29 JAN 2014 by ideonexus

 1/9998 Produces Binary Output

The pattern will break down once you get past 8192, which is 2^13. That means that the pattern continues for an impressive 52 significant figures (well, it actually breaks down on the 52nd digit, which will be a 3 instead of a 2). The reason it works is that 9998 = 10^4 - 2. You can expand as   1 / (10^n - 2) = 1/10^n * 1/(1 - 2/10^n) = 1/10^n * (1 2/10^n 2^2 /10^2n 2^3 /10^3n ...) which gives the observed pattern. It breaks down when 2^k has more than n digit...
Folksonomies: games math puzzles
Folksonomies: games math puzzles
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12 JUN 2012 by ideonexus

 Curiosity is More Important Than Doing Good

The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves some of the greatest men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigators. What animates a great pathologist? Is it the desire to cure disease, to save life? Surely not, save perhaps as an afterthought. He is too intelligent, deep down in h...
Folksonomies: virtue curiosity
Folksonomies: virtue curiosity
  1  notes

More good has been done through curiosity.

01 JAN 2010 by ideonexus

 A Fictional Book that Describes Infinite Worlds

I have translated the entire work: it is clear to me that not once does he employ the word 'time.' The explanation is obvious: The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Ts'ui Pen conceived it. In contrast to Newton and Schopenhsauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one a...
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A book that describes infinite worlds fails without hypertext.