25 December 2008 - taking forever

Jay Scott : Daily Whale : archive : 2008 : 25 December 2008

Hilbert’s Timeshare

Some jobs, like cleaning house, take forever. One of the jobs that takes forever is scheduling the jobs that don’t take forever, and one of the jobs that doesn’t take forever is scheduling the jobs that take forever.

But there is a way out of the dilemma: Laziness. If a task takes finite time, simplify your life by lazing around for the rest of eternity.

clue:

Divide the future into time slices; there are infinitely many. Given a task, assign it every second free time slice. Having done that, you still have infinitely many free slices.

Zero and infinity are simple. It’s everything else that causes trouble.

give me a clue so sweet and true