Believing that everything can be described by numbers is one thing, but using that as a basis to believe that everything is numbers sounds pretty preposterous to me.

In a previous life I might have been an avid follower of Pythagoras, but I would have gone my separate way if they insisted I take the extreme view above.

Imagine their shock (and my glee) upon discovering that pi cannot be described using a fraction made of natural numbers.

Boy were they a long ways from irrational and transcendental numbers.

Watch out for the giant meteor which is now whizzing past the Earth, a near miss in astronomical terms.

He showed that every continuous function (one with a connected graph) is equal to the sum of its Fourier series except perhaps at some negligible points. (He actually proved a more general result, that a broader class of functions, called square-integrable, equal the sum of their Fourier series except perhaps at those points.)

2006 mathematics prize announced

The real challenge is not so much selecting and implementing the best solution from the infinite possibilities of modern technology.

Sorry, but now they have proven that it is impossible to go back in time and try to convince your teenage parents not to get married so that you would never be born.

Paradox explained.

Many people nowadays are uneasy when it comes to trusting the infinite possibilities of technology.

There is just no way to know for sure ahead of time whether or not things are going to turn out as you expected them to happen.

But does that really matter?

The truth of the matter is that there is a finely tuned mesh of reality which combines the strengths of technology with the way things are meant to be.

This means that the human emotions and spiritual awareness cannot be underestimated when searching for the ideal balance between solutions based purely on fact and those solutions built upon faith that things will turn out alright.

That is why it is not a good idea to ignore (almost) completely the limitations of technology for the sake of getting things done now or never.

In the Layman's Guide to the Banach-Tarski Paradox, an explanation is given to the seemingly impossible claim that it is possible to take a solid sphere, cut it up into a finite number of pieces, rearrange them using only rotations and translations, and re-assemble them into two identical copies of the original sphere. In other words, you've doubled the volume of the original sphere.

A Dutch lesbian has given birth to the world's second cloned baby, the Raelian movement says.

No, I am not making this all up. Yes, I am telling the truth. Believe it or not it really happened. Read all about it in this Reuters article.

Sometimes one seriously wonders where the world is going to. These Raelian folks sound like a really strange bunch of dreamers with their cult. Check out the Raelian Revolution homepage if you really feel like flipping out.

Way back in the year 1848 there was this construction foreman named Phineas Gage. His job was to lead a gang of workers in digging out a pass through the mountains for the railroad in Vermont. This was done by using heavy dynamite. One day poor Phineas was unexpectedly caught off guard when an explosion went off prematurely. This long metal rod used to tamp down the pieces of dynamite in the drilled holes flew upwards like a rocket launched into the sky. The heavy javelin-shaped structure pierced his skull, entered a point just below his left eye, went clean through his brain and exited out the top of his head.

The amazing thing is that he survived, even though a huge portion of his frontal lobe had in an instant been removed completely. A brand-new person, but not quite, this poor man at the prime of his life.

So whatever happened to poor Phineas afterall? Well, he survived just fine and at least appeared to function normally in many "rational" ways. Like doing mathematical calculations, reciting complex tasks, remembering names and dates, no problem with these kind of things. However, he seemed to have lost complete control of his emotional side, or rather he had no emotional side left over. Phineas became an unbearable person with whom to be. He was extremely asocial, cussed and screamed alot for no obvious reason. Quoting from an account by Dr. Harlow: "the equilibrium or balance, so to speak, between his intellectual faculty and animal propensities had been destroyed."

So it seems that the brain is organized in such a way that emotion cannot be logically separated from even the most so-called rational decisions we make in everyday life. Even the most basic objective and factual thoughts are connected to some underlying form of emotional wave patterns. To say the least.

All this is inspired by the following book which I am reading with much pleasure and philosophical back-slaps: "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain" by Antonio R. Damasio.

If you are interested in investigating this subject about the human mind in more detail then I can recommend you check out one or more of the following links:

• The Amazing Case of Phineas Gage
• The Phineas Gage Information Page
• Insights from a Broken Brain
• The History of Lobotomy and its Application to Neuroscience

Are you bored? Here is something fun and amazing for your late evening entertainment. Type in some words on this page (Text to Speech) and hear a computer generated voice say them back to you!

Or click the following quote to hear Crystal talk philosophy: The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing