I bet you didnt know that

retalivity

Brexit has been a parody of itself for years now, and shows no signs of stopping.

There are 4 passport colours in the world (or shades of 4 colours), and the colour usally indicates what geographic region they are from.

Red is historically used by commie countries, but was also adopted by the eu in their burgundy shade.
Blue is used by 'new world' countries to distinguish themselves from old world - primarily used in the americas and err....britain soon?
Green is used in countries where islam is predominant
Black is used in a number of countries as it looks 'cleanee' or where it is the national colour - primarily africa or nz

Greybottle

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

The UK gave the $490m contract for the New Blue Passports to a foreign company.

And the original decision to change colour from Navy/Black to red was made under Maggie Thatcher.

They never had to change the colour, the only legal stipulation from the EU is what appears on the cover... country, crest and Passport.

Croatia has blue passports.

Tell me how

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

The UK gave the $490m contract for the New Blue Passports to a foreign company.

Don't think the contract is actually signed yet. De la Rue are playing the nationalist card to try to get back in the game.

Greybottle wrote:

Croatia has blue passports.

Up to 80 countries have blue passports according to the BBC!


Brexit is another example of how the wishes of a few can manipulate the actions of many. Farage, Johnson, Gove and Rees-Mogg used the ideal of Brexit from their perspectives to dupe 17.2M to giving them a mandate of sorts.

After the news of Cambridge Analytica last week, it's clear we will never experience a major election without active subversive elements trying to sway opinions.

Even in Ireland, you could argue the 2040 plan advertorials scandal was a boy scout attempt at the same practice. It was always this way to some degree but AI, internet, social media has blown it wide open.

smacl

Chancer3001 wrote: »

False. You have a very big number that can probabaly be divided by many many other numbers.

e.g. if your "big number" ends in an odd number...adding one will just make it divisible by 2.

if not, itll probabaly be divisible by some other number, 3 or 5 or 7 etc etc

...or maybe you could read up on Euclid's theorem that asserts that there are infinitely many prime numbers, and has many proofs, not least Euclid's own proof as given earlier by Capt'n Midnight and considered to be a classic piece of mathematics which is widely taught.

Fourier

Evade wrote: »

40% of infinity so... infinity?

Some infinities are bigger than others.

The infinity of whole numbers is the same size as the infinity of rational numbers (fractions in normal terms).
Same size in the sense that you can construct a map that links each fraction to one whole number without skipping any whole numbers or fractions.

However the infinity of real numbers is even larger because you can't make a map connecting it and the whole numbers.

So there are bigger and smaller infinities.

Capt'n Midnight

Fourier wrote: »

Some infinities are bigger than others.

The infinity of whole numbers is the same size as the infinity of rational numbers (fractions in normal terms).
Same size in the sense that you can construct a map that links each fraction to one whole number without skipping any whole numbers or fractions.

There's more whole numbers than fractions

Here's the map, you just keep zig-zagging



But 1/1 = 2/2 = n/n so there's lots of duplicates.

So some fractions are mapped to more than one real number.
In fact an infinite number of fractions are duplicates of each other. And when you cross them off there's more whole numbers left.

Fourier

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

There's more whole numbers than fractions

I think there is the same amount. That's just one map. You can equally construct a map where the whole numbers are over counted and also ones where neither are.

Technically speaking they both have cardinality Aleph_0.

A better example is that the whole numbers are a subset of the fractions. As each n is represented by n/1.

8valve

There are more parts in a bicycle chain, than in the entire remainder of a bicycle.

Esel

8valve wrote: »

There are more parts in a bicycle chain, than in the entire remainder of a bicycle.

Teddy Boys used to use a bicycle chain as a weapon. They are sometimes used for distressing furniture.

Ipso

Esel wrote: »

Teddy Boys used to use a bicycle chain as a weapon. They are sometimes used for distressing furniture.

If someone used a bike chain as a weapon on you, wouldn't you be distressed?

Capt'n Midnight

Ever wonder what it would be like to be an astronaut ?

‘I felt exactly how you would feel if you were getting ready to launch and knew you were sitting on top of 2 million parts — all built by the lowest bidder on a government contract.’
Attributed to John Glenn

Capt'n Midnight

Ipso wrote: »

If someone used a bike chain as a weapon on you, wouldn't you be distressed?

We need to stop this cycle of violence :mad:

loyatemu

in 2001 a race was held between a racing pigeon and a greyhound to settle an argument that presumably began in the pub.

The dog won: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/1346423.stm

dxhound2005

In South Africa in 2009 a pigeon beat the internet in a race.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8248056.stm

Riddle101

dxhound2005 wrote: »

In South Africa in 2009 a pigeon beat the internet in a race.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8248056.stm

Shame it wasn't a Swallow then we could have made some Monty Python references.

Fourier

Slight continuation of the numbers thing.

There are numbers like pi whose decimal expansion goes on forever:
3.14159....

However there are ways of computing pi that get better the longer you run them, so if you run a computer program very long you'll get as accurate an estimate as you want.

