42 or 54?

[Timballisto]

Why does Houston need to know if we have a dimwit anyways? That 500 thing she did is long gone.

...Did I miss something?  I must have.

[drumnbach]

In 1990, you missed Hakim Alajuwan break the NBA playoffs record for most blocks made in a game. He did this against the LA Lakers.

[Timballisto]

...uh...not exactly what I was looking for, but I guess that that is correct...

I meant what have I missed recently that applies to the posts prior to your last one.

[AstralLemming]

That we do &#A0;

Are modern message boards designed to detect when a user insults somebody\s intelligence? Because I always find that when someone does so, there is always ` always ` a grammatical error or a spelling mistake in that person\s incendiary comment, and this occurs with such shocking regularity as to suggest that such mistakes are inserted into posts by a nefarious (and possibly self-aware) piece of CGI code.

If I was not attempting to set a reasonably good example to everyone, I think I would swear. My guess as to why you get spelling and grammatical errors in such posts has something to do with the person in question typing exceptionally fast due to being absolutely furious.

That good enough for you, you infuriating little cretin?

[drumnbach]

Were you furious because I didn't know what "math" was? Then you'd be delighted to know that I can now count to 4. At this way station in the numerical continuum, I still can\t properly fathom the number 54, but I am almost there. I understand why this would give you reason to label me a cretin, but please bear with me as I am a slow learner.

EDIT: It might please you to know that I\m now at 4.5. Give me a week and I\ll have this conundrum cracked.

[guest]

If I was not attempting to set a reasonably good example to everyone, I think I would swear. My guess as to why you get spelling and grammatical errors in such posts has something to do with the person in question typing exceptionally fast due to being absolutely furious.

That good enough for you, you infuriating little cretin?

For crying out loud, you gotta know by now that this board has never been a stellar example of good spellers and grammarians, live with it!  

Actually I propose to moderator that this thread should be closed, "Hitchhiker's Guide..." the movie has been out for a while, basically flops, and I doubt anyone really cares at this point anymore about it.  I'm not even sure if I get this "42 or 54 "thing, unless "Hitchhiker's Guide..." really stated that 42 is the "answer to everything" (I thought the story says it was just the answer to a question no one remembers anymore?).

[geoo]

Well, I don't know what the story says, but at least Google (calculator) says that the answer to life, the universe and everything = 42:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=answer+to+life+the+universe+and+everything ::

[guest]

Well, to be fair I never read the book or saw the movie myself, the little I know about the story was picked up from here and there from third-person accounts so to speak.

I just remembered someone said something about the earth being created to calculate the answer to some question, the answer turned out to be 42 but no one remembered what the question actually is anymore.

And then of course the earth gets blown up at some point.

[Special_Gunpowder]

That good enough for you, you infuriating little cretin?

No. It still doesn't explain what math is. Or why you're furious for that matter when you had the sheer and outright nerve to condemn my cerebral pal to the world of "dimwitdom" from which he will probably be scarred for life and lose out on employment and good times as a result but most likely won't.

[Timballisto]

NOTE:  BEFORE YOU READ THIS POST, MAKE SURE YOU UNDERSTAND THAT I DON'T CLAIM THAT THE STATEMENTS BELOW ARE ACCURATE, OR, FOR THAT MATTER, CORRECT AT ALL.  THESE ARE MOSTLY JUST MY THOUGHTS AND OBSERVATIONS.

If you know for sure that something is wrong here, then don't hesitate to tell me so I can know.  Same goes for conflicting beliefs if anyone has any.

Well, back to the math thing:

I don't think there is a real answer to this.  Not that I'm aware of.  If there is tell me.  I tend to think that, while math is a lot of other things, it is also, at the same time, one thing:  A thing used by humans to try to translate everything that exists into something we can understand and manipulate.  If this is true, then that's pretty cool.  Only, I wondered something.  What if math has a mistake in it somewhere?  As everything in math is ultimately connected, then wouldn't an error cause a chain of other errors?  I think this might be true especially due to the length of time in which humans have been studying math, on purpose or not.  I think humans technically created math.  There is no math that a random spirit does to figure out where a ball goes when it's thrown, or something like that.  We made up math to predict where that ball would go.

