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#2108 06/15/00 07:28 PM
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jmh Offline
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And I thought I'd made it up all by myself!

Oh to have lived in the days before Everest had been climbed, when no-one had been to the North Pole or had crossed the Atlantic by balloon. Our ambitions seem so small now, just a teeny weeny word that no-one has ever said before.

Did you hear that the Internet had finally disproved the idea that if you gave an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, one day one of them would write "Hamlet"!


#2109 06/16/00 12:13 AM
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>>Did you hear that the Internet had finally disproved the idea that if you gave an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, one day one of them would write "Hamlet"!

drat! another core belief debunked... next you'll be telling me that there can be identical snowflakes.




#2110 06/19/00 09:25 AM
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All right, I give up! It's a noun and a verb and I still don't know what it means. What is a google search? I've heard of google as a mathematical term, some sort of very large number I believe, but that doesn't really help.

Nor it seems does the AWAD spell-check. It thinks I mean goose, or is it trying to tell me I am a goose?

Bingley


Bingley
#2111 06/19/00 09:28 AM
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... and what a humiliating way to get promoted from stranger (so unfriendly, Anu, dear) to newbie.

If I take too long to get my next promotion, will I become an oldbie?

Bingley


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#2112 06/19/00 10:07 AM
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jmh Offline
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Sorry - to save you looking back through hours and hours of A Word A Day, there was a strand where twusm suggested that we stopped asking silly questions that could be looked up easily by typing in http://www.google.com. We've all been (sorry, some of us have been) taking his advice since then - a very good search engine it is too!

If anyone finds us refering to old strands a quick way to find things is via the search form at the top of the page.

Good luck!



#2113 06/19/00 10:10 AM
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> I've heard of
google as a mathematical term, some sort of very large number I believe, but that doesn't really help.

Bingley,

A googol is the mathematical term for a million million or a million squared. Close though.


#2114 06/19/00 11:08 AM
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What we used to call a billion in fact.

Bingley


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#2115 06/19/00 11:22 AM
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No it is even bigger

http://public.logica.com/~stepneys/cyc/g/googol.htm

I checked it out recently whilst estimating my vocabulary!




#2116 06/19/00 11:37 AM
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jmh, I'm sure you're being overly modest.

Bingley


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#2117 06/19/00 12:53 PM
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> What we used to call a billion in fact.

Duuuuhhhhhh! I feel not unlike a fool. Let me get my facts straight. a thousand million in North America is a billion. Everywhere else (presumably) it is a million million.

A googol is 1 followed by a hundred zeros.

Yes, that seems to make sense.


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