[ExI] This means something...

[spike at rainier66.com]

From: Mike Dougherty <msd001 at gmail.com> 
Subject: Re: [ExI] This means something...

 

On Wed, Jul 8, 2026, 11:33 AM <spike at rainier66.com <mailto:spike at rainier66.com> > wrote:

>… Playful banter?  What playful banter?  I never saw that.

>…Yessir, gemini knows you by name - you're famous….

 

Cool thx Mike.  But JIP!  No mention of playful banter and my being the world humility champion!  I feel cheated.  I’ll sue.

 

Regarding that cryptography mention, one of the things of ExI that I regret is that no one archived (as far as I know) Hal Finney’s spinoff side group which discussed blockchain, at the root of cryptocurrency, that anything of fixed or controlled quantity can be used as a currency.  That all started because Hal was interested in Mersenne primes, and the notion I will claim: that one could discover a Mersenne prime, then offer to sell it to the highest bidder, who would then be famous for all eternity in math circles.

 

Hal took the idea and ran with it (a very Halish thing to do.)  He was the guy smart enough to figure out how to create a blockchain system for it, enabling a person to own a number.  I don’t know if he invented it himself, but somebody (I think it was Hal) figured out how to make a hash function with a limited number of solutions, each one of which requires more compute cycles to find, then secure the find with blockchain.  I think our own late Hal Finney is the real father of BitCoin, the importance of which grows over time.

 

>…  I fully expected "redness of red, qualia of quale…

 

No sir.  I have always eschewed every discussion of qualia.  I have made it perfectly clear I have never understood that concept and I am most satisfied to leave that to those more qualified.

 

>…pheasant of fez" 

 

Hey cool, I like it.  May I steal that please Mike?

 

>…to be irresistable to spike-style "yes, and..." but I get life moves fast - faster than ever. 

 

>…Heh, I've spent considerable time discussing part of something so small it doesn't even take up space - specifically row zero of pascal's triangle.  Not sure if something so small counts as a big idea?

 

That is a big idea.  My intuition tells me that row zero contains a 1.  I need to figure out what row -1 contains, but my intuition again kicks in and suggests row -1 must somehow create some kind of symmetry.  

 

Mike do you know the answer?

 

 

 

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