Wednesday, December 31, 2008
JSH: Test of cognitive function
One of the weirder things I face is the possibility that rejection of my work is about an inability of people to hold information about it in their working memory so here's a test of that assertion with what many have maintained on math newsgroups is a meaningless prime counting function that is just one of many others, but what you are about to see here is not a trick.
For reasons that escape me, that function cannot be held in human memory, so to give it you have to SEE it first.
To see the fully mathematicized function you can go to the Wikipedia Talk pages of the prime counting function:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Prime-counting_function
You may have to read a ways down, but I give the full function below "Questioning Controversy".
Look at it and see if you can comprehend it.
Look away and see if you can remember it.
No one in human history has derived THAT particular function before, or since. And I'm hypothesizing that maybe 1 in a thousand of you can even remember it—no matter how hard you try—but I doubt any of you can fully re-derive it completely from memory.
For reasons that escape me, that function cannot be held in human memory, so to give it you have to SEE it first.
To see the fully mathematicized function you can go to the Wikipedia Talk pages of the prime counting function:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Prime-counting_function
You may have to read a ways down, but I give the full function below "Questioning Controversy".
Look at it and see if you can comprehend it.
Look away and see if you can remember it.
No one in human history has derived THAT particular function before, or since. And I'm hypothesizing that maybe 1 in a thousand of you can even remember it—no matter how hard you try—but I doubt any of you can fully re-derive it completely from memory.
# posted by James Harris @ 01:58 
