On Disinclination to Learn

“Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.”

– Douglas Adams

Precambrian Supereon

In the geochronology of the Earth according to the Geologic Time Scale, the Precambrian supereon accounts for 88% of all geologic time. The Precambrian lasted from the Earth’s beginnings, over 4.5 billion years ago, until the start of the Phanerozoic eon, 541 million years ago. During these 4 billion years it covered the Hadean, Archean and Proterozoic eons.

Hadean eon (~4500–4000 million years ago)

The Hadean eon is the first subdivision of the Precambrian supereon and therefore the first geological eon. It began with the formation of the Earth around 4.5 billion years ago, and ended 500 million years later, 4 billion years ago.

The name “Hadean” comes from the Ancient Greek Ἅδης, the ancient Greek god of the underworld, in reference to the hellish conditions on Earth at the time: the planet had just formed and was still very hot due to high volcanism.

During this eon, the Earth was bombarded for millions of years on end with meteors from outer space. The valleys of craters left by this onslaught of rocks filled up and became the first oceans. Also, because of the heavy bombardment, pieces of rock broke away from the Earth and formed the basis of the Moon. The Hadean is also the eon in which it is suggested that life on Earth began.

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.” – Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Archean eon (4000–2500 million years ago)

The Archean eon lasted from from 4 billion years ago to 2.5 billion years ago. Although, in older literature, the Hadean is included as part of the Archean.

The name comes from the Ancient Greek Αρχή, meaning “beginning, origin” and is a reference to the fact that photosynthesis started to take place in this eon.

Even though it is suggested that life on Earth originated earlier during the Hadean eon, we known for certain that certain species of bacteria thrived during the Archean eon. It is also the eon during which the first continents were formed.

“Evolution did not end with us growing opposable thumbs. You do know that, right?” – Bill Hicks

Proterozoic eon (2500–541 million years ago)

The Proterozoic eon is the longest geological eon to date. It is the eon which precedes the Phanerozoic eon in which we currently find ourselves.

The name comes from the Ancient Greek and means “earlier life”. It represents the time just before the proliferation of complex life on Earth.

One of the most important events of the Proterozoic was the accumulation of oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere. Also, the first appearance of advanced single-celled, eukaryotes and multi-cellular life, roughly coincides with the start of the accumulation of free oxygen. Finally, towards the end of the Proterozoic, the earliest arthropods, fungi and small shelly fauna appear.

“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” – Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

See other: History of the Earth

Why did the Chicken Cross the Road?

‘To get to the other side’ is a bit too simplistic. So, to remedy that, here are a number of interesting and more original replies to this famous – and surprisingly old – anti-humour riddle joke:

‘There are ‘quips and quillets’ which seem actual conundrums, but yet are none. Of such is this: ‘Why does a chicken cross the street?’ – The Knickerbocker, or The New York Monthly, March 1847, p. 283

Douglas Adams: 42.

Aristotle: To actualize its potential. It is the nature of chickens to cross roads.

Buddha: If you ask this question, you deny your own chicken-nature.

Julius Caesar: To come, to see, to conquer.

Howard Cosell: It may very well have been one of the most astonishing events to grace the annals of history. An historic, unprecedented avian biped with the temerity to attempt such an Herculean achievement formerly relegated to Homo sapien pedestrians is truly a remarkable occurrence.

Salvador Dali: A melting fish.

Charles Darwin: It was the logical next step after coming down from the trees. After all, chickens, over great periods of time, have been naturally selected in such a way that they are now genetically disposed to cross roads.

Jacques Derrida: What is the difference? The chicken was merely deferring from one side of the road to other. And how do we get the idea of the chicken in the first place? Does it exist outside of language? Also, any number of contending discourses may be discovered within the act of the chicken crossing the road, and each interpretation is equally valid as the authorial intent can never be discerned, because structuralism is dead.

Rene Descartes: It had sufficient reason to believe it was dreaming anyway.

Bob Dylan: How many roads must one chicken cross?

Albert Einstein: Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road crossed the chicken depends upon your frame of reference.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: It didn’t cross the road; it transcended it.

Epicurus: For pleasure.

Michel Foucault: It did so because the discourse of crossing the road left it no choice – the police state was oppressing it.

Sigmund Freud: The chicken was obviously female and obviously interpreted the pole on which the crosswalk sign was mounted as a phallic symbol of which she was envious, selbstverständlich. However, the fact that you are at all concerned about why the chicken crossed the road reveals your underlying sexual insecurity.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: The eternal hen-principle made it do it.

Stephen Jay Gould: It is possible that there is a sociobiological explanation for it, but we have been deluged in recent years with sociobiological stories despite the fact that we have little direct evidence about the genetics of behaviour, and we do not know how to obtain it for the specific behaviours that figure most prominently in sociobiological speculation.

