Quite. The figure that I’ve heard tossed around is that there about 10^60 bits per kilogram, which means that a googol bits would be about 10^40 kg. The mass of our sun is a paltry 10^30 kilograms, meaning that a googol bits is ten orders of magnitude more massive that a medium-sized star.
I don’t mean to pick on this, but why do people always assume that half of <whatever> is less than the average?
If Bill Gates and 9 other shmos like me sit down for dinner together, 9 of us will be well below the average income. Not 5.
My eye opening fact is realizing that it makes me grin to learn that I know something Lobsang doesn’t know.
Dammit damnit darnit dagummit!!! I even went to MS Word to run it past the spell checker – I thought I remembered there was a difference (isn’t there an urban legend about Google ending up that way due to a spelling error?), but when I tried googel I naturally got a spelling error. So I went with the familiar, thinking I remembered wrongly. I guess I was, but not in the way I thought.
Oh, speaking of averages, I find it amusing that on average, human beings have less than two legs.
Well I’m not Q.E.D. I’m not known for my knowledge base. I consider myself intelligent, but not necessarily knowledgeable (there’s a difference) so there are likely to be simple facts I am yet to discover. (I pride myself on being willing to admit ignorance)
Now, If I knew something that Q.E.D. doesn’t know - That’s a time to grin!
?.
If every single person but 1 had 2 legs, the average would be less than 2. Since there are far MORE people with 1 leg than 3, the average must be less than 2.
You seem to have forgotten to take into account people without any…
I see your point.
But if I am to put my pedantic head on - those with one leg would be dismissed from the average calculation as anomalies.
No. His post was a demonstration, not an assertion.
I can see how you might get on the nerves of some dopers.
But not me. You are one of my favourite posters. In fact I’m going to mention you in the “Dopers I’d like to meet” thread. If only because I’ve always wanted to put a face to this font of knowledge.
This reminds me of the “There are more molecules of water in a drop of water than there are drops of water in all the oceans” comparison. I wonder if it’s true.
Damn, I meant to quote this one.
Let’s find out! First, let’s standardize a “drop.” We’ll say a drop is a sphere of water .5 cm in diameter, which is a volume of ~.065 cc. Given a molar mass of about 18 for water, that means our drop contains 3.35 x 10[sup]22[/sup] molecules. According to this, the Earth has 1.3 billion cubic kilometers of water, or 1.3 x 10[sup]24[/sup] cc, which is 2.0 x 10[sup]25[/sup] of our standardized drops. So, at least for this size drop, no, it’s not quite true. But, for a sufficiently large drop, it would be.
Anyone wanna work out how big that drop must be?
One time in chemistry class, a homework problem was to calculate how many elephants’ worth of mass would be in a single cubic centimeter composed of protons packed as tightly as possible. The answer is some ridiculous number like a trillion elephants’ mass or something like that.
Parents get to name their children. I thought names were assigned somehow by an agency somewhere. The fact that some parents really do choose to give out monikers like Chasity makes me think an agency should still be involved somehow.
I seriously doubt this. Most of the people I meet are in a collegiate or professional setting. The times when I would meet people likely to fall into that category would be, maybe… service workers, restaurants, etc… things like that? And I don’t encounter those people with nearly the regularity that I meet college students, professors, medical students, professionals, etc. 50% of the population may be below average intelligence, but any given person’s circumstances will greatly skew the proportions in the people they actually encounter in the course of their daily lives.
Language is a virus from outer space.
That must be one of those neighborhoods where you have fully restored Queen Anne mansions next door to tenements.
When a Guatemalan student [from a filthy rich family] was introduced to our class when I was in 3rd grade I realized parents can actually name their child Jesus (as long as they don’t pronounce it that way of course) and not be evil people
When my mother told me that Jesus and Joshua are the same name I remember smiling and thinking something to the effect of “oh Mama… you are so obviously easily confused by J words”
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I don’t remember learning about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny- I remember believing in them and I remember not believing in them- but a shocker I remember realizing from that same time were that-
-your grandparents are your parents parents
-people didn’t have to be married to have children (I remember thinking that the wedding band actually had something to do with the reproductive process, and since I always wanted a little brother I was upset when my parents stopped wearing their’s [due allegedly to the weight they’d gained since getting married 20 years before])
-when your parents write checks, they actually have to have money to cover them (checks confused the hell out of me when I was a kid; I never understood why they didn’t just write checks for everything and save that money)
I also remember the first time I realized while looking up vocabulary words in the back of a 3rd grade textbook “hey, the dictionary is in alphabetical order! That helps immensely!” The glossary was a few pages long and I’d been using a “let’s see, ocelot… no… leprechaun… no… fisherman… no… ah, here it is, sauerkraut…” hunt and gather method.
The realization that the moon looked the same to me as it would have looked to Napoleon, Jesus, kids on the other side of the world, or Captain Kangaroo.
That my dad was roughly my age when he started a family and sired me, my brother, and my sister.
My dad the deadbeat
The liar
The cheater
The coward
The habitual smoker and drinker
The father who asks me if the money I need to go to the hospital can wait a week, and then ignore my calls for a month or longer.
Yet, while he was just a little bit older than me, during our prime developmental years he worked to take me and my siblings to Disney, to provide us with a house in a good area, good food, and do countless things that must have been some kind of torture.
At roughly my age, he got himself into this. My dad, born into a family that would have roughly seven brothers and sisters in the same house and who probably never received the time of day from either of my grandparents. I only have two siblings, and I feel like I was short changed in regards to receiving any kind of wisdom or guidance. How much could my dad have possibly received?
Yet he held us it all together, at least until I was nine and then my parents got a divorce and my dad skipped town for a good number of months. When we heard back from him, he was a different man. I suppose he had taken his adult life back and perhaps even rediscovered it. Although he still invites us over for dinner, perhaps he himself doesn’t think he was cut out for the whole parenting thing from the get go.
He had once told me, unprovoked and out of the blue and without meaning to offend me, that if he could go back and do it all over again he wouldn’t have had kids.
Sometimes I don’t know what to think.