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Post by chrisjenl on Oct 11, 2014 22:27:51 GMT
I'm beginning to think Lindsey was sucked into Zimmy's World with the rest of them. Otherwise I think she would have contacted the Court by now, and would be meeting the arriving boats. Nice ride, Renard. (Rowbot is bummed that they didn't choose him.) I think she is going to holiday or back to the court after she "waved" the children away. so she don't now what going on. |
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Post by forestflight on Oct 12, 2014 4:06:36 GMT
She didn't divide by zero, she divided by 1/∞! If she divided n by 1/∞ wouldn't that just mean, n infinities (whatever that would be)? Whereas n/0 would be undefined right then and there.... A Tragedy™! Anywaaaay. (I don't know anything about math, so I'm probably wrong, but seem to recall something saying that a/b ÷ c/d = ad/bc...) </offtopic> |
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Post by Changeling on Oct 12, 2014 6:15:24 GMT
If she divided n by 1/∞ wouldn't that just mean, n infinities (whatever that would be)? Whereas n/0 would be undefined right then and there.... A Tragedy™! Anywaaaay. (I don't know anything about math, so I'm probably wrong, but seem to recall something saying that a/b ÷ c/d = ad/bc...) </offtopic> Technically, you can't have n infinities. It's just infinity. But yes, if you divided by 1/infinity you would get infinity. If you divide by zero pretty much the same thing happens though. It's more complicated than that, but if you graph a hyperbola you'll see that's what happens, as the limit approaches 0 you get infinity. |
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Post by chrisjenl on Oct 12, 2014 11:00:13 GMT
One (....or more) question. Go Renard going into Zimmy world?? Till now he is very afraid of everything with Zimmy on it: gunnerkrigg.com/?p=81Or go he first kill all the "etheric siphons"? and the Serpets after they are back in reality?? Or not and think only at Annie and go head first into Zimmy world. .... And if he do how work Zimmy world on hem??? |
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Post by thedoomblahsong on Oct 12, 2014 11:19:44 GMT
I think she is going to holiday or back to the court after she "waved" the children away. so she don't now what going on. On the previous page the ship implies that Lindsey is always nearby during these cruises. She must be there in the adult supervisor/extra-dimensional nautical engineer capacity. She must be in Zimmingham then. I bet she looks like a distorted red bud. Or a lady with red hair and a creepy crustacean face. I've been wondering where Lindsey's at ever since the Seraphim interrupted the ball. I guess she didn't notice what was happening until the storm began and she got sucked in. Say, does it seem to anybody else that this chapter is going really fast? It's only been a dozen pages since the ship entered Zimmingham. In these few pages the messenger drone has reached Rey, he already contacted the robots and they're already here! Those motorboats must be fast, but still, it took most of the day for the cruise ship to reach this spot. Did nothing of note happen while Rey and the bots were traveling? The ship has already had a conversation with Paz and Kat, Kat is already making headway with the shipflesh without really having to be persuaded, Annie and Jenny chatted for a bit, and for Pete's sake Gamma has already been found. I'm a bit disappointed actually... I was looking forward to multiple chapters with a bunch of epic adventures, bizarre Zimmingham phenomena, the heroes having to save Gamma, Zimmy, and Kazpat from the clutches of the flying monkeys seraphim, Rey arriving at the last possible moment, Lindsey wrestling the ship gojira style, someone dying, shenanigans. Instead it looks like... the chapter is wrapping up. And we still have so many questions! Are we going to learn new things about Zimmy, Gamma, and their relationship? Is Zimmy going to stop being a jerk to Gamma and maybe teach her a few words in English, let her have her own life for a bit? Will we learn more about the nature of Zimmingham? How are the other students coping with Zimmingham? How will this change their view of Zimmy, Annie and the bunch? Who are the other students with etheric abilities? Are Red and the one with the dots on her face on this cruise? Will we meet students for any of the other houses? Do any of the other students have any story significance at all? Will we learn more about the structure of robot society? Is Kat becoming a mech-angel now? Is Robot going to learn that maybe it's not such a good idea to start a cult around your friend? Are Kat and Robot ever going to sit down and have a chat about that? At this pace, it looks like the day will be saved in a straightforward way, and a lot of these questions and issues are going to be deferred yet again :< |
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Post by Jelly Jellybean on Oct 12, 2014 13:31:10 GMT
Say, does it seem to anybody else that this chapter is going really fast? ... Instead it looks like... the chapter is wrapping up. I agree. I enjoyed the copious details in all the setup pages, but this latest page does have a "oops, look at the time" kind of vibe. But as I think about it more, there are multiple parts of this chapter that are running in parallel and it looks like Tom is aligning each one to reach their climax at the same time. The Robots riding to the rescue, Annie and Jack looking for Gamma. Kat and Paz trying to talk ShipBot off the ledge. But conspicuously absent at this moment are Lindsey and the Seraphs. Maybe we will have a page with one panel showing each of these parts the moment before the etheric distortion goes "POP". And we still have so many questions! ... At this pace, it looks like the day will be saved in a straightforward way, and a lot of these questions and issues are going to be deferred yet again :< Bravo! I guess we have to wait to give you a cookie, but I think you're right. This chapter and book will probably end with a resolution to the immediate danger (the etheric distortion). But the longer-term implications to the students and robots will probably be left to play out in future chapters. |
