Urth Net

← back to the conversation

Sigh

Adam Thornton IO · 12 Jan 2011, 18:42 · 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: adam at io.com (Adam Thornton (IO))
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2011 12:42:19 -0600
Subject: (urth) Sigh
In-Reply-To: <4D2DCCC2.20100 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> <4D2DCCC2.20100 at io.com>
Message-ID: <7310ded3d0425cfab52101ca6e23017a at imap.io.com>


On Wed, 12 Jan 2011 09:46:10 -0600, Jeff Wilson <jwilson at io.com> wrote:
> 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.

I'm positive.

Or rather, I should have specified positive integers.

Adam

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net