A problem I’ve been grappling with:
How large is this seemingly bottomless pit of non-renewable “innocence” we keep losing?
Is there such a thing as “peak” innocence?
How does the city of Toronto manage to lose its so often. (Is it growing back?)
Is lost innocence surrounded by mountains of unmatched socks?
Responses that provide equations preferred.
(As you may have noticed, I’m in a philosophical mood today.)
Update – Looks like we have our answer.
Toronto never lost its innocence it just keeps getting slapped upside the head by reality…
Damn, you beat me to it! Was too busy typing the damned equation! 🙂
We can say that lost innocence is Il= -1, at minimum.
Then we can say that found innocence If= +1, there is no maximum because its weakened by the loss.
If we do the math, we end up with 0 which is nocence.
On further examination we observe that there is no such thing as found innocence.
Once it is gone its like water down the river.
Innocence is the initial state, from then on rather unhappily its down hill.
Albert Einstein — “Innocence is relative. The question then becomes…Did Toronto lose its innocence or did Innocence lose Toronto.”
(If he didn’t say it, he should have.)
If you think what you wrote were equations, Richard, then thank god you’re not designing our bridges. An equation is an expression of an equality or an inequality between two values or formulas. In order for the equation to be valid, the values of the two formulas must have the same units. Your faux arithmetic does not exhibit compatible units, ergo your strings of characters are not valid equations per se. Fortunately, my equations at least have valid units, so they are not completely without worth of further consideration.
Unhappily, Lev? Why unhappily? Why downhill? I’m very happy to be less innocent than I once was. I love knowledge, where by knowledge I mean the dictionary definitions of:
– The state or fact of knowing.
– Familiarity, awareness, or understanding gained through experience or study.
– The sum or range of what has been perceived, discovered, or learned.
– Learning; erudition: teachers of great knowledge.
– Specific information about something.
Listen to those words: experience, study, perceived, discovered, learned. Those words all describe values that tend to increase temporally over one’s life. Thus, at least until I review my thesis tomorrow, for tonight I stand on my results above:
Innocence is a deficiency of youth; fortunately we tend to outgrow it.
G’night all, thanks for the discussion, best wishes, thanks Kate, &c.
If you think what you wrote were equations, Richard, then thank god you’re not designing our bridges. An equation is an expression of an equality or an inequality between two values or formulas. In order for the equation to be valid, the values of the two formulas must have the same units.
I was trying to keep it simple so the folks in Toronto can understand it too. Typing stuff like “presence or absence of Σ Su(t,θ,Φ)” doesn’t exactly reach the common Torontonian…
In the interest of accuracy though, and if Kate would please be so kind, where ever I used the word “equation”, could you please change it to “math”?
Your faux arithmetic does not exhibit compatible units, ergo your strings of characters are not valid equations per se. Fortunately, my equations at least have valid units, so they are not completely without worth of further consideration.
Jealous much?
Actually, I’m not jealous at all Richard, I’m fluffing up my g’night pillow.
T+Ï€ = I-3.16
Actually, I’m not jealous at all Richard, I’m fluffing up my g’night pillow.
Are you good at fluffing? Are you a master fluffer?
[ SFX: Dreaming music ~ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92bbESmG6u4 ]
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of innumeracy,
I fear no evil, for I know that:
[ SFX: Snoring (and with apologies to the Psalmists). ;-]
Er, Vitrivius, does it simplify the math at all if we use polar co-ordinates, and for the sake of the discussion, hold that (0,0,0) is located at the foot of Yonge Street? We could then examine the fluctuations in innocence and adjust as the universe revolves around its origin.
Actually, vitruvius, imaginary time and space DOES exist. Both Plato and Aristotle, despite their differences, agree on this. And naturally, I agree with them.
It is not within the discrete time/space of our immediate experience, but, it underlies it; it is the basis for it. Your ‘error’ (heh) is to assume that there is only one type of time, the Newtonian/Kantian experienced tick, tick, tick.
Good morning.
…so this mathematician walks into the bar…
Stephen Hawkings used imaginary time in order to satisfy the initial conditions of the space/time equations without involving singularity.
the other way would have been to consider it as a miracle.
Hence, we have a new slogan for Toronto:
‘Toronto the not so good anymore.’
You might pitch it to the city, Kate, I understand they need one. Plus you’ve got a somewhat rational process of arrival, with fancy equations that could lead to even fancier charts and graphs.
Snicker if you will, however, it may even help tourism. Toronto is widely known as ‘the city that fun forgot.,’ and ‘New York designed by the Swiss.” How boring. And now that its lost the Indy, $50 million in tourism will be gone this summer.
The dark undertone of “Toronto the not so good anymore” accompanied by pictures of club land on a Saturday night, etc., might just work in an Amsterdam kind of way.
EinStein
ZweiStein
after that everything is relative.
There are many ways that innocence can be found – they just don’t make the news as such. Given the answers.com definitions:
1) Drinking age laws. Although the potential exists to lose innocence up to a certain age, once you have reached that age – you have either found innocence or will never lose it.
2) Parking. Who hasn’t lost innocence by parking a couple of minutes early in a “NO parking between x and y hours” only to find innocence a couple of minutes later? … Or lost innocence at a parking meter and found it by inserting a loonie?
3) Before the advent of remote car door openers, everyone used a key to open the door. Innocence lost. How many people now are locked out of their cars because the batteries in their remote went dead? Innocence found.
As far as peak innocence … it’s localized … I’d have the guess that occurs sometime in the winter (with what was once considered bad weather), early in the week, when the most people are asleep.
Ahem, so does this mean Toronto really does have a backseat?
