Dramatis persona*

helenhead Helen Chick

I've always wanted a bumper sticker that said "I'm a female, LDS/Mormon, Scout leading, geocaching, piano-playing, bicycling, mathematics educator with a PhD in maths ... and I VOTE"!

I think this makes me a minority group of cardinality 1!

* Since there's only one of me and "personae" is plural (I think), I've gone with dramatis persona.
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Aaaagh. Immobilised.

Consider a dog in the middle of a square room with four equally desirable bowls of yummy food, one in each corner. You can imagine it looking at first one, and then the next, and then the third, and then the fourth, and thinking (in doggy thoughts): “Which one do I go for? Which one? Which? That one? No, that one? Ooh, that one?”.

And there it remains, stuck in the middle in a frantic state of indecisiveness completely unable to move.

That’s me, near enough. Too many urgent things needing to be done, right now (or yesterday, preferably (or, better yet, last week!)), and all of them equally pressing. To make matters worse, there are more than four.

Unlike the dog, I can be distracted by something totally unrelated and irrelevant, like writing a silly blog entry!

4 comments to Aaaagh. Immobilised.

  • Colin

    A paradox, a paradox,
    A most ingenious paradox.
    Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha,
    This paradox.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buridan's_ass

    🙂

  • Colin

    (Sorry, the link only half worked; you’ll need to copy and paste! I think WordPress got ” ‘s_ass-y “!)

  • hchick

    Ah-hah! Thanks for that. I’d heard the idea once a long time ago, but I can’t remember the details of the story nor where I heard it. I’m pretty sure the version I heard had a dog not an ass, and I have no recollection of the actual number of equally desirable objects.

  • Colin

    Hmmmm… in the cold light of day, even the copy and paste doesn’t work for me; I just get “Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name.”

    Call me stubborn, but if anyone is still interested, try http://TinyURL.com/42ysl8

    It is interesting to note that it is a common dilemma, even for International Chess Masters. In one of the semi-final competitions during the Championship of the Soviet Union master Veresov exceeded the time limit. After the game he started to show his partner various ways of how he could have given checkmate in three or five moves.
    “So why didn’t you do it? What did you waste your time for?” asked his surprised opponent.

    “I was trying to decide which mate would have been more spectacular.” – (Quoted from http://www.chessgames.com)

    “I’m pretty sure the version I heard had a dog not an ass”- So, was it the Devo song, or the episode of Growing Pains!?!

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