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Originally posted by spungo:
Ha ha - sorry, Cockroach. You're quite right - we shouldn't be doing this here. C'mon, Snupy - let's go somewhere private where I can punish you for being a very naughty girl.

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Originally posted by EngrBohn:
I suspect it's accidental that we start counting at zero. You'll notice the languages that pre-date C start their array indexing at one. But it made the implementation of C ("assembly code with a thin veneer of safety glass, with enough abstraction to be classified as a high-level language") much easier to start counting at zero, due to the equivalency of pointers and arrays.

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My guess about the whole numbering from zero thing is that, in a digital computer, addressing starts at zero (all address lines off is the number 0 in decimal - calling this 1 for convenience sake would require making 0 something else and that would create its own set of issues).

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i also like the number 60 for it is the purest form of carbon. c60

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What?? It's been a very long time since I've sat in a chemistry class, but I seem to recall that C-14 is the radioactive isotope (used in "carbon dating"), and that the normal form is lighter (fewer neutrons). An atomic weight of 60 is way too high for Carbon.

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Second, there is the 9 wizard.
09 Notice that 10's place counts up from 0,
18 While the 1's counts down from zero.
27

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I guess this would have been more effective if leading whitespace were preserved....

9 is a cool number for base 10 digit manipulations, though. It used to be one of my favorite numbers when I was younger.

I think Nayt is referring to C-60 *molecules*, not C-60 isotopes. IIRC, Buckmeisterfullerines ("Bucky Balls") are molecules with 60 carbon atoms, requiring a great deal of energy to form, but remarkably stable (i.e., requires a great deal of energy to break apart). Originally thought only to exist in labs, I recently read of some being found on meteorites. They've got some interesting applications, which generally involve trapping other molecules inside the geodesic sphere.

I never thought of it as a file permission before. --x--xrwx has a certain masochistic daredevil charm. Like, anybody in the world can do anything to my file, and then I'm going to EXECUTE IT!!

Actually that seems like the default file permission for a Windows box that's executing Microsoft Outlook and is connected to a cable modem.

I used to be very fond of aleph-sub-1 and aleph-sub-2. I don't think I've ever seen a set of cardinality aleph-sub-3 (besides the obvious artificial ones, like "power set of aleph-sub-2").

My favorite physical constant is Planck's Constant.

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Originally posted by Alien Investor:
My favorite physical constant is Planck's Constant.

[/B]

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someone PLEASE remind me what planck's constant was! i remember knowing it at one time, but it's going to drive me nuts all night now!

i was always partial to the number 28. good things will happen to me when i turn 28.

Talking about numbers... I was wondering if there is a base in which PI becomes a nicer number to deal with... actually because of PI, e, Spr root 2, ect... I am wondering if we chose the right base.

3,7 and 9 are also nice numbers. Magic, for those of us who's studied childrens litterature and/or reads a bit fantasy. 3 magic gifts, 7 dwarfs, 9 in the fellowship, etc.

When I was little/younger I was fascinated by the numbers 27 and 37.

But you can't leave out 666 or 999 - for various reasons.

31 - my sister's birthday and Halloween.

15 - my birthday, and the fatal ending of the Titanic.

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Originally posted by EddieKatz:
someone PLEASE remind me what planck's constant was! i remember knowing it at one time, but it's going to drive me nuts all night now!

i was always partial to the number 28. good things will happen to me when i turn 28.

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...of the order of 10^-34 Joule seconds. Planck's constant represents the conversion factor between frequency and energy in electromagnetic radiation. That is, E = hf. E:energy in Joules,h :Planck's constant and f: frequency of radiation in Hz.

Einstein, when explaining the photo-electric effect, suggested that if the energy of the incident light was quantized in discrete packets of energy - in units of h - than the phenomenology can be neatly explained.

Bohr also demonstrated that if the angular momentum of the electron in a hydrogen atom was quatized in units of h, than the well-observed spectral lines of hydrogen can be derived (something which had been a mystery for years!)

Enough geek talk...

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"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."

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Originally posted by snupy:
Umm...has anybody seen my labcoat?? I seem to have misplaced it somewhere.....

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Oh...I'm sorry... I seem to have it... is this your riding crop as well? (I can't think how they managed to get into my possession...)

I hope you realise...I'm banned from that lab, now...forever. (Oh, the shame!) ...we'll have to stick to the same story...for the police.

Oh, you mean j

I was wondering if there is a base in which PI becomes a nicer number to deal with... actually because of PI, e, Spr root 2, ect... I am wondering if we chose the right base.

I'm guessing you think those numbers are "not nice" because they're irrational. Any "reasonable" number-base is still going to have those numbers as irrational. I say "reasonable" because you might be able to argue that a Pi-based number system would have Pi as a rational number. There are is a problem here though...
- I don't know if it even makes sense to discuss irrational number bases -- they certainly don't give you any more expressive power than natural number bases.

I think I have an outline of a proof that a Pi-based number system, even if it makes some sense, requires a new set of axioms. The last step of which is that in a Pi-based number system, there are Aleph1 rational numbers.

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cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?

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Originally posted by EngrBohn:
- GameMaster -
The other number I am supprised didn't show up more is: I (Sqrroot -1)

Oh, you mean j

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I seem to remember back when I was at school, that j was used by engineers and i by physicists ... is that still the case?

Of course, I still haven't been able to convince my wife that imaginary numbers *exist*.

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cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?

The divisors of 28 are: 1, 2, 4, 7, 14

1 + 2 + 4 + 7 + 14 = 28

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Originally posted by spungo:
...of the order of 10^-34 Joule seconds. Planck's constant represents the conversion factor between frequency and energy in electromagnetic radiation. That is, E = hf. E:energy in Joules,h :Planck's constant and f: frequency of radiation in Hz.

Einstein, when explaining the photo-electric effect, suggested that if the energy of the incident light was quantized in discrete packets of energy - in units of h - than the phenomenology can be neatly explained.

Bohr also demonstrated that if the angular momentum of the electron in a hydrogen atom was quatized in units of h, than the well-observed spectral lines of hydrogen can be derived (something which had been a mystery for years!)

Enough geek talk...

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Originally posted by macadddikt18:
Do we dare ask why you were banned from the lab?
Nayt

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Uh, no.

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Originally posted by macadddikt18:
then i guess to keep all us from throwing up or worse, we will leave it at that.
Nayt

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i.e. 5 + 7 = 1 dozen

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I'm egotistical and I'm
proud of it!

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Originally posted by snupy:
Don't knock it 'til you've tried it, Nayt

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I've tried it so does that mean I can knock it. My favorite number has got to be 13. I was born on a friday the 13th kinda scary isnt it. Oh and snupy dont pick on the vanillas now lol...

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Originally posted by macadddikt18:
i also like the number 60 for it is the purest form of carbon. c60
Nayt

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In other news, e totally came out of someone's arse, I will never understand that number.

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We're talking about favorite numbers and almost every geek in here is living in base 10?

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That's one of the reasons zero is so cool. It's the same in every base.

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In other news, e totally came out of someone's arse, I will never understand that number.

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e is the base of the natural logarithm function (in other words, ln e = 1). I won't try to describe the full usefulness of logarithms here (ask your algebra teacher about that one...), but the natural logarithm is special because it has the derivative (d/dx) ln x = 1/x .