pyesetz | Updates to recent posts

Predicting US elections: This essay began with "I remember", which was supposed to indicate that it is a reminiscence rather than a fact-piece. Still, things seem to be going my way on Wall St.: we are less than 1% away from the target pre-election low that I gave.

Continuum Hypothesis: The inestimable Dr. J reminds me of the Banach–Tarski Paradox, which seems to say that you *don't* need to chop up a sphere into an infinite number of pieces in order to somehow reassemble it into two spheres of equal size. However, as stated at Wikipedia, the pieces themselves are not "solids" in the usual sense, but infinite scatterings of points. It's a finite number of pieces but each piece is an infinite collection of disconnected points. How long would it take to select the points for each piece? Can this be done in finite time? Does it matter that the sphere isn't actually made of an infinite number of points but rather a finite number of atoms that cannot be split without destroying them?