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I detect a certain semantic dissonance in that paragraph. 1. Never have I denied you the right or opportunity to express your views - nor, for that matter been in any position to put any obstacle to your expressions of anything you like. I did not delete, censor, edit, obscure or complain to a higher authority about any of your five and half thousand posts. That, to me suggests that you have been expressing quite freely. 2. Explaining why you have failed to change my mind, explaining as many ways as I could think of, as many times as you asked the same questions, over and over, is not an accusation. 3. In any case, nobody can accuse you of doing in a debate exactly what a debate is designed to do: state your position in such a way as to convince your interlocutor and audience. That we have both failed is a result of different world-views, not of anybody being denied self-expression.

That is a superficially neat way of avoding my observation that your attitude contributes to the expansion of terrorism. The consequences of the war on terror demonstrates those consequences. I shall be happy to answer your question once you have addressed my assertion. In the meantime, declaring a war on terror was a short term, rhetorical victory, and a long term, ignorant disaster. That is a remarkable admission. You feel qualified to pontificate on terrorism without having the background knowledge to understand the source and maintenance of the most prominent form of terrorism, at least in regard to its impact on the West. The emotive tone of several of your posts gives the impression that you have been moved by the horror of terrorism and have latched on to a simplistic solution to one aspect of it. The desire to combat it is understandable, but disregarding its inherent immorality, its demonstrated ineffectiveness, and its long term effect of expanding terrorism, makes it a very poor choice. One that exacerbates the problem you wish to eliminate.

I accept your point that the country is in decline given how much of the economy is contingent on oil and how much corruption there is (it's basically a mob family writ large into a country where all kickbacks go up to the leader), but as it remains one of the worlds major superpowers with an impressive military, nuclear stockpile, and more than capable cyber army, and as he is single handedly in charge of all of it with zero checks on his power like the Man in the High Castle, I find it a bit hyperbolic to refer to him as "an obsolete remnant of an obsolete system." It's not like Putin is Mugabe in Zimbabwe or something. I tend to agree, but as he's implicitly threatening nuclear strike, and took control of Chernobyl as one of the first things done during the invasion within 24 hours presumably so he could threaten to blow off the concrete bubble that's been built to contain the radioactivity, it's not unreasonable to mention how this may be part of what's preventing Biden and team from putting sanctions DIRECTLY on Putin himself just yet. They're keeping their powder dry where they can, but they're also likely trying not to back him into the type of corner that would result in such "mad" behavior with nukes. Putin isn't a weakling like Trump, but Trump's also not the subject of this thread.

You are correct that the encoding is 0 for No and 1 for Yes. So the coding therefore depends upon both the order of the questions and the questions themselves, and not the position of the square. So yes the shorter string "11" would identify square 1A. Since @joigus has also observed that the question "Is the coin in square 1A ?" would lead to an even shorter string "1" identifying this square it leads nicely to some further comments. 1) However if the answer was No then there would remain 15 other possible places. So each answer partitions the set into two subsets squares for which the question holds true and squares for which the question is false. 1) I have already observed the set of questions to elicit the identifying code may vary in number. 2) Therefore there exists a minumum set which will identify any given square. 3) The minimum question set that will identify any square is a binay search. This discards half the squares (8) ; Then Half the remaining (4) ; Then again half the remianing (2) ; and finally half the remaining to end with one square. This takes 4 steps and is called a binary search. However this minimum set is not unique and also since the order is important the output string will not be unique either. Such a set might be, and searching for square D4, 1) Is the coin in the upper half ? : No 2) Is the coin in the left hand half of the remainder ? : No 3) Is the coin in the top half of the remainder ? : No 4) Is the coin in the right hand half of the remainder ? : Yes leading to the string "0001" Swapping questions (2) and (4) would lead to the string "0100" Two further comments Firstly about joigus' question what happens if there is only one cell. The actually you would not need to perform any compution since the coin cannot be anywhere else. This brings out the observation I often make about probabilities viz the probabilities 0 and 1 have different properties from any other value inbetween. Secondly since all the information is contained in the questions and answers, the configuration of 'the board' is irrelevant. The cells may be arranged in a line or a ring or scattered.

As you wish

To paraphrase W. Churchill "We have not yet begun to sanction!" Sanctions that aren't cherry picked to avoid any pain to the countries administering them might have a better chance of getting results. The Germans, just as an example, have to be willing to turn the thermostats down and put on sweaters, and other countries need to be willing to do the equivalent.

! Moderator Note You have one more chance to explain what this is supposed to mean You can give an example: use your theory of everything to give the orbital distance of a geosynchronous orbit. Show us that calculation.

Russian plane destroyed. It starts at 40, so wait patiently:

I had basically this exact same thought when reading it. Scanning past experiences to find a way of categorizing this new one.

@Ghideon and @studiot. I think I know what both of you are getting at. Thank you for very constructive comments that go in the direction of elucidating something central here. -------------- Qualification: The "canonical" entropy \( -\sum_{i}p_{i}\ln p_{i} \) is not the only way you can define an entropy. We should be clear about this from the get-go. There are other definitions of entropy that you can try, and they happen to be useful, like the Rényi entropy, and still others. But once you have decided what form of entropy it is that characterizes the level of ignorance about your system in terms of your control parameters, the calculation of the entropy based on your knowledge of the system should be independent of how you arrive at this knowledge. --------------- But the way you arrive at that information is not neutral as to the heating of the rest of the universe! I'm calling the particular questions your "control parameters." It's very interesting what you both point out. Namely: that the coding of the answers (and presumably the physical process underlying it) strongly depends on the questions that you ask. Suppose we agree on a different, much-less-than-optimal set of questions: 1) Is the coin in square 1,1? 2) Is the coin in square 1,2? and so on. If you happen to find the coin in square 1,1 at the first try, then you have managed to get the entropy of the system to 0 by just asking one binary question, and in Ghideon's parlance, your string would be just 1. The way in which you arrive at the answer is more or less efficient (dissipates less "heat" so to speak), in this case, if you happen to be lucky. But the strings Ghideon proposes, I think, are really coding for the thermodynamic process that leads you to final state S=0. Not for the entropy. Does that make sense?

I think that's still too much of a leap. If it was a sudden death, how did the brain know "it will not recover"? I think it's much more likely that the brain was trying to determine what was happening wrt an event it's never experienced before. Scanning the past to see if there's a familiar pattern that can explain this new phenomenon. Death could feel so different that "life flashes before your eyes" in an effort to categorize it.

I'm uncertain, but didn't Schrödinger publish some pussy records?

Thanks for clarifying. Best of luck with your studies, /G

! Moderator Note Aliens are like karma. If you want to use them as an argument for anything else, you need to establish support for their existence FIRST. If you keep asserting things you're unwilling to support, you won't be doing the minimum needed to keep this speculative thread open.

I call upon Swansont to publicly showcase his pussy records. How much pussy does he get per week? Zero, even to a science nerd, is still embarassingly low.

DO YOUR OWN HOMEWORK Or send me somebody who passes the vision test first and I'll do their homework. You have a genie a bottle here if you match the part. The whole 'litany against the senses' thing is being a bit overblown value wise. It's slim pickin's where I come from.