Sunday, December 27, 2009

One Plus One

I've been thinking about this for a long time.

And I do think there is something (I do not know precisely what) that is very essential about moving forward from counting to adding and then from adding to multiplication and then from multiplication to exponentiation. This does invite going forward still further (beyond exponentiation).

However; to move from one to the other (counting to adding to multiplication to exponentiation) you can do so by just saying "repeat". Another way to move from one to the other is to think of it geometrically. Both are sort of covered in the post "One Plus One"

I actually wrote the post a couple of days before Christmas and for a Christmas present this year my brother-in-law Frank gave me "ONAG". A couple of years ago I purchase "Surreal Numbers" and quickly thought that ONAG would be the perfect follow on. Of course the post "One Plus One" is light years from what Conway is doing but it really did strike me when I got the Christmas present, I thought "Wow I was just thinking about what numbers are?"

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Going To The Cloud (Part-1-Of-N)

Hi;

For years now my siblings and I have drawn names at Christmas. We were a large family and some sibling hit on the idea of drawing names at Christmas. Whether or not this sibling, who's identity is lost in the mists of history (perhaps it was even one of our parents who suggested it) did it because they did not have enough money to purchase every other sibling a present, or for whatever reason it has persisted for years.

Some years ago (eight? oh my...) I hit on the idea of putting up a web page that would fill in for the 'Name-Drawing-Hat'. Since that time it has worked all the intervening years except one where we decided to draw from a hat.

Year before last I even put together an open source project that you could download from a popular code sharing site and put together your own custom name drawing event.

Well this year the time has come to move this all to Google Apps and this post is one of many that will detail my progress to accomplish this. Keep watching this blog for updates on how it is going. Please feel free to comment and even join in with ideas.

Zach