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Infinitely Long Name For Pi

...and other irrational numbers
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Proteins sometimes have very long names because each amino acid residue is named and strung into a long sequence of standard organic chemistry nomenclature. I won't give an example.

In a sense numbers already have this simply by virtue of the fact that one can just go "three point one four one five nine...", but this is time-consuming and it can take a long time to get very far.

One way of overcoming this would be to invent a standard nomenclature for numbers, which it would be advantageous to have easily pronounced regardless of native language. This probably doesn't quite get there but it's a start.

I suggest the following:

No consonant clusters or diphthongs. Each syllable is CV, similar to Japanese. There are ten vowels: A, E, I, O, U, AA, EE, II, OO, UU, short and long respectively. A syllable consisting of a vowel is seen as starting with a glottal stop. Within a number, it's pronounced as a separate syllable. The consonants are: B, D, F, G, K, M, N, P, S, T, V, Z. That allows 130 possible syllables. The named number is converted to base 128, ignoring ZU and ZUU for convenience and the order of syllables corresponding to the digits starts with A for 0, AA for 1 and continues in alphabetical order through the consonants. This is going to be a little difficult for some people to pronounce but it's a compromise. It's not feasible to represent integers above 127 with this system and there is no sign. The idea is simply to represent real numbers with an assumed fixed point in the second position.

The value pi therefore begins with the letter E, which is quite neat. The first few letters of pi are "Eboo'oovupife...", an equivalent of thirty-five bits precision, which is six syllables and twelve phonemes compared to the approximate decimal equivalent of "three point one four one five nine two six five...", which is ten syllables and thirty-five phonemes, so it's more efficient than English and gives an algorithm for forming an infinitely long word, which pi surely should be. Obviously it also makes it the longest word in the world.

nineteenthly, Sep 15 2017

Second link in list Blatantly_20Idiotic...ctions_20for_202016
As described [8th of 7, Sep 15 2017]

Chrip https://www.chirp.io/
Machine to machine audio transmission, like R2D2. [zen_tom, Sep 17 2017]

[link]






       //Obviously it also makes it the longest word in the world.//   

       Joint longest, along with infinitely many other words, surely?   

       (Next invention: the infinitely large Scrabble board. The scoring could be interesting.)
Wrongfellow, Sep 15 2017
  

       A word is ok, words are better. Can you add some spaces. To create regular sentence structure. In this way it wouldn't be as boring. Also very time a '32' is encountered, add an '!'. Everytime a '44' is encountered, add a comma.   

       I just feel like, it's a long word. Most people aren't going to read it.
mylodon, Sep 15 2017
  

       Could you not also do this by mapping every possible combination of 3 digits to 1,000 different, pronounceable 3-letter strings (e.g. 001 = "bab", 002 = "bac" ... 999 = "zuz") and then replacing each 3- digit chunk of pi with the right 3-letter combination?
hippo, Sep 15 2017
  

       //Proteins sometimes have very long names because each amino acid residue is named and strung into a long sequence of standard organic chemistry nomenclature.//   

       That's not really true. What you describe is the protein's amino-acid sequence.
Proteins tend to be given very short names, although the standard form for these varies with the organism type.
Loris, Sep 15 2017
  

       I can't paste them here but there are plenty of protein names with thousands of letters. They're out there with formal ways of transforming chains of amino acids into them. Clearly these names are not practical so there are shorter names too. Even so, I like the idea of it becoming phrases as well, because with the right rules it could become an infinitely long sacred text.   

       So this is what I'm going to say, a la Carl Sagan's 'Contact': in addition to the infinite number of infinitely long words for numbers, I propose that there be a means of deriving a sacred text from the number and that a religion be founded on it.
nineteenthly, Sep 15 2017
  

       //Proteins tend to be given very short names// Yes. I wonder, though, if anyone has ever written out the name of a sizeable protein in standard chemical form (as in "Bis(3',4')-phenyl amino.................. amine"). A typical protein would probably have a name at least 10,000 characters long.
MaxwellBuchanan, Sep 15 2017
  

       // with the right rules it could become an infinitely long sacred text..... a means of deriving a sacred text from the number and that a religion be founded on it. //   

       Ahem. Baked.   

       <link>   

       Second link in the list, "The Nine Billion Names Of God"
8th of 7, Sep 15 2017
  

       //I can't paste them here but there are plenty of protein names with thousands of letters. They're out there with formal ways of transforming chains of amino acids into them. Clearly these names are not practical so there are shorter names too.//   

       But they're not names, they're descriptions.
Would you say a photograph of you is your name? What about the sequence of your genome?
  

