Uniqueness is Proveable

I don't know about you, but I love the xkcd comic. Even more I love his what if weekly blog where people send in questions and he searches for an answer and shows a bunch of the steps he took to find an answer. The ridiculous things that come up with physics and imagination. I wanted to write about it today because he uses some fun mathematics and also because I have been thinking about the phenomena of Twitter. The question today is "How many unique English tweets are possible? How long would it take for the population of the world to read them all out loud?" And to put the answer in perspective, he incorporates the old story about the bird sharpening its beak on a mountain and wearing the mountain down to show how long is a day of eternity. You may remember my own thoughts on eternity here last year. Eternity is heady stuff. The answer to the first question is effectively never. The calculation shows that it would take 'ten thousand eternal years' to read it all out loud. Long enough to get bored with it all. Although the creativity of humanity, and especially those speaking the English language, is just ludicrous enough for you perhaps not to get bored all that time. Yesterday in theology class we were talking about the image of God in humanity and how historically what is considered to be the image of God in humanity has changed through rationality, creativity, and community. I wondered, out loud even, if perhaps since God could be described as so many things, that every human has something different as the image of God within them. Interesting idea for theology perhaps. Apparently because of the definite article which has always been used in talking about the image of God, there can only be one thing amongst all of us. However, since the phrase comes from the Old Testament, I am going to look it up in Hebrew. Why does everyone have to be made in the same image of God? We are all very different people. I will have to think more about it. Uniqueness can be proven mathematically in some areas. I think it is amazing how we are all unique.