Achilles won’t ever be able to catch that damned turtle.

“Things can constantly change while remaining the same”

We already have a term for this, it’s called Equilibrium. The world is full of forces which are (roughly) equally balanced like this, giving an illusion of boring inertness which is once in a while shattered abruptly (e.g. by an earthquake, in which the incredibly powerful forces acting on the very ground itself are briefly out of equilibrium).

I’m just glad this didn’t end on a “Pair of Docs” joke.

If Cat is two meters tall, and every panel he sinks 50% farther into the paradox per panel, after how many panels will Girl actually try to help Cat?

Bye, Cat! We’ll miss you! Write if you get work!

I hate, hate, hate, hate Zeno’s tortoise. It’s not a paradox; it’s just plain old bamboozlement.

This is a different kind of geeky than is most common in these strips, but Zeno’s tortoise is a different way of thinking which introduces the interesting concept of an infinitesimal (both infinitesimal length and time). Infinitesimals have philosophical implications to the teaching of mathematics, and, although they were used for years without formal definition by the inventors of calculus, most math educations avoid them entirely.

Unrelatedly, alternate name for this strip: “The Red Queen’s Quicksand”

Bah, the fact that his paradoxes prove that something we know happens doesn’t happen only serves to highlight his faulty thinking, not our faulty perception. Bloody Greeks, looking inwards for “truth” while the world fell apart.

Struggling when mired in paradox only makes you sink faster.

marxism isn’t any kind of “scheme”. it’s an intellectual method. i think what you meant to say was “communism”. just sayin’.

An earthquake isn’t when the tectonic plates are ‘out of equilibrium’… it’s when they are finally no longer able to resist the inevitability of change. That’s another Cat & Girl strip entirely.

More nitpicking, but a universe can’t be “rational.” Rationality is an attribute of thought or the expressions of thought. The universe is neither.

Nitpicking party! An Earthquake isn’t the slippage of techtonic plates; it’s the vibration caused by that slippage!

Also, it’s not that earthquakes are when things are ‘out of equilibrium’. It’s that constant earthquakes -are- the equilibrium.

Mike: According to “The Dynamics of Plate Tectonics and Mantle Flow: From Local to Global Scales, Stadler et al. Science 27 August 2010: 1033-1038” there seems to not yet be a consensus as to how much of the accommodation for tectonic stress and strain is due to earthquakes, though they are surely some of it.

That’s what SHE said. Dr. Stadler. She said that. Wrote that.

Why a paradox? Why a no parachickens?

Also to carla marx’s comment, marxism (and marxian communism) is *specifically* non-utopian; it’s materialist by definition.

Paradoxes make me sad. But that, as Michael Ende would say, it’s another story…