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Post by nero on Oct 12, 2014 16:55:24 GMT
I'm wondering how all of this is affecting Zimmy. Someone is bound to get hurt by the end of this adventure and it will most likely be her. Besides whatever punishment the ship will end up having, I would like to see Lindsey explain her feelings to the ship.
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Post by warrl on Oct 12, 2014 21:29:32 GMT
If she divided n by 1/∞ wouldn't that just mean, n infinities (whatever that would be)? Whereas n/0 would be undefined right then and there.... A Tragedy™! Anywaaaay. (I don't know anything about math, so I'm probably wrong, but seem to recall something saying that a/b ÷ c/d = ad/bc...) </offtopic> Technically, you can't have n infinities. It's just infinity. But yes, if you divided by 1/infinity you would get infinity. If you divide by zero pretty much the same thing happens though. It's more complicated than that, but if you graph a hyperbola you'll see that's what happens, as the limit approaches 0 you get infinity. But, while the limit is infinity as you approach zero, N/0 is not equal to infinity. It's a different sort of undefined. Because ∞*0 is 0. To be super-fussy, it's only undefined for N <> 0. 0/0 is not undefined, it's indeterminate. Why the difference? Because if A/B=C, then A=B*C. For A<>0 and B=0, there is *no* value C that you can plug into the first half of that which also makes the second half true. For A=0 and B=0, you can plug *any* value C into the first half, no matter how little sense it makes, and the second half will be true. |
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Post by todd on Oct 12, 2014 23:09:55 GMT
Again, why are people assuming that Lindsey's been turned into something? The children haven't been transformed. The ship and the Seraphs have, but they're robots/machines, not organic life forms like the students and Lindsey. In fact, I don't think we've had any evidence of living beings being altered by Zimmy's world.
And I don't think that "the Robot Navy's here" is necessarily a sign that the chapter's wrapping up quickly. We don't know how much they can do on the outside of the disturbance, or how long it would take them to find a solution. I certainly think that it's going to be a lot more complicated than showing up.
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Post by Daedalus on Oct 13, 2014 0:12:15 GMT
And looking again at the size of that chasm in the sea - clearly that mad experiment endangered more than just a boatload of students. Think of all the poor fish and crustaceans! It looks like some sort of weird gravity well. So if the water in the middle is just missing, and is now in Zimmingham (somehow), is water flowing in and out of the other dimension, or is water on the 'outside' unable to get in - ie, the walls are held up by 'etheric flux' or whatever? Physics of reality bending  |
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Post by Daedalus on Oct 13, 2014 0:35:31 GMT
If she divided n by 1/∞ wouldn't that just mean, n infinities (whatever that would be)? Whereas n/0 would be undefined right then and there.... A Tragedy™! Anywaaaay. (I don't know anything about math, so I'm probably wrong, but seem to recall something saying that a/b ÷ c/d = ad/bc...) </offtopic> Technically, you can't have n infinities. It's just infinity. But yes, if you divided by 1/infinity you would get infinity. If you divide by zero pretty much the same thing happens though. It's more complicated than that, but if you graph a hyperbola you'll see that's what happens, as the limit approaches 0 you get infinity. Um...sort of. As I understand it: As warrl already noted, division by zero does not give infinity...exactly. I'm fudging slightly - see below*. But from the perspective of limits, 1/0 does NOT exist because the limit from the positive direction (+∞) does not equal the limit from the negative direction (-∞) [assuming we're moving along the curve 1/x]. So there is no general answer for 1/0: every limit that results in this fails. However! It gets harrier when we consider ∞/∞ or 0/0 or 0*∞ (or 1^∞ or ∞^0 or ∞-∞ or 0^0). Here, limits can work...sometimes. All of these can be...ugly because they depend on what expressions were used. In fact, depending on the two functions that yield the ∞ or 0 or whatever, different answers happen. These forms are called indeterminate because, as stated, there is no ONE answer. There could be different answers depending on other information we were not given, so as written, we don't know the value of those expressions. For example, 2n/n and 2n/(n^2) and (e^n)/n all give very different values when n-->∞, even though they both look like ∞/∞. If you care, the first is 2, the second is 0, and the third is ∞. The best way to think of this is that ∞ is not a single number, but instead stands for a class of numbers (as does 1/∞). Read more here  *The reason is that infinitely large quantities and infinitely small quantities (infinitesimals) do not act like normal numbers and in fact are NOT numbers in the normal sense of the word.
