cosine

When I think of a computer, I think of a portal to a large net of communications and media from around the world, as well as an ability to contribute to it.

Try to do a history of the use Euclid's Elements through the past century and compare it with mathematics literacy in the corresponding years (by looking up people who graduated with math or science degrees, or other methods if possible). Its a popular hypothesis that Euclid's Elements leads to a better understanding of math. If you could find a correlation, someone might say something.

Right, and are you given a domain? Otherwise you technically have an infinite amount of values, but maybe they just want the first positive ones.

I have to say this is a rather amusing, and even slightly heart-warming, piece of news. However evem though we joke about the dolphin giving consent, I do think its quite possible the dolphin may have a connection with the woman. Someone only needs to have a pet to know that affection can go across species (though not normally in the romantic sense... but then again, just how many differences are there? especially to a dolphin...)

Hey, I really don't want to sound like a jerk, especially since I like the opportunity to be at the founding of a project like this. But its a point I feel needs to be examined, so I'll go out on a limb and ask: Why do we feel the need to create WiSci? What is the benefit of us creating WiSci as opposed to using Wikipedia and editing that when we want to contribute?

We'd equate Egypt with "pop music." What if we were each put onto our own desert island?

That specific model gives a possibilty of the universe having an ultimate horizon, but being infinitely vast in distance, which it just seems to settle some of the more intuition problems raised here. Perhaps I am the only one that thinks it is easier to see that image (linked to in post 188) than to trying to reckon in our imagination the possibilities of an infinite or finite euclidean plane. However, you question is even more interesting, because this nice intuitive picture does not come without its consequences! The particular model I suggested implies such wonderous things as that there exist triangles with less that 180 degrees, that pythagorean's theorem actually fails, and that there can be more than one parallel through a given point to a given line! And it even goes so far as to imply that the reason that we may not be so sure about these (or even may go as far as to believe they couldn't exist) are only the result of our vastly small size in our quite large universe. It is inspiring to think that as it was once widely thought the earth was flat, and is now known to be not-so, it is now widely thought that the universe is euclidean, and may later be known to be not-so!

Has anyone considered that the universe maybe be something like a hyperbolic plane, as in http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showpost.php?p=234110&postcount=188 ?

Ouch, this post right after mine! (#188) And it even has a link in it! Psh. Happy new year!

Yeah, basically Cartestian co-ordinates are an application of the abstract concepts discussed in the Elements.

Then we could feed them to computers instead of humans. What if we lived in a 2D plane?

There would be less corruption. What if everyone was blind until age 18?

Ohh, I see. Thanks!

There's always the 4 or 5 operator rule, where only + - * / and ^ (and parenthesis) are allowed...

Well I just got that number as a trivial upper bound this way: Consider a line of 9 boxes. The first box has 9 possible entries, the second box has 8,... so this line has 9! possible permutations. Then there are 9 of these rows. So I figured that 9*9! would be an upperbound (since I didn't put any more restrictions on it). But that would leave an upperbound of 3265920 possibilities. Thats intuitively small. I apologize since I'm not really that much of a probability/combinatorics person yet (first class will be tomorrow). Can you tell me where the flaw in my logic is?

Nothing out of the ordinary. What if the sun was the moon and vice versa?

Thats not even reverse discrimination, thats just plain discrimination. Its stupid, but is he legally allowed to do that?

Then economic classes would be more polarized than they already are. What if voting was compulsory?

Then we could excercise in nap form. What if there was peace on earth?

Oh yeah... thats true. Upon reflection, at least the "What If" and "Four 4s challenge" thread encourage one post to base itself on the one before it. Thus leading to an infinite thread by induction!

Thats alot to ask for. Why do you want to know?