> "A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but
> he is braver five minutes longer."
No disrespect to Emerson (well, not true, it's fun to poke fun at him and his "philosphies") but I would suggest rather that the hero is braver five minutes fewer.
I've managed to slaughter both NT and Solaris Unix, but then again I'm a power user who taxes machines with a hundred open windows and a dozen open apps. (My NT menu bar at the bottom of the screen is currently 11 columns by 6 rows, pop up on mouseover of course.)
They did that on Leno a few years ago, when they introduced one of the band members to his chat-room long time love, Susan (or Debbie or whatever), a late-30-something balding, long-haired nerd male.
If I understand it correctly, k is n, and the neat trick about the sum is that each element corresponds to a 16-bit hex digit when PI is written out in hex.
So, since each element of the sum is a straightforward (if itself intense) calculation, you can just pick the k, run the computation, and you're done.
I also wonder, they say they don't have a formula for decimal digits. While they may not have a direct formula, any decimal digit would overlap at most 2 hex digits, and which 1 or 2 hex digits correspond to a given digital digit is a straightforward calculation, just multiplying by a constant...
State legislators do have an interest in defining a legal definition for PI (and other constants) for use in contracts.
If someone only wants to sell you enough dough for pies 3.1 x D, where D is specified by you, you're gonna get pretty upset if you manufacture pies by the millions. Now you're in court, and the judge says, tough luck, there was no PI specified in the contract, and there was no legal definition of accuracy...
To assume the latter exists, you have to throw out causality. Yet that seems nonsensical because, like the man said, you've just renamed God to Random().
Have scientists tested the randomness of QM measurements to make sure they're random? For all we know, there's just some deterministic random number generator generating a sequence of 10^^(10^^googleplex) digit numbers in a sequence that doesn't repeat for 10^^(that other number^^googleplex^^googleplex) numbers.
On the other hand, it would be pretty scary if it generated the good old Knuth seeded sequence, 55 at a time.
Actually, the digits would have complete relevance to each other -- they are each other's neighbor in a deterministic formula.
Yet what you say is also just a restatement that, for sufficiently long strings of PI digits, you would expect to see any particular string of digits with some nonzero probability.
There are formulae to test the quality of random number generators to make sure that they do generate sequences like this.
For example, a random number generator that generated a 10^^100000 32-bit numbers at random before repeating the sequence wouldn't be very good if it didn't generate three 2's in a row once in awhile.
In the book Contact by Carl Sagan,
**** spoiler alert ****
he suggests that a group of the digits of PI "way out there," when graphed (in base 11?) showed a circle, which, although statistically possible in a random number sequence, wouldn't be expected for far, far longer. More geometric figures were a little further along. This was seen as proof of a "God", so to speak, or more accurately, a message from the creator of the universe, since only whoever created reality, PI, geometry, numbers, etc. could embed geometric figures and other messages. (That was also where the aliens got the idea to test cultures for intelligence by embedding messages within messages within messages.)
Did anyone ever Huffman-code, winzip, run-length, or otherwise the first billion (or hundred billion, or whatever had been calculated prior to this new formula) digits of PI to see if they compressed at all?
"Hmm, we've calculated the first billion digits of PI."
Well, you could compress the compressable numbers as follows. Contents of set B not in set A are sorted in ascending order, call it set C.
Compress set C as follows. The first element is compressed as "the first element of set C, the set of noncompressable random numbers". The second is the second, and so on.
That will work for the first countably infinite elements, anyway, but that still leaves the infinite bulk behind. You could map it to the reals for a 1-1 correspondence, but by that time you've just relabeled the reals, and lost any compression anyway.
Well, either the Bible is literal or it is not. If it is literal here, then it is wrong and we can conclude the Bible is a bunch of made up crap (or that God isn't so smart after all.)
If it is not literal here, then how do we pick and choose where it is literal? Why treat various lineages as literal timelines? Six days to create the world? God literally directly created life?
They do if they want to have more than a few hundred million people living at any given moment. They do if they don't want large portions of the population dying from simple diseases.
> We as a species have quite well survived our own
> stupidity for far longer [than 600 years of
> science.]
I have issue with the "quite well". As a species, certainly. As individuals, well, enough barely survived to reproductive age, I suppose...
> It's odd. When someone disproves something that
> is stated in the Bible or the Koran or by
> members of their religious institution...it's
> held up as proof that the Creator doesn't exist
> and that religions are a farce.
