of information.

Usefully sized amount of information. It could be an entry in a diary, or perhaps 1K byte of procesing memory constituting a cell in the proposed ASS computer.

Interesting data complete with suggested processing recipes.

Fluid used in writing with certain old fashioned fine writing instruments called pens.

An idea or a passion coming into the mind. Creative work is said to be 1% inspiration and 99% persperation.

Code or command which identifies one of the possible actions listed in the instruction set.

{ 0, 0+x x: 0<x<1, 1 }

Ideally, a (hardware, software or otherwise) thing or apparatus, given that someone may have applied a great deal of care and effort to make it, someone may have applied another great deal of care and effort to get it working correctly or accurately and the one who uses the instrument ought to take great care of it.

Basically anything anyone could like to study elsewhere or even in this GLoSsary. Anything that might attract attention and occupy thoughts for a while.

"May you live in interesting times" is an old Chinese curse.

Mirror image.

The way back.

Integrated Service Department.

[ rumoured to belong to Judit ]

joule

I still haven't finished the job of messing about with this here GLoSsary. Will I ever?

Happy, merry, joyful or gay.

J, SI derived unit of energy equivalent to overcoming a force of one newton over a distance of one metre.

It was once said that the only reason why humans are tolerated at all on the Earth is because they have the capacity to bring joy.

To move in one go or at one leap or bound from one place to some other, without stopping anywhere else. You should be warned that landing safely at the second place may be problematic.

[ rumoured to belong to Kafka ].

kelvin

K, SI base unit of thermodynamic temperature stipulating the Boltzmann constant to be 1.480649x10^-23 J K^-1 (joules per kelvin) exactly.

Mathematically, an embedding of a circle (loop) into three-dimensional Euclidean space.

kilogram, SI base unit of mass defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the Planck constant h to be 6.62607015×10⁻³⁴ when expressed in the unit J s, which is equal to kg m² s⁻¹, where the metre and the second are defined in terms of c and ∆νCs.

A reference standard kilogram mass was (and no doubt still is) kept at Sèvres near Paris.

[ rumoured to belong to Laura ].

Symbolic system supplying semantic models of anything imaginable in any real or virtual world.

A legend is some famous old story, sadly usually a violent one at that. However Legend! has been reclaimed to indicate some more recent famous pursuits of some of our friends, which are fortunately not quite so bloody.

Measures distance. At the same time, length is a quantity with the dimension of distance in the International System of Quantities.

Leibniz (1646-1716) has been noted as one of the most important logicians between the times of Aristotle and Gottlob Frege.

Also see ABSOLUTE.

An organised collection of books.

A set of software routines.

(According to Douglas Adams) Precursor to the Universe and everything.

Visual sensation.

The agency which stimulates visual sensations when it strikes the retina of the eye, an event signalled through the optic nerve to the visual cortex of the brain.

The speed of light is about a foot per nanosecond.

This word came into late Middle English meaning "loop" with the form and topology of a link in a chain as a noun or "connect" as a verb.

A fundamental phase of matter which is half chaotic [that is it will exhibit Brownian motion]. Something you can pour. At very low temperatures there is a super fluid state of liquid helium III with zero viscosity.

A possibly ordered string of data items.

Empty:

0, nought, Q? "What is 1/2 a love?" A! nought!

Also something you can feel very strongly for a very long time.

Random outcome of a vague instruction.

Symbols for masses in interesting dynamics statements.

Also: (M mega) 1 000 000 or ~ 2²⁰

(m) metre.

Arrangement whereby one can act on behalf of more.

Network of correspondences between respective elements of at least two sets.

A quantity which makes items with that quality hard to get going and often even more difficult to get them to stop again within the required time or distance.

Physical items that lack mass are compelled to move at the speed of light.

In the event that it would matter to know this I suppose any material thing with a rest mass greater than zero. Condensed energy.

Potentially any system featuring hysteresis.

