I’m currently taking a philosophy of science class, and have come to one conclusion–philosophers worry too much.

I’ve gone through numerous texts that always claim that a statement merely begs the question. Philosophers are never satisfied. Maybe this is necessary in some circumstances, but I’ve found that they are usually altogether too cynical.

Being a philosopher seems like it would take too many years off your life. Could someone perhaps point me to some optimistic philosophy? I’m sure there are tons out there. It just seems like pessimistic philosophy is more in fashion.

Today I called 911. No, the apartment wasn’t burning down. My cell phone was actually in my pocket, and somehow, the keyguard was disengaged and 911 was dialed.

Now, what is the probability of this happening? This event implies that six keys needed to be hit in sequence: CALL, * (to shut down the keyguard), 9, 1, 1, CALL. There are no other sequences that can produce a call to 911. This event is highly unlikely. Probability and information theory states that under certain conditions two independent events occuring to produce a joint event of meaning is asymptotically small. This stems from the Asymptotic Equipartition Property. In this case, the two events were the random dialing of keys in my pocket and the dialing of 911. It’s safe to say that these two events are usually independent.

Obviously, I didn’t say anything to the 911 operator when my phone connected. The police department called me back asking if I was all right. It’s good to know they call you back even when all they hear is the shuffling of pants.

I came across a group called the World Jump Day. Their aim is to reduce the effects of global warming by shifting earth’s axis of rotation. Okay, I buy that. But how do they propose to do this?

Their proposal is to have 600 million people jump at different specified times around the world. Now this, my friends, is ridiculous and impossible due to our old friend called conservation of momentum.

Once we jump up, the earth is actually pushed away by a very tiny amount, and once you land the earth comes to meet you. Momentum is conserved. Another way of saying this is that the total mass x velocity of the system (you and the earth) remains constant. The earth and you go back to where everything began. The only way to really change the momentum is for you to jump high enough to escape earth’s gravity.

Even if we could do this, there would be no way you could get 600 million people organized to do anything worthwhile. The total tally of people signed up is around 60 million, but I suspect this number is inflated.