Sigh

Jeff Wilson · 12 Jan 2011, 15:46 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2011 09:46:10 -0600
Subject: (urth) Sigh
In-Reply-To: <4D2D45B1.5050804 at io.com>
References: <SNT123-W3771004317774F4FF580E4CFF10 at phx.gbl>	<4D2D1A56.3020001 at io.com>	<4D2D2A35.8030805 at io.com>	<4D2D39D9.3000707 at io.com>
	<4D2D45B1.5050804 at io.com>
Message-ID: <4D2DCCC2.20100 at io.com>

On 1/12/2011 12:09 AM, Adam Thornton wrote:
> But of course that, in turn, assumes that all the copies of the library
> are complete. If we then postulate that any iteration of the library may
> or may not have a copy of a particular book then the number of (complete
> and partial) libraries our immortal traveler must traipse through before
> encountering repetition becomes the power set of the number of complete
> libraries, or 2 ^ ( 10 ^ ( 2.4548624015714 x 10 ^ 1834215 ) ) . This,
> rightly, seems like a big number.
>
> But, in fact, to an arbitrarily good approximation, *all* integers are
> bigger than that.

Really? I would've said a bit less than half.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >

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