zompist bboard

Creating genuinely new mathematics is, of course, non-trivial, but you can surely get away with doing less than that while also doing something more creative than just shuffling notation. Maybe your people have some ideas that are important to them but seem weird to us now, like wanting to construct...

Math concepts are universal. While there will be differences in notation and numeral systems, even the most exotic aliens will agree with us on the value of pi and the Pythagorean theorem. I think I actually wrote up a system trigonometry once which used a fraction of pi as the base unit instead of...

I don't understand most of the responses so far. I mean, trivially, there is a huge amount of mathematics now that there wasn't 2000 years ago, or 1000, or 500, or 100. There's no reason at all to expect some culture we've never talked to before to have "the same concepts".

the duke of nuke wrote:- I'm now in a serious relationship (with a young lady) and it's an opportunity to, how to put this delicately, explore new activities.

So is the first item!

Eddy wrote:Wait, really? If so, I'm almost impressed that I've had that much impact on your subconscious.

I had a dream once where you ejaculated into a bottle. So!

But I think we're all exactly aware of how often misinformed racists get mistaken for being just misinformed or just racist.

Chopin was the head of a chemistry department but he wasn't very good at it (I mean he was good at chemistry but he had all kinds of weird rules no one liked)

Eddy wrote:I wouldn't mind hearing more about this strong "s" in the Seattle dialect. What does it entail from a phonological perspective and where does it occur?

Oh my god don't even try, you will end up coming here and sounding like a retarded snake.

I suspect that certain federal subsidies that encourage the production of corn, thus making it very cheap, are at least partly to blame in making high-fructose corn syrup so ubiquitous in such vast quantities. I have often heard that, but never understood why they subsidize such an unneeded resourc...

ugh you GUYS

thedukeofnuke wrote:

eodrakken wrote:

thedukeofnuke wrote:restrained gay men

pix pls

You know I actually will post pics.

But they only answered part of eodrakken's request.

Are there any language-determiners that use a method as straightforward and logical as simply looking small words that are extremely common in certain languages? I mean, if a sample contains a lot of "and", "the", "this", "is", it's probably English, and there are certainly other sets of such words...

It's actually pretty easy, at least the algorithm I know; no doubt people have come up with better and more complicated ones. It goes like this. Pick a statistic to look at--frequency of digrams (consecutive pairs of characters) seems to work well--and record those statistics from the given text and...

not cool bro

The LHC-discovered Higgs boson reaching back through time to prevent the LHC from discovering it? Why CERN isn't dismissing it as crackpottery. Apparently the math actually does work out. :? The math works out for a lot of things (or so I gather from string theory!). There's a longer article here ,...

heh






















did it

So... what happens to the Nitrogen and Oxygen that is shot with the laser? The article doesn't really explain where the light energy is coming from. Well, it does: plasma emission. Which I believe is also used in some forms of spectroscopes, so presumably we're talking about very small, brief plasm...

The Amazon lost tribe story certainly caught the media's attention over here. We're now having a fairly quiet time for news this week, but this one caught my eye: Spanish Parliament approves human rights for apes. Another eye-catching headline with a real story behind it. If it's just the right to ...

I have just discovered ZUG.com . Some excellent pranks: The Powerbook Prank The Credit Card Prank: Part I , Part II The Walmart Prank And when you're done with those, go read every other prank on the site, because they're all awesome. Although a favorite joke doesn't come to mind, I do enjoy laughi...

My new sigquote: They're not perfectionists, they're just aliens. From post-LCC2 dinner today, during a discussion of how the English Channel was scooped out by inattentive aliens using a giant unobtainium shovel-shaped thing attached to the front of their saucer. That was my rightful place >:| Spa...

Your Hatshepshut link goes to the same place as the dinosaur bones one.

I had an idea. Much of the earlier part of this thread is unusable because of the disappearing special characters. Getting the original posters to edit their posts to correct the question marks all over the place would be rather difficult, particularly as several are no longer regular members. Howe...

Mr. Saturday wrote:Anyone who intentionally removes any part from their body should have their head removed. End of.

In a final irony, Mr. Saturday will die of acute appendicitis.

Coelacanth wrote:It's big, but it needs preserving.

People like you are why we have these tales of Napoleon's penis floating around in a jar.

By the way: "eigen" has entered English scientific language: Eigenvector, eigenvalue, eigen angular frequency, for example. Try this on LEO. "Eigen" becomes "proper" in British and "characteristic" in American. "Eigenvalue" = "proper value" or "characteristic value", for instance. But more and more...