wonderings

What (amount or piece of asbestos) qualifies as a singular asbesto?

Swag is subjective

Swag is subjective?

Jeaus christ i dont remember typing that but tru

what do elephants find attractive about other elephants?

In a programming language where the only operations are boolean OR and boolean NOT, all variables are 1-bit, and data can only be read once before it is destroyed, what operations are possible, and how can we distinguish those that are and those that aren't?

Or, if we represent all boolean operations as directed graphs, what operations are both planar and acyclic?

Or, what operations can we make with redstone in minecraft without ever making bridges?


Given some finite collection of positive integers S = {a₁, ... } (repeats are allowed) of size N, where you're allowed to ask for the closest number X to some number Y that can be made as a sum of the elements, how many times do you have to ask before you know the whole collection, as a function of N?

For example, if you have the collection {2, 2, 10}, you can determine the set in four guesses, if you somehow know to ask exactly the right numbers. First, ask for the closest sum to infinity, which tells you 14 is the sum of all elements. Your guess for the set is currently {14}. Next, ask for the closest sum to 12, which returns 12. Your guess for the set is now {2, 12}. Next, ask for the closest number to 10. Your guess for the set is now {2, 2, 10}. Finally, ask for the closest number to 7, which gives 10. The only number less than ten that is further from 7 than 10 is 4. 4 cannot be in the set, as to get a total sum of 14, you would also have to have a 6 (or some combination of numbers that add to six) which is impossible, as you already know the closest number/sum to 7 in the set is 10.

In other words, how many different attempted withdrawals from an atm do you have to make to determine what bills are in the atm?

What are the average minimal values as a function of N? The average average values from some algorithm? The average average values from guessing randomly?

atm puzzle

somebody on reddit posted the impossible counterexample of distinguishing {1,1,1} and {1,2}. so i guess im not getting into the next martin gardner book

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2+4=2*3=6
2*4=2^3=8
2^4=2^^3=16
2^^4=2^^^3=256
...

???

im sure there's a very simple explanation behind this but im far too tired to figure it out

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why do europeans and middle easterns and indians some africans have pointy noises while asians and other africans have flat round ones and why do native americans have pointy noses when they come from asians who have round ones

why do mammals have five toefingers per paw

why do humans laugh and why do we bare our teeth to show nonaggression

could i still sit down if i had a tail

what color were dinosaurs

why do humans assign human attributes, particularly infantile ones, to animals we should be killing and eating? are we really just that social

for that matter, are nonsocial animals capable of feeling empathy/wanting to help somebody that is not them or maybe not even in their species

why is it really easy to fall asleep sometimes and really hard others even when im just as tired

why are plants green instead of black

is oxygen really the best gas for life to live on

we're really lucky that the universal solvent just so happened to be the most likely product of some of the most common elements in the universe

how come gravity doesn't reduce entropy? are gravitational waves kinda like heat is to electromagnetism? would gravity reduce entropy if it was just newtonian instead of gr?

how come when youre really tired and about to fall asleep all of a sudden everything completely loses its sense of scale and everything seems really small and really big and skinny and fat all at once

why don't more people ask more questions there are so many good ones to ask

edit: why doesn't the [noparse]

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[/noparse] tag need a closing tag

how do you reconcile the lorentz force (particularly when combined with the biot savart law) with galilean relativity

Mash together!!!!

compare a deinonychus to a wolf, two animals with similar predation patterns that occupy(ed) similar niches in their ecosystem. now compare their skulls. look how much more brain room the wolf has! the deinonychus looks like just a big mouth in comparison. then compare geckos and mice. crocodiles and jaguars. velociraptors and housecats. elephants and triceratops.

why do mammals have such big brains???

to contain all the memes

Most people would accept that a computer is Turing-complete -- ignoring the fact that a truly Turing-complete machine has infinite memory while (most) of our computers don't. Most people would also accept that something is Turing-complete if it can simulate something that is already Turing-complete.

Is an infinite bag of electronics parts -- wires, resistors, capacitors, inductors, transistors, and diodes -- Turing-complete, then? You can compute anything with them, including a computer, and oftentimes you can make a much more efficient computation machine by building it with electronics rather than by building it with a computer then programming the computer.

The issue is that putting in the input feels an awful lot like building the machine, rather than just telling it what you want to compute. Are the collection of parts or the electromagnetic field really computing anything?

What about a 20 kiloton pile of iron, copper, and various rare earth metal ores? You can make electronics parts from that. But this seems an awful lot less like "simulating" something, and an awful lot more like just "making" it.

What about a single wooden block? You can probably carve something Turing-complete out of wood if you have a good enough chisel.


At each of these examples (it seems intuitive that) less and less computing power is actually present in our "computer" and more and more computing power and work is put into configuring the "inputs" and interpreting the "outputs". Clearly, we have to include other information about the system in the part we consider Turing-complete, probably including the method of adding inputs and instructions on interpreting outputs.

But at what point could we just take the input and output system alone, replacing our "Turing machine" with some arbitrary object? And at what point do we consider the human integral to the operation of our machine?

And all that is without even going into the inherent fuzziness behind any mathematical/computational system -- math has to be defined in terms of human language at some level, or defined implicitly. There're always gonna biases, undeclared/implicit axioms, or unclear definitions.

If a perfect, idealized system can only exist in our brain, which is itself incredibly fuzzy and imperfect, can it truly exist?

ive been avoiding watching this video for a while because the thumbnail makes it look like clickbaity psuedoscientific shitposting, but it pretty perfectly captures what this thread is about