John Cuthber

Then it would still be wrong to say "It's the difference between a tithe and a tax; a tithe you give happily..."

I think the Arecibo one was spherical too. It' might be something to do with the lack of steering. With a sphere it points in all directions- you just need to move the receiver. But a paraboloid has a single axis that you have to line up with the target.

They are not analogies, they are examples.

That's, kind of, the point. Ask Jonathan Swift

I'm hoping we can avoid the big endian vs little endian wars. :-)

And, for CuriousOne's (and also any non-trolls) benefit. Computer programmers are among the people who (fairly) commonly use other number bases, rather than base 10 which most of us use. And, because of that, they need to say what base they are using. In particular they commonly use bases 2, 8, 10 and 16. Binary , Octal, Decimal and hexadecimal. And they designate them as BIN, OCT, DEC and HEX. So, for example the number of miles between London and Slough would normally be written as 22. If we want to be a bit more specific, we need to say that we ae using base 10- known as decimal. The number of miles between London and slough is 22 DEC That means that the number is two lots of ten and 2 lots of 1 On the other hand, you could also express it in Binary The number of miles between London and slough is 10110 BIN That's 1 times 16 plus 0 times 8 plus 1 times 4 plus 1 times 2 plus 0 times 1 Or we could write it in Octal The number of miles between London and slough is 26OCT That's 2 times 8 plus six times 1 OK, back to the joke. Now, the number of days you have to wait from the start of October before you get to Halloween is 31. Again, if we are being careful to say what base we use that's 31DEC And consider the number of days into December you have to go to reach Christmas:25. It's a base 10 number so we can clarify that: it's 25 DEC But we could express the number 25 DEC in octal. It's 3 times 8 plus 1 times 1 So it's 31 OCT. 25 DEC is 31OCT

"using this new method man doesn't need an intelligent robot to come up with theories or invent" Man never did need an intelligent robot.

It's that time of year... Why do computer programmers muddle up Christmas and Halloween? Because 25 DEC = 31OCT

No. That's silly. All poodles are dogs but not all dogs are poodles. A number base is a positive integer. But not all positive integers are used as number bases. I have already pointed out a good place to start- twice. It's clear that you are refusing to learn from it or you are not bright enough to understand it. Which is it? Why are you stubbornly failing to learn?

"Why are numbers between 0 and 1 fractions?" Because they are what you get if you take a whole something, and fracture it.

Any positive integer. Why not read about it and find out, rather than guessing badly. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_(mathematics)

Newton grew up in a world where 12 inches made a foot, three feet made a yard, Two yards (or six feet) made a fathom, five and a half yards made a pole, four poles made a chain; ten chains made a furlong and 8 furlongs made a mile. He would have measured masses: 16 drachms made 1 ounce, 16 ounces made 1 pound and 14 pounds made a stone. Two stone was a quarter and 4 quarters (112 pounds) made a hundredweight and 20 hundredweight made a ton. He was, for a while, Master of the Mint so he understood that you got four farthings to the penny, 12 pennies to a shilling and 20 shillings to the pound. He also knew about guineas (twenty-one shillings). He must, therefore, have been able to do arithmetic in bases 3,4,5.5,6, 8, 10, 12, 14 ,16 20 and 21. You can add 60 to the list, since he will have worked in minutes and seconds (of arc and of time). Given that he was bright and numerate, he would probably been able to figure in gross (144) too. His published works would have included the Roman and Arabic numeral systems. So why would the question "Did Issac Newton know about numeral systems?" lead to ? The answer is obviously "yes". A batter question might be "will we ever teach "CuriousOne" about number bases?"

I'm happy enough to pay taxes. Like most of the UK population, I voted against the party that cuts taxes.

No. It is not. Try learning what words mean before trying to use them. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_(mathematics) There isn't any daunt. He's correct.

I know that. you know that. Religion can't understand it. It couldn't a thousand years ago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusades And it still can't today https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boko_Haram

No. I mean numerology . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerology

From what I have seen, "Alt Right" at least pretend to be Christians. They claim to be theists- they go to church and say that Trump (or whoever) is God's chosen president.

And other forms of fraud. Numerology doesn't work.

No, I speak English.

I'm shocked! How would anyone write such a thing. You forgot the apostrophe on cat's (or cats' if there's more than one cat) It's an apostrophe catastrophe. :-)

Funny thing is; whenever I see people talking about "They are planning to steal my ideas", it's people whose ideas aren't worth stealing.

So, it's "demonic" in that it killed about 10,000 times fewer people than it was built for.

That isn't what "letting someone think something" is about.

... to you. But not to us. Why would ew think you are right and we are wrong? Feel free to die, but when I get sick, I'm going to visit the doctor. Incidentally, given that I pay him*- who is in power? *indirectly, but that's not the point