sethoflagos

So your OP reduces to 'What is the best compression algorithm for big numbers?'.

The earth's surface is almost exactly 2x10^84 square Planck units. I vaguely remember reading that something unpleasant happens when you try storing that much information on a limited surface.

It isn't just a matter of absolute magnitude alone. The largest defined finite integers (such as Graham's number) have a very limited set of prime factors, or are very closely related mathematically to such (eg 10^100 + 1). One can easily envisage integers that are vanishingly small in comparison to Graham's number, but are far more difficult define uniquely due to the complexity of their prime factor composition and hence their mathematical remoteness from our established notational shortcuts. The problem then reduces to finding the smallest integer that cannot be uniquely defined within a computable space. A couple of approaches spring to mind. Say we set an arbitrary bound on our computer processor to 2^64 bit arithmetic operations and addressing. Recognising that our decimal based counting system is itself an abbreviation of the numbers, we can now count in base 2^64 up to 2^64 digits. That system tops out at 18,446,744,073,709,551,616^18,446,744,073,709,551,616 (>10^(19*10^19)) A second approach may be to recognise that all integers may be represented by Producti=1,n (Pi^yi) where Pi is the ith prime number. Setting the same bit-width bounds on n and y, the first number that fails to compute will be the measly 2^2^64 ~ 10^(8*10^19), but since the majority of referable primes will have magnitudes far in excess of 2^64, the number field will extend far beyond this.

How do you square this claim with your speciosity figures for the various orders: Where mammals are in last place as niche holders. Most notably being eclipsed by the extant dinosaurs (birds) that you claim were superseded by mammals? Your vision of a continuous transition to 'a higher level of evolution' far from being 'A New Theory of Evolution' seems to me to be a rebranding of some aspects of Lamarckism. An old theory that has been long debunked. Evolution only lives in the moment and works with the genetic material available to it at the time. It has no long term goals. It is entirely possible that the next mass extinction is survived by nothing more complex than say, lichen. What kind of progess would that be?

You're welcome. Some years ago we went over all this with a fine toothcomb on a trumpeter's forum I drop into from time to time. There was a general concensus in support of Ericsson's conclusions.

You're paraphrasing the core message of Malcolm Gladwin's 'Outliers: The Story of Success'. Gladwin's background is in journalism. His work heavily borrows from and grossly distorts the work of K. Anders Ericsson, a Swedish Professor of Psychology, particularly his research on deliberate practice as presented in such books as 'Towards a General Theory of Expertise' (1991). This quote from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practice_(learning_method) highlights a major discrepancy in Gladwin's 'motivational' interpretation: And by 'deliberate practice', the implication is total engagement a highly structured programme of skills development with regular feedback from an expert tutor. Clearly reading a book on the subject would not count as deliberate practice for example.

Mad as a bag of weasels. I've spent most of the last twenty years mentoring Nigerian graduate chemical engineers, both male and female. While there are plenty of gripes on differential terms of employment, I never heard a whisper of any cultural bias in the subject itself other than its innate opacity to the innumerate.

Many compromises are involved. Just considering bird's eggs. Burrowing birds tend to lay nearly spherical eggs which optimises content volume / shell area, or more particularly shell calcium content as a birds calcium reserves tend to be a limiting factor in egg production. This is also the strongest shape for a given calcium budget. Cliff nesting birds tend to lay highly pyriform (pear-shaped) eggs that tend to roll in a tight circle helping to prevent them rolling off the edge and also positioning the air bubble in the egg close to where the oxygen hungry brain and eyes will form. For active fliers, aerodynamic requirements produce a strong adative pressure to form eggs that present a low cross-sectional area against the direction of flight and this favours a more ellipsoidal shape (prolate spheroid to be pedantic). Most species fall in between these three idealised geometries with the balance being optimised for each one's characteristic lifestyle.

Sorry. Caught me on a bad day.

No offence taken, but do you really think my handling of the N-S equations is sub-graduate level? What I was primarily looking for was some help with the differential equations. Essentially, if I can't get Laplace transforms to work I'm stumped on the analytical solutions. I've had more success with numerical methods on the simplest cases, but anything beyond simple (eg the slightest hint of rotational flow) basically needs a Cray with the methodology I've been using.

In putting together maintenance teams, it's common practise to pair up a 'bright spark' with a 'steady Eddie'. One to determine the root cause of the problem, and one to see that it's properly dealt with. Their strength is in their diversity, and I strongly believe similar priciples are true on a broader scale in society as a whole. But above all, I have a profound distrust of those who promote IQ testing, for reasons best summed up in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell. (It's still on the statute books).

This reads like a random paragraph from Finnegan's Wake. Only without the poetry.

What do you think your IQ is? Do you think a high value correlates with a certain social ineptitude?

It's called 'groupthink' and the objective of the group involved is to subjugate you into accepting their ideology with threats of humiliation and ostracism. If you're a sheep you follow; if not then you tell them to go **** themselves..

It did. They were called gastralia and are seen commonly enough across the lineages that led to both mammals and reptiles for us to be pretty sure that our own ancestors probably had them oto 300 miilion years ago. And slowly over time, all lineages lost them except for the tuatara and crocodilians in the present day. And the only reason we lost them is that the return didn't repay the investment as well as alternative developments did.

Yes, that's the general idea.

No. Delete the lower 'Birds' and replace with 'Dinos'. Delete the extraneous 'Dinos' line. Best would be to replace 'Reptiles' with 'Sauria' but I guess that's more for the purist than the common folk.

Except that 'Present Reptiles' are not descended from dinosaurs. The lineages that were to become lizards & snakes, turtles & tortoises, the tuatara and the crocodilians had all split off from the sauria/archosaur line before dinosaurs were a thing..

A residence permit for Bonaire isn't valid for the European part of the Netherlands so I guess that makes sense. Pity.

Mrs Seth and I still have a couple of years left on our Netherlands resident cards. Are they valid in Bonaire? I might need to rest a year or so after such a long flight!

If we created an image of a star from not just its emr transmissions but all concurrent arrivals of its cosmic rays in a range of velocities, we'd obtain a trace of it's historic worldline as viewed from our current location in space. Is that what you mean?

I'm in no position to dispute this, Genady. But I don't understand why it should be so.

Oh dear, I seem not to have expressed myself very clearly (again). Everything you say is true. But to clarify, I was speaking specifically about past events (not objects), such as an atom emitting a photon or a merger of two compact bodies as 'causes' producing measurable 'effects' in our 'now'. Yes, other signals associated with these events may be observed by other distant observers, but in general, our observation and theirs would not have their own cause-effect relationship unless we were able to communicate our observations to each other. Certainly true if an event enacted by us produces a future effect. But a future event causing an effect on our 'now' is a whole different ballgame which we discussed recently on another thread as I remember (shades of the Transactional Interpretation). Even if possible, would the action be measurable?

Many thanks! Since I got no alert, I've not checked this thread for a couple of days so I missed your post. Perhaps I should press 'Follow' on my own threads!

I don't know GR well enough, but when we measure these shock wave patterns in the CMBR we're measuring across a vast expanse of time, so aren't we measuring a flat spacetime? I'd appreciate being put right if I've misunderstood something here. And Conservation of Energy has worked pretty well for me over the past forty-odd years. Much gratitude expressed on that thread.