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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • Anything with a nonzero probability will happen infinitely many times. The complete works of Shakespeare consist of 5,132,954 characters, 78 distinct ones. 1/(78^5132954 ) is an incomprehensibly tiny number, millions of zeroes after the decimal, but it is not zero. So the probability of it happening after infinitely many trials is 1. lim(1-(1-P)^n ) as n approaches infinity is 1 for any nonzero P.

    An outcome that you’d never see would be a character that isn’t on the keyboard.









  • Strictly speaking, the energy it consumes is the gravitational potential energy of the ore they’re mining, which would be consumed anyway in the form of, well, gravity, acting on the ore on the way down. They’re just using it productively instead of dissipating it as heat from the brakes. Using only energy that ordinarily would have been wasted is of course very neat, but it’s not breaking any laws of physics.