When Nonsemble are not making their indie-classical noises together, they puzzle over questions like these.
Is a pool without water in it still a pool?
A pool's essence is the body of water it contains, and yet the phrase ‘installing a pool’ tends to refer to the creation of an appropriate hole in the ground. Without the qualifier ‘empty’ preceding it, can ‘pool’ aptly refer to a spatial void intended for water, but yet to contain a single drop? Or is ‘water’ to ‘pool’ as ‘words’ is to ‘novel’ or as ‘smug grin’ is to ‘Christopher Pyne’ – the latter is not truly itself without the former.At what point does bread become toast?
Is it merely the act of putting it in the toaster? Is there are a colour definition somewhere on the scale of white to incrementally more brown to black that defines a toasted state? Is warm bread actually just a weak form of toast? Or is toast simply an unnecessarily confusing word that we use to describe cooked bread out of convenience?When is a tube of toothpaste finished?
So many times we have all exhausted our toothpaste, thrown it in the bin, before going to the supermarket to kneel before the shrine of Colgate and select our favourite from the 403,648,294 available varieties. But do we ever really finish the toothpaste? There is always a little left behind, like radioactive material living out its indeterminate half-life. But perhaps the answer to this question is a personal one, and each individual's personal toothpaste threshold may tell us something profound and beautiful about who we are.What are the statistical odds of turning on your television and seeing Jeff Goldblum?
Our resident mathematician thought about it for a while and decided that it might not be so hard come up with a rough estimate. In fact an equation for the probability of Jeff Goldblum appearing on any given channel at any given time may look as simple as this:P=J/T x F
Where J is the number of hours that Jeff Goldblum appears on screen in feature presentations (movies, tv shows), T is the total number of hours of feature presentation in current circulation on television, F is the percentage of time that a given channel dedicates to showing feature presentations (this assumes that Jeff Goldblum doesn't do anything media worthy in his spare time and doesn't appear on news and current affairs programs, or advertisements for that matter).
You could make it more complex by trying to lump channels together into one big probability, but you'd have to have consider a lot of information about the number of channels that a given person has available to them, such as style of programming, and whether or not they constantly replay seasons 8 and 9 of ‘Law And Order: Criminal Intent’...
Is every food a variation of a sandwich?
Let us consider first, a turkey-salad sandwich, a distinguished part of the ancient human tradition of putting food inside other food. By the small variation of removing the bread, we arrive at a turkey salad. Therefore, the turkey salad may rightly be considered a variation on our primary archetype of the turkey sandwich.May we then take this further? We may call a whole, baked fish surrounded by bread a whole-baked, fish sandwich, thereby making baked fish also a variant of the sandwich. And with less tenuity we may also consider the pizza to be an open sandwich, sushi a rolled, rice-based sandwich, and curry a deconstructed sandwich, and so forth. This basic versatility of the archetypal categorisation of food is a haunting reminder of the fallibility of human logic and our need to categorise and control in order assuage our ever-present fear of inevitable death.
Honourable mentions
How black do jeans have to be to be called black jeans?Which is wetter: moist or damp?
If diamonds are forever is Neil Diamond immortal?
If you are happy and patting a duck are you actually feeling down?
At what point is fungus going to evolve mind-control abilities and become the dominant life force on this planet? Or has it already? Is fungus even alive?
