Shaving a Yak and Turtles All the Way Down

These are two phrases I learned from Boris. I was trying to explain them both to someone today, and realized that I only had a vague grasp of what they meant. Wikipedia to the rescue:

Yak shaving is a neologism which describes the act of performing seemingly unrelated and often annoying tasks which stand in the way of an ultimate goal. Often these tasks stack up on each other, where one task becomes impossible due to some obstacle, which leads to another unrelated task, yet another obstacle, and so on.

As it turns out, large sections of the video game industry exist purely to get gamers to shave yaks. Seth Godin has a good example about the terrifying act of visiting Home Depot.

“Turtles all the way down” refers to a infinite regression belief about the nature of the universe.

The most widely known version today appears in Stephen Hawking’s 1988 book A Brief History of Time, which begins with an anecdote about an encounter between a scientist and an old lady:

“A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.
“At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.”
“The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?”
“You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down.”

Happily, few contemporary video games involve infinite regression. Some of the classics–Tempest, for example–seem to fit the turtle problem.