Well, as Carl Sagan once said, if two religions are in conflict, one must be wrong. But if one, why not both?
Remember that religions typically have a sacred text that must be 100% true, the word of God. If some of it is false, then how do you know any of it is true? You don't.
Secondly, it's long been a joke that science should be proud that it is so powerful that, every time it looks, it makes God hide.
It's ironic that religion, born of superstitious behavior on observations of the real world, should eventually turn the concept of God or the Creator from one intimately involved in daily life (floods, good or bad crops, storms and rain, the moon and sun going across the sky, conception and birth, throbbing life itself) to one reduced to a scardey-cat who refuses to show his face any time someone with a notepad starts to pay attention.
Everything going chusssh-chusssh-chusssh might overload the mind as to what's important, it's true.
Why not, instead, have a.wave of Sandra Bullock or Nicole Kidman saying seductively, "Over here, I want you now." That'll turn the heads of men (and women too, fearing a rival.)
Or why not use a fart? It has the property of turning you 180 degrees in the opposite direction.
>> All I saw was a guy who looked constipated with
>> flashing hair and a eyebrow twitch. Are the
>> animators just lazy?
>
> Nice troll.
>
He's not trolling, sorry dude.
They do stand around not just looking constipated, but grunting all the while as if, too. The animators aren't the only ones lazy, so are the writers.
Typical episode of Dragon Ball Z: The Next Generation:
Super-super-powerful bad guy slaps around super powerful, but second-rate good guy
Second-rate good guy starts grunting for five to twenty minutes building up energy for some super-"move".
Super-super-powerful bad guy stands there all the while.
Second-rate good guy finishes grunting and blasts super-super bad guy with varying success or failure.
Super-super bad guy, who usually survives (sometimes barely, sometimes easily) says, "I had no idea you contained so much power. Too bad it wasn't quite enough!"
Speaking of which, you almost certainly did not get an animation cel, which is to say, a sheet of celluloid on which was painted an actual frame later filmed for the movie. More likely (and correct me if I'm wrong) you got the "rip-off cell", which is to say, a frame from one of the myriad film reels sent out to theaters.
Disney (and others) realizing how tremendously much the old real painted cels sold for at auction, especially for major films, now distributes frames clipped from the returned film reels sent to theaters from ages past and sells them as "cells" and whatnot, with fine print stating exactly what it is, knowing full well the person thinks they're getting a hand-painted cel, not that they're getting a clipped frame from a used film reel.
For crying out loud, 11% of the adult population in this country doesn't even understand the world is round like a ball and not round like a flat pancake.
> Of course, we could always find a planet
> populated by robots a la Transformers....
Nah, we already have bombs that can punch through thirty feet of steel-reinforced concrete before even exploding. A few feet of steel ain't jack squat. A walking aircraft carrier will be dead in minutes in a war. At least sea vessels protect important things below the water line and have defensive Vulcan guns and whatnot.
Transformers, Ultra-Man, Johnny Socko's flying robot, Godzilla, Mech-Streisand, they'd all be dead within a half an hour of walking up on the shores of New York or Tokyo or Southpark, CO.
Also, scientists were well aware that some bacteria not only don't need oxygen, but are killed by it. Those bacteria can be a problem in canning if you aren't careful.
>...multiple failures of the N1-L2 rockets either
> at launch or shortly thereafter in 1969, and the
> Salyut space station not reaching orbit due to
> Proton rocket failure in 1972.
Let's not forget the mid 70's when they launched that stupid Venus probe that crashed back onto earth and the Real Steve Austin had to stop it before it killed millions.
Slashdot Mirror
Although, a lot of people thought caning should have been brought to this country. Many cheered on the incident.
And as far as international pressure is concerned, the US did cave on the Elian Gonzalez thing.
> "A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but
> he is braver five minutes longer."
No disrespect to Emerson (well, not true, it's fun to poke fun at him and his "philosphies") but I would suggest rather that the hero is braver five minutes fewer.
I've managed to slaughter both NT and Solaris Unix, but then again I'm a power user who taxes machines with a hundred open windows and a dozen open apps. (My NT menu bar at the bottom of the screen is currently 11 columns by 6 rows, pop up on mouseover of course.)
Truly, imagine how idiotic sitting for hours every night in front of the "idiot box"/"boob tube" would have been to Laura Ingalls-Wilder.
"Can you BELIEVE how much of their life is wasted just watching drivel, and very poorly-written drivel at that?"
