The constitution grants congress the power to set weights and measures. It also defines terms of office in years.

Easy solution to permanent power – set the value of a year to 5,000 days or 50,000 days.

I resent people treating the hole as a big deal which can be used to prove their pet idea, and I’ve seen quite a variety of pet ideas.

To perhaps make the comparison to quantum mechanics clearer, there are people who think that quantum tunneling means it’s possible for them to drive their car into a wall and come out unharmed on the other side. I could defend the “possibility” of this at the level of a chance less than 1 out of the number of particles in the universe, or I could say “no”, and I think it’s the better choice to say “no”.

Godel’s incompleteness can be pushed arbitrarily far down, as it relies on a diagonalization argument, meaning there are systems of axioms and language where the proposition P takes years to write out. The limits to reason then start to sound like a complaint about the permeability of neutronium to me.

Furthermore, a complete mathematical system is possible. Godel’s incompleteness theorem applies to a) sufficiently expressive systems that are b) reasoning about themselves. An inexpressive system can be complete because it can’t express a proposition like P. An expressive system can have P proven from another system.

But maybe I overestimate his sense of humor.

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that one of my principle beefs with the fundies is aesthetic, as well as theological/historical/scientific etc… They don’t even have any incense or Latin, damn it!

Isn’t that what reason is in the first place? A subset of nature using a bunch of funny little stupid rules?

As for practical impacts, there’s

http://math.andrej.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/real-world-realizability.pdf

and

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/rosetta.pdf

for starters. I mean, would you have predicted the impact of Babbage’s ideas back in the 19th century? And then there’s computational complexity. Knowing what can’t be done can end up saving a hell of a lot of time.

Trying to fight them with better, more pure, more perfect, more lifeless algorithms will never, ever work.

If purifying your algorithms makes them more lifeless, you’re doing it wrong. Addendum: that all religions are wrong doesn’t mean religion per se is wrong. Most atheism is founded on an argument from ignorance – I can’t imagine how spirituality could work, therefore it doesn’t work. Pure hubris.