In computerese a place where data can be kept and accessed by one or more processors.

This could be a poke in the eye, a kick in the teeth, or hopefully a more pleasant form of communication bringing you some data.

An instrument which can provide a more or less accurate measurement of some quantity.

m, SI base unit of distance equal to the length of the path travelled by electromagnetic radiation in a vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second.

Shiny thing which through reflection provides a virtual and reversed image.

A simplified mathematical description of a system or a process.

One mole (mol) contains exactly 6.02214076 x 10²³ elementary entities. This is the only SI base unit that is expressed as a pure number and as such has no physical dimension associated with it.

Do nothing, leave nothing un-done; say nothing, leave nothing un-said (from "The Way" the very old and concise basis of Taoism).

Organised noise said to be the food of love.

Often used as a negative response to a question.

{ Natural Numbers }

0 = ϕ, 1 = {0}, 2 = {0,1}, 3 = {0,1,2}, … (von Neumann definition)
0 = ϕ, 1 = {0}, 2 = {1}, 3 = {2}, … (Zermelo definition)
Anything with the right structure is an instance of natural numbers. Many people are familiar with natural numbers for counting. They may exclude 0, ϕ, or the empty set from their view.

It is said that all of the properties of numbers can be expressed using just the basic properties number and successor (the next number up).

newton, SI derived unit of force.

A name, a name, what's in a name? A rose by any other name would still as sweetly smell.

NOT ( p AND q)

Unpleasant.

Adjective, of a process, the ways & means of the Universe before you started editing it.

Nothing, nought, 0 & all will come to this.

A system of nodes bridged by links.

Never, repeat never, ever, write with indellible ink.

Of course we never plan to finish, we never plan to start, and we never ever make a plan (unless we happen to think that it is very crafty).

N, SI derived unit of force, oddly enough about equal to the weight of a typical apple on the surface of the Earth. Named after Isaac Newton, Lucasian Professor of mathematics at Cambridge University, who published the Principia Matematica in 1687. This work, and his other magnus opus, Opticks, had a profound influence on the development of the modern natural sciences and indeed the philosophy of science.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Isaac Newton, shortly before his death

and perhaps more tellingly … … old Kinnairdy (David Gregorie) confided a model [to his son] of an improved cannon, which in his enthousiasm to improve the munitions of war, he had designed in his peaceful home by the Deveron. His son [Savillian Professor David Kinnairdy (Gregory), contemporary of Newton's], who thought it most ingenious, showed it to Sir Isaac Newton, and the great philosopher evidently agreed with him; but to invent an instrument, the only object of which was to kill better than any cannon in use, seemed to him a fearful abuse of ingenuity. The horrors of Marlborough's wars, where men were slaughtered by the thousand, were they not enough as it was? Who could deserve mercy from his Maker if he were to bid god-speed to such a terrible machine? Sir Isaac asked the professor to destroy the model, which he did, and the little toy which may have been a gatling gun, for aught we know, was broken in pieces.

Successor, the item immediately following.

Not any; not a; not one. (Yes! we have no bananas …)

Nay; not so; the opposite of _yep, used to deny, refuse or disagree.

A point or region in a standing wave where a wave characteristic has minimum or zero value.

Crossroads. A knot of connectivity.

Spurious energy. There are several kinds: thermal, random, white, impulse.

NOT ( p OR q )

-

x-1

Interesting anti operator requiring just one operand.

Not later or some other time, but action !!

Naught, 0, zero, not a thing.

Element of an ordered system used to count, label and express a measurement.

Sometimes confused with 0 or zero.

Resting, not working, un-selected.

Working, functioning, selected.

1, Unity.

A person (in the third person).

Please_Edit.

Something on which an operation is performed. p,q,r,s etc. appearing to the right and left of a logical operator.

(Fundamental) process: the interaction of operators and operands.

Logical: NOT, AND, OR, XOR.

