Hen da yo. Tabun. ^^; On the other hand, if nobody gave a crap about fictional characters, nobody would bother with creating fiction, either. So if somebody has gone to the trouble of making the imaginary people suffer, it's equally legit for us (as readers) to go to the trouble of giving a crap. Right? Right?

*crickets chrip*

Posted by Kristin O. @ 04/06/2003 10:36 PM EST

So I'm googling around looking for a comprehensible page on Lorentz attractors, since somebody suggested to our publisher that it would be a good subject for the upcoming issue on "Chaos and Order," and I stumble upon this page comparing the number sequence to Jessica Rabbit: http://www.abarim-publications.com/artctframedns.html. To wit:

Well, if Jessica is not real, how can she provoke a real response? Something that is not there can not cause a real effect. The question is thus not if Jessica is real but what it is about Jessica that allows her to transcend out of the fictional realm from which she sprang, into the realm of very real emotional responses?

Um, Universe? You're scaring me with the synchronicity. I feel obscurely better now, though.

Nevertheless, there's something very unreal about numbers. But there's also something very real about them. Numbers help us to stilyze reality into a tangible shape that we can push and punch and move around. Numbers help us to define what needs to be debated, they help us built the world we live in. And although they work on a principle that depends on something that they themselves can not reach or fathom, they imitate the universe so well that a glimpse of that which they can not contain shines dimly from their ranks.

Through a glass darkly, after all.

Posted by N-chan @ 04/07/2003 10:57 AM EST

Numbers, real or otherwise, make my brain bleed. But as for Jessica Rabbit: I suppose that some part of us, some basic emotional reactor located in the gut or the brain stem or someplace equally primitive, responds to all representations as if they were real. Otherwise they'd hold no power at all. I mean, very small children sometimes don't distinguish between the actual and the imaginary. As we grow up into 'rational' adults, we're trained to make that distinction, but I think there's a part of us that never really learns, and that part continues to responds to fiction/representation as if it were real.

Just think of porn! Um. What I mean to say is, it's only a representation, but it can generate the very same physical response as, well, the real McCoy. The /body/ recognizes it as real, even while the rational brain is categorizing it as fiction.

Posted by Kristin O. @ 04/07/2003 12:27 PM EST