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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Spuddaccino@reddthat.comtoMemes@lemmy.mlNo doubts
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    1 year ago

    We’d need to find exactly where it “passes over”, which could depend on who you ask.

    No, we don’t. It doesn’t matter when that is, because you and I both agree that it’s out there somewhere, and that at the point in time referenced, a non-chicken laid an egg and a chicken hatched out of it. That’s all we need out of that point, and neither of us are disputing that part of it.

    If you define a chicken as hatching from a chicken egg (“every chicken must have hatched from a chicken egg”), then the egg came first. If you define a chicken egg as an egg that was laid by a chicken (“all chicken eggs must have been laid by chickens”), then the chicken came first.

    Agreed. I, personally, use the broader egg definition you reference in the last paragraph, but a definition of “chicken egg” would put the whole thing to rest, and I propose this: Not every chicken egg contains a viable chicken. We all agree that these eggs are still chicken eggs when we buy them at the supermarket, though, so my proposed definition is that a chicken egg is laid by a chicken. Otherwise, we end up with unclassified eggs in our omelettes, and we can’t have that.


  • In such a case, we would simply need to look backward in history until we find an ancestor that doesn’t meet the chicken criteria. Fowl as a clade were separated from other bird clades before the K-T Extinction Event, and many such species before the event had teeth, which means they weren’t chickens.


  • I see what you’re saying, and I agree with it, but the question isn’t asking “Which egg was the first chicken egg?”, it’s asking “Did the egg come before the chicken?” Determining the exact point is a way of answering the question, but is a lot of work that isn’t strictly necessary to do so.

    We can use the Theorem because we don’t care when that point actually was, the question doesn’t ask that. We just need to prove that there was such a point, and the Theorem does that.

    To use that text as an analogy, we don’t care which is the first purple or blue word, we just know there is one because the gradient starts from red, passes through purple, and ends up blue, so it must have a first purple word and a first blue word.


  • Spuddaccino@reddthat.comtoMemes@lemmy.mlNo doubts
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    1 year ago

    chicken would also be able to defined as it’s ancestor

    This isn’t the case, and there’s a mathematical theorem describing this called the Intermediate Value Theorem. Basically, if you have a function describing a line you can draw without picking up your pencil, at some point along that line the value takes on every value on that line. Makes sense, right?

    If I draw a line separating Chicken-birds from Not-chicken-birds, and show the evolutionary path leading from non-chicken to chicken, at some point it crosses that line. We don’t have to know where that point is, we just know it crosses the line at some point.

    At that point, wherever it is, we have a bird that meets the criteria of “chicken” hatching from an egg laid by a bird that doesn’t.

    Besides, this is all pretty moot. We actually know when and where chickens originated. They originated about 3000 years ago in China and India after being domesticated from Southeast Asian Red Junglefowl.









  • For SSD’s, it’s 100% a logical table, because data is stored all over the place for load balancing purposes, so it already uses a logical table to keep track of what each block is for at any given point in time.

    For HDD’s, historically they were physically separated, and they mostly are still, but there’s still a logical table, and there’s no reason the logical table can’t say “Blocks 0 through 1234 and 2000 are part of partition 1” if you have something somewhere else that you want on that partition.