Inconceivable disk drive

In my mathematics page, I describe several levels of numbers. In particular, literary numbers are numbers written with between one hundred and twenty billion zeroes after a 1. I call them literary because literary works can be thought of as big numbers, if you assign a value to the digits and use place notation. Literary numbers are also the numbers of disk drives. If a computer's disk drive has 340 MB of storage, then the number of possible configurations of that disk drive is about 10 to the billionth power, a 1 followed by a billion zeros. It would fill 8 encyclopedias. My current disk drive has 80 GB of storage. That is really huge! There is no way I will know everything about this computer. The number of configurations of that drive is about 1 followed by 34 billion zeroes. That exceeds the limit of 20 billion zeroes that literary numbers have. This number is inconceivable instead. Just think of it. I am typing this on an inconceivable computer, a computer with an inconceivable number of configurations. We have yet to see an inconceivable tornado, but we are seeing inconceivable computers. There is no way I will know everything on this computer. Computers have come to the place where they have taken an independent existence, above and beyond what our minds can conceive. It's a little scary. Could a world controlled by computers be around the corner?

Wild Ride

The stock market took a wild ride today, down, and then up. Kodak said it would have better than expected earnings, but the market went right on down anyway. People are getting too ebearient about the market, more so than economic conditions warrant. It did recover nicely, however. The Dow was up 4 points just two minutes before the closing bell, but in those last two minutes it lost 16 points! Now because of that I will hear violins instead of trumpets on Marketplace tomorrow morning. Well, at least I won't hear pianos.

Tie Games

I didn't watch the Baseball All-Star game as I was doing other things last night, such as preparing my workshops for SUUSI. But I had been a long-time fan of baseball, more so than for other team sports; in general, I could care less about televised sports events, except running and some Olympic events. I have been an old-time fan of the Rochester Red Wings and consequently the Baltimore Orioles. But one reason I have been disinterested is because I don't like rooting for a team; I get depressed when that team loses. And there is one thing about a baseball game: it is structured so that always one team wins and the other loses. It is a win-lose game. If the game is a tie, extra inning after extra inning after extra inning is played until one team wins.

So I got a bit of a surprise this morning when I found out that the All-Star game ended in a 7-7 tie after 11 innings. Like many things in the 21st Century, this game was weird. It was arbitrarily ended, with the score a tie. There was no winning or losing team. And the fans could not take it. They complained that they were cheated because a team did not win. It almost seems that they would prefer their favorite team lose than have the game be a tie. They wanted their money back. Sorry, fellas. The ball team and its owners promised you 9 innings when you bought the ticket, and these two teams gave you 11 innings. I say you got more than your money's worth. There is such a big desire for winning in our society that people can't tolerate a tie game. When they get one, they complain about it, although admittedly the abrupt ending of the game because they "ran out of pitchers" seems a little strange; past teams have played up to 15 innings in All-Star games. There wasn't even a Most Valuable Player. Come on. There should be some player who was most responsible for helping his team to tie.

But the main thing is that people were disappointed by a tie game. I like a tie game. Both sides can come out as winners. Both played well, and the other team could not defeat them. That's ideal. A tie is win-win, and should make all the fans happy. There are ties in other games. A chess game need not end in a win. Many games played by grandmasters end in draws.

To me this passion for winning is potentially harmful, since if there is a winner, then there is a loser, and the losers are made to feel bad. Activities are the best when everyone is a winner. If people acted as though making everyone a winner was a top priority for every person on the globe, there would be no international conflicts or wars. What a world that would be.

Nonwords and gobbledygook

I certainly got my fill of non-words and hifalutin language today. I do have a non-word web page, but I recognize there are useful nonwords that increase meaning and understanding and non-useful ones that don't. Among the latter is stockage, meaning the inventory you have on hand. Microsoft Word kept redlining it as though it were misspelled. I thought at first that stockage" was a useful non-word, until I realized that there was a word stock which means the same thing. Why do people have to add the -age? It's meaningless, like foundationment or activitization. Another one is resourcing, the present participle of the verb resource. Generally I don't mind nouns used as verbs meaning "to provide with a", such as hatting, but this one is too general. What resource is being provided? The one I found really unusual was unvaulable. This is evidently a misspelling, but of what? The non-word unvaluable, which means worthless? Or did the author mean the word unavailable?

But all wasn't bad. I came up with a possible name for the replacement for the World Trade Center: call it Ground One.

Quote of the Day

Sometimes I like to quote particularly interesting things I have heard. I call this the "quote of the day". Today's quote of the day is from Jody Brown, a cattle rancher, and goes "If animals weren't meant to be eaten, then why are they made out of meat?" To which I would reply, "Then what are you made of?"

I heard "I could have danced all night" on TV tonight. To me this symbolizes the mood you get into when you get really excited about someone or something (it doesn't have to be dancing or a partner of the opposite sex) so much that you can keep going and going on with it, while other people keep saying you got to stop or you'll wear yourself out. In the song the housekeeper keeps warning Eliza, "Don't you think you should be in bed?" But she's not in that mood. She keeps singing, "I could have danced all night." This may help you discover the passion in your life. If you can keep going on and on with it and not get tired, that is what you should be doing for a living.