If anything, interacting in front of the "new TV" is at least an improvement in that more brainpower is required.
They did that on Leno a few years ago, when they introduced one of the band members to his chat-room long time love, Susan (or Debbie or whatever), a late-30-something balding, long-haired nerd male.
...or that people are tortured and killed because of the way they freely interact with other consenting people.
Imagine a lion tearing out the throat of another lion because that other lion refused, absolutely refused, to join the first lion's health care plan.
I should hope that burritos are upwards of 60% fat. They'd be pretty gross if only 5% fat.
If I understand it correctly, k is n, and the neat trick about the sum is that each element corresponds to a 16-bit hex digit when PI is written out in hex.
So, since each element of the sum is a straightforward (if itself intense) calculation, you can just pick the k, run the computation, and you're done.
I also wonder, they say they don't have a formula for decimal digits. While they may not have a direct formula, any decimal digit would overlap at most 2 hex digits, and which 1 or 2 hex digits correspond to a given digital digit is a straightforward calculation, just multiplying by a constant...
State legislators do have an interest in defining a legal definition for PI (and other constants) for use in contracts.
If someone only wants to sell you enough dough for pies 3.1 x D, where D is specified by you, you're gonna get pretty upset if you manufacture pies by the millions. Now you're in court, and the judge says, tough luck, there was no PI specified in the contract, and there was no legal definition of accuracy...
To assume the latter exists, you have to throw out causality. Yet that seems nonsensical because, like the man said, you've just renamed God to Random().
Have scientists tested the randomness of QM measurements to make sure they're random? For all we know, there's just some deterministic random number generator generating a sequence of 10^^(10^^googleplex) digit numbers in a sequence that doesn't repeat for 10^^(that other number^^googleplex^^googleplex) numbers.
On the other hand, it would be pretty scary if it generated the good old Knuth seeded sequence, 55 at a time.
Actually, the digits would have complete relevance to each other -- they are each other's neighbor in a deterministic formula.
Yet what you say is also just a restatement that, for sufficiently long strings of PI digits, you would expect to see any particular string of digits with some nonzero probability.
There are formulae to test the quality of random number generators to make sure that they do generate sequences like this.
For example, a random number generator that generated a 10^^100000 32-bit numbers at random before repeating the sequence wouldn't be very good if it didn't generate three 2's in a row once in awhile.
In the book Contact by Carl Sagan,
**** spoiler alert ****
he suggests that a group of the digits of PI "way out there," when graphed (in base 11?) showed a circle, which, although statistically possible in a random number sequence, wouldn't be expected for far, far longer. More geometric figures were a little further along. This was seen as proof of a "God", so to speak, or more accurately, a message from the creator of the universe, since only whoever created reality, PI, geometry, numbers, etc. could embed geometric figures and other messages. (That was also where the aliens got the idea to test cultures for intelligence by embedding messages within messages within messages.)
It's also a Skeptic principle: there are so many things that could happen that million-to-one (and far rarer) things happen all the time.
Did anyone ever Huffman-code, winzip, run-length, or otherwise the first billion (or hundred billion, or whatever had been calculated prior to this new formula) digits of PI to see if they compressed at all?
"Hmm, we've calculated the first billion digits of PI."
"Could you zip up the file and e-mail it to me?"
"Sure."
zip/raw =? 1.0
Well, you could compress the compressable numbers as follows. Contents of set B not in set A are sorted in ascending order, call it set C.
Compress set C as follows. The first element is compressed as "the first element of set C, the set of noncompressable random numbers". The second is the second, and so on.
That will work for the first countably infinite elements, anyway, but that still leaves the infinite bulk behind. You could map it to the reals for a 1-1 correspondence, but by that time you've just relabeled the reals, and lost any compression anyway.
Unless, of course, QM physics pulls randomness from a pool of random numbers transfinitely larger than the set of reals.
Which could indicate building QM on a real-number based spacial mathematics could be wrong...
So very, very, very tired...
> Explain to me why I can get this out of a
> "perfect" random number generator:
>
> 000000000000000000000000....
Actually, you can't. The probability of getting any particular string of digits out of a perfect random number generator is 0.
Yet if you ran such a generator to generate one number, you would get a number whose probability was zero.
Therefore truly random number generators do not exist. QED, there is something behind Quantum Mechanics' random wave functions.
So tired, must sleep...
Well, either the Bible is literal or it is not. If it is literal here, then it is wrong and we can conclude the Bible is a bunch of made up crap (or that God isn't so smart after all.)
