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[Turbo Ninja]

and is roughly similar to 70!

The first time I read that, I thought you were just really excited about the rough similarity of 70 to 10¹⁰⁰ in a sarcastic or facetious way and punctuated your thought accordingly.  Then I remembered some high school math.

I preferred the emotions I felt when I was mistaken (this is usually the case with me).

[Golfhaus]

So Onstad had a meeting with the Google folks?

Is he, like, in Trouble? How awesome would it have been if he tried to explain the situation as if Ray and Teodor were real, as opposed to imaginary and stuffed, respectively?

"Mr. Google, sir, what you need to recognize is that cats are... well, they're sneaky. It's hard to keep an eye on them. And once they learn to use computers, they become terribly difficult to control. While I certainly apologize for Teodor's involvement, I simply can't see how I can be held responsible for the cat's actions. He's richer than all of us. He is highly motivated, and draws from an enormous pool of financial resources."

I'm guessing that there isn't actually a problem since the link to the code is still there, but I like the idea anyway.

[jaydub]

I guess that it's similar to 70 in the same way that they're equally distant from infinity as well...

Strangely, for a non-mathematician, I sometimes do get excited by numbers (or the way numbers work anyway).  I suspect this is yet another deeply geeky part of my personality, as my enthusiasm is rarely matched by my fellow biologists.  Example digression to follow - tune out if you're a math-phobe:

My company has a large number of actual forehead-bulging, journal-writing, mathematicians who frequently present their work to the rest of us in technical reviews, pre-conference workshops and the like.  They seemed to have a preference for taking the numerical output of some of our instruments and performing a log-transformation to base e, after which they'd do algebra and statistics and stuff.  I wondered about that and dropped by the Ivory Tower to ask why they always did this.  It turns out that log-transformation has some very nice effects on how numbers behave (variance stabilization, additive rather than multiplicative effects of underlying factors, etc) so I started doing the same thing with some of my data. 

So far, so good - nothing really to get charged up about (I'm just doing what the cool kids do with their toys).

One day I was trying to figure out a way to explain to an innumerate colleague what log-transformed values mean, and in the course of fiddling around with percentages I suddenly found that differences in natural log-scaled numbers are roughly equivalent to percent-differences on the linear scale!

Is so cool. 

Also: New Mexico Whiptail lizards are all female, and reproduce parthenogenetically!  <--Biologist bona fide

[Golfhaus]

One day I was trying to figure out a way to explain to an innumerate colleague what log-transformed values mean, and in the course of fiddling around with percentages I suddenly found that differences in natural log-scaled numbers are roughly equivalent to percent-differences on the linear scale!

Is so cool. 

My math skills were more of the "make the calculator say BOOBLESS" variety, myself.

[Victoria Waterfield]

Also: New Mexico Whiptail lizards are all female, and reproduce parthenogenetically!  <--Biologist bona fide

I was totally going to call you out for being obviously not a biologist until I got to that part.

[Lister]

So Onstad had a meeting with the Google folks?

Is he, like, in Trouble?

Maybe he finally got around to starting Google.

[coldfrog]

Isn't a googol a really big number?  I think so...  No doubt Wikipedia will set me straight.


Edit:  It is:  10¹⁰⁰

What is better is a googolplex, which is 10^googol.  Does that number really exist, or was that like a joke made by mathematicians who were trying to outdo each other?
Edit: It exists.   However, it is still kind of a joke.

In about 1920, Edward Kasner's nine-year-old nephew Milton Sirotta coined the term "googol"; Milton then proposed the further term "googolplex" to be "one, followed by writing zeroes until you got tired". Kasner decided to adopt a more formal definition "because different people get tired at different times and it would never do to have Carnera [a champion boxer] a better mathematician than Dr. Einstein, simply because he had more endurance.

Googleplex, of course, is an online database of movies.

[robot_god]

One day I was trying to figure out a way to explain to an innumerate colleague what log-transformed values mean, and in the course of fiddling around with percentages I suddenly found that differences in natural log-scaled numbers are roughly equivalent to percent-differences on the linear scale!

Is so cool. 

Once I discovered that the levels of Pascal's triangle correspond exactly to the powers of 11.

[littlefallsmets]

Speaking for the members of the community without mathematical aptitude, with college degrees in the more liberal arts such as English or Writing for Film or Lawnmower Repair, I would like to interject into the conversation...

c*ck.

[coldfrog]

Speaking for the members of the community without mathematical aptitude, with college degrees in the more liberal arts such as English or Writing for Film or Lawnmower Repair, I would like to interject into the conversation...

c*ck.

EGG SANDWICH

[theinevitable]

math makes me kind of sad. Because by the time I realized that it wasn't hard and I was kind of good at it, I'd already locked myself into a sequence of being a year behind in math classes. No Physics AP for me, even though physics is easy as hell.

Now that I am in college and I don't have to take math or science, I am yearning for them. Weird. I am planning to take calculus and physics and computer science soon.

[vagittarius]

Wow, it does look nice as the Google logo. Impressive!

If you do have Firefox and Greasemonkey installed...here you go:

http://dev.userscripts.org/scripts/show/6585

Hello, fifty dollars!

[wombat]

Speaking for the members of the community without mathematical aptitude, with college degrees in the more liberal arts such as English or Writing for Film or Lawnmower Repair, I would like to interject into the conversation...

c*ck.

BARBED c*ck.

[CortJstr]

Googleplex, of course, is an online database of movies.

It's also the most popular movie theatre in Springfield.

[coldfrog]

BARBED c*ck.

Hey, now that I think of it...

Bifurcated c*ck?