Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Certain bits of television I'd like to watch all the…
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2001 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
Certain bits of television I'd like to watch all the way through. Examples: Baseball and The Civil War by Ken Burns. The seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine that I never saw, and all of Babylon 5. And some Nova and Frontline episodes. Fortunately enough, the transcripts for those last two shows are online at pbs.org, and every so often I go reread the transcript for "The Proof."
STACY KEACH (NARRATOR): The task was to prove that no numbers, other than 2, fit the equation. But when computers came along, couldn't they check each number one by one and show that none of them worked?JOHN CONWAY: Well, how many numbers are there to be dealt with? You've got to do it for infinitely many numbers. So, after you've done it for one, how much closer have you got? Well, there's still infinitely many left. After you've done it for a thousand numbers, how many, how much closer have you got? Well, there's still infinitely many left. After you've done it for a million, well, there's still infinitely many left. In fact, you haven't done very many, have you?
