Decibels, Amplifier Power and Origami

[Barry]

Should that not be 9.223 10^18 grains or 2^63? Remember the first square has 1 grain or 2^0.
I should definitely get a life!

Hi Kevin,

Yes you're absolutely right - I realised my mistake last night and wondered if anyone would spot it.

Still a hell of a lot of rice!

Cheers

[The Grand Wazoo]

I like rice a lot but I think in this case he should've gone for 1/2 and 1/2.

[Krisbee]

Of course, rabbits (and some Australians?) have know about the effects of exponential growth for some time. You could take the Grand Wazoo's table and replace paper folds with generations of your ancesters. One fold would be your parents, two folds your grandparents etc. So going back 30 generations gives you over a 1000 million ancesters. That might get you back to about the time of the battle of Hastings. Going back to biblical times might take a 100 generations and would give you a truly astronomical number of ancestors, equal to 2^100 or 1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376.

But a few questions spring to mind. Are my 1000 million ancesters of 30 generations ago the same as yours? What was the population of the UK in 1066? What was the population of the world in biblical times? Surely there were just not enough people on the planet to make the supposed number of my, and your, ancester from one hundred genrations ago? So who does everyone descend from, and is everyone on this forum related to me?