If it is not literal here, then how do we pick and choose where it is literal? Why treat various lineages as literal timelines? Six days to create the world? God literally directly created life?
Yes, it does indeed make a huge difference.
> Humans do NOT need science.
They do if they want to have more than a few hundred million people living at any given moment. They do if they don't want large portions of the population dying from simple diseases.
> We as a species have quite well survived our own
> stupidity for far longer [than 600 years of
> science.]
I have issue with the "quite well". As a species, certainly. As individuals, well, enough barely survived to reproductive age, I suppose...
> It's odd. When someone disproves something that
> is stated in the Bible or the Koran or by
> members of their religious institution...it's
> held up as proof that the Creator doesn't exist
> and that religions are a farce.
Well, as Carl Sagan once said, if two religions are in conflict, one must be wrong. But if one, why not both?
Remember that religions typically have a sacred text that must be 100% true, the word of God. If some of it is false, then how do you know any of it is true? You don't.
Secondly, it's long been a joke that science should be proud that it is so powerful that, every time it looks, it makes God hide.
It's ironic that religion, born of superstitious behavior on observations of the real world, should eventually turn the concept of God or the Creator from one intimately involved in daily life (floods, good or bad crops, storms and rain, the moon and sun going across the sky, conception and birth, throbbing life itself) to one reduced to a scardey-cat who refuses to show his face any time someone with a notepad starts to pay attention.
Everything going chusssh-chusssh-chusssh might overload the mind as to what's important, it's true.
.wave of Sandra Bullock or Nicole Kidman saying seductively, "Over here, I want you now." That'll turn the heads of men (and women too, fearing a rival.)
Why not, instead, have a
Or why not use a fart? It has the property of turning you 180 degrees in the opposite direction.
>> All I saw was a guy who looked constipated with
>> flashing hair and a eyebrow twitch. Are the
>> animators just lazy?
>
> Nice troll.
>
He's not trolling, sorry dude.
They do stand around not just looking constipated, but grunting all the while as if, too. The animators aren't the only ones lazy, so are the writers.
Typical episode of Dragon Ball Z: The Next Generation:
Super-super-powerful bad guy slaps around super powerful, but second-rate good guy
Second-rate good guy starts grunting for five to twenty minutes building up energy for some super-"move".
Super-super-powerful bad guy stands there all the while.
Second-rate good guy finishes grunting and blasts super-super bad guy with varying success or failure.
Super-super bad guy, who usually survives (sometimes barely, sometimes easily) says, "I had no idea you contained so much power. Too bad it wasn't quite enough!"
> a free animation cell from the movie!
Speaking of which, you almost certainly did not get an animation cel, which is to say, a sheet of celluloid on which was painted an actual frame later filmed for the movie. More likely (and correct me if I'm wrong) you got the "rip-off cell", which is to say, a frame from one of the myriad film reels sent out to theaters.
Disney (and others) realizing how tremendously much the old real painted cels sold for at auction, especially for major films, now distributes frames clipped from the returned film reels sent to theaters from ages past and sells them as "cells" and whatnot, with fine print stating exactly what it is, knowing full well the person thinks they're getting a hand-painted cel, not that they're getting a clipped frame from a used film reel.
As you can see, real cels are quite expensive.
For crying out loud, 11% of the adult population in this country doesn't even understand the world is round like a ball and not round like a flat pancake.
> Of course, we could always find a planet
> populated by robots a la Transformers....
Nah, we already have bombs that can punch through thirty feet of steel-reinforced concrete before even exploding. A few feet of steel ain't jack squat. A walking aircraft carrier will be dead in minutes in a war. At least sea vessels protect important things below the water line and have defensive Vulcan guns and whatnot.
Transformers, Ultra-Man, Johnny Socko's flying robot, Godzilla, Mech-Streisand, they'd all be dead within a half an hour of walking up on the shores of New York or Tokyo or Southpark, CO.
Actually, the large organisms all need oxygen.
Also, scientists were well aware that some bacteria not only don't need oxygen, but are killed by it. Those bacteria can be a problem in canning if you aren't careful.
> ...multiple failures of the N1-L2 rockets either
> at launch or shortly thereafter in 1969, and the
> Salyut space station not reaching orbit due to
> Proton rocket failure in 1972.
Let's not forget the mid 70's when they launched that stupid Venus probe that crashed back onto earth and the Real Steve Austin had to stop it before it killed millions.