Saturday, January 3, 2015

Otis Escapes, parts 4067 - 4070

 4067. Birds communicate with people by their series of flight patterns. These flight patterns are not infinite, even if they appear to be infinite to the untrained eye. An alphabet would be useless if it contained millions of letters, and so bird flight patterns are limited in number, and there are about 40 or 50 of them that can be clearly be identified.


4068. “But,” you may object, “obviously every time a bird takes flight, its movements must be infinite, because the temperature or the air, and the movement of the wind would conspire to make every flight of a bird as varied as the shapes of snowflakes. Flight would vary infinitely like snowflakes and for the exact same reasons!”


 4069. God, I can just see your smug expression because you surely feel that you have presented me with an infallible argument abolishing all my silly notions about bird language. You sit there across the table, puffing on your pipe, and you have an expression on your face like a person who has just won a game of chess with the well known four move-checkmate, the one that always confounds the beginner.



4070. Hold on for a moment while I find a way to extricate myself from my obvious theoretical embarrassment. It is true that every snowflake is different, and therefore, for the same reasons the flight of every bird is different.

No comments:

Post a Comment