One  who operates equipment or acts as an agent of social intercourse.

+, Logical operator allowing either one or both out of two options.

A certain lack of chaos in a system.

Degree of complexity.

Dimension of restriction of degrees of freedom.

An order of magnitude is a difference in size between two things, one ten times larger than the other.

Instance not covered by foresight.

"According to other wise guys …" Else.

Pressure.

p is also often used as a logical operand.

pascal.

1991 is palindromic, which means that it reads the same way backwards or forwards. Perhaps I should quote the famous example "able was I ere I saw elba".

An interesting and mostly harmless legendary animal that can walk both ways. It is troubled by the conflicting arrows of indecision.

a contributor offered this divergent opinion:

In my experience, the palindromedary does not suffer from "arrows of indecision." For one thing, it is not only capable of walking in either direction, it is capable of walking in both at once. That leaves you with either two palindromedaries, or one palindromedary in more than one place, and with the conundrum of resolving what meaning, if any, that distinction has. Is there any real difference between having two palindromedaries, or one palindromedary in two places? I suspect all palindromedaries may be in a sense identical to the first one, which has merely multiplied its locations. Rather than being "troubled by the conflicting arrows of indecision" the only weapon I know the palindromedary to fear is the crab canon which can get it coming and going.

(Classically) a usually small body at a particular place at a given time. Isaac Newton called these corpuscules.

Highly structured, high level computer language devised by Niklaus Wirth using several reserved words some of which are also mentioned or annotated in this GLoSsary. named after the seventeenth century French philosopher, Blaise Pascal.

Pa, SI derived unit of pressure, equal to one newton per square metre.

Harmony, freedom from war.

A fine writing instrument said to be mightier than the sword.

Love of wisdom.

Human thought become self-conscious (According to the preface of an old copy of the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy).

In the times of Galileo, Leibniz and Newton, Natural Philosophy would cover what we might call physics, astronomy and cosmology as well as chemistry, anthropology, zoology and botany.

Mysterious number pondered on since antiquity. A full turn of spin will traverse an angle of 2 pi radians.

Editor: Would you find it boring if I were to ask you to give me pi to 132 significant digits citing sources?
ChatGPT: As an AI language model, I don't experience boredom, so feel free to ask me anything you like! Here's pi to 132 significant digits, as per NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory:
3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679

One of four fundamental states of matter (solid, fluid, gas and plasma).

May it please you.

Go ahead, change the world. Signals are clear. Happy = On.

1

Vague instruction between or outside Please_Edit & Please_Wait.

A number greater than 1 OR less than 0.

Please be patient and bear with us for a short while.

0

Vague instruction between Please_Wait & Please_Edit.

If you can't please yourself then you can't please your soul.

A number greater than 0 AND less than 1.

Strictly speaking the rate at which work can be done (or energy converted) per unit time. Otherwise the ability to do or act.

The third enemy. In this sense it ought to pointed out that this enemy is one's own power, and not that of others, because the misuse of one's own power will damage one's dignity.

Empty. Ripe for squatting.

A number which may be divided only by itself and by one. There is only one even prime number (the first) which is 2 but there are an infinite number of odd ones.

Not public.

A certain sequence of steps or instructions which can be followed like a program.

The ASS computer has no processor as such.

In general I disapprove of blenders, electric carving knives or any such kind of food processor.

The very first word of a Pascal computer program. After some more words and characters, declarations, procedures, functions and the main body of the program (if the program is complete) you will find END..

Said of anything accessible to everybody in principle.

High-level programming language that has good code readability due to its adherence to significant indentation.

Q: { Rational Numbers }

Symbol representing electric charge measured in coulombs.

q: Logical operand.

Question

Quantum chromodynamics.

Quantum electrodynamics.

QED is the title of a book by Richard Feynman subtitled The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. This small book comprises four lectures, three of which are said to explain all physical phenomena in the Universe except beta decay and gravity.

