Lachlan, creator of lemmyunchained.net

  • 6 Posts
  • 73 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • A few years back, I moved into an old farmhouse in the countryside. It was peaceful, except for the noises that would come from the attic every night, a soft thumping like someone walking around. After a couple of sleepless nights, I finally mustered the courage to check it out.

    I climbed up to the attic with a flashlight. It was full of dusty old furniture and trinkets, probably from previous tenants. As I was examining a pile of old newspapers, my flashlight caught something - a pair of eyes glowing in the dark, staring right back at me. I nearly dropped the flashlight in shock. As I shone the light in the direction, I found an old portrait of a woman. The eyes were eerily lifelike. I convinced myself it was just the way the light was hitting it.

    The noises didn’t stop, but I learned to live with them. But the weirdest part was when I left the house a 6 months later. The movers came to get my stuff, and I told them to leave everything in the attic, I’d Grabe those items myself. I mainly needed movers for the big heavy stuff. Later, when I returned to pick up some remaining items, the portrait was gone.

    To this day, I still can’t figure out where it could have gone, why just that. Probably some completely logical explanation, but it still gives me chills when I think about it.





  • Sometimes, it’s surprising how life unfolds. I remember back in my second year at boarding school, we were all set to return for another term, standing on the train station platform. Fooling around, we missed the train.

    With no other options and perhaps a bit of youthful audacity, we took dads old ford and we ended up driving it all the way to school.

    The car broke down, we almost got caught. Then crazily, we crashed into a famous tree on campus.

    However, as wild as that was, missing that train might just have saved us.

    We later found out that the Chamber of Secrets had been opened around the time we were meant to be on that train. A deadly monster, a Basilisk, was slithering around the castle, able to kill just by meeting your gaze.

    Who’s to say we wouldn’t have bumped into it, had we made that train? With our track record of stumbling into trouble, it seems more than likely. It’s a chilling thought.

    Xoxo Ron












  • You’re correct that infinity isn’t necessarily all-encompassing. Your example of the decimal expansion of 1/3 represents a “bounded infinity,” where the values can continue indefinitely but are limited in scope - in this case, to repetitions of the number 3.

    In contrast, when we consider the potential configurations of the universe over infinite time, we’re imagining something more akin to an “uncountable infinity.” This is a type of infinity exemplified by the set of all real numbers between two points. For example, between 0 and 1, there’s an infinite number of decimal numbers. This infinity is unbounded because there’s no limit to the variation within this set - any decimal between 0 and 1 could potentially appear.

    So in the context of the universe, the idea is that given infinite time and assuming no constraints, the possible configurations of matter and energy might resemble an uncountable infinity, with infinite potential arrangements. That means, given enough time, even highly improbable configurations could occur.