This post is trivial enough to require posting on a Friday, but it points out the meaninglessness of anything that is not defined precisely enough.
We don't need to use Google to figure this out. If we had perfect documentation, I think everyone on earth today could be shown to be a relative of any other randomly selected person throughout all human history. But to be more pertinent to the discussion, let us assume the worst case for Machiavelli - that he had no siblings, wives, or children, all of whom would have been his relatives. He still had two parents, whether they were married or not, each of whom had two parents, again married or not, and so on backwards to 20 generations. Ignoring the probable duplication of some of the names, there would be about one million names in the list. These people are all relatives of Machiavelli because they are his ancestors, and so are all the people who are themselves not direct ancestors of Machiavelli but yet are related somehow to the million direct ancestors we have found out. Next to each name in the list write down the person's birthdate. There is an overwhelming certainty, given roughly one million observations, that every one of the 366 possible days of the year would be in the list one or more times. Picking any one of them would be statistically unremarkable. Or, convers! ely, randomly pick any day of the year and you can find a relative of Machiavelli born on that day. Statistical remarkability, in this case, depends on the precise definition of "relative", and no precision was given in the original reference to Machiavelli. How many relatives did he have and does he still have? Tens of billions. Is the number increasing exponentially? Yes. There will be another billion relatives in about ten more years. Lastly, I think the poster meant MICS, and not MIX. I don't remember any MIX product. -----Original Message----- On Mon, 28 Jun 2010 10:04:12 EDT, Ed Finnell wrote: >>> >>>Back when it was MIX, they'd fall on some relative of Machiavelli's >>>birthday! Sinister.... >>In a message dated 6/28/2010 9:50:09 A.M. Central Daylight Time, >>paulgboul...@aim.com writes: >>Perhaps this is statistically unremarkable. How many relatives >>does Machiavelli have? Is the number increasing exponentially? >> >Google's pretty good at these types rhetorical discourses. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