Quasi Stellar Object.

Also Quasar. A heavenly body that looks like a star (through a very powerful telescope), but is thought to be situated far beyond the stars of the Milky Way Galaxy and must therefore be literally astronomically bright to be observable at all. Most researchers think that quasars might be the brilliant, relatively tiny central regions of far, far-away active galaxies whose outer parts are so hard to see because of the intense glare. Quasars are characterised by extremely high red shifts and have a starlike appearance despite the fact that they must be some of the brightest objects in the Universe.

A discrete quantity of energy proportional in magnitude to the frequency of the radiation it represents or an analogous discrete amount of any other physical quantity, such as momentum or electric charge.

Explained in five words: Don’t look: waves. Look: particles.

Neither strictly a wave nor purely a particle but a category in its own right described by Schrödinger's time-dependent equation (general) and governed by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

Hard to observe fundamental particle; all hadron matter is supposed to be made up of quarks. They come in six flavours, three carying two thirds the charge of a proton: up (u), charm (c), and top (t), the remaining three carrying minus one third of the charge of an electron: down (d), strange (s), and bottom (b). Each flavour has a colour quantum: red, green or blue. Two up quarks and one down quark form a proton (total electric charge plus one) and two down and one up quark form a neutron (with a total electric charge of zero).

Due to the confinement of colours quarks may never be observed separately in the present configuration of the Universe, that is, at temperatures below the Hagedorn temperature (~ 1.7x10¹² K) at which hadronic matter becomes unstable. Quark ensembles and gluon tubes behave rather like pieces of string. If you try to isolate one end of a piece of string and pull very hard indeed, the string will snap and you will still not have isolated the end of a piece of string but you will have two pieces of string with two ends each. Similarly with quarks, trying to isolate them requires so much energy, that it is enough to materialise some extra quarks yielding ordinary and exotic baryons as well as mesons that are made of quark-antiquark pairs.

Quarks interact and bind with each other through exchanging gluons, which are massless bosons. Combinations of three quarks will always include one each of the three colours, whereas mesons comprising two quarks are also colour-neutral through combining colour with anti-colour.

Quasars were discovered by finding optical astronomical sources corresponding with interesting radio signals. However, most other quasars have since been found to be radio-quiet. Use of the term "Quasar" was frowned upon in the early years but is now more common than the "official" Quasi Stellar Object or QSO.

Pseudo, fake, not real or original.

A formal question perhaps put into SQL, designed to edit or extract specific information from a database.

A long and possibly perilous pursuit of something thought to be highly desirable or worthy.

Q?, something one can ask or wonder.

To be, or not to be; - that is the question:-
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And, by opposing, end them? - To die - to sleep
-No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consumation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die - to sleep; -
To sleep! perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death, -
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, - puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than to fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with a pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment,
With this regard, their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.

(Hamlet's soliloquy by Will. Shakespeare)

Slang reference to money in England, otherwise a latin word meaning "what" as in Quid pro quo.

Fine writing instrument from olden days fashioned from a pen feather.

Famous method to waste time and resources on radio and TV.

{ Real Numbers }
Reals strictly (in cardinality) << Complex.

rad or radian is the SI derived unit of angle. The circumference of a circle describes an angle of 2 pi rad from the centre.

Not imaginary, not virtual, existing in fact.

A colour commonly used in signalling to indicate that it is not safe to proceed.

Perform a certain procedure again and again or some more times.

Message advertising that certain permissions, data or actions would be warmly appreciated.

Affirmative, understood, used a lot in military communications. N.B. the Jolly Roger was the skull and crossed bones flag supposedly used by pirates in years of yore and these days by those who deny authority the right to monopolise the electromagnetic spectrum.

As aVerb: To support or encourage as by cheering or applauding.

As a Noun: The part of a plant or tree usually under the ground, that holds it in position, draws water and nourishment from the soil and stores food.

