Discover Top Posts Tagged with #base ten

Hi I am going around to everyone who reblogged that post with tags: please use this ask as an excuse to ramble about your ocs I want to hear about them

OK SO IM WORKING ON A MORE ELABORATE GOOGLE DOC BUT FOR NOW. i have this post which i totally didn't spend a million years looking for........ thanks for taking interest in my silly characters I hold them very dear to me >_<

#zioasks #base ten

Can you Calculate the Mind of the Fae?

Have you ever thought to look at numbers? I mean really look? Past all the nonsense like money and busy work from math classes and schedules and dates and unhelpful stuff. What is it about numbers that makes mathematicians love them so much? What are numbers anyway?

Symbols representing a quantity. That’s all they are. But you humans..oh you clever humans...you thought of putting a system around the whole thing. To make things easier. You started out simply enough. With the One and the Two and so on. All the way up to Nine. Then you started to have some problems. You could always just make more symbols and give them names. But it was hard to memorize all those symbols and all those different names. Imagine trying to count numbers like ten billion when every single number has a completely unique name. You could easily end up with numbers called “George” or “Eloise” or “Henrietta”. Then where would you be? Bamboozled and befuddled. So someone very clever decided to invent the Zero. Imagine inventing a symbol to mean the times when there was nothing to count. So you had ten good symbols.. and names for them. Easy to remember...what if you combined them? Counted up from Zero to Nine....then started over. Every ten symbols you start over. It got you a whole lot further than trying to come up with new symbols for everything. Very well done, very clever humans. But even that will only get you so far. Within just that little base ten system you have so many difficulties when you get too high. Patterns stop working, or you lose your ability to calculate them correctly. Instead of a mathematician you’re left with a gibbering wreck of a monkey who is scribbling drawings of bananas on chalkboards because they’ve lost their wits somewhere and even the janitors haven’t been able to find them and stuff them back in through the ears. Its hard sometimes to tell how big numbers are..just by looking at them. A million seconds is about 11 days. A billion seconds is 31 and a half years. A trillion seconds is 31,709.8 years. It gets harder and harder to keep track of things as you go on. And it all just keeps going. On and on into infinity. Forever. It never stops. Quick. Lets do a quick game. What’s the highest possible number you can think of? Is it....a Quintillion? That’s a One followed by Eighteen Zeros. Quite a big number. But how big? Well human scientists think that there may be seven quintillion grains of sand on all of the Earth’s beaches. Now do you see? So you have One Quintillion. Good. Now add one to that. You have One Quintillion and One. Now add another one to that. One Quintillion and Two. There’s your problem. No matter how high you go, no matter what colossal number you manage to think of...you can always add one more to it. So what’s the point then? If you can just keep going forever and it never stops? The point, child, is the game. That’s right, you heard correctly. It’s the game. That is why numbers are so fascinating to those who understand them. It’s a challenge, a game. It is a dance of beautiful patterns and shapes that weave in and out of each other in highly complex weaves. You make the rules and then you see how the game plays out inside that paradigm, that particular set of rules. You don’t have to use only ten symbols. You can use base 13 if you like, or even base 26 if you can remember that many symbols. But its all a game to see what works within the system...can reality itself be reduced to a set of understandable equations? Possibly. Only one way to find out, ready set go. All this is for humans. Humans with limited ways of seeing, limited lifespans, limited sight. Imagine for a moment what could be done by beings whose lives span far past entire eons. Billions of years. What those eyes have seen. What those minds are like. What strange games of numbers they can play.