The "Fencepost" Problem (or so I just learned...)

I've felt for a while as if there is something fundamentally different in my logic and the logic of people who understand numbers. Maybe I have a hard time dealing with things that make sense at face value, I don't know. I'm sure that anyone who really grasps mathematical concepts can then whirl off into my fun happy land of theory and abstraction, but I, a humanities-head, just never hired the captain for that particular boat.

There was a wall I hit when I was young, regarding math. It was an obstacle to my understanding, a conceptual dilemma so deep that I still don't get it. It perplexed me so much that rather than dwell, than trying to wrap my third grade mind around it, I just pushed it away. But deep in the back of my mind, this Unknown instilled a deep mistrust in me regarding even the simplest of equations. To this day I check myself over and over again. I never relaxed, never relinquished my mind to the muscle-memory required to know instantly that six times seven is forty-two.

I'll explain the problem by example. Next week is the 22nd to the 26th. That's five days. But 26 minus 22 is 4. That makes NO SENSE to me. I guess it is because the day of the 22nd is also an entity that is being taken away, but I always felt like the function of subtraction was to reveal a quantity that has been parsed from a whole. So what's the point if it gives you the wrong number? I mean I must conclude here that when we subtract numbers from each other, we are really counting the spaces between them, the integers. The concept of integers helps me a little bit, but no one explained integers to me in third grade so I was pretty disheveled about the whole thing.

I see numbers as things that exists independently of the objects they quantify. I see them like ghost skins. If we have three apples, the first apple is wrapped in a ghost skin that is 1. The third apple is wrapped in a ghost skin that is 3. 3 minus 1 is 2. That makes sense because if you take one apple away you have two left.

But what does it mean when you say that the "difference" between 3 and 1 is 2? Seems to me that the difference between 3 and 1 is 1. Apple 2 is the difference, the solid object that lies between apple 1 and apple 3.

When you say the "difference" is 2, you must be saying that there are 2 spaces between apples 1, 2 and 3. "Difference" in math is supposed to be synonymous with "subtraction". But the only way you can say that the difference between 1 and 3 is 2 is by counting the spaces. But when you "subtract" 1 from 3 and get 2, you are counting the apples - the solid objects - not the spaces.

Way more complicated than it has to be. Well, welcome to my brain. This is something I've avoided trying to think about for 15 years.

The problem is not necessary in my ability to wrap abstract numbers around the physical universe. It's something to with my expectations of how this marriage works. I feel subtly betrayed by the 1 up or 1 down problem when trying to add or subtract real quantities, and most of the time I just give up and count on my fingers. Because fingers are real, physical, and won't trick you with silly things like "differences". I looked up math disabilities in grade schoolers and none of them really sound like what my issue was. So I'd just be curious to know if anyone else knows what I'm talking about.

Edit: I feel incredible satisfaction at finding this wiki page, thanks to the all-knowing Bjorn.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fencepost_problem#Fencepost_error

Je n'en connais pas la fin

There is a light at the end of the street partially obscured by garden growth, twisted lines layered over each other, diffusing into darkness.

The yellow window quivers in my view as my knees stutter under me, somewhere deep in my bones there are rings growing, etched around my marrow, bark crackling out of the calcium and I become twitchy. Twitchy, as if flesh and blood have taken flight, have reeled back and retreated yellowbellied into the night, taking with them my softness, the give in my body, the rubberyelastic stretch of skin and blood cells break apart from their plasmic suspension, chickering off like startled geese.

My rainstick throat takes a reluctant breath. My pulse is the dry flap of wings against chest.

I am the devil in this transmutation. I was the butcher who sold myself off in parts. I was the liar who turned my face into a prism of multiple angles and matterless reflections for which there is increasingly less of a true source.

Among the dry and dying, I am afraid of fire. How it would wipe me out, how it would scatter me so thinly I would make no sense. I would be chemically irreparable and my remnants, though substantial when gathered, would be nothing to anyone in their isolated corners of the universe.

My legs stop in their roots. One leg goes back obeying the orders of a separate mind. Ahead of me the light is unshaken. It has no doubts.

What is the price of bravery? What is obscured by fear? What is necessitated by knowing?


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What if Alien Abduction is Just a Metaphor for Birth?

I got a copy of my birth certificate in the mail today. It is strange to see the rote and foreign facts which describe the circumstances surrounding your entrance into this world. How many live births before me? 2 Mother's age? 37. "Sharyn" "Grace" "Johnson" weird weird weird. Babies don't have any baggage. They weigh less than ten pounds. If they are lucky, everything is done for them.

I saw a question at the bottom of the certificate which kinda confused me.

"What Eye Prophylaxis Used?: Yes"


So, Google.

http://www.chp.edu/CHP/P02698

Let me get this straight okay? You're a baby, you're born. They pull you out of your mother's womb into florescent lights, slap your ass to make you cry, then they take a clipper and sever the cord that connects you to her. They put a plastic band around your wrist and wheel you away, where they put drops in your eyes, stick a needle in your leg. If you are most males, they slice off your foreskin. If you were jaundiced, like me, they stick you in a glass box and shine and blue light in your face. Then they cover your genitals and wheel you up to a window where strangers come to stare at you. And that's with no complications.

Makes you wonder, doesn't it?

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Just Marvelous

Joan Robinson is Neat, Too.

Herman Daly is my new hero, up there with Noam and Chesterton and Kant. But less so the last two, because they are dead. I've heard about Daly before, but never read any primary source text.

But you and everyone you know should read this:

http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/81/the_crisis.html



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True Story

Did you know how we got the word "sabotage"?

Before the industrial revolution hit France, most lower-class French people were farmworkers. They essentially sharecropped for the richy-rich estate owners.

They had special wooden shoes called "sabots". When they found themselves being replaced by much more efficient machines, they sought revenge by throwing their shoes into the gears.

Sabotage.

Carol Chomsky

Carol Chomsky

Noam Chomsky lost his wife of 60 years yesterday.

It makes me sadder than I planned on being.

Just thought you should know.