A base.

A quantity that, multiplied by itself a specified number of times, produces a given quantity.

In a UNIX systems the superuser with a UID of 0.

Dutch word, which cannot really be translated into English in its full glory as perceived by us cloggies.

Somehow close to Rush, Noise

I & several friends like it up to a point. Used in the ISD?

second

In the case of sex (involving men) this is always with a condom. However, it is not quite really safe even then.

An opportunity.

Oscilloscope, an instrument which provides a visible representation of electronic signals. The most common variety uses a cathode ray tube to achieve this.

In the ASS computer the number of dimensions encompassed by its architecture.

s, SI base unit of time equal to the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom.

To look is not necessarily to see and you may not have to look in order to see something in your mind's eye, which may be called insight, imagination or fantasy.

Look into a mirror and you will see a mirror image of this.

A company of personalities accompanying anyone with a lot of friends or a split personality.

You need at least one sensor to do this.

Albert Einstein said that common sense is that layer of prejudice established in us before we are eighteen.

Instrument which notices something. Try connecting one logically or not to an actuator.

Fundamental mathematical grouping consisting of zero or more elements.

A natural way to grasp sets is to start with the empty set ϕ, {} or 0 and add elements to that.

Interesting and oftentimes enjoyable activity of animals which can lead to life or death.

Very important support for books, Yol's CD's and cassettes and other items subject to gravity.

International System of Units

ChatGPT: There are seven fundamental dimensions in the International System of Units (SI):

• Length (L)
• Mass (M)
• Time (T)
• Electric current (I)
• Temperature (Θ)
• Amount of substance (N)
• Luminous intensity (J)

All physical quantities can be expressed in terms of combinations of these fundamental dimensions. For example, velocity is expressed in terms of length and time, and is thus said to have the dimension [L/T].

Editor: Sorry to nit-pick, but you said "velocity is expressed in terms of length and time, and is thus said to have the dimension [L/T]". However, velocity must also have direction specified. Otherwise it is just speed.

ChatGPT: You are correct, I apologize for the oversight in my previous response. Velocity is a vector quantity and as such, it has both magnitude and direction. Therefore, the dimension of velocity is [L/T] for its magnitude, but its direction is typically specified separately. Thank you for pointing out the error.

A sign which can signal, broadcast, or otherwise make it be known, that an exchange of energy has occurred.

A place into which something can disappear or terminate.

The only fundamental phase of matter that is not fluid. Constituent atoms or molecules may be arranged in a regular fashion as a crystal (crystalline), or as an irregular collection of microscopic crystals (polycrystalline), or without any periodic arrangement even microscopically (amorphous).

A place from where something can emerge or originate.

The distance between both ends of a banana.

The distance between the wingtips of an aircraft.

In the ASS computer, the number of cells to traverse to get from one side of the machine to another.

Originally, the length of the arch (or arc) of a bridge.

Latin: ghost.

Used by Isaac Newton to describe the range of colours created from apparently plain sun light when refracted through a prism. This usage has since been extended to include any particular section from the entire range of frequencies of electromagnetic radiation.

Much of what we think we know about stars results from the study of their spectra.

The rate at which something moves, given by the distance travelled per unit time. If the direction of travel is also taken into account then it is velocity.

S
p
i
n
I suppose this is only -1/4 spin. Neither half nor integer spin.

Structured Query Language.

Standard deviation is a term in statistics expressing by how much the members of a group differ from the mean value for the group. It is found by taking the positive square root of the mean of of the squared deviations of the observed values from their mean in a frequency distribution.

Standard error is a measure of the statistical accuracy of an estimate, equal to the standard deviation of the theoretical distribution of a large population of such estimates.

The Standard Model in physics is a ridiculously successful theory stated as a mathematical description of the elementary particles of matter and the electromagnetic, weak, and strong forces by which they interact.