If we had, say, .5 divided by 2, the resulting number (.25) would act very differently from the original number (.5).
Zero breaks this: 0/2 is equal to 0. Infinitely small numbers, however, DO care about whether we multiplied them by two. So if we had a limit that ended up as a 2n/n where n was approaching zero, it would be 2, obviously - even though the top and bottom would both look like 0, they're infinitesimals where multiplication by two matters.
Likewise, even though we're taught that ∞*2=∞, the 'value' changes when we compare the left infinity and the right infinity to some other infinite quantity. So our normal perception of the way operations work (multiplication, division, etc) sometimes fails when these pseudo-numbers get involved.
There seems to be an asymmetry here, though: 1/∞ works, but 1/0 does not. What's wrong? Well, this is essentially because -∞ and +∞ are distinct, but -0 and +0 are not (and therefore -1/∞ and +1/∞ coincide). This leads directly back to the problem with division by zero that was spoken of in the first paragraph.
Sorry if this all was not clear haha. PM me if you want me to try to explain it further. TLDR: I math-geeked, haha  |
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Post by Changeling on Oct 13, 2014 0:51:30 GMT
To people explaining it to me in detail, I do understand the concept. I just don't really care to get into it in great detail. I mentioned it's a lot more complicated than just "looking like infinity", but on a very simplistic scale, if you attempt to divide by zero you don't get a number, you get something more conceptual. Infinity itself is in a (similar but yes not the same and I don't need to be told the difference) boat. Any mathmatics working with an infinite or a null division by default isn't going to be a quick and simple explanation. But, in a very superficial way, they work the same.
The problem with higher mathematics is they're difficult to convey properly to someone who doesn't understand them in a realistic time-frame to somebody who doesn't. Hell, as was mentioned elsewhere, trying to even explain the concept of .999... is difficult to somebody who doesn't already understand it, because it goes against intuition. And that's a lot less complicated than this sort of math.
Long story short, dividing by 1/infinity and dividing by zero will completely screw any simple math, so when used in that sort of problem they become functionally identical. If you could somehow graph both on a normal graphing calculator you'd get a line that appears vertical. Which is what I was getting at. If we start working with higher math, yes they have a lot of differences.
To clarify one thing, I did not intend to mean a hyperbola looks at all like either of these things. But you can't graph n/(1/infinity)). The closest you can get, that I can think of off the top of my head, is a hyperbola. Or rather, a section of a hyperbola as it approaches. I didn't see the need to clarify this because, again, I'm not trying to actually get into a math lecture, just quickly illustrate an otherwise complicated concept.
