This Post Involves an Episode of Frasier Dubbed in Hungarian

I was going to write a post about the paradox of the card game War—the paradox being that it should always “end” (aka, “keep going forever”) in a draw with neither player receiving all the cards, even though games of War do in fact end. I found the solution to this online on Math Overflow, a site similar to Stack Overflow (what up, fellow software engineers). There’s a lot of lingo of the maths on there I don’t understand, but there’s a explanation…and a possible combination of dealt cards in which the game would go on forever (the questioner calls it an “infinite expected length”, which I assume is a math term).

So there’s that. But, completely unrelated to this, I saw an episode of Frasier, a show in which the titular character and else-people live in Seattle. The astute television viewer will notice that he doesn’t live in Seattle proper (see the video below), as in the downtown area, but in an apartment building with the view of downtown…to show that he does live in Seattle. Or might live there, or near it.

It’s dramatic logic, like when you see on a murder weapon day-old dried blood that is bright red and wet-looking, though it defies mechanics of human biology. Bright red blood is more striking and drives home its bloodness; dark crust doesn’t communicate the same drama.

I just thought it strange, in the case of major cities, we recognize them from afar than in intimacy. St. Louis is another example. You know you’re looking at St. Louis because of the Half of the McDonald’s arches in the skyline, but no one is going to know it’s St. Louis if you show, say, a photo of even a famous restaurant one of its “well-known” neighborhood. But residents or workers, when they think of St. Louis, probably think of those smaller types of things when they hear the city name, not the arches.

Just a thought I had on location familiarity.

Photo of cards by doobybrain.