Buridan’s ass is a figurative description of a man of indecision. It refers to a paradoxical situation wherein an ass, placed exactly in the middle between two stacks of hay of equal size and quality, will starve to death since it cannot make any rational decision to start eating one rather than the other. The paradox is named after the 14th century French philosopher Jean Buridan.
[Thank you, Wikipedia.]
That’s me right now. I just finished doing all the basic setup of a new site at openconceptual.com (powered by WordPress but it’s not really blog), capping off a fairly productive weekend that saw me improve this site a whole bunch and learn more about what’s running “under the hood.” Not really any massive accomplishments but there was a lot of gratifying convergence — a lot of little tweaks that aren’t much in themselves but each go a long way on behalf of the whole.
Anyways, what I’m getting at is that now I just want to relax. Problem is I can’t figure out how. I’ve got the start of the London Knights game on — but if it’s a bad game I’ll be annoyed. There’s also a Raptors game starting but I know that’ll be bad.
So I’m thinking of going to get a movie.
Now the problem is whether to walk to the Daisy Mart at Oxford and Adelaide for a $1 movie, but all of the best new releases might be gone, or I can walk the same distance the other direction to Blockbuster at Oxford and Richmond where they’re more likely to have all the movies, but at six-times the price.
If I was an economist I’d probably have a way to calculate the optimal movie-renting strategy. Maybe I’ll start collecting data — i.e. what’s the probability of Daisy Mart having the movie I want, etc.
The other option I have is to watch the DVD I picked up at the library the other day — Hamlet.
