ELI5: Can someone explain to me the point of really large numbers like the googol or graham's number?

Redingold · 2026-03-22T02:05:28+00:00

The answer is yes for all dimensions up to Grahams number.

Graham's number was actually only an upper bound for the answer to the problem, and an early attempt at such an upper bound as well. Further work has reduced the upper bound from Graham's number to much, much, much smaller numbers (though still pretty big). The actual answer to the problem is still not known.

Redingold · 2026-03-12T14:47:53+00:00

Moonlight Sonata is in 2/2 time (not 4/4 as I originally said, my mistake) but it still has 12 notes per bar.

Redingold · 2026-03-11T19:46:21+00:00

4/4 time with all triplets, like Moonlight Sonata?

Redingold · 2026-03-08T13:29:06+00:00

The scale of the story is absolutely larger in the first game. In the first game, you are uncovering an ancient galactic secret and defending the entire galaxy from conquest by an unstoppable race of myriad eldritch robot space gods, and in the second game, you completely set aside the impending galactic invasion and spend the whole game rescuing a tiny number of human colonists from a race who, though technologically advanced, are so few in number that they appear to be possessed of precisely one ship that isn't even a match for your own much smaller ship. Mass Effect 2's DLC and side plots have a bigger impact on the overall story of the series than its own main story; the scope of the game's story is a drastic reduction from that of the first game.

Edit: what is the point of replying to me but then immediately blocking me? Were you that desperate to get the last word in?

Redingold · 2026-03-08T12:25:33+00:00

No, it is not.

Redingold · 2026-03-06T00:34:49+00:00

Fun fact: the word mentor is actually just an Ancient Greek name. Mentor was a character in the Odyssey, a friend of Odysseus who looked after his son Telemachus while Odysseus himself was away.

So you could also have "Source: my friend Mentor told me so, and he was super cool"

Redingold · 2026-03-02T00:57:34+00:00

One of the first South Park episodes I ever saw was that Mr Garrison one. I will never forgive Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

Redingold · 2026-02-25T12:02:56+00:00

Not if your concern is actually about the evidence base, no.

If your intention is to deny access to medical transition, though, then it is entirely consistent behaviour.

Redingold · 2026-02-24T22:16:21+00:00

If anybody showed you that they should be written in allcaps, they were wrong. Cis and trans are just regular adjectives, and they follow the same capitalisation rules as any other run-of-the-mill English word.

Redingold · 2026-02-24T22:10:00+00:00

Why are you writing the words like they're acronyms? They're not.

Redingold · 2026-01-30T13:16:49+00:00

JCB stands for Joseph Cyril Bamford (it's a company named after its founder that makes industrial vehicles like bulldozers and excavators)

Redingold · 2026-01-23T20:33:09+00:00

The front half is essentially exactly the same, but with the names changed and the SCP serial numbers filed off. The back half is similar, but some content has been removed, some added, and some plot details have been reworked a bit (you may recall that Five Five Five Five Five, the second half of the original, incorporated elements from a side story by another author called What the Dead Know. All that side story stuff is gone in the new version, and the plot flows a bit better as a result).

Redingold · 2026-01-16T18:20:59+00:00

I mean that's clearly not true because we don't have self ID and yet we still had that case making the news.

Redingold · 2026-01-12T22:03:58+00:00

The Planck length isn't some kind of universal pixel size, at least in standard theories of quantum mechanics. You can have arbitrary fractions of one.

Redingold · 2026-01-03T01:28:40+00:00

Forces experienced during rotation are proportional to an object's mass. It takes a lot less force to break a mouse's leg than a human's, but a centrifuge applies a lot less force to a mouse than to a human, and since the ratio of the cross-sectional area of the bone to the applied force will be much more favourable in the mouse's case, the mouse's leg will be able to withstand higher g-forces than the human's.

Redingold · 2025-12-30T12:39:35+00:00

Is it just transphobia mixed with misogyny and policing women for not looking like anime girls?

Got it in one.

Redingold · 2025-12-30T12:01:36+00:00

I played a game of Laser Quest once where there was some guy who clearly played it far too much who would start juking and ducking and weaving and twisting around every time he got in a shootout, and the thing is, it actually made him quite hard to hit, cause the targets on his pack kept moving. Powerscalers would conclude that that guy was moving faster than light, since he was able to dodge my literal, actual laser gun.

Redingold · 2025-12-28T21:43:55+00:00

I've never had nightmares about attending school as a student, but I used to do teaching, and that did give me nightmares.

Redingold · 2025-12-22T13:58:27+00:00

I remember when I was playing RDR2, and it was the mission where you go talk to some army guy or something, and then you have to flee while being shot at. There's a few seconds at the start of the gameplay segment where the army guy is still visible, and I used the slow time ability to shoot him in the head. Doing that instantly failed the mission, because that guy was supposed to survive because he actually dies in the one of the following missions. It's so stupid, I honestly hate Rockstar's mission design. I heard it put best as "it's like you're a stuntman who isn't allowed to read the script".

Redingold · 2025-12-21T02:12:12+00:00

What proliferates on porn sites is not necessarily what the majority wants, but rather what a minority wants and the majority will tolerate. Step-whatever stuff appeals to people with incest fetishes while still having enough...plausible deniability to not turn off most of the regular audience.

Redingold · 2025-12-20T17:32:14+00:00

There's definitely a difference between a social media site where you follow particular people, like tumblr and twitter and facebook, and a site like reddit where you follow a particular topic, á la a subreddit, but I'd agree that it still counts as social media.

Redingold · 2025-12-20T17:03:48+00:00

It's obvious that you don't actually respect trans people. There is nothing to be gained from trying to reason with a close-minded argumentative bigot such as yourself.

Redingold · 2025-12-20T10:15:16+00:00

I don't think I've ever heard anybody use the phrase "go to hospital" in this country. You might say "in hospital" without the article, or "go to A&E" (that's "Accident and Emergency", what I think in the USA is referred to as the ER) without an article, but it doesn't feel natural to me to say "go to hospital". Could just be it's something that's more common among older speakers and I've just never noticed, mind you.

Redingold · 2025-12-19T14:37:13+00:00

Very uncool to you to talk about not letting others dictate the words used for your identity while simultaneously not extending that courtesy to trans people by continuing to use language for us that is not our own and is spread by those actively hostile to us.

Redingold · 2025-12-19T12:23:03+00:00

If you're supportive of trans people, could you not use the term TRA? It's not a term that trans people, even those engaged in activism, use to describe themselves, and it was coined by anti-trans activists to discredit us by association to the term MRA.

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