I find it incredible that a group presumably at the cutting edge of creativity is incapable of recognizing that this video reveals the extraordinary possibility of being a bird with a human brain and flying without the danger of dying. Where is your imagination, up your keyboard?
He's my cofounder and I don't understand what he is talking about either. As for what I am saying, the basic point is that only two interesting things have happened. One is The Big Bang, and the other is that we know it. All else is imaginary. The idea that "we've only observed a thin slice of existence" is falling prey to the metaphor to which I am objecting. There is no "existence" to slice up.
YOU WROTE: "When I did my app, I really liked the last question which was to tell about something 'surprising' or 'amusing' that you had discovered. So I asked if they had had many good answers to that one. Paul said that there were some really good ones, but that inexplicably many had left that question blank! Then he chuckled and said "Actually, there was a guy who submitted this wonderful algorithm for wiping his ass.""
My co-founder and I answered the question as follows. "timach notes that time is expanding between The Big Bang and The Advent of Human Consciousness. These are the opposite poles of existence. This means that the mathematical model of physical time using the complete ordered field of real numbers is a misleading metaphor. What is great about mathematics is that it is a tinkertoy of metaphor, and thus offers unlimited possibilities for new metaphors. Rigor is the window through which intuition shines.
erdos2 discovered an enumeration formula for a class of combinatorial objects (the "almost-injective" functions) with the following decomposition: the formula is a sum of two terms, the first of which has a closed form representation as fixed sum of generalized hypergeometric functions and which is asymptotically significant; the second is provably not representable in closed form (hence there is no closed form enumeration formula for the almost injective functions), and asymptotically negligible. Moreover, the significant term is asymptotically equivalent to a simpler hypergeometric function, from which a limit probability distribution for the almost injective functions can be derived."
I wonder if these responses are far less memorable than a high quality ass wiping algorithm.