       OK, look. There's a plasmid called RK2 I used to work on. It has various genes, encoding proteins. The annotation for one of the shorter ones, taken directly from the EBI database is below:   

       FT CDS complement(59033..59338)
FT /transl_table=11
FT /gene="korA"
FT /product="KorA repressor protein"
FT /function="global repressor"
FT /db_xref="InterPro:IPR011991"
FT /db_xref="InterPro:IPR032428"
FT /db_xref= "UniProtKB/TrEMBL:A6H992"
FT /protein_id="CAJ85740.1"
FT /translation="MKKRLT ESQFQEAIQGLEVGQQTIEI ARGVLVDGKPQATFATSLG
FT LTRGAVSQAVHRVWAAFEDK NLPEGYARVTAVLPEHQAYI VRKWEADAKKKQETKR"
  

       (note - I had to insert some spaces into e.g. the translation for the halfbakery to accept this)   

       If one scientist were talking to another about the encoded protein, they'd call it "KorA", or "KorA repressor", or "KorA repressor protein", or "KorA protein", or something like that.
What you were talking about is labelled "translation", because it's the amino-acid sequence the DNA sequence is translated into. No-one who deals with proteins calls this sequence the "name".
You see those lines with "db_xref" in? Those are identifiers for it in various databases of proteins. You can go and look it up in for exampe UniProt using those, and the webpage will tell you that its name is "KorA repressor protein".
Loris, Sep 15 2017
  

       // repressor protein //   

       <Obligtory Blade Runner Ethyl Methane Sulphonate reference/>
8th of 7, Sep 15 2017
  

       I see what you're saying [Loris]. They are, however, sequences of pronounceable letters without letters or punctuation. Even so, a description of an object could be a name, and what happens in molecular concerns (I can't decide whether to call it chemistry or molecular biology, or maybe it's something else) need not be a guide to what happens elsewhere.   

       'The Nine Billion Names Of God' is currently sitting on this device's desktop, coincidentally. I had in mind something like the esoteric programming language Shakespeare, and religious wars between factions on how to transform the number into text.   

       [MB], I've wondered about that too.
nineteenthly, Sep 15 2017
  

       Use A and O for one dimension and pitch for the other.
JesusHChrist, Sep 15 2017
  

       Actually, somebody should trawl the database and find the amino acid sequence with the longest word or phrase in it. Or the most rude words.
MaxwellBuchanan, Sep 15 2017
  

       OK, a quick BLAST reveals that diacylglycerol kinase delta-like isoform X4 [Lingula anatina] contains the peptide SHITSHITSHIT.
MaxwellBuchanan, Sep 15 2017
  

       Well they are filter-feeders so they probably need that, or maybe God was just panicking.
nineteenthly, Sep 16 2017
  

       Well, he was operating on a deadline.
mylodon, Sep 16 2017
  

       Pi already has an infinitely long representation, it starts "threepointonefouronefive"... and goes on for as long as you care to exhale sounds.
zen_tom, Sep 16 2017
  

       There's no reason we can't have an infinite (virtual) scrabble board. Take a standard touch-screen monitor the size of a game board. Lay it flat. Add per-user, one smart-phone sized device for displaying each person's letters. Each user can play with her letters on the personal display and when it's his turn select them to display and organize on the main board. The main board can auto-tally scores and be movable via touch. The game would be limited by the number of letters.   

       Also there's no reason Scrabble should still enjoy a monopoly on the standard layout. IP laws are laying a strangle-hold on our culture.
Voice, Sep 17 2017
  

       [Voice], I'm starting to get ideas about an infinite Scrabble board but it won't impinge on your implementation, rest assured. It's more about other aspects of how it might work abstractly.   

       Yes pi already has an infinite representation, but it's inefficient per digit and it's decimal.
nineteenthly, Sep 17 2017
  

       OK, I think I'm getting this now, it's more an encoding scheme for numerics that maximises utility for speech transmission. Perhaps for inter-robot communication over audio, like that chirp comms protocol, only one that humans have a better chance of joining in with.
zen_tom, Sep 17 2017
  

       Yes.
nineteenthly, Sep 18 2017
  

       //there's no reason Scrabble should still enjoy a monopoly//   

       True. That would be like Colonel Sanders sneaking out for a Big Mac.
MaxwellBuchanan, Sep 18 2017
  

       The fun thing is that pi is just as concrete a position on the line as 0 or 1 or alephnull.
RayfordSteele, Sep 18 2017
  

       //concrete// Concrete is something you wear a hard hat for. An abstraction is something you hit your mind against.
wjt, Sep 20 2017
  

       //wear a hard hat for//   

       That might've been a good idea. Beating my head against walls at the time did produce an enjoyable light-headedness though as I learned to just ignore the pain...
RayfordSteele, Sep 21 2017
  
      
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