Dates are also utterly arbitrary human constructions. A famous example is the absurd conclusion to the quest for the ultimate question in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where the answer was 42 and the question was hypothesized by one of the characters to be "What do you get if you multiply six by nine?" - it was pointed out that 6 times 9 does in fact equal 42… in base 13.Īnother functional absurdity of trying to assign meaning to numbers comes from playing with the numbers or digits in dates. As a result, numbers, when considered like this, are quite arbitrary and easily manipulated to indicate anything you like. The universe, however, doesn't deal with numbers like this - if it even deals with numbers at all - just like it doesn't deal with a discrete concept of " species". Computers use base 2, being only able to process states as either "on" (1) or "off" ( 0) - with the exception of quantum computers which are base 3 using 1, 0, and both at the same time. Insect numerology, for instance, could yield very different answers - we can conjecture that intelligent insects may evolve a system of numbers in base 6. It is apparent that the whole "theory" hinges on this relatively arbitrary choice of base, which probably stems from humans having five digits on each of two hands. Numbers in western languages are written in base ten - that is, when we run out of fingers to represent a number, we reuse them, wrapping around, as it were, adding another digit place to represent the next jump. It is important to think a little bit about numbers and the meaning of cardinality (although a thorough treatment of this is not needed). “ ”The numbers, Mason… What do they mean?!
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