Very large blob of plasma held in thrall to its own gravity.

sr or square radian is the SI derived unit of solid angle. The surface of a sphere presents a solid angle of 4 pi sr from the centre.

Stop the war, but don't stop thinking.

It was once said that it was very strange, that strange did not in fact appear in the GLoSsary until now. It could also have been said to be odd. Strange is often used to mean not of this place, not understood or unknown. In the theory of quarks strangeness is a quantum number associated with elementary particles. It is conserved in strong and in electromagnetic interactions.

Sequence of items with a link between each item and the next.

Style is rumoured not to be a homomorphic mapping.

A nearby star presenting a primeval thermo-nuclear explosion in balance with its gravity about 150 000 000 km from here described by Douglas Adams as "a small un-regarded yellow star somewhere at the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy". The Earth's share of the Sun's radiation suffices to drive the weather engine of the air and the oceans.

Slightly salty moisture exuded from sweat glands in the skin. Evaporation of sweat cools the body. Also see: (1-99% Perspiration)

Pleasant (self-)similarity.

A grouping of real or virtual entities for the convenience of our musings about them.

I left my red flag at the green semaphore.

The Red Herring of Fighting the System
"The world is in decay"; leads some people to wish to Fight the System at the root of this misery. There are some who say that it will make the system stronger if you try to resist it.

Perhaps it is wiser to make the System irrelevant, by ignoring it or going around it or by pushing it out of the way. This has the advantage that all your energies are available FOR your cause rather than against some red herring.

That some Systems cause a lot of trouble may be clear to anybody who has read more than one history book. But what is the System? Is it some Evil conspiracy? Is it a manifestation of Old Nick 'O Teen or some other real or virtual bogey monster? Perhaps it is Capitalism, Communism, Imperialism, Managerism, Terrorism or some ism invented by propaganda outfits, spindoctors and others who may have lost touch with reality.

The reality is that Rich Folks and Oligarchy depend on an abundance of poor people to exploit and that there are more than enough narrow-minded and or selfish persons in positions of power who will choose time and again for profit or short-term economic gain rather than for the common good and the future of their grandchildren. This phenomenon to me IS the system.

In our present troubled & interesting times it has been said that history is finished. And well it may be if it is true that our collective folly is having an impact on the workings of the weather sentiments around the world. If that is indeed the case and if this green house or other unpleasant effect proves to be irreversible then it would have been pointless to write these words.

Symbols representing temperature or time.

Very useful potable fluid said to be served shortly.

Slightly salty clear fluid emitted from tear glands in the corners of the eyes, lubricating these fast-moving organs. It can flow copiously when emotions run high. This procedure is known as crying.

test.html

Software specifically crafted for software testing, including test suites, validation suites consisting of smoke tests or perhaps also including functionality of the software to be tested.

A string of characters.

When a relational database is reduced to flat tables expressed as text and any relational links are documented in additional flat tables, the combined result is a textbase.

Software conveyed as text, possibly in the form of source code.

In that case.

At that time.

Hmmmmm.

"I think therefore I am" or perhaps "I feel, therefore I am … I think".

"Where two people agree on everything at least one of them is not thinking".

Ask Chronos. The perceived passing of the past through the present into the future. Measured in seconds. Any real action will involve the passing of time. Given that many laws of physics (excepting those of thermodynamics involving entropy) are time reversible, it is still a matter of debate whether time can only pass from the past to the future or whether it can also proceed in some other direction.

(Rendered as /tmp) A directory under the root directory in a UNIX system used to store temporary data.

The way the constituent parts of a space or a network are interrelated or arranged.

In mathematics, the study of geometrical properties and spatial relations unaffected by the continuous change of shape or size of figures (without anything breaking or holes either appearing or closing).

A family of open subsets of an abstract space such that the union and the intersection of any two of them are members of the family, and which includes the space itself and the empty set.

Useful structure.

A large, living plant which can be said to have its affairs in much better order than most humans.

