Subject: Re: [lojban] pro-sumti question

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 06 Jul 2002 16:57:41 +0000

la pycyn cusku di'e

>xorxes:
><But it can also be that the mass is somehow less than the sum of
>it's elements, when there is some kind of overlap among the elements.
>It all depends on how you define the sum, of course.>
>
>"Sum" is left pretty vague as a promissory note to fill it in, though 
>xorxes
>seems sure that it cannot be. I was trying to think of a case of the sort 
>he
>suggests here, but nothing natural came to mind -- orverlapping is not
>something things do well. It works nicely with sets, of course, but masses
>of sets are not very pleasant to contemplate.

I would have said overlapping was something things did well long
before it could be metaphorically extended to sets!

Anyway, consider for example a wall covered with pictures.
Each picture covers a certain area, but some of the pictures
overlap, so the area covered by the mass of pictures is less
than the sum of the areas covered by each picture.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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