Ernest Hemingway: To die. In the rain.

Heraclitus: A chicken cannot cross the same road twice.

Adolf Hitler: It needed Lebensraum.

David Hume: Out of custom and habit.

Doug Hofstadter: To seek explication of the correspondence between appearance and essence through the mapping of the external road-object onto the internal road-concept.

James Joyce: To forge in the smithy of its soul the uncreated conscience of its race.

Carl Jung: The confluence of events in the cultural gestalt necessitated that individual chickens cross roads at this historical juncture, and therefore synchronicitously brought such occurrences into being.

Immanuel Kant: Because it would have this be a universal law.

Martin Luther King: It had a dream.

Gottfried von Leibniz: In this best possible world, the road was made for it to cross.

Machiavelli: So that its subjects will view it with admiration, as a chicken which has the daring and courage to boldly cross the road, but also with fear, for whom among them has the strength to contend with such a paragon of avian virtue? In such a manner is the princely chicken’s dominion maintained. In any case, the end of crossing the road justifies whatever motive there was.

Karl Marx: To escape the bourgeois middle-class struggle. It was a historical inevitability.

Sir Isaac Newton: Chickens at rest tend to stay at rest. Chickens in motion tend to cross the road.

Moses: And the LORD spake unto the chicken, “Thou shalt cross the road.” And the chicken crossed the road.

Pyrrho the Skeptic: What road?

Jean-Paul Sartre: In order to act in good faith and be true to itself, the chicken found it necessary to cross the road.

B.F. Skinner: Because the external influences which had pervaded its sensorium from birth had caused it to develop in such a fashion that it would tend to cross roads, even while believing these actions to be of its own free will.

J.R.R. Tolkien: The chicken, sunlight coruscating off its radiant yellow- white coat of feathers, approached the dark, sullen asphalt road and scrutinized it intently with its obsidian-black eyes. Every detail of the thoroughfare leapt into blinding focus: the rough texture of the surface, over which countless tires had worked their relentless tread through the ages; the innumerable fragments of stone embedded within the lugubrious mass, perhaps quarried from the great pits where the Sons of Man laboured not far from here; the dull black asphalt itself, exuding those waves of heat which distort the sight and bring weakness to the body; the other attributes of the great highway too numerous to give name. And then it crossed it.

Mark Twain: The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated.

Kurt Vonnegut: There is no “why”, there only “is”. So it goes.

Ludwig Wittgenstein: The possibility of “crossing” was encoded into the objects “chicken” and “road”, and circumstances came into being which caused the actualization of this potential occurrence.

Zeno of Elea: To prove it could never reach the other side.

Uncertainty‏

When contemplating the property uncertainty‏, as with knowledge, it turns out to be very difficult to provide an uncontentious analysis. Because of its many different conceptions and dimensions, the full value of uncertainty‏ is surprisingly hard to capture. To that end, below is a list of quotations to help sketch a definition of the property uncertainty‏.

“We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!”
– Douglas Adams

“Il n’est pas certain que tout soit incertain.”
(It is not certain that everything is uncertain.)
– Blaise Pascal

“The mistake is thinking that there can be an antidote to the uncertainty.”
– David Levithan

“As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”
– Albert Einstein

“Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of not knowing.”
– Mark Z. Danielewski

“In these times I don’t, in a manner of speaking, know what I want; perhaps I don’t want what I know and want what I don’t know.”
– Marsilio Ficino

“When in doubt, be ridiculous.”
– Sherwood Smith

“We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end.”
– Blaise Pascal

“I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.”
– Richard Feynman

See more: Approximations

Q.E.D.

Q.E.D. is an abbreviation for the Latin quod erat demonstrandum meaning ‘[that] which had to be demonstrated’.

‘Q.E.D.: a Mathematician’s way of saying “I win”.’ – Urban Dictionary

The abbreviation of the phrase is traditionally placed at the end of a mathematical proof or philosophical argument to denote the conclusion of the demonstration. The abbreviation thus signals the completion of the proof.

The phrase is a translation into Latin from the Greek ὅπερ ἔδει δεῖξαι ‘what was required to be proved’. The phrase was used by many early Greek mathematicians, including Euclid and Archimedes.

The phrase has also been used outside mathematics and philosophy for comic effect.

For instance, in Thomas Dolby’s 1988 song Airhead, he imagines a conversation with the titular young woman and says “quod erat demonstrandum, baby”, to which she squeals the eager reply “ohhh, you speak French!”

Also, in chapter six of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the abbreviation is included in the following exchange:

The argument goes something like this: “I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”

“But,” says Man, “the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.“

“Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.