However there are other numbers, like Chatin's constant (the chance a random computer program crashes) that you can prove have no algorithm that can compute them. So they're fundamentally unknowable. The so called uncomputable numbers.

jasonb

But would that not be true of a lot of numbers though? For example, could an algorithm prove the chances of me dying today? I'm sure one could calculate a number, but there's no way of knowing if it's correct?

Unless of course the algorithm says I'm going to die today, and then I do...

Fourier

jasonb wrote: »

But would that not be true of a lot of numbers though? For example, could an algorithm prove the chances of me dying today? I'm sure one could calculate a number, but there's no way of knowing if it's correct?

Unless of course the algorithm says I'm going to die today, and then I do...

That's a good and subtle point. Really the distinction is between the number itself and applications of the number.

So for instance let's say the chance that a piano breaks today in Chicago might be 1/456. There's no algorithm that could definitively find that out for you, but the number 1/456 is easy to compute. It's more you can't discover that it applies here. I mean really in a sense this is no different than somebody hiding 8 balls in a bag. No algorithm will be able to work out that there is 8, but still 8 itself is easy to compute.

However Chatin's constant can never be computed, that is the number itself independent of its applications.

dxhound2005

I have no idea what is going on here. But just referring back to prime numbers which set off this discussion. We know there are infinite prime numbers, but is it possible that there will inevitably be vast increases needed in the number of digits as new ones are found.

There does not appear to be any logical progression with 2 of them having 12 million digits, then 17 million, then 22 and now 23. It somehow seems logical to me that when one with a hundred million digits is found, then there will be very few numbers larger, which won't have more divisors than One.

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

Edit: What I mean is that when a prime with 100 billion digits is found, the next one might have 500 billion.

Fourier

I have no idea what is going on here.

My fault, not suited to a casual thread.

dxhound2005 wrote: »

But just referring back to prime numbers which set off this discussion. We know there are infinite prime numbers, but is it possible that there will inevitably be vast increases needed in the number of digits as new ones are found.

That's a very deep question. In 2005 it was proven that no matter how large the numbers get you'll always find a prime number with another prime within 6 numbers of it.

Franz Von Peppercorn

Anybody want a shot at explaining Cantor’s diagonal proof of the uncountable nature of real numbers?

Fourier

Franz Von Peppercorn wrote: »

Anybody want a shot at explaining Cantor’s diagonal proof of the uncountable nature of real numbers?

I'll try, might as well explain cardinals and the continuum hypothesis while I'm at it.

New Home

You can bet I really didn't know any of that.

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

New Home wrote: »

You can bet I really didn't know any of that.

I knew some but got to the point where I decided "I don't want to know any more of this".

New Home

I figured I'll go back and read it all again when I feel I can concentrate a bit more... you never know, I might actually learn something, for a change.

Fourier

Anders Shy Aircraft wrote: »

I knew some but got to the point where I decided "I don't want to know any more of this".

Fair enough.:)

I'm starting to feel really stupid trying (and failing) to keep up.

Fourier

Candie wrote: »

I'm starting to feel really stupid trying (and failing) to keep up.

Ah I wouldn't think that, it's abstract stuff that few have an interest in, I was angling toward talking about things you can prove can't be proven (related to Gödel's theorem) , but I think it's too involved for a casual thread.

I'd like to be able to convey it comprehensibly someday as dispite their abstract appearance they're some of the most philosophically deep results of the 20th century.

Realt Dearg Sec

The "I bet you thought you knew that but actually you didn't, and it's exponentially more complicated than you ever could have imagined" thread.

Personally I think the discussion is great even though a lot of it is over my head. Get back to me when you're ready to talk about the train times in Dracula again.

I'm dumbing the thread down substantially with this one!

I love extraordinary coincidences but my favorite coincidence story isn't really that extraordinary, it just sort of illustrates how we can choose to keep going when things go wrong.

The daughter of Irish immigrants to Argentina, Miss Violet Jessup found herself working on the postal shipping lines as a stewardess until she settled in the UK, where she was offered employment by the White Star Line on their new luxury liner, the Titanic. As the ship started to sink, she grabbed a baby apparently abandoned on the deck and managed to get to a lifeboat, and was happily able to reunite the baby with it's mother on the Carpathia, the ship that rescued survivors.

Traumatised and shaken from the experience, Violet then trained as a nurse with a view to staying on dry land.

After the onset of world war one Violet worked for the British Red Cross, and as fate would have it found herself working aboard the sister ship of the Titanic, the Britannic. Having survived one shipwreck, Violet found herself in the unenviable position of being aboard the Britannic when that ship sank in 1916. Again Violet survived, in spite of suffering a head fracture as she was sucked under the keel after she jumped into the water.

You'd think she would part ways with the sea at that point, but she spent a total of forty years on the waves in various capacities, and having also survived a brief and violent marriage, eventually retired to rural Suffolk where she wrote her memoirs.

What I like about Violet is just that she kept walking up that gangplank, she just kept going. It's kind of heroic, or stupid, or perhaps both.