Cogito certe, sed sumne?
Ed Cryer
Johannes Patruus
> http://tinyurl.com/65k8fmx
>
> Ed
All that stuff's beyond my ken, though I have a book here which opens with
the sentence: "Man, being the most able to know and understand, may
rightly be called the consciousness of the universe".
Make of that what you will.
Patruus
Ed Cryer
That very thought was uttered by professor Cox. He said that we are the
universe's attempt to understand itself.
Very Hegelian!
Ed
Johannes Patruus
Well gedda load of this cover illustration from a book published in 1984:
ftp://ftp.worldofspectrum.org/pub/sinclair/books-pics/ZXSpectrumAstronomy-DiscoverTheHeavensOnYourComputer.jpg
(I actually typed in most of the proggies in that book, and can still run
them on an emulator!)
Patruus
Johannes Patruus
> Johannes Patruus wrote:
>> On 21/03/2011 18:26, Ed Cryer wrote:
>>> On 21/03/2011 18:13, Johannes Patruus wrote:
>>>> On 21/03/2011 17:53, Ed Cryer wrote:
>>>>> http://tinyurl.com/65k8fmx
>>>>>
>>>>> Ed
>>>>
>>>> All that stuff's beyond my ken, though I have a book here which opens
>>>> with the sentence: "Man, being the most able to know and understand, may
>>>> rightly be called the consciousness of the universe".
>>>>
>>>> Make of that what you will.
>>>>
>>>> Patruus
>>>
>>> That very thought was uttered by professor Cox. He said that we are the
>>> universe's attempt to understand itself.
>>> Very Hegelian!
>>>
>>> Ed
>>
>> Well gedda load of this cover illustration from a book published in 1984:
>> ftp://ftp.worldofspectrum.org/pub/sinclair/books-pics/ZXSpectrumAstronomy-DiscoverTheHeavensOnYourComputer.jpg
>>
>
>
>>
>> (I actually typed in most of the proggies in that book, and can still
>> run them on an emulator!)
>>
>> Patruus
>>
>>
>
> those old programs? I got one to communicate with an original ibm pc
> (8088 cpu, 320k mem) but I don't remember what the plug looked like. Was
> it a serial interface on the Spectrum?
>
> Eduardus
You could try connecting the cassette recorder to the audio-in (or perhaps
microphone) socket of a PC on which emulator software is running, but it
might not work.
But there shouldn't be any need since the vast bulk of Spectrum software
is downloadable from here:
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/archive.html
Patruus
Ed Cryer
Very 2001 Space Odyssey!
It looks like a Star-child surveying Earth from out in space.
There's one expression that always does me 'ead in.
"There are two hundred billion stars in our galaxy.
And there are hundreds of billions of galaxies.
More stars than there are grains of sand on Earth".
Ed
Johannes Patruus
Summat else to do t'head in -
"One evening I was trying to think of a way of making the small size of
the atom vivid to my own class in chemistry. I thought it might be
interesting, first, to calculate the approximate number of atoms in the
average human body. I know my own body weight and I know precisely how
much each kind of atom weighs. I also know fairly well what percentage I
have in my body of each of the different kinds of atoms. So it did not
take me long to figure out that I have in my body about five octillion
atoms. Writing this number out with digits it is 5,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000: five followed by twenty-seven zeros.
Five octillion is obviously a very large number. But again we are rather
lost when we try to grasp clearly its size. We are unable to visualize
distinctly the difference between, say, a trillion or a sextillion or an
octillion. While I was meditating on this difficulty, I noticed some dried
peas in a dish on one corner of the kitchen table where I was making my
calculations, and I began to wonder what five octillion peas would look
like. Suppose I actually had five octillion peas; would they cover several
acres, several square miles, or perhaps even several counties?
There was an empty medicine bottle about a cubic inch in volume sitting on
the table so I counted out a hundred peas and found that they just about
filled this bottle. Knowing this, it was fairly easy to calculate that a
million peas would fill our household refrigerator, a billion peas would
fill our house from cellar to attic, and a trillion peas would fill all
the homes in the town of Bel Air, Maryland, near where we were living. Bel
Air at that time had a population of about ten thousand and I could make a
guess at how many peas it would take to fill all the houses there.
I next calculated that with a quadrillion peas I could come close to
filling all the buildings in the city of Baltimore, which was the nearest
large metropolis. You see how we are progressing: million, billion,
trillion, quadrillion, adding three ciphers at a time.
I saw that I was going to run out of buildings pretty soon so I searched
for another measure for the peas. We were living just south of the
Mason-Dixon line, the boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania. The
state of Pennsylvania is roughly rectangular so I decided to take that as
my next measure.
Suppose that there is a blizzard over Pennsylvania but instead of snowing
snow, it snows peas; and we get the whole state of Pennsylvania covered
with a blanket of peas four feet deep. You can imagine what it would be
like under these conditions driving out on the Pennsylvania Turnpike,
seeing peas banked along the roadside, drifting up against the houses,
peas off to the horizon in every direction, peas covering the entire
state, from Maryland up to western New York and from New Jersey out to
Ohio. Pennsylvania thus covered with peas four feet deep would contain
just about a quintillion peas, the next rung on our ladder of ascending
numbers.
For the next step we need to imagine this blizzard of peas taking place
over all the land areas of the entire earth. We have to have North
America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa all covered with peas
four feet deep. This pea blanket would contain about a sextillion peas.
For our next figure we must go out among the neighboring stars, collect
two hundred and fifty planets each about the size of the earth, cover all
these planets with peas four feet deep — and then we will have a
septillion peas.
Finally, we go out to the farthest reaches of the Milky Way; we collect
one million, two hundred and fifty thousand planets each the size of the
earth; we cover each of these planets with peas four feet deep; and then,
at last, we have the number of peas corresponding to the number of atoms
in an average human body. So now perhaps you have some idea of how small
an atom is and, incidentally, an idea of how complicated you are."
(From "The Symphony of Life" by Donald Hatch Andrews, Unity Books, 1966)
Peas vobiscum!
Patruus