Originally published at: Look Mum No Computer creates a googol counter | Boing Boing
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Brilliant. Borges would approve, I think. And Arthur Ganson?
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“A society grows great when old men [people] plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”
– Greek Proverb
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That’s some long-term thinking… reminds me of the Clock of the Long Now.
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I just heard that quote on After Life, an amazing new show from Ricky Gervais.
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Three seconds before completion:
“A fatal error has occurred. Please reset the system”
Sam_battle sometimes drops in on the BoingBoing BBS.
The Vogons will come to make way for the intergalactic highway way before then.
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My hobby: counting members of the set of all googol counters.
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He could have done this more simply by just filling a container with enough matter to be a googol subatomic particles and then called it a day.
Let’s see … calculating … that would be … uh … never mind.
There isn’t a googol of subatomic particles in the universe.
Let’s hope that protons don’t decay. If they do, and the hypothetical half-life of a proton is about 1e33 years, then his counter going at 1000 counts/second will have to survive over 1e50 proton half-lives, and that will make it very hard to keep all the parts from disintegrating.
Thanks for explaining my joke.
If protons don’t decay, the googol counter could complete maybe 1e15 complte cycles before its atoms all quantum-tunnel into iron atoms.
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