My burning question:
Will Toronto lose Sundin????
Vitruvius. You obviously don’t know anything about math, so I’ll keep this simple.
But not as simple as you have. You have forgotten to factor in senility, the increasing pace of loss of innocence (due to a variety of other factors such as better access to information), and the “third sock variant” – due to a company now packaging socks in threes (to replace the lost one in a pair). Few are so stupid as to fall for such an idiotic marketing ploy, but it’s Toronto we’re talking about.
And you aren’t considering the effect of global warming. But your type rarely does. Ignore science at your peril.
And, finally, you’ve set a new record for the use of the word “ergo” in one comments list. I counted four, but my counting isn’t as good as my math.
Re: Alfred the Average “Will Toronto lose Sundin????”
Only in Toronto would the solution to having a bad team be to get rid of the only top level player they have. And, since you brought it up, this is clear proof Toronto hasn’t yet lost it’s innocence. They keep hoping to win a cup. Some even believe it will happen in their lifetime.
Pursuant to my 2:15 comment above, I’ve reviewed my 12:20 model.
The last Σ Su(t,θ,Φ) should be Su(t,θ,Φ), or in detail Σ Su(p,t,θ,Φ).
Sorry about that.
Kate – you’re stumped by the guy who wants his virginity back. I’m not. I kind of understand where he’s coming from. You’d get to re-experience that “first time” again. Something cool about that first time, you know?
Vitruvius. Thanks for the correction. I take it all back. Using my trusty plumb-bob, I’ve determined your estimations are close enough for rock & roll.
You’re welcome Jimbo. As soon as I saw that glaring error I realized how ET, working from my seminal results in this field, erroniously derived the existence of mystical space/time (ouch, ouch, hey, stop hitting me ET, I’m kidding 😉
The funny thing is, my model, developed in stages while thinking about the given problem (as shown by the record above), isn’t actually incorrect. The basic formalization of the problem, I(t1) < I(t0), comes directly from the problem conjecture, “loss of innocence”, which means a decrease of innocence over time, which means we have < for decrease, I for innocence, and t for time.
Past that point it becomes an exercise in how to parameterize the problem according to relevent axes of variability. Since the definition of innocence includes a lot of things that are normally lost over time, parameterization by age seemed an obvious choice, and the rest just came out in the wash.
But really it’s just a lark. All I’ve done is construct a mathematical model that expresses the inherent tautology in the “loss of innocence” conjecture, namely that “innocence” is defined as stuff that is lost over time. Ba da bing, ba da boom.
There were two deduced points I made that were based on my model’s results. First, at 8:37, “Philosophically it’s the Zen thing about wisdom dieing with the old and innocence being reborn with the new”. Second, at 2:15, “Innocence is a deficiency of youth; fortunately we tend to outgrow it”. And I’d like to add a third, that famous line from Opie Read’s 1898 novel A Yankee from the West: “There’s a sucker born every minute”.
Based on my analysis herein, I’ll stand on the three conclusions in the previous paragraph.
Dear Suck, er, vitruvius…NO!!! Innocence is NOT ‘stuff’, ie, matter, ie, some-thing, ie, a thing-in-itself.
It’s potentiality-to-be-stuff. That’s why it’s innocence… of stuff. It’s innocent, ie, lacking spatial and temporal perimeters. Lacking values or attributes. Nothing mystical or that type of blather about it.
Innocence isn’t the Fullness-of-Being, but the LACK of being particular; it’s the potentiality to be particular but with no specific agenda of what particular Form of Matter it will transform into. Innocence is ‘lack of Form’.
The question then moves on to: Can Innocence, as a whole, decrease over time? That is, can the world lose its Capacity of Potentiality? The answer has to be: No.
What does that mean? Well, is just means that the action of transforming Potentiality into Socks, which will dissipate back into Potentiality, will SPEED UP. More and more socks will disappear; but more and more socks will be manufactured in China….faster and faster and..
hmmph. These Twits-in-the-West.
I don’t care what it is, ET, I’m interested in what I can build out of how it behaves. As Theodor von Karman said, “The scientist seeks to understand what is; the engineer seeks to create what never was.”
All right, come on now folks, step right up, how much would you pay for this? But wait, there’s more! We have the logical sentence “loss of innocence”, and we have the definition “innocence = stuff you expect to lose over time”. So, we can substitute the right hand side of the definition for innocence into the logical sentence, and we end up with:
I mention that because this finally brings my whole argument back to Kate’s original point (if I may be so bold as to suggest): Why is “the loss of innocence” News? It’s expected. Expected data is not information (according to Shannon).
And so, as the sun sets slowly in the west and Don Ho sings Hawaii calls, we return to the oldest text at SDA, as paraphrased by me: This is just the voice of an ordinary Canadian yelling back at the [news] ~ You [and your loss-of-innocence snake-oil] don’t speak for me.
Vitruvius. I understand the equation. Sort of. I’m having fun with it. I still think you need to account for senility/Alzheimer’s. At least in my case.
And now you have to go and drag the late, dearly missed Don Ho into it. I think he managed to keep a special kind of innocence through his entire life.
This has been like a breath of fresh air. As a relic of an elder age – Fortran [card deck] programming – I’ve enjoyed the comment thread immensely, and had a wonderful time seeing how my interpretation matched up against that of others. (Quite well, to my great pleasure.) For me, the answer isn’t important – the fact that Fortran is still being used is of much more interest. It makes me feel 30 years younger…………… if only my physique (a sad state of affairs!) could actually BE younger!!
Who needs C/C++/C+-%#$ ?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?
Too many equations.
Call in the army.