| Poll |
| Is the gate on the picture open, closed, all at once or half open/closed? |
| Open |
|
39% |
[ 47 ] |
| Closed |
|
5% |
[ 6 ] |
| It's all at once |
|
8% |
[ 10 ] |
| It's half open, half closed |
|
47% |
[ 57 ] |
|
| Total Votes : 120 |
|
Plorg
Joined: May 08, 2005
|
 Posted:
Mar 08, 2006 - 17:24 |
 
|
| CircularLogic wrote: |
You are right, if you ask why I not choose "close" as baseline and not "open". That`s an easy one. "Open" - for a gate - means that there is an opening. An opening is quanitfyable. "Closed" is the absence of an opening. Absence of something is always absolute and a binary state - because either there is something, or it`s absent. Therefore there is no such thing as half closed. Same with light and darkness - there is no such thing as half as dark - or empty and full - there is no half empty, because empty is the absence of content. |
Take a glass that is half full of water.
It is placed in a vacuum jar and the extra air/non-glass/non-water molecules are extracted.
The top half of the space in the glass is absent of water molecules.
In the upper water-free space, there is a true binary state of emptiness.
Now consider the halves of the glass if you cut it vertically.
The left half of the glass has some water, so it is not empty.
The right half of the glass has some water, so it is also not empty.
So according to this binary evaluation, the glass is not empty.
However, cutting horizontally, the upper half of the space is empty.
We can take the space inside the glass, divide it into very small molecule-sized sections,
and evaluate each piece true/false of whether it has water molecules in it.
Integrating these spaces together, we can actually find a non-binary
evaluation (not full and not empty) of exactly how full (or half empty)
the total space in the glass is. |
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f_alk
Joined: Sep 30, 2005
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| Posted:
Mar 08, 2006 - 17:26 |
|
just a quick side note:
the above won't work with fluid water, as it will start to cook and fill the "void" with steam. |
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CircularLogic
Joined: Aug 22, 2003
|
| Posted:
Mar 08, 2006 - 17:45 |
|
| Plorg wrote: | Suppose a gate is locked in a position so that there is one millimeter of space beneath it.
By practical designations, the gate would commonly be referred to as "closed".
It is not open wide enough for a horde of zombies to enter.
Now suppose that the horde of zombies have some canisters of fire ants and nerve gas.
(These are sophisticated zombies)
Releasing the fire ants, they crawl through the millimeter gap.
Releasing the nerve gas, it seeps through the millimeter gap.
So... unless the gate is sealed to be airtight, is it closed?
There are many "near-closed" states of the gate that are commonly
considered as closed, depending on the perspective of whatever
is trying to get in the door. |
Closed is the position of the gate where is is down as much as possible. Even if the gate doesn`t shut perfect, it is closed - even for fire ants, who can crawl through it. For the ants, the gate is closed, but there is a passage into the building.
Now if the position with the 1mm-gap is not the closed state, because the gate can shut completely, then it`s open, because it is not closed. It`s open and passable for the fire ants or the nervegas and it`s open but impassable for the zombie horde, you, me, my car, the semi-truck and the tank... well maybe it`s passable for the tank, but that`s another question. |
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CircularLogic
Joined: Aug 22, 2003
|
| Posted:
Mar 08, 2006 - 19:18 |
|
The whole vaccum-thingy makes no point, so I cut it out.
| Plorg wrote: |
Now consider the halves of the glass if you cut it vertically.
The left half of the glass has some water, so it is not empty.
The right half of the glass has some water, so it is also not empty.
So according to this binary evaluation, the glass is not empty.
However, cutting horizontally, the upper half of the space is empty. |
You are only saying, that if you cut the glass horizontally, you could say "Half the glass is empty" which is correct but not equal to "The (whole) glass is half empty".
| Plorg wrote: |
Integrating these spaces together, we can actually find a non-binary
evaluation (not full and not empty) of exactly how full (or half empty)
the total space in the glass is. |
Let me just remove the part that makes no sense:
Integrating these spaces together, we can actually find a non-binary
evaluation (not full and not empty) of exactly how full the total space in the glass is.
That is completly true. False is (in a mathematica sense), that there is something like "half empty" because empty is an absolute word - not a quantifiable. |
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Plorg
Joined: May 08, 2005
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| Posted:
Mar 08, 2006 - 20:11 |
|
So you're saying that the "closedness" of the gate is dependent
on the gate's design and the maximum ability for it to close.
On farms, there is a construct called a cow gate or cow trap.
It is a break in a fence with a small u-turn built in,
so that humans with their vertical thin bodies can pass through,
but cows with their long horizontal bodies can not.
These gates have no moving parts by design,
so they can not be further "opened" or "closed".
They are generally constructed of horizontal bars with
space between them, so it happens to be completely
porous to anything smaller than a dog.
Is this type of gate always open or always closed
or simultaneously both or neither? |
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