It doesn't assign a heapiness value, though: it assigns odds of something being a heap. That still treats heaps as a crisp set. Compare: a probability function will tell me the odds of a die rolling a six, but it still either the die does or doesn't land on six; there is no "slightly six" in dice, there are just the odds of being either completely six or not. That's not the case with heaps: a collection of grains can be only slightly heapish, or very heapish, which is something different than being slightly or very likely to be (completely and unambiguously) a heap.

Europeans think 200 miles is a long distance; Americans think 200 years is a long time.

(And 2000 years ago is still pretty recent, even just as far as human history goes. That's closer to the Moon Landing than it is to the building of the Pyramids of Giza).

The formalism of use here is not probability, but fuzzy sets. The Problem of the Heap basically highlights that "heapishness" is not a crisp property; there is not a clear-cut line between heaps and non-heaps, rather the demarcation between heaps and non-heaps is fuzzy. A collection of grains of rice can be more heapish or less heapish, and sufficiently non-heapish (for a given purpose, context, etc) collections can be called simply "non-heaps", of sufficiently heapish collections likewise simply called "heaps", but there is never a sudden switch from heap to non-heap.

Probability doesn't express that properly, because it still speaks as though a given collection either is or isn't a heap, and adds the further complication that two different collections of the same number of grains may be a heap and not a heap respectively, though their odds of being a heap are the same.

Going back to chickens: it's not that over time, successive organisms got more and more likely to be chickens. It's that over time, successive organisms got more and more chickenish. Chickens are not a crisp set. Chickenishness if a fuzzy property.

But stillsufficiently chickenish birds came before sufficiently-chickenish-bird eggs, because a chicken egg is an egg laid by a chicken, not necessarily an egg containing a chicken embryo. (Consider: when you buy unfertilized eggs at the store, are those chicken eggs or not?)

This is tangential but I just have to comment that there is so much presumption in your suggestions. That he has retirement savings that he could live off of. That he has a house he could sell. Especially that the alternative to owning a house would cost LESS than owning one — why would anyone ever buy if not to escape the infinite debt that is a life of renting until you die?

In my 20s I wanted to spend my life doing things to enrich the world, art and writing and philosophy, but got sidetracked from those things by the need to get a stable enough life that I could do those things without ending up homeless or starving again —after that happened or nearly happened too many times for comfort. Now as I'm approaching middle age myself, it's becoming clear that it's going to take my entire productive life, if I'm lucky and things continue going as well as they recently have started to, to get to a point where I don't have to work doing pointless things that contribute nothing of value to the world just to have a place to sleep, and can actually start doing something worth doing with my life when I retire — if I'm lucky enough to ever actually retire, since it'll likely be by retirement age that housing is secured and I can start saving up food money to live off of for the few years I'll have left, and that's ignoring the probability that by then I will likely have medical expenses destroying any ability to save like that anymore.

So the alternative to "toil[ing] away the rest of my life working for The Man doing trivial things" as the GP put it isn't "sell my house" or "live off my retirement savings", it's "sleep in my car and beg for food money". In either case I lose out on actually doing anything worth living for, but in the former case at least I'm living a comfortable pointless existence.

The mold dies once it reaches my stomach anyway, and it's already there by the time the wine gets anywhere near it, so I don't know what you're talking about with "kill the fungus". But seriously, bread and water with a roquefort? That leaves a meal of the strongest savory-flavored food in the world, paired with no other flavors of note (depending on the bread you're thinking of). Gotta add some variety in there, and the sweet and sour notes of a rich fruity wine contrast the savory cheese beautifully.

I also have a very high alcohol tolerance and don't care much for the taste, so I never understood why drinking was attractive at all. (With the exception of drinks that actually do taste good, mostly paired with good foods; I do like a nice sangria with my roquefort cheese).

I eventually discovered that I could get drunk if I combined hard liquor with caffeine. And I still didn't understand why that feeling would be appealing. Why would anyone enjoy having poor motor control and cloudy thinking?

Now a drug that made you hyper-competent, that I could see the appeal of; and it would probably be the downfall of me, assuming side-effects and addiction are the price of that temporary boost.

To be complete, Adams' story was far from complimentary of the B-ark people, too. In fact it's mostly just ragging on how useless and incompetent the B-ark people are (and how they completely ruined the world they eventually settled on), and only mentions in passing how their homeworld also collapsed in their absence.

In mathematics "almost" denotes an infinite set minus some finite subset, so if there are only 10 billion galaxies that can support life and the universe is infinite, then the universe is "almost lifeless": infinitely lifeless except some finite subset with potential life.

Punishing people for speaking is tantamount to prohibiting speech. Virtually every law against anything is a declaration to the effect of "if you do this, you will be punished"; so if you can legally be punished for doing something, it is effectively illegal to do it.

I like your point, but seriously... "copyright", "copyrited", AND "copywrite" all in one post?

You might already know this and just not be mentioning the name, but that is called the just-world hypothesis.

I'm in favor of people learning how to drive before they do so, and of testing programs that certify that you do in fact know how to drive safely, and I'm fine with such certifications being used as defensive evidence if someone thought you were driving dangerously and charged you with such. You can show them that you've passed this test that shows you are able to do things like whatever you did safely. Not that that should make it an open-and-shut case, but it's good evidence. "It's ok, I know what I'm doing." Absence of such certification could likewise count against someone: change it from a mere one-time error of judgement to recklessly engaging in activities you have no competence in. But again, the absence of certification wouldn't make it open-and-shut, it's just a piece of evidence, and other factors can outweigh it.

What I'm against is punishing someone who was, despite such certification, operating a vehicle in a safe manner anyway. That is what makes it a license and not just a certification: you're not allowed to (meaning you will be punished if you) do something, even if you do it safely, without someone's prior permission. Note well that requiring licensing doesn't actually preemptively stop people from driving without a license, it just punishes people who do; and it punishes them whether or not they were actually driving unsafely. The ones who were driving unsafely would have been rightly punished anyway even if they did have a license. So the mandate of licensure does nothing but punish those who were driving safely without permission.

But what rich and probably white old person is going to want to run around in a dirty brown peasant body?

I don't think anyone forgets that. It's like a defining character trait.

If ever you can be legally punished not because you did something that hurt or even endangered someone, but simply because you didn't ask permission first, liberty has one foot already in the grave.

If someone with a license to do X does X and hurts or endangers somebody anyway despite their license, they get rightly punished for it anyway.

If somebody with a license to do X does X and nobody gets hurt or endangered in any way, they don't get in trouble for anything, as they shouldn't.

If somebody without a license to do X does X and hurts or endangers somebody, they get rightly punished for it too.

But if somebody without a license to do X does X and nobody gets hurt or endangered in any way, they get punished, not for causing any harm or danger, but for having the gall not to ask permission before safely and harmlessly doing something.

The only difference mandatory licensure ever makes is punishing people who wouldn't have been punished otherwise because they weren't doing anything harmful or dangerous. Mandatory licensure, of anything, only ever harms innocents, by punishing them for harmless behavior that they simply didn't ask permission for first.