Also, is there any real way to tell if anything is "right"?

Another thing is, I think that math fails to serve the purpose stated in my, note: "my", definition of math, because of things like irrational numbers like pi, and other things.  Can we really totally manipulate circles with the irrational number pi?  No.  Not really.  Yeah, we can get very close, but never honest to goodness on-the-dot.

While I'm on this big spiel about nothing, I might as well state my beliefs about time as well.  I don't think that there is the currently observed concept of time.  You can't build a time machine and go back in time, because there is no time.  Time is this:  The comparison of how many times one event occurs to the amount of occurences of another when both events occur constantly.  For example, an event, called an hour, is the swinging of a pendulum 3600 times.  1 hour occurs for every 3600 swings of a pendulum.  Both things are events that occur with constant timing.  Every time the earth moves through one twenty fourth of a 360 degree rotation is basically an hour, so the event of an hour is not something that is purely an idea in an odd sort of way.

Well, since I'm only in geometry, all you calc people can have fun slicing this into little pieces of ground beef with your knowledge of the reality of these things.

[drumnbach]

Time has always left me cold. Some say that it is an illusion, some say it doesn't exist at all. But then I hear it referred to as an actual commodity in science texts, ie in general relativity and in such thought experiments as the 'twin paradox', which goes something like this:

You take a twenty-year old twin away from his twin brother and send him into space. He (the space-twin) rockets around the universe at three fifths of light speed. He takes eight years to finally return to earth. The space-twin will be eight years older than he was before his mission through space began, yet the earth-twin will be ten years older. This is because speed has an effect on time.

You are correct; time is a flimsy concept. The mind can change its own perception of time at will, for example when we have fun and enjoy ourselves, our perception of time speeds up; conversely when we are in great danger (perhaps we are falling off the edge of a high cliff) our perception of time slows down greatly. Certain drugs can have the same effect on time-perception: alcohol can speed up time, whereas hallucinogens like LSD and psylocybic mushrooms can slow down time.

[guest]

Whoa Tim, what medication have you been taking lately?  

...can you lend me some?  

Only, I wondered something. &#A0;What if math has a mistake in it somewhere? &#A0;As everything in math is ultimately connected, then wouldn't an error cause a chain of other errors?

That is actually more to this musing than you might think.  Basically, if you can find a logical contradiction (ie. prove that something is both true and false) in math, then the entire edifice of math falls apart because with one inconsistency, you can prove any statement to be true.

What's more wicked is that it turns out there are things in math that cannot be proven true.  You can Google "Godel's Incompleteness Theorem" for some details.  The catch is this:  the theorem basically says that, assuming math is consistent, there are statements in math you cannot proved to be true, including whether math itself is consistent or not.  So either there is some hidden inconsistency in math that no one has discovered yet, or, there isn't any but then no one can ever know for sure, because you can't write a valid proof for it.

Well, since I'm only in geometry, all you calc people can have fun slicing this into little pieces of ground beef with your knowledge of the reality of these things.

Actually, a lot of the stuff you're talking about have more to do with philosophy than math.  When you're in college you might want to try out a philosophy class or two if offered.

[Timballisto]

Ha ha!  Lol.  Medication.  No, I just think about these type of things all of the time in and outside of math class.  I'm guessing that my friends spend more time thinking about other things.  The people at this board seem to think about math just as much as I do, which is cool.

[AstralLemming]

Sorry, drumnbach. I was feeling a little psycotic after having to talk on the phone for half an hour to a boy I know(and hate) who happens to be more of an annoying little cretin than you'll ever be. Not to mention the stupid ****** computer had just crashed for no good reason whatsoever. They always seem to pick the time when you're at your most furious to show you the 'blue screen of death' after you've just managed to finish off an insanely hard part of one of your games... Once again, sorry, drumnbach.

[Mindless]

Here's the original BBC radio series archived:
http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/cgi-bin/h-browse?dir=/pub/.arch-download/hhgttg