Genesis 2:2 By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing...
And here we have: The Holy
Bibble. We've got the domain name all registered and the webhosting
giving us a place to put the holiest of holy comics (except for,
perhaps Sinfest). I'm feeling pretty
holy right now. Pretty cleansed of all my sins. I imagine you should be
feeling pretty damn holy right now as well after reading all about the
advent of your great^100 grandfather. Wave hello to him, I'm sure he
can see you in the great above. Tell him you're reading all about him
and what a defiant little punk he was in his earlier years.
Anyway, let me
introduce myself a little. I am Lucas Daniels, and I am here to set you
all free by revealing the true Word of God. My brother in religion is
Cannan Jacobs. Basically, I draw it, and he writes it, though you
probably won't see much of his commentary online. He's super religious,
you know, like living in a cave, eating nothing but bugs and rodents,
all in the name of the Lord. I have to drive out fifty miles to go
visit him in his cave with a few candles (he vehemently opposes
electricity, of course) and paper so we can write the next week of Holy
Bibble. It's a tough job, but it's for a good cause. It's for the Lord!
What
up dawgs? I am known as Cannan Jacobs. It is true, I went through a
phase in my spiritual life where I thought isolation and deprivation
was the true path to salvation. But your mom proved me wrong. Your
mom's french toast is really good. I know, because she made me some for
breakfast. Yeah, that's right. I'm yo daddy.
Hmm...
great^100 grandfather, eh Lucas?
You know... Mathematics is the most pure of all God's creations. It
transcends all of humanity. For example: any intelligent alien race,
regardless of biological structure, would come up with the same value
for pi (the ratio of a circle's circumference to it's diameter) as we
have. Like Plato's Perfect Forms, Mathematical abstractions are a
property of the universe itself: it's proofs and theorems are encoded
in the Ether; They are not created, but discovered. I cannot,
therefore, tolerate your blasphemous claim that Adam is our great^100
grandfather.
Let
me speak for a moment on the system for describing the greatness of
grandfathers. If you are talking about your grandfather, you say
"great" 0 times. If you are talking about your grandfather's father,
you say "great" 1 time. If you are talking about your grandfather's
father's father, you say "great" 2 times, and so on.
Formally, we can define the language of grandfather strings as follows:
GRANDFATHERS = { w | w = x*y, where x and y are strings, x = "great" and y = "grandfather" }
Note: the star operator "*" indicates that the string x can be concatenated with itself zero or more times, i.e.
x* = {"","great","greatgreat","greatgreatgreat"...}
Now let us analyze Lucas's expression: great^100grandfather
Is Lucas's string in the language GRANDFATHERS ?
Clearly it is not, for it cannot be expanded to fit the form x*y, where x and y are strings, x = "great" and y = "grandfather".
This is because great^100 is not equal to (k)"great" for any k.
A
more suitable way to express Adam's "greatness" is to multiply "great"
by a constant instead of reaising it to a power. In this way,
(0)"great" = "", (1)"great" = "great", (2)"great" = "greatgreat", and
so on. I could, in this way, refer to my grandfather's father's
father's father by using the expression (3)"great""grandfather", which
would, on evaluation, return "greatgreatgreatgrandfather".
But
how many "greats" is necessary to describe Adam's "greatness" ? 100 is
clearly too small, as 100 generations would only amount to about 2000
years. 10^100 is clearly too big, as there are only about 10^80 stable
particles in the universe, and it would be unreasonable to think that
there have been more generations of humans than there are stable
particles in the universe. The answer lies somewhere in between... I'll
post more on this interesting problem later.
For
those of you who thirst for a deeper understanding of formal language
theory (as every virtuous man should), I recommend Michal Sipser's book
Introduction to the Theory of Computation. You can find it here.
Fuck you, Cannan, Adam was your Grandfather^1000!
:: SeeIT Strip :: 
