A very unusual piece of wood

"Pinochio?" you might ask. No, and no again. It is spelt Pinocchio. So I was walking back to my place with groceries when all of a sudden it started raining. And I really mean "all of a sudden", like in those movies where the sky is clear then all of a sudden it is pouring. Now, I don't know if there are places where this is how rain normally works, but here in Vancouver it generally starts with a little drip drip...then drizzles a bit...then a few minutes later you have rain. You get a few drops on your head and you know that you only have a couple of minutes before the rain comes. But there is this warning system. Drip drip. But that was not the case on this particular occasion. And my first thought was "wow, it's like i'm in a movie" (more specifically I pictured myself in Kurosawa's Rashomon). And then it occured to me, it is quite possible that Pinocchio is the most powerful theoretical tool in existence. Now, we all know that Pinocchio's nose gets longer when he lies. But here is where it gets tricky. Does he have to be aware that he is lying for his nose to get longer? What if he expresses an untrue proposition against his knowledge? Of course, the correct answer to this is that yes, he does have to be conciously lying. But then I would have nothing to write about, so let us just suppose for the remainder of this entry that Pinocchio's nose gets longer whenever he expresses an untrue proposition (I say "expresses an untrue proposition" instead of lying, because the word lying seems to imply a mesure of concious awareness). Now, it seems that Pinocchio's nose calculates the truth value of any proposition in about the same amount of time in every circumstance. That is to say, the complexity of a computation does not effect the time in which the nose completes that calculation. In essence, Pinocchio's nose can, for any input determine a truth value, expressed either in the lengthening of the nose or in an absence of lengthening (we are here assuming the law of excluded middle). Given the absolutely horrible and unconvincing argument layed out above, Pinocchio can, in effect, solve any decision problem (in the logical sense). For example, the halting problem is solvable by the nose, since any calculation takes the same amount of time, the nose can determine whether or not halting will occur (the nose computes the infinite steps of the neverending case in a finite amount of time). Thus, anyone who has control over Pinocchio can ask him to recite any proposition, and accordingly if his nose does not grow it is an irrefutable proof that the proposition is valid. So, in essence, who needs science when we have Pinocchio? And i'll tell you. It's the scientists. Without science they would be flipping burgers for a living much like us philosophy majors. The last fact I want to point out here is that the death of Pinocchio is a mystery. In the movie he lives (all that rubbish about becoming a real boy is...well, it's rubbish). But it is clear that Pinocchio is not alive today. So how did he die? May I propose the following: Pinocchio was murdered by scientists!* Yes, I not only may propose it, but have proposed it in this very entry.

*Please don't feed or abuse the scientists.