Thursday, September 02, 2004

Recipriversexclusion?

Look around you and I bet you will see someone sporting a mobile phone in their hand. Smart, small, sleek sexy phones with myriad ringtones, games, screensavers and what not.

But what is noteworthy is the fact that advertisements of mobile phones hardly speak about the phones abilities as a medium of communication. Ads talk about high resolution camera, motion camera capabilites, WAP/Bluetooth enabled phones, radio, MP3 player, media streaming capabilities etc etc etc. So simply put, the phone is described as being anything but a phone. This I think is a perfect example of recipriversexclusion.

The most bizarre of mathematical concepts, a recipriversexclusion, a number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself.

Update: The mobile phone can now be used as a railway ticket booking device also. The Indian Railways has announced a scheme where one can book tickets via SMS.

10 comments:

Sundar said...

What a concept! Kindly enlighten us with the etymo.

Sundar said...

What a concept! Kindly enlighten us with the etymo.

a_beautifulmind said...

Another real life example of recipriversexclusion , if a number of people are due to arrive at a party at 7.00pm, that is the only time that none of them will arrive. This is a real phenomenon. Test it the next time you throw a party, or have arranged to meet a group of people somewhere. It works!!

Epiphany said...

hey Anthro....I guess this is true for anything
u wanna buy nowadays.....the accessories would
anyday takeup more space than the product.....
hell even the muviz make more cash from the
ringtones than the actual song!!! guess the days
of simple things are gone!! but it is more fun this
way dont u think??

Anonymous said...

Sundar, there is no etymo of recipriversexclusion that i know of. maybe u can ask etymo king Ishwar.
It is a term that appears in Hithchikers guide part 3-Life Universe and Everything.
And a_bm, the definition u have given also appears in the book.

Anthro.

Anonymous said...

Sundar, there is no etymo of recipriversexclusion that i know of. maybe u can ask etymo king Ishwar.
It is a term that appears in Hithchikers guide part 3-Life Universe and Everything.
And a_bm, the definition u have given also appears in the book.

Anthro.

a_beautifulmind said...

Then u must be knowing he said, I quote "Bistromathics,'the most powerful computational force known to parascience."
Recipriversexclusion is one of the two basic ideas of Bistromathics.The other being Non-absolute numbers.
Bistromathics was first developed to explain the seemingly inexplicable use of numbers in restaurants: arrival time, party size, and bill amount all appear to violate classical mathematical laws.

Praveer said...

I got a B in Security Engineering in the Second Semester. That I guess was my first real life experience of Recipriversexclusion.
The grades in that subject were numbers whose existence can only be defined as for being anything other than Security Engineering itself !

Praveer said...

Hey Anthro! I think had a_bm put just a little more effort, this post of yours cud have been an ebook link to Hitchhiker's Guide by Douglas Adams.

Monkey said...

Good point on the mobile phone ads! I never even realized that!