Comments on: Counting, and things other than counting

By: kevin.

kevin. — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:53:59 +0000

Well you got CNet to write an article about you, albeit a factually incorrect article — it says the book you are writing is “Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store.”

By: Robin Sloan

Robin Sloan — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:19:11 +0000

Hey, no way! That’s totally better, b/c I didn’t get anything for posting tweet #5,000,000,000, other than the excuse to write a blog post.

By: rAchel

rAchel — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:00:00 +0000

oh oh! they used the photo I took of you! boy, am I proud.

By: jon_hansen

jon_hansen — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:38:31 +0000

I called into my local radio station recently and won free concert tickets for being “caller # 12,” but this is obviously much cooler. Congratulations, I guess :)

By: Tim Carmody

Tim Carmody — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:29:58 +0000

Also, I just today read Bertrand Russell, who talks about counting in his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy. He points out how you can define counting in any way, starting from anywhere, counting from anywhere, and it still seems to be internally consistent. He sees this as a problem with the foundations of mathematics (specifically Peano's arithmetic axioms). But I'm actually impressed that the principle of counting is so generalizable. Here are two of the alternative counting schemes Russell gives: (1) Let "0" be taken to mean 100, and let "number" be taken to mean the numbers from 100 onward in the series of natural numbers. Then all our primitive propositions are satisfied, even the fourth, for, though 100 is the successor of 99, 99 is not a "number" in the sense which we are now giving to the word "number." It is obvious that any number may be substituted for 100 in this example. (2) Let "0" have its usual meaning, but let "number" mean what we usually call "even numbers," and let the "successor" of a number be what results from adding two to it. Then "I" will stand for the number two, "2" will stand for the number four, and so on; the series of "numbers" now will be 0, two, four, six, eight . . .

By: Tim Carmody

Tim Carmody — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:21:46 +0000

You know, I thought about this when you titled your tweet “the PENTAGIGATWEET.” If you were doing it binary, like for RAM, the 5G number would be 5368709120.