This page is referenced by:

• 1 2018-08-12T22:47:10+00:00 Temporal Anomalies Detected 9 plain 2018-08-13T15:03:59+00:00 Myriad weird wonders warp space-time in the universe, including black holes, wormholes, and rabbit-holes. But the temporal anomalies observed of late in The Petriverse defy even the strangest laws of physics.  Apparently, the stone signs designating this rock garden a "slow time zone" may have a scientific meaning, referencing actual physical phenomena.
  
  The slow time zone, actually a 44-foot segment of sidewalk, seems to change the velocities and therefore relative time of pedestrians. Subjects have been observed moving in slow motion after reading the signs, and the probability that walkers slow their pace in this space, thus stretching time, increases exponentially in comparison to other parts of the same sidewalk on Olive Avenue.
  
  "Time really drags in this place," Loyola Marymount professor Paul Harris said. Harris, a past President of the International Society for the Study of Time, believes that carefully placed rocks are creating a gravitational field.  "Aesthetically pleasing stones exude an attractive force on bodies and brains, causing people to stop and stare. They forget that time is passing by at its usual hectic rate outside the garden," Harris said.  According to an inverse law, the longer one stops, the slower one's time passes.
  Temporal vortices also form around certain stone messages.  Harris says that knotty statements like 'NOTHING is written in stone...+ so is this' generate a "paradox vortex in the cerebral cortex" of puzzled observers. "Brains caught in circular reasoning cause a time loop to occur," Harris mysteriously explained. Residents are urged to keep watch and report any slow time sightings to Petriverse designer Pierre Jardin immediately.
• 1 2019-03-03T19:07:30+00:00 A Textual Intellectual's Indexical Lexicals 2 plain 2019-03-03T19:11:17+00:00 As a professor of Petric Poetics, Pierre Jardin is an aspiring textual intellectual. He explores and exploits the self-referential, literal qualities of petriverses and text messages, their tendency to indicate what is happening at the moment of speaking, and use words whose meaning depends on context. There's a word for such words: indexicals.  Indexicals are deictic, meaning they point to something.  Words in the indexical lexicon include I, you, this, that, here, there, today, tomorrow, and now.
  
  The paradigmatic petriverse "Nothing is written in stone" was given a further twist when Jardin appended the indexical phrase "and so is THiS" to it. As previously stated, "nothing is written in stone," when written in stone, produces paradox because the proposition becomes self-referential and creates a tangled loop of logic caused by the oscillation between the message's contradictory meanings.
  
  The indexical "THIS" in the message has two different meanings, that operate on different logical levels: it could refer to the single word "this"; or it could self-referentially mean the entire message "nothing is written in stone...and so is this."  The message creates another level of paradox in the contradiction between the confident assertion that "nothing is written in stone," meaning nothing is EVER written in stone, and the baldly stated literal observation that 'this' whole message, like the word nothing, is written in stone.
  
  "THIS" is a particularly emphatic lexical, used to famous effect by Robert de Niro's character in The Deerhunter when he says, "This is this.  This is not something else.  This is this."