Startling facts E.G. space is quite big actually

I am sure I have been told zero is not a number because it refers to no quantity

i once had a long conversation with a maths geek where we tried to devise arithmentic that used base pi.

Now my head really hurts 🙂

The numbers exist independently of the digits we use to write them down.

Hmmmm that is interesting to contemplate, difficult, but interesting. My brain will give up contemplating it shortly, if not already! Binary then really is the purest of number bases, it’s all we need. Err.. Well floating point has it’s issues in binary, well and decimal too. Hence some fractions easy to express as fractions have infinite digits in base 10. Imaginary numbers… I took an open source Mandelbrot set plotting program several years ago and reimplimented it using arbitrary precision floating point math libraries (GMP and/or MPFR). I’m pretty shit at maths though (GCSE grade C!). It’s easy to zoom into the Mandebrot set and hit the wall of hardware implemented floating point calculations. The slow down was massive when switching to the arbitrary precision libraries, a small render could easily take hours and that’s on modern hardware. Then along came Kalles Fraktaler* created by people who actually understand maths and so my little program killed instantly. I’ve seen several people talk about the zoom levels achieved exploring the M-set saying it’s the equivalent to the size of the universe multiple times over, and leaves the planck length for dust. Used to love exploring it, spent a lot of time in there. If you know what you’re doing in the paths taken when zooming down into it you can build up patterns by iteratively zooming into the same sequence but each time you do this the frequency of the sequence doubles and it can be difficult to keep track of it. *if you’re a maths/fractal geek it’s well worth a look around that website, way beyond my understanding though.

I am sure I have been told zero is not a number because it refers to no quantity

A lack of “something” is just as important than a “number” of things.
Without zero, we’d all be f**ked.

Oh we need zero.   Its just is it a number or just a placeholder.?

Is 0.0000000000000001 a number or almost a placeholder?

I am sure I have been told zero is not a number because it refers to no quantity

It’s the abscence of quantity.

I have one pork pie. I eat the pork pie, how many pork pies do I have?

2 more in the fridge but that’s besides the point.

Oh we need zero. Its just is it a number or just a placeholder.?

How do you feel about “10”?

How do you feel about “10”?

Its OK

I prefer 7

But in the case of 10 the zero is not a zero, this is where numbers become meaningless/meaningful.

If instead of 10 our numbering system used X the existence of 0 would not matter.

There are loads of integers, big big numbers. So many grains of sand, stars, a googol, a googolplex, Graham’s number, tree(3) all increasingly mind boggling.

However, whilst each of these numbers have a square and a cube of their own, 26 is the only number that sits directly between a square and a cube. That blows my mind!

But in the case of 10 the zero is not a zero, this is where numbers become meaningless/meaningful.

Sure it is. This is primary school maths, 10 is one “tens” and zero “units”.

If instead of 10 our numbering system used X the existence of 0 would not matter.

That’s not maths, it’s geometry. You could represent 10 as 😁😢 for the difference it makes. Your X still represents zero whatever symbol you choose.

There’s enough protein in a single ejaculation from a blue whale, to feed a human for an entire year.

Channel 5 are on the phone …they want to talk to you about your pitch for a new reality TV show ..

Im still not sure if I believe Edinburgh is further west than Bristol

Im still not sure if I believe Edinburgh is further west than Bristol

Exhibit A:

Edinburgh is pretty much on the same longitude as Cardiff.

Edinburgh is further north than both toronto and Moscow ( russia) but they get freezing cold winters.  that just seems wrong

Channel 5 are on the phone …they want to talk to you about your pitch for a new reality TV show ..

Channel 4 have already got “Come Dine With Me”.

Wales has 3 official languages

Wales has 3 official languages

sounds like BSl

Edinburgh is further north than both toronto and Moscow ( russia) but they get freezing cold winters. that just seems wrong

If sir would permit me to make an introduction?

TJ, the Gulfstream. The Gulfstream, TJ.

