flights of fancy

[cellio]

"Existentially speaking, is there such a thing as half a piece of cake?" -- kayre

This evening at dinner the fundamental dynamics of lightsabres came up. Specifically, how does the color encoding work? Is Luke's blue because Luke prefers blue, or because any lightsabre Luke uses will channel Luke-specific force, which is blue? If so, do the admission criteria at Jedi University include "sabre does not glow red" (and if not, why not)? Are there important qualitative difference between blue and green sabres, both of which appear to channel the light side of the force? Surely these are important research topics for someone out there who has, you know, seen all the movies.

Comments

[akitrom.livejournal.com]

By the way, there are two such things as half-a-piece of cake.

One requires the other half to still be attached. "There's still a couple of letters in the icing on the right half of this piece of cake."

The other definition is temporary and locally defined. (All language is locally defined. All language is jargon.) If you've cut a cake into pieces of a certain size, then the temporary, local definition of "piece of cake" includes both the type of cake (chocolate, or what have you) and the size of the piece. "I only want half a piece of cake" uses this local, temporary definition, as a short-cut for the more lumbrous "I only want a piece of cake half the size of the one's you've already cut for people."

The more important question is whether people in your part of the country "ice" a cake or "frost" a cake with the thick chocolate liquid sealant.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

If the other half is still attached, doesn't it make it all one thing? I was under the impression that for the purposes of referential sanity, most people didn't allow the division of connected consistent solid objects up into an arbitrary number of virtual "things".
If you want to refer to the halves separately, it would seem that one half would need to be in a different context than the other, like if it were on the other side of a dimensional rift, or covered with a handkerchief and invisible, or something. That would provide a situation where it would be natural to refer to one half independently of the other, so it would consist as the entirety of one thing.