I tried enlightening the resident ten-year-old yesterday, and got enlightened instead. I thought I’d blow his mind with Zeno’s paradox that to walk from A to B, you must first walk from A to one half of B, for which you must walk from A to one quarter of B, and so on, ad infinitum. And because each walk takes some nonzero amount of time, you’ll take forever to reach B, i.e., you won’t reach it. *Checkmate atheists*. It would have been a great (albeit premature) introduction to series and limits, but kiddo instead dismissed the entire reasoning because it is very obvious that we can and do, in fact, get from A to B everyday. From there, it was a lost battle for me to try and steelman Zeno’s argument on more analytical grounds, when it is so clearly wrong prima facie. So, the kid reached the right conclusion (Zeno’s paradox is nonsensical), but following entirely empirical logic that cut short any discussion about intellectual logic. I felt like the midwit from the meme, trying to cleverly complicate a trivial puzzle beyond necessity, like adding pointless flair to the world’s lamest magic trick. It reminds me of Carl Sagan’s observation that to make an apple pie, you must first create the universe. There’s an equally-valid mindset by which you just need to make the dough, slice apples, and bake them in the oven.