Facts to make you popular #1

Before I write the next post in my 'New Perspective' series, I thought I'd jot down a pile of crap instead.

And so, over the coming weeks I will scrape the universal bucket of totally useless facts and bung 'em here. In fact, read these and you'll become the centre of any party, pull any bird, and win friends and influence people – simply because you will amaze all with the welter of moronic titbits (that looks suspiciously like a rude word, don't you think?) between your ears. So here's the first (… I hope I can think of a second):

Zeno of Elea (c. 495 BC–c. 430 BC) was a Greek philosopher and mathematician. Aristotle even called him the first to develop the notion of the dialectic. But all of that is irrelevant right now, because what Zeno is most famous for is his paradoxes.

His arrow paradox, my personal favourite, states that for an object to get from A to B, it must pass through an infinite number of half-way stages to get there. However, given this is true, in a finite duration of time it follows that it must be impossible for the object (the arrow) to actually transverse this distance. Therefore, and this is the crunch line, motion is impossible.

As Zeno himself summarised: "What is in motion moves neither in the place it is nor in one in which it is not". (Diogenes Laertius Lives of Famous Philosophers, ix.72)

Well, I'm convinced.