I'm doing some work for an old friend of mine.

His situation is interesting. Not too long ago, he lost his job and got divorced, and otherwise his life got pretty screwed up and off-track.

He left the United States, took a job below his old skill level for a while, and then stopped that and started a company. Now he's living an exceptional life, and on the verge of making a lot of money.

I thought that was awesome, and I was quite happy for him. After we'd gotten done going through a lot of numbers, choosing some vendors, designing some systems, and otherwise figuring business out on the phone, we talked personal life. I said, "Man, I'm so happy for you. So much is going right. Congratulations."

He wasn't excited. He was a little worried.

He said, "Sebastian, man... I hope I don't change. I like who I am right now, I hope this doesn't change me."

And you know what?

His fears are valid. He's going to change.

Almost guaranteed.

June 14, 3009

Twilight still hung in the sky, yet the Pole Star was visible above the trees, for it was a perfect cloudless evening.

"We can stop here for a few minutes," remarked the librarian as he fumbled to light the lamp. "There's a stream just ahead."

The driver grunted assent as he pulled the cart to a halt and unhitched the thirsty horse to drink its fill.

It was said that in the Age of Legends, there had been horseless carriages that drank the black blood of the earth, long since drained dry. But then, it was said that in the Age of Legends, men had flown to the moon on a pillar of fire. Who took such stories seriously?

The librarian did. In his visit to the University archive, he had studied the crumbling pages of a rare book in Old English, itself a copy a mere few centuries old, of a text from the Age of Legends itself; a book that laid out a generation's hopes and dreams, of building cities in the sky, of setting sail for the very stars. Something had gone wrong - but what? That civilization's capabilities had been so far beyond those of his own people. Its destruction should have taken a global apocalypse of the kind that would leave unmistakable record both historical and archaeological, and yet there was no trace. Nobody had anything better than mutually contradictory guesses as to what had happened. The librarian intended to discover the truth.

Forty years later he died in bed, his question still unanswered.

The earth continued to circle its parent star, whose increasing energy output could no longer be compensated by falling atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. Glaciers advanced, then retreated for the last time; as life struggled to adapt to changing conditions, the ecosystems of yesteryear were replaced by others new and strange - and impoverished. All the while, the environment drifted further from that which had given rise to Homo sapiens, and in due course one more species joined the billions-long roll of the dead. For what was by some standards a little while, eyes still looked up at the lifeless stars, but there were no more minds to wonder what might have been.

Related to: How to Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3

This started as a reply to this thread, but it would have been offtopic and I think the subject is important enough for a top-level post, as there's apparently still significant confusion about it.

How do we know that two and two make four? We have two possible sources of knowledge on the subject. Note that both happen to be entirely physical systems that run on the same merely ordinary entropy that makes car engines go.

First, evolution. Animals whose subitizing apparatus output 2+2=3 were selected out.

Second, personal observation; that is, operation of our sense organs. I can put 2 bananas on a table, then put down 2 more bananas, and count out 4 bananas; my schoolteachers told me 2+2 is 4; I can type 2+2 into a calculator and get 4; etc.

Now, notwithstanding the above, does 2+2 really equal 4, independent of any human thoughts about it? This way lies madness. If there is some kind of pure essence of math that never physically impinges upon the stuff inside our heads (or, worse, exists "outside the physical universe"), there's no sensible way we can know about it. It's a dragon in the garage.

The fact that our faculty for counting bananas can also be used to make predictions about, say, the behavior of quarks is extremely surprising to our savannah-adapted brains. After all, bananas are ordinary things we can hold in our hands and eat, and quarks are tiny and strange and definitely not ordinary at all. So, of course, the obvious thing that comes to mind to explain this is a supernatural force. How else could such dissimilar things be governed by the same laws?

The disappointing truth is that bananas are quarks, and by amazing good fortune, the properties of everyday macroscopic objects are sufficiently related to those of other physical phenomena that a few lucky humans can just barely manage to crudely adapt their banana-counting brain hardware to work in those other domains. No supernatural math required.