Timeless questions quiz

Off the top of my head, here are some timeless questions. (Reader challenge: do not resort to the internet!)

Section I: Cite, or state the "answer."

(1) To be or not to be? -- that is the question.
(2) What rolls down stairs (alone or in pairs), rolls over your neighbor's dog, what's great for a snack and fits on your back?
(3) And hast thou slain the jabberwock?
(4) Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
(5) Now, tell me: who's your housekeeper, and what do you keep in your house?
(6) Is there, is there balm in Gilead?
(7) Did I just hear an alarm start ringing? Did I see sirens go flying past?
(8) Have you no consideration for my poor nerves?
(9) Could I be Leander, on a wave borne to a new home across this lonely sea?
(10) Why did Constantinople get the works?

Section II: Cite. (I don't know the answer offhand.)

(1) And isn't it ironic, just a little bit?
(2) Where have all the flowers gone?
(3) ... or am I rewriting history?
(4) You guys had a riot? On account of me? My very own riot?
(5) Is it too late to start, with your heart in a headlock?
(6) ... or were you looking at the woman in the red dress?
(7) Where's the fish? Where's the fish? Where's the fish?
(8) Not even Wensleydale?
(9) Why, God, why tonight?
(10) Who looks at a screwdriver and says, "I think that needs to be more sonic"?!

Section III: Complete the question. Then answer it.

(1) Dr. Livingstone, ________?
(2) If all your friends jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, ________?
(3) Why ________________, _____________?
[UPDATE: I forgot these two:]
(4) What would _____ do?
(5) How many ______ does it take to get to the center of ________?

For bonus points, describe a scenario or short story in which all of these questions are asked.


This post's theme song: "Who is the Scarlet Pimpernel?" (It's me! It's me!)

Other people are different from me

Let a worldview be an n-dimensional real vector, where each entry represents a weight (relative importance) of some aspect of the world. WLOG we can normalize these vectors, and consider them as a solution space for the problem of "how do I prioritize things in the world as inputs that influence my life?" For example, I'd have a heavy weight for, say, mathematics, and a low one for 18th-century French literature; a devoted humanities student, vice-versa.

But it's not that the humanities student's vector is nearly orthogonal to mine. It's that he has a paintbrush and a palette of oils representing different philosophical schools, and he's riding a unicorn through clouds of poetry. He's operating in a totally different paradigm. He doesn't even have a vector. Yet we inhabit the same world -- we can meet and interact, so some parts of my worldview must align with his.

This is what it is like to be trapped in my head. I've no idea what it is like to be trapped in anyone else's head -- I've never been there -- and at best I can simulate it according to parameters I conceive and choose. If I'm running simulated annealing on a solution space and you are gimbling in the mimsy borogrove-infested wabe, how can I grasp anything about you? Even if you describe it to me, I will still have no sense of it, just a description.

That inadequacy is apparent here (oh, irony): I write, but what can you really understand from this about me or how I work?

And if this gulf of unknowability really separates people, how do they "get to know" each other? You are just "getting to know" an increasingly detailed abstraction of me that you construct in your head based on my observable behavior.

Sometimes I want to abandon the meta-abstraction and go distribute food in third-world countries. Then I remember how bad I am with people, and how much I love the power of meta*, and I stick to academia.

My apologies for making these existential high-school-level musings so frequent. I've drafted lighter posts (with pictures!), and they'll be up soon.


This post's featured writing implement: my science pencil, which heat-sensitively turned from green to yellow as I wrote.

This post's theme facebook group: Currently Undergoing an Existential Crisis.