There are 171,476 words in current use in the English language. The number of permutations of six of them is...

wait for it...

25,420,382,124,197,500,000,000,000,000,000

Twenty five nonillion permutations (25 and thirty zeros)

People are vastly outnumbered by #bacteria! #earth #nonillion

Dream Journal 2016-05-26: The Unluckiest Guy In The World

The Guinness Book of World Records certifies many things, and in this dream I watched a news broadcast about a man that was just recently crowned “The Unluckiest Guy in the World.” This guy looked super banged up: his face was all purple and bruised, his arm was in a sling, and most of the places you should be able to see skin were covered in bandages. It’s probably difficult to objectively be awarded the title of “Unluckiest,” but this guy wasn’t falling off ladders and tripping over cracks in the sidewalk.

This guy had been hit by a meteorite. And while that’s a pretty rare event, there are documented cases of it happening in the real world. But he wasn’t just struck with one meteorite... Over the course of about 20 years this man was hit by meteorites on FIVE separate occasions! Nevertheless, the guy seemed pretty upbeat about things, but that may have just been him getting excited for his TV interview.

The dream ended there, but it left me with a question: What exactly are the odds of being struck (but not killed) by a meteorite on five separate occasions?

I did some digging to find out the answer, and it appears that the chances of dying from a celestial impact are significantly more likely than surviving an impact event. There’s some fancy math involved and I don’t quite understand exactly how it works out, but it seems like the chance of being hit with a meteorite and surviving are somewhere between 1 in 700,000 and 1 in 1,600,000. The discrepancy is probably due to the relatively small sample size of confirmed people that have actually been struck by meteorites. I’ll link to a few stories of some such people at the end of this post.

But back to the math!

We’ll assume a ballpark chance of one in a million (1:1,000,000) just to make the math easier, and we’ll also assume that each meteorite strike occurred with no relation to any of the previous strikes (statistical independence). And because we’re looking at 5 total strikes, our answer is 1/(1,000,000^5).

“But that’s an ugly answer!” I can almost hear you screaming. “We wanna see how many zeroes the answer is gonna have... FOR REALSIES!” And I completely agree with that point. SO LET’S SIMPLIFY AND SHOW SOME ZEROES!

You would have a 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 chance of being hit that many times over the course of your entire lifetime. It’s a large number, to be sure, but it’s still small enough to have a specific name: nonillion

A one in a nonillion chance. That’s small enough that even the lottery fans think the chances are too low to bet on.

As promised, here are some quick articles about people that have survived meteorite impacts:

http://firsttoknow.com/true-story-ann-hodges-historys-meteorite-victim/

New Post has been published on http://sansarg.com/wp/2013/11/13/technology/artist-creates-88-nonillion-imaginary-artworks-for-the-tate/

Artist Creates 88 Nonillion Imaginary Artworks For The Tate

An artist has created an incomprehensibly large number of imaginary artworks for the Tate using a computer algorithm.

The artist behind ‘Shardcore’, a website exploring “the interface between art and science” created the works using a massive dataset of artistic descriptions released by the museum.

Released on Github, the Tate’s data included information on 70,000 artworks that it owns or owns jointly with the National Galleries of Scotland, as well as 3,500 associated artists.

Shardcore noticed that as well as objective data – the artist’s name, the date of the work and the materials – were more subjective tags describing the emotional resonance of the work, the movements to which it belongs and other “uniquely human judgements”.

With this data in hand, the artist built a tool which can recombine the data in new ways – effectively creating descriptions for works which do not exist, but conceivably could exist. As so:

The total number of works ‘created’ through the establishment of the tool is a healthy 88,577,208,667,721,179,117,706,090,119,168 (which for clarity is “eighty-eight nonillion, five hundred seventy-seven octillion, two hundred eight septillion, six hundred sixty-seven sextillion, seven hundred twenty-one quintillion, one hundred seventy-nine quadrillion, one hundred seventeen trillion, seven hundred six billion, ninety million, one hundred nineteen thousand, one hundred sixty-eight”)

The works can be explored using an online tool, here. Below we’ve uploaded some of our favourites so far.

Shardcore wonders whether the entire process could be automated – including the creation of the works themselves by a generative 3D printer:

“It makes me wonder whether the whole process, from generating an idea through to the actual production of the artwork could perhaps be automated. Maybe a hook into the Thingiverse API and a 3d printer? In the meantime, please enjoy exploring an area of idea space, created purely by a machine.”

Head over to Shardcore’s website to learn more about the project.

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