This page had gotten stale over the last coupleyears, so I've updated it with further thoughts I've had on the matter:

First off, if you've made it here then there's a very good chance you didn't come looking for forkliftaccident pictures. Your curiosity now piqued, I'll treat you to my uniquely acerbic point-of-view regarding the glass is "half-full" vs. glass is "half-empty" method of psychoanalysis.

For those unfamiliar with this theroy, it claims a pessimist will see the glass as half-empty while an optimist will see the glass as half-full.

To be frank, this is utter nonsense. Making a judgmenton the level of fluid in the glass as an unaffected condition implies the glass and the fluid came into being exactly in the state in which we observe it. Thus the glass is and always has been (though might not always be) either half-full or half-empty.

If the theory were qualified with a statement such as, "Observe the glass, as it is, having never been affected by external factors or having changed in any way since it first came into existence," then some manner of credibility would hold to classifications made upon hapless innocents who fall prey to the question.

Now, if we throw out the wildly outrageous concept that the glass and fluid contained therein came into existence in the same exact state as the one in which we are observing, it must be concluded that either the fluid or the glass is in a resultant state. In other words, something happened to one of them to cause the state of half-empty or half-full.

This line of thought leads us to the following conclusion: If the glass had been filled to at or around the halfway point and nothing more, then the resultant state is "half-full." If it had been filled to at or near the brim and then drained of half of its contents, then the resultant state is "half-empty."

You see? It's that simple.

All of that being said, I was thinking about this conundrum the other day in the shower...I do some of my best thinking in the shower...I really must put some kind of grease pencil in there orsomething so I can write these ideas down. Without variation, these ideas either completely or in great part leave me once I'm out of the shower.

If we were to allow the possibility that the glass came into existence in the virgin, unaffected state I went on about in the beginning of this diatribe, only one logical conclusion can be made: The glass, whether half-empty or half-full, is simply too big.