taeto

Yes, life should contain obvious life and its ecosystem should maintain life. But we might aim for an explanation of life which does not itself refer to the concept of life, maybe. Similarly, the concept of "conscious" is not without trickyness. We do not think of a person who has been knocked unconscious as not being a conscious being.

Yesterday Friday at about 9 pm I return with train from a meeting. Exiting the station, notice a plastic card lying on the wet asphalt outside. It is a Visa debit card, the name of its owner too generic for precise ident. I can at least identify the bank, and I chug the card into the mailbox of the local branch, with a short note telling the story. That's it then, today's good deed accomplished, happiness will ensue. Bonus points for remaining anonymous, just in case some shadier character already managed to clear out the account using the chip function on the debit card, and subsequently discarded it on the ground as useless. Then I might begin to look like one of the possible suspects to a crime, what with standing there, the card held in my grubby little guilty looking hands. But actual guilt creeps in. If it was me, suppose I had lost my own card without noticing. The bank opens Monday morning, and would give a call saying, hey, we just got your card in with the mail, how about it? You must've just left it in a shop at some point during your weekend shopping spree. But we'll keep it for you until you are ready to come by and pick it up. Have a nice life. So I am thinking, I should, just in case, have tried to warn the owner of the lost card: Before handing the card to the bank, engage with an ATM, slide it in, ask for 10 bucks and punch 0000 three times in a row as pincode. Do I have that right? The card gets blocked automatically and surely the owner gets a notice, checks her purse, and properly notifies the hotline that the card is actually missing. When it gets returned from the bank it should work the same as before. Inb4, yes, there is a bank hotline where info of a lost card can be called in. I looked for it after I got home, without finding anything other than a robot voice, that clearly did not understand the concept of somebody calling in about a lost card of the found kind.

From context, yes.

Example, please. That should be "impractical", not useless: www.pinterest.se/pin/201043570837115009/

That's funny, I thought about volcanoes too. Eventually settling on clouds as an even better example.

Please mention one question that you asked about it, and to which you did not get at least one competent answer.

Now since PNP is \(\sim 10^{615}\) and \(q\sim 10^{410}\) we have that the ratio PNP/\(q\) is \(\sim 10^{205},\) correct, at least roughly to order of magnitude? In your calculations that you posted before, starting from In[87] and ending with Out[92], what would happen if you had replaced your value of q by some other value, say \(q = 10^{500},\) and you had done exactly the same calculations. What would become different? In particular, based on those same calculations with the new value of q, would you again tend to conclude that \(10^{500}\) is also close to a factor of PNP?

Unfortunately it is also toxic. According to Wikipedia: "Common side effects include headache, ringing in the ears, trouble seeing, and sweating. More severe side effects include deafness, low blood platelets, and an irregular heartbeat. Use can make one more prone to sunburn. While it is unclear if use during pregnancy causes harm to the baby, use to treat malaria during pregnancy is still recommended."

The number in this quote is your q, right? It is an integer, so why is it represented in floating point? Are you suggesting that this number is a factor of PNP, or are you now saying that it is just "close" to some factor? If it is close to a factor, do you agree that PNP/q (that is, PNP divided by q) is also close to a factor?

Demodex folliculorum isn't really alive then? Or by "waste" we include exhaled air?

Thanks PG! Since the question concerned a possible mechanism, and chloroquine and quinine are known to be similarly effective in treatment of malaria, I suspected that this study might be the origin of the "rumour". Good that you have the actual article, which I did not notice as I was in too much of a hurry.

"Chloroquine might be getting new life as an antiviral treatment for the novel coronavirus that emerged in Wuhan, China in late 2019 and has infected some 25,000 people in more than 25 countries. For decades, the drug was a front-line treatment and prophylactic for malaria. In a three-page paper published Tuesday in Cell Research, scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s State Key Laboratory of Virology write that both chloroquine and the antiviral remdesivir were, individually, “highly effective” at inhibiting replication of the novel coronavirus in cell culture. Their drug screen evaluated five other drugs that were not effective. The authors could not be reached for comment." Quoted from www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/science/020620/could-an-old-malaria-drug-help-fight-the-new-coron It suggests an inhibition of phosphorylase by quinine binding to (viral??) PNP. Unusual.

So far as I understand it, you have to avoid setting any accuracy in Mathematica. The computations are supposed to be exact by default. It is if you set a degree of accuracy that the calculations are not made exactly, but only to the degree of precision that you require. The relevant documentation page is reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/PrecisionAndAccuracyControl.html . I admit that the documentation is not always easy to read. I hope that when we talk about factorization here, the aim is to express your given number as a product of smaller natural numbers? You suggested that your 615-digit number has a factor which is a 410-digit number. There must be other factors in the factorization, what are they?

That came out as possibly ambiguous. The test to use will depend on what kind of data you expect as the outcome of the experiment. Then once you can actually see the data, you are bound by your initial decision. Anything else would be cheating.

I still do not know if this is a homework question. But let us try a small example. If we have \(b_1 = (1/2,1/2)\) and \(b_2 = (2/3,1/3),\) do you know how to determine the matrix \(A?\) Do you see why trace\((A) = 5/3 \) is the optimum and \(A\) is uniquely determined?

You yourself call it a `2048 bit number'. Which means that it can be written in binary notation as a string of 0's and 1's of length 2048. Now observe that to decide whether 2 is a factor or not, the first 2047 bits have nothing to say about it whatsoever. The only thing that matters is whether the final 2048'th bit is a 0 or a 1. To decide whether 2 is the smallest non-trivial factor (one that is larger than 1) is the same thing as to decide whether 2 is a factor at all. If you write the same number in usual decimal notation, all that matters again is to be able to decide whether the last digit is an even or odd digit. The point being that the `most significant' digits may be the most useless when you try to decide about factorization.

I do not see an immediate solution. But is it not just a linear programming (LP) problem? Clearly you want to maximize a linear function of the matrix entries subject to several linear equality and inequality conditions, the nonnegativity, sum of row entries, and the condition \(b_1A=b_2\) which is equivalent to \(n\) linear equations. So unless I am missing something, the solution will just be standard. Edit: I notice that linear programming is already one of the tags for the question posed on a different site. Have you tried to look at the dual linear program (DLP) to the given LP?

The estimated age for the star of 14.46 ± 0.8 billion years. The calculated age of the Universe as determined by the final 2015 Planck Satellite results being 13.799 ± 0.021 billion years, it does not conflict, since e.g. an age of 13.8 billion years for the star would not make it an outlier in terms of its measured age. Though admittedly somewhat up in years. I thought that early stars and galaxies were supposed to have very short lifespans. So I kind of share the surprise.

Very well, I see this is a philosophy thread. I imagine her real name is Kanti-Ann, and she would insist that there is actually nothing to see here.

What's his/her name again, the turtle at the bottom? Or have they numbers to them in place of names? Number 1729 counting from the top perhaps is the bottom one?

Mathematically there is nothing wrong with having turtles all the way. Cosmologically, maybe, but I am no expert. It sounds more to me like a chicken versus egg kind of question. Which I believe to be resolvable, though I seem to forget the exact solution.

I see Ghideon already made the same comment. But luckily for us, the probability that it happens during our own lifetime is exactly zero. Indeed it could only happen at its very end ☠️.

The source for a change in \(\Lambda\) might be something like Barrow and Shaw "The Value of the Cosmological Constant", arxiv.org/abs/1105.3105.

Somehow this statement is difficult to understand, Strange. Surely if it happens, then it happens within the lifetime of the universe, not afterwards.

It is a kind of phun 🥳