This, according to Scott Funkhouser (quoted in Nature), is what the answer to life, the universe and everything could look like:
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00
Or something like it, because I’m not exactly sure what 10
122 should look like. I’m not sure who Scott Funkhouser is either, as the article doesn’t make it clear. Could be a physicist, could be some guy the author of the article met in a park while eating his lunch one afternoon. What I do know is that Scott Funkhouser is from the Military College of South Carolina, which might be great, but doesn’t really shout “Princeton” or “Caltech” or “MIT”.
It is remarkable enough that the parameters of nature should somehow produce one large-number coincidence. For the same basic set of parameters to produce two large-number coincidence problems is essentially preposterous — unless the two problems are related.
No, coincidences aren’t really remarkable when you start working backwards from the coincidence itself. Take any coincidence you like, work backwards, and what do you have? Well, a coincidence. Plus some causes. Use fuzzy logic to hop and skip over the separate chains of events which led up to the coincidence, and you’re pretty much guaranteed to find some matches. Remarkable? If there were no patterns discernible in something as big as the universe, that would be remarkable.
Still, a thoroughly enjoyable article. Because large numbers are funny.
[Update: thanks to Scott for a link to the actual paper, entitled A New Large-Number Coincidence and a Scaling Law for the Cosmological Constant.]
Popularity: 44% [?]
Time isn’t what it used to be. On the other hand, it isn’t what it’s going to be either. More opportunities for time-related confusion in The Telegraph in an article entitled, The new theories that are killing time.
Popularity: 40% [?]
For the hipster believer in your life, there’s The Manga Bible: From Genesis to Revelation. At first glance, Manga might not appear to be the most obvious medium for interpreting the good book, until you consider it as a type of Hentai:
Extreme violence: genocide, patricide, matricide, homocide
Then Jael Heber’s wife took a nail of the tent, and took an hammer in her hand, and went softly unto him, and smote the nail into his temples, and fastened it into the ground: for he was fast asleep and weary. So he died.—Judges 4:21
Explicit sexual themes: rape, incest and (as highlight) a virgin raped by supernatural beings
Behold, here is my daughter a maiden, and his concubine; them I will bring out now, and humble ye them, and do with them what seemeth good unto you.—Judges 19:24
In fact, it’s a wonder minors are allowed to buy the Bible at all. More cherry picked Bible verses at the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible.
Popularity: 64% [?]
Americans might be able to do things bigger and better than anyone else, but British teens have finally proven that Blighty need not play second fiddle when it comes to breeding generations of stupid meat puppets. A fifth of 3,000 British teens polled identified Winston Churchill as a fictional character, a list which included Florence Nightingale and Richard the Lionheart. On the other hand, the teens identified King Arthur, Sherlock Holmes and Robin Hood as having really existed. More in the Telegraph, home to fine thinkers everywhere.
Popularity: 41% [?]
