Theodolite is one of those things that makes me wish I had a use for it. And an iPhone to use it on.
16 February 2020: I do, and I have, now. Which might prove useful.
Occasionally I try to impart some elements of good science storytelling to people, and one of the points I make (based entirely on Garrett Hardin) is the big difference between literacy and numeracy. Literacy understands full well that the difference between a million and a billion is one letter. And that a billion is bigger than a million. But how much bigger? My example is simple enough. If a million seconds is 11 days (which it is, give or take), how long is a billion seconds?
It's especially worrying when the big numbers refer to big money. US Senator Everett Dirksen was clearly onto something when he said, "a billion here, a billion there ... pretty soon you're talking about real money". 1
Listening to Lord Bragg and his guests discussing random and pseudorandom numbers taught me a thing or two, and raised a couple of “issues”. One, trivial, can be dismissed at once: why was there no discussion of the amazing prescience of the shuffle function on so many people’s iPods? Because it interests no-one except the iPod listener. Trickier was the way the various guests seemed to skirt around the predestination issue. In answer to the general question of whether, if you knew all the existing preconditions of a coin-toss, you could predict the outcome, the answer seemed to be a less than convincing “Well, you can never really know all the preconditions.”
OK, but ...
Deep philosophical musings have once again been prompted by a reader, who complains of losing the way when following links from my posts. They open in the same window, and lead to distractions that move further and further away, and then they realize they can’t get back to where they started, right...
Theodolite is one of those things that makes me wish I had a use for it. And an iPhone to use it on.
16 February 2020: I do, and I have, now. Which might prove useful.
I may regret this, but having learned to spread little goodies to followers through Google Reader, I thought I would send them back here to The Mother Ship. Over there, below the Random Photograph. To do that, however, I have to make them available to all and sundry, rather than just to my friends a...
