On the Nature of Things | Forum

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A painter by the name of Murphy, while not a brilliant scholar,

was a gifted portrait artist.

Over a short number of years, his fame grew and soon

people from all over Ireland were coming to the town

of Miltown Malbay, in County Clare, to get him

to paint their likenesses.



One day, a beautiful young English woman arrived

at his house in a stretch limo and asked if he

would paint her in the nude.



This being the first time anyone had made such a

request he was a bit perturbed, particularly when

the woman told him that money was no object;

in fact, and she was willing to pay up to £10,000.



Not wanting to get into any marital strife,

he asked her to wait while he went into the house

to confer with Mary, his wife. They talked much

about the Rightness and Wrongness of it.

It was hard to make the decision but finally

his wife agreed, on one condition.



In a few minutes he returned.



"T'would be me pleasure to paint yer portrait, missus,"

he said, "The wife says it's okay. "I'll paint you in the

nude all right; but I have to at least leave me socks on,


so I have a place to wipe me brushes."

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Typhoon wrote:FC0pT9xg1oI

noddy wrote:if only our famed beasties had a higher success rate, curse you modern science.

Parodite wrote:XM8aBESf8EI

Brecher wrote:I have seen some ultrafinitists go so far as to challenge the existence of 2100 as a natural number, in the sense of there being a series of “points” of that length. There is the obvious “draw the line” objection, asking where in 21, 22, 23, … , 2100 do we stop having “Platonistic reality”? Here this … is totally innocent, in that it can be easily be replaced by 100 items (names) separated by commas. I raised just this objection with the (extreme) ultrafinitist Yessenin-Volpin during a lecture of his. He asked me to be more specific. I then proceeded to start with 21 and asked him whether this is “real” or something to that effect. He virtually immediately said yes. Then I asked about 22, and he again said yes, but with a perceptible delay. Then 23, and yes, but with more delay. This continued for a couple of more times, till it was obvious how he was handling this objection. Sure, he was prepared to always answer yes, but he was going to take 2100 times as long to answer yes to 2100 then he would to answering 21. There is no way that I could get very far with this.

Harvey M. Friedman "Philosophical Problems in Logic"

Miss_Faucie_Fishtits wrote:That gave me the....... feels. My first dollfie was a birch log. My brother peeled the bark off her..... oh, the humanity...... .........