begin  quoting [EMAIL PROTECTED] as of Sun, Nov 12, 2006 at 11:59:38AM -0800:
> On Sat, Nov 11, 2006 at 06:27:01PM -0800, Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
> > As I understand it, we currently don't have any numbers we have trouble
> > believing in.
> 
> What do you mean 'believing in'?  Anyone can make up any weird
> kind of number system at any time.

...where "anyone" is typically a mathematics graduate student...

> > But field theory seems to have
> > closed most of the holes including things like different degrees of
> > Infinity (there are more real numbers (aleph-1) than there are integer
> > numbers (aleph-0))
> 
> How did a field theory (physics) 'close holes' in Cantor's transfinite
> arithmetic?  Are you suggesting there is a physical application
> of transfinite arithmetic?

There's more than one field theory, I suspect.

[snip]
> If I may add my sob story....I'm bugged by our calendar.  Quick
> what date is Thanksgiving this year?

Thursday week after next.

>                                      Different numbers of days
> in different months, leap years, leap seconds...yikes.

There are ~365.24 or somesuch days in a year.  Without some celestial
engineering capabilities, we can't fix that.  And if we *did* have the
ability to "fix" it... should we?

Personally, I *like* that my birthday isn't on the same day of the
week each year.  It's a bit annoying that it's relatively fixed w/r/t
the winter solstice (everyone is still broke after the winter solstice
celebration), so my suggestion would be to have a 360-day year.

So you'll have July be the dead of winter in a few years. So what? Why
would that be a bad thing?

(Aside from messing up all the calendar algorithms...)

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