Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Fish!

Continuing in my trend of being a complete copycat, I now have fish!!
<--  See, over there?
Yeah, they're pretty cool.  And, if you're interested, I have an invisible fish...or two...or three.  So, for those of you looking to kill some time, can you see them?  And how many are there?
I maintain the right to remove them at any time and completely forget about changing this post.  If so, sorry, you'll just have to live with it.
I also got some practice converting to hexadecimal for the coloring, which was quite enjoyable.  It's always fun to do strange problems like that.  I can do two digits fairly easily.  Three becomes much trickier, because I fundamentally do not think in base-16. 
On a vaguely related note, does base 1 work?  I've had a teacher tell me that to express, say, 8 in base 1, you need: 11111111.  But at the same time, isn't one of the defining characteristics of a number system the existence of the placeholder, the number zero?  And base one certainly doesn't have a zero.  Or if it does, it doesn't have a one, and thus can't express numbers...  It's thoroughly confusing.  But also very fun to think about.
Another of my favorite contemplations is an infinitely sticky substance.  That is, it sticks to anything it touches.  Anything. A single point particle of it would bring anything it touches to absolute zero, because everything it touched would be unable to move away from it or along it (since it's a point particle).  Luckily, not many things would be able to touch a single particle of it because it would have a limited area around it.  Once filled by particles, the clump of particles would behave like a single (very strange) particle.  It would be a very strange clump, a hodgepodge of charge, mass, and strange interactions, but a particle nonetheless.  And if there were a lot of this sticky substance, you could get to the point where you have a macroscopic particle, immobile and probably rather stringy, since chances are that few sticky particles are only stuck to other sticky particles.  So we have a fantastically dense, entirely indivisible, fractal-like construct.  What would you be able to do with such an object?  Because it is indivisible, it would be infinitely harder than diamonds.  It could not break.  Could it bend? Perhaps.  It would involve the rearrangement of the particles around the sticky particle, which I suppose could be possible, so long as they could slide by each other easily.  Charge or space-filling-ness (I'm sure there's a word for that, but I can't think of it) would change their ability to change positions.  But what if one of the particles swinging around was a sticky particle?  If it got close enough to another sticky particle, they'd stick and not be able to rotate again.  So over time, if any rotation were possible, the stickiness would slowly gravitate towards the center, creating a very nearly spherical macroscopic particle.  But...no.  Because then you have suddenly much less surface area for the same number of particles stuck to the outside, which means that some would have to come disconnected, which is against our initial condition.  So probably if there's any room for rotation or bending, then the sticky particles are not yet fully saturated.  Since saturation would occur pretty much instantaneously, this is impossible.  We're left with an infinitely strong, completely unbreakable root network.
Any other interesting ideas for random ramblings?  Let me know!!  I'm almost invariably willing to think about interesting topics. 

And today, I'm grateful for warm tea on chilly nights.

No comments:

Post a Comment