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The Fog of Numbers - Clusterfuck Nation
The number problems we face are now hopeless. America will never be able to cover its current outstanding debt. We're effectively finished at all three levels: household, corporate, and government.
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ity to really care about the place they called home.
It's especially ironic that given our preoccupation with numbers, we have arrived at the point where numbers just can't be comprehended anymore. This week, outstanding world derivatives were declared to have reached the 1 quadrillion mark. Commentators lately -- e.g. NPR's "Planet Money" broadcast -- have struggled to explain to listeners exactly what a trillion is in images such as the number of dollar bills stacked up to the planet Venus or the number of seconds that add up to three ice ages plus two warmings. A quadrillion is just off the charts, out of this world, not really subject to reality-based interpretation. You might as well say "infinity." We have flown up our own collective numeric bung-hole. -
While extremely allergic to paranoid memes and conspiracy theories, I begin to wonder about the impressive volume of World Wide Web chatter about an upcoming bank holiday -- meaning that the US government might find itself constrained to shut down the banking system for a period of time to deal with a rapidly developing emergency that might prompt the public to make a run on reserves. God knows, there are enough black swans crowding the skies these days to blot out the sun. I hesitate to suggest that readers who are able to should consider stealthily withdrawing a month's worth of walking-around money from their accounts.
The week past, some so-called "conservative" political action groups (read: brownshirts pimped by corporate medical interests) trumped up a few incidents of civil unrest at "town meetings" around the country, ostensibly to counter health care reform ideas. The people behind these capers may be playing with dynamite. It's one thing to yell at a congressman over "single payer" abstractions. It'll be another thing when the dispossessed and repossessed Palin worshippers, Nascar morons, and Jesus Jokers haul the ordnance out of their closets and start tossing Molotov cocktails into the First National Bank of Chiggerville.
Benford’s law, Zipf’s law, and the Pareto distribution « What’s new
A remarkable phenomenon in probability theory is that of universality – that many seemingly unrelated probability distributions, which ostensibly involve large numbers of unknown parameters, can end up converging to a universal law that may only depend on a small handful of parameters. One of the most famous examples of the universality phenomenon is the central limit theorem
Number is Different from Quantity by Gregory Bateson
Number is different from quantity. This difference is basic for any sort of theorizing in behavioral science, any sort of imagining of what goes on between organisms or inside organisms as part of their processes of thought.
Numbers are the product of counting. Quantities are the product of measurement. This means that numbers can conceivably be accurate because there is a discontinuity between each integer and the next. Between two and three there is a jump. In the case of quantity there is no such jump, and because jump is missing in the world of quantity it is impossible for any quantity to be exact. You can have exactly three tomatoes. You can never have exactly three gallons of water. Always quantity is approximate.
Good Math, Bad Math : Infinity is NOT a number
You can see the confusion right away: "1/0 is infinity because ...". Bzzt. No. 1/0 is not infinity. 1/0 is nothing. 1/0 isn't defined in our number systems: it's not a number. In fact, it's not just not a number, it's nothing. It's a meaningless expression. Asking what 1/0 is is like asking "What's the square root of a nice juicy plum?". Or what predicate makes the logical statement "∀x: P(x)∧¬P(x)" true?
If you treat infinity as a number, you fundamentally break everything that makes arithmetic work.
Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » Shor, I’ll do it
to explain Shor’s algorithm without using a single ket sign, or for that matter any math beyond arithmetic.
6 milliards d'Autres, 6 billion Others, 6 miliardi di Altri – A Yann Arthus-Bertrand project
In 2008 you will be able to listen to the thousands of testimonies which have been collected, and add your own testimony to the site.
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