Digital Wanderer |

I Know It's Already Been Everywhere

2005-08-22

. . . but it’s still insanely cool
Spin AKA Hard to Be a God

I Recommend a Logic Textbook to the Commenter

2005-08-22

I was taking the bus to the dacha (that’s how lazy I’ve become—too lazy to walk 3 km), and a five-year-old girl, her mother, and her grandmother got off at the same stop as me. When we arrived, it turned out that they were heading to my friend’s house. Later I stopped by, and the girl, whose name was Masha and who had huge bright-blue eyes, recognized me immediately and said that I had ridden with them on the bus. We introduced ourselves. The grandmother’s name was Chestya, short for Cheslava, and it turned out that she had lived in the same (private) house as my parents and had written her PhD thesis in philology in the room next to theirs.
A few hours later I was riding back on the last bus, again with them. While we waited for the bus, Masha played a game with her mother: she counted the cars going into the city, while her mother counted those going out of the city. Masha was winning by a wide margin, thanks to a fiendishly clever trick that she explained to me: the cars heading into the city were returning from their dachas, so there were many more of them.
The following dialogue ensued:
Me: There’s a flaw in your logic: today is Monday, a workday, so no one goes to the dacha.
Masha: [thought for a moment], it’s summer now, and they’re on vacation.
Masha’s mother: Her father teaches logic.
That was when I fell silent, defeated by the inexorable knowledge of a five-year-old human being with bows in her hair.

P.S. Masha liked me very much, but we’re unlikely to meet again because she and her mother are from Vitebsk

P.P.S. Dad says that Cheslava not only completed her own dissertation, but also influenced him in that regard. My grandfather was unhappy about it: he had only completed four years of school, and the height of his educational ambitions for his son was a technical college (despite that, Grandfather was the chairman of a collective farm during the war)

Read more →