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Post by thedoomblahsong on Oct 13, 2014 7:12:42 GMT
Again, why are people assuming that Lindsey's been turned into something? The children haven't been transformed. The ship and the Seraphs have, but they're robots/machines, not organic life forms like the students and Lindsey. In fact, I don't think we've had any evidence of living beings being altered by Zimmy's world. And I don't think that "the Robot Navy's here" is necessarily a sign that the chapter's wrapping up quickly. We don't know how much they can do on the outside of the disturbance, or how long it would take them to find a solution. I certainly think that it's going to be a lot more complicated than showing up. As you say, the Ship and Seraphim have been transformed, and as I noted recently (I think it was this thread) we saw Zimmy and Annie switch places in Spring Heeled II, and of course Jack was permanently altered by his vacation in Zimmingham. It even changed his hair color! And Kat sometimes looks like a Geiger-Angel, at least to Zimmy. TL;DR Zimmingham doesn't always change people, but it definitely can. It's true we have no reason to assume Linds was transformed. I think the reason I jumped to that conclusion is that Linds is so huge, and Zimmingham is a little claustrophobic, she must need to be shrunk a bit? Maybe? It's more the combination of the Robonavy's arrival in what seems like minutes, and the fact that Gamma's been found so quickly. Today's page seems like it's picking the pace up even more, but it could be that on wednesday's page the robonavy will encounter some obstacle... |
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Post by todd on Oct 13, 2014 10:40:56 GMT
[As you say, the Ship and Seraphim have been transformed, and as I noted recently (I think it was this thread) we saw Zimmy and Annie switch places in Spring Heeled II, It's more the combination of the Robonavy's arrival in what seems like minutes, and the fact that Gamma's been found so quickly. Today's page seems like it's picking the pace up even more, but it could be that on wednesday's page the robonavy will encounter some obstacle... The ship and the Seraphs are robots, not living organic beings like Lindsey or the students. As for the Zimmy/Annie switch, we don't know how physical that was. It might have been just Zimmy seeing herself as looking like Annie and Annie as looking like Zimmy, rather than a physical transformation (we don't even know if Annie saw herself looking like Zimmy). And I think we should suspend judgment on how quickly the chapter is going until it's reached the resolution. I don't think that Tom would have actually made it a multi-chapter story anyway. |
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Post by arkadi on Oct 13, 2014 20:28:30 GMT
AW YISS THE MOTHA FUCKIN CAVALRY The Robohirrim! Arise, arise, Robots of the Angel! Torn seas appear, terrible danger! seraphs are roaming, seeking true flesh; Go save your goddess, Search for your souls! Forth Robohirrim! Sail to Zimmingham and the Court's ending! |
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Post by todd on Oct 13, 2014 22:21:47 GMT
The Robohirrim! Arise, arise, Robots of the Angel! Torn seas appear, terrible danger! seraphs are roaming, seeking true flesh; Go save your goddess, Search for your souls! Forth Robohirrim! Sail to Zimmingham and the Court's ending! Given that it's a sea--borne expedition, a more appropriate cry might be "Gunnerkrigg expects every robot will do its duty!" |
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Post by arkadi on Oct 13, 2014 22:45:59 GMT
Sail to Zimmingham and the Court's ending! Given that it's a sea--borne expedition, a more appropriate cry might be "Gunnerkrigg expects every robot will do its duty!" The irony being that, half of the time, the Court seems to have no idea what the robots are up to |
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Post by todd on Oct 13, 2014 23:01:34 GMT
Given that it's a sea--borne expedition, a more appropriate cry might be "Gunnerkrigg expects every robot will do its duty!" The irony being that, half of the time, the Court seems to have no idea what the robots are up to Then maybe - "the Robot Navy's here!" (Based on the HMS "Cossack" rescuing some British POWs from the German ship "Altmark" in the early days of World War II with the words, "The Navy's here". Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty and not yet Prime Minister, held that those words should be ranked alongside the Nelson quote I alluded to above as great quotes from British naval history. And it would be appropriate, since this is also a rescue mission.) |
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Post by thedoctor on Oct 14, 2014 3:01:15 GMT
The Robohirrim! Arise, arise, Robots of the Angel! Torn seas appear, terrible danger! seraphs are roaming, seeking true flesh; Go save your goddess, Search for your souls! Forth Robohirrim! Sail to Zimmingham and the Court's ending! Then DEATH! DEATH! DEATH! (Oh so appropriate!) |
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Post by SilverbackRon on Oct 15, 2014 3:15:46 GMT
Wow, I got stuck on xkcd for hours after you posted that... An archive binge is always so much fun. |
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Post by Daedalus on Oct 15, 2014 6:58:15 GMT
Wow, I got stuck on xkcd for hours after you posted that... An archive binge is always so much fun. Did you see the one about 'glass half full'? still one of my favorite science articles ever. |
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