Are for second hand editing only. That is: Please, don't be the first person to start cutting a piece of wood when it is still part of a living tree.

Anything which can be put into a closed box.

Anything that doesn't count or matter or which is very easy.

Compare False. Truth is already dealt with by Forth. Furthermore, don't believe people who claim that they own it, or that they represent the sole rightful owners.

Trust is like wisdom in some ways. A highly prized quality, which when once broken can not easily be restored. One is wise to know or feel whom to trust and whom not to trust.

Said of highly chaotic, bumpy and irregular motion, not at all smooth nor laminar.

055H

Symbol meaning union, an [interesting integration procedure].

In the natural (English) language a prefix meaning anti or not.

In twentieth century history allegedly a forum for world-wide politics (United Nations).

Absolute, unlimited, without preconditions.

Symbol U, operation forming one set containing all the members of each of the operand sets.

Standard quantity.

Everything existing everywhere. Furthermore, the Universe is filled with electromagnetic radiation, but it is nearly empty of matter.

Something that cannot be seen from its outside.

Tiring Direction.

I was once said to be vague in certain circles where this word was regarded as an insult. I chose to take it as a compliment, because it is oftentimes better to have a vague idea about the precarious state of affairs immediately, than to have to wait for the clear picture when it may be too late.

Very Important Piece Of Paper.

Of something which is orthogonal to something real.

Interesting spiral thingy you get when a source and a sink are temporarily out of balance. May occur in turbulent situations.

If anyone asks me what they can do with their marvelous new superfast computer with its new fancy software conglomorations this is my answer.

Violent chaotic exchanges between powerful operators. Usually a very sad story.

Curiously common clear fluid (at atmospheric pressure and comfortable room temperature) essential to the operations of all life on Earth. Water can be a very good drink indeed (important).

According to Empedocles (ca. 494 - 434 BCE) one of the four elements.

A disturbance moving through a field at some -- often characteristic -- speed. Electromagnetic radiation is a disturbance of the electromagnetic field and moves at the speed of light.

Highly prized commodity which can nowhere be bought, but which is sorely lacking resulting in many sad stories in these times.

Studio of an artisan.

Crucial question asked in Bistronomics.

Symbols representing un-known quantities.

Exclusive or.
Logical operator in the natural (English) language perhaps best described as "either or".

Exchange.

Hopefully homomorphic mapping from one useful language to another (a difficult and time-consuming process).

Crossreference, which relates items in two or more tables of data.

Often used as an affirmative response.

{ Whole Numbers }

A local minor subculture celebrity who was supposed to have been President of the Universe.

Zeno of Elea, ancient Greek philosopher (5th c. bce). Famous for some stories, which are often (perhaps mistakenly) described as paradoxes:

• 1. Dichotomy: Alpha to Beta

  Suppose a traveller wishes to travel from alpha to beta. To do this she must first travel to the place halfway, M and from there on to beta: but if N is the point halfway between alpha and M, she must first reach N, and so on ad infinitum (Zeno: 'What has been said once can always be repeated'). It is impossible to accomplish an infinite number of tasks in a finite time. Therefore the traveller cannot complete nor even start her journey. [Note to cast doubt: If a first task is completed in one minute, a second in half a minute, a third in a quarter of a minute, a fourth in an eighth of a minute, a fifth in a sixteenth of a minute and so on, then an infinite number of tasks can be accomplished in two minutes.]

• 2. Achilles and the Tortoise

  In a race the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point from which the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead.

• 3. the arrow

  An arrow cannot move at a place where it is not. Neither can it move at place where it is. However, a flying arrow is always where it is. That is, at any instant, it is at rest. But if at no instant it is moving, then it is always at rest.

• 4. Stadion

  Consider two rows of bodies, each composed of an equal number of bodies of equal size. They pass each other as they travel with equal speed in opposite directions. Thus, half a time is equal to the whole time.

0