Tag Archives: Idea Polish Level: 1

Air Calories

I wonder how many calories you get just by breathing. Would location matter? I think it would, because somewhere like a pizza place probably has more microscopic particles of food in the air than somewhere like your house. After all, they deal with a lot more food than your house (unless I’m completely misjudging the average household).

What about places like the forest, where there would be lots of pollen and stuff like that floating around? While that’s not food for us, it would certainly still have calories.

Finally, would it be possible to have a restaurant in which you only “eat” by smelling the food? I guess it’d be possible, but it wouldn’t last long…

~ George

Complete Amnesia

What if someone completely forgot everything, and not just memories but also words, images, tastes, everything. How would someone with this “Complete” Amnesia describe the world? They wouldn’t know colors or textures, verbs or nouns. They wouldn’t even know what colors, textures, verbs, or nouns were or that there even was a such things. What if that person tried to describe what he “saw” in a book? Over all, I think it’s be pretty interesting.

~ George

Deeper Movies

Have you ever watched a movie and thought that even if it was good, it was very shallow? For example, most real villains don’t do evil for the sake of evil. Something that I thought would be interesting would be if someone took a simple movie and made it a lot deeper. For example, they could show the villain’s back story, have the hero not be able to take down 20 ninjas by himself, have there not be 20 ninjas in the first place when they can use guns, etc. Just get rid of all those “that would never happen” things and replace it with something more interesting. Maybe retroactively make the movie into a book, since they say “the book it always better than the movie” (not including those little movie picture books for children and the like).

~ George

Ponderings from Math Class

One of the things that has me so tied up for time is my math class, precal/trig in one semester (5 credits!). However, during class I often think of random questions or observations, and I think that instead of making a post for every single one, it’d be better if I just make this single post and keep updating it. If I make a post based on something in here, even better! Quite a few of these will probably only make much sense in my head, but since half the point of this blog is to make people think about things they wouldn’t usually think about, I think it’ll work :). Anyhow, on to the ponderings…


(1) First off, every time I hear the word “pondering” I think of a joking definition made by a past teacher of it. Someone asked what pondering meant, and he replied something like, “pondering is what it’s called when someone wanders around making ponds, the word explains itself, you see.” 🙂


(2) What if 4 > 4 was somehow a valid statement? (((I actually have a way to make it so, but it involves something that I’m not anywhere near posting)))


(3) 1 = 1/1 = 2/2 = 3/3… Somewhat similar to the last question, what if it wasn’t exactly equal, or in some way it wasn’t true. They actually aren’t exactly the same, after all; you type them different, so if you were to measure the bit count of them they wouldn’t be equal


(4) How can you have $i ? Is it equal to $1? $-1?


(5) A joking quote from the teacher: “I’m pointing big!”. What would that actually mean? “Point” means a specific place, but point “big” could mean a general direction, or what?


(6) Interesting Observation: It is impossible to plot a perfect graph, because there is always a smaller number to calculate


(7) Interesting Observation: In precal, you are told that the only numbers you have to worry about being undefined are dividing by zero (infinity), even roots of a negative number (i), taking log of a negative number (also i), and taking log of zero (infinity again). However, you also can’t do this: 0^0, which is undefined (note: not infinity or i, “indeterminate”; even Wolfram Alpha can’t figure it out: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0%5E0). So if you had a problem in which you needed to find the domain of 0^x, the answer would be {x|x<>0}. Also, a^0 = 1 = a/a, so 0^0 = 0/0, which is also indeterminate.


 

(8) Funny comment my teacher made: “Now back to more pleasant things, like math!” (after a conversation about exponential growth and Ebola)


 

(9) log base a of x = y is equivalent to a^x=y, so long as x>0 and x≠1, both of which are impossible (at this level of math?), for example, log 0 = y would mean that 10^SomeRealNumber = 0, but what if it worked? Same with log (-100) = x, which means 10^x=-100, although I think that one is possible with imaginary numbers


 

(10) Interesting Observation (that I’m positive lots of people know): You can have any base for a number system (ours is base-10) and still use decimals, it just depends on when you shift over a decimal. For example, our base 10: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 (one 10), 11 (1 and one 10), 12 (2 and one 10)…; base 8: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 (one 8), 11 (1 and one 8), 12 (2 and one 8), 13, (3 and one 8)…; also, base 12: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, a, b, c (one c), 11 (1 and one c), 12 (2 and one c)….

It can get pretty hard to imagine, but you could do it, especially if you were raised on it


 

(11) 0 < 8 > 0 is a perfectly valid statement, but is there any context in which it would be useful? At the very least it’s symmetrical 🙂


 

(12) It’d be interesting to create a problem that has an exact answer and is made up of whole numbers, yet the exact answer is 20 digits long (and not just a irrational number, like e, or a fraction, like 1/3). Also, if you wanted to be mean, you could say that the answer has to be exact, and nobody would trust that their calculator wasn’t just rounding to the 20th decimal, causing everybody would think they just had to restate the problem instead of giving an exact decimal.


 

More to Come!

~ George