At one time I liked to watch my car's odometer roll over from, say,
4999 to 5000 miles. A special number. Then I thought that a number
like 12345 was just as "special" as say 12000. But then 11111 was
equally special ... I realized that they are all special, it's just
our restricted vision that only sees the significance of a subset.
There is a connection to entropy here somewhere. If a container of
gas has all the slow molecules on one side and the fast ones on the
other, that's a special arrangement. They will bump around and go to
some other arrangement that we don't see as special -- one of the
huge number that are classed as "equilibrium". They could go back
to the original state but never will (well, hardly ever).
On Thu, 17 May 2007, Eugene McDonnell wrote:
On May 17, 2007, at 2:53 PM, Ralph G Selfridge wrote:
I have always liked
All non-negative integers are interesting:
Consider the set of non-interesting integers; There must be a first, which
is interesting for that reason. The un-interesting integers form an empty
set.
Of course if you have a different idea of interesting.......
Many years ago I remember telling Bruce (?) that 19 was the smallest
uninteresting integer. When he was asked if I could prove this, I said it
wasn't interesting enough to bother.
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