Unknown to Will, I sometimes have conversations with him in his absence. Last night's conversation was a refresher in strong induction--

"Will," I said to Will, "one wasn't all that bad, was it?"

Silence.

"Well, I suppose we can't really remember," I continued, choosing to ignore that he wasn't responding. "But since we're both alive without any major emotional or physical scars that we can trace back that far, I figure that one couldn't have been all that bad."

"And twenty-two--last year, you'll remember, n--wasn't bad at all. It was sad, I suppose, for a little bit--graduation and all that--but overall it wasn't all that bad."

"Nor was twenty-three," I continued, "especially for you. I mean sure, there were probably some bad moments--I seem to remember you getting a bad cold at some point this past year, but nothing incurable, and second semester at school sounded pretty harrowing, I suppose."

Cowboying on in the conversation: "But, overall, things seem to have worked out, and all for the better, no? And as far as we know it, that's pretty much n+1 for us (because twenty-three years, really is an arbitrarily long time--but not too long). So it seems that things being not bad (in fact, fairly good) is somewhat invariant of the iteration of the natural numbers. So it stands to reason, Will--"

He seemed like he was about to say something here--some crushing argument about time not continuing in countable punctae. But I had an argument for that too. Fortunately the conversation didn't come to that.

"--that twenty-four can't possibly be all that bad. Really: it stands to reason that twenty-four should probably be good."

And, to be honest, regardless of reasoning (faulty or otherwise), twenty-four can't possibly be bad at all. In fact, twenty-four ought to be fairly to very good, and twenty-five, -six, -seven, and the many, many returns I'm sure we'll observe, Will, those ought to be very happy too.

But let's not rack our heads with this stuff on this very special day:

A very happy birthday, Will.

(things are in the mail--or, at least, will be as soon as I get my act together...)