Yes! English, Welsh and BSL

That’s why the Wales Govt COVID press conferences always had signing

Just posted this link on the space, astronauts and rocket thread, but it properly ought to be here. JWST has just revisited the tiny patch of sky that Hubble looked at for the Ultra-deep field view, which took twenty days to produce. JWST has picked up more objects that weren’t visible in the original image, in twenty hours…

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/jwst-surpasses-hubbles-deepest-image/

IHN – I know why it happens but it still seems weird 🙂

The average public swimming pool contains 75 litres of urine.

— World of Statistics (@stats_feed) April 17, 2023

Its just is it a number or just a placeholder.?

Define ‘number’.

The set of natural numbers is what most people think of – the question of whether or not natural numbers includes zero seems controversial. For me it would seem to be a number. If I ask you how many fingers I am holding up, the answer to the question ‘how many’ must be a number, right? But you could legitimately answer ‘zero’. I can never hold up -3 fingers, so the answer can never be -3, but it can be zero. You could say that the answer zero is a special case by saying ‘you are not holding up any fingers therefore the question is invalid’ and if we had no word for zero that would be correct. But we do.

Although, for you to answer zero you would expect me to be holding up two fists. But if I didn’t hold my hands up at all, would you still say zero or would you say that the question is unanswerable and the answer is therefore not defined?

It’s a bit like a problem we face in IT. If you fill in a form with say your address on it, you can leave one line blank for example the second line after your street and house number. Does that mean that you just didn’t fill that in, or is it that you don’t have a second line? We have to distinguish between the two when we store your address. There’s a difference between no data and an intentionally blank line or, in maths terms, ‘zero’ and ‘undefined’. So in the case of fingers, there’s a difference between me holding up two fists and you having your eyes shut. In both cases you see no fingers, but you intuitively know there’s a difference.

Edinburgh is further north than both toronto and Moscow ( russia) but they get freezing cold winters. that just seems wrong

If sir would permit me to make an introduction?

TJ, the Gulfstream. The Gulfstream, TJ.

That’s the explanation I always used too, but someone told me the other day that the relatively shallow sea around us has more of an impact than the gulfstream.

the mississippi flows uphill in places due to centrifugal force

Are you sure? Momentum perhaps. I’m not certain that’s the right word either, fluid dynamics is weird. Pressure? Water flows upwards out of fountains.

I can ride a bike uphill without pedalling, given sufficient downhill just before it.

No I am not sure – it baffles me but centrifugal force means that there is a slight upward force as you get near to the equator so at one point this is greater than downward pull from gravity as the area is very flat.  so for a stretch the river gets further fromthe centre of the earth.  add in that the earth is not a sphere and it all gets confusing

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/209805/rivers-that-flow-uphill-due-to-earths-rotation

apparently sea level is 20 km further from the centre of the earth at the equator compared to the poles because of the centrifugal force.  My head just burst.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equatorial_bulge

@frankconway

And still using the same software for the this forum 😉

Full Member

So Sirius will be in proximity of earth in about 500,000 years.
At which time the politics and brexit threads on STW will still be going strong with windbaggery coming from descendants of today’s protagonists

apparently sea level is 20 km further from the centre of the earth at the equator compared to the poles because of the centrifugal force. My head just burst.

Ah, now that makes more sense to my GSCE Physics mind. The Earth isn’t a globe, it’s an “oblate spheroid” – it’s flattened at the poles. So water might well seemingly flow ‘uphill’ due to centrifugal (or is it centripetal?) force, but that’s the force acting on the Earth as a whole which has deformed it rather than force directly on the river itself. Sea levels are going to be higher at the equator because of spin, the same reason as you need a rear mudguard if you don’t want to end a ride looking like a sepia Dickie Davies.

Maybe.

because of the centrifugal force

Also worth noting that centrifugal force is relativistic – it’s only really a ‘thing’ if the observer is in a rotating frame of reference and needs a way to describe the apparent force pushing an object away from the centre of that rotation, for the external observer in a static frame of reference all that exists is the centripetal force that stops the object from continuing in a straight line.

so the river ends up flowing away from the centre of the earth.  Weird.