It [the brain] has 100 billion neurons and 10- to 50-fold more glial cells — PNAS
In a human, there are more than 125 trillion synapses just in the cerebral cortex alone. That's roughly equal to the number of stars in 1,500 Milky Way galaxies. — Smith (ScienceDaily)
Indeed, for any set S, the subsets of S are more numerous than members of S. — John Stillwell
1. The total number of meaningful messages is less than the total number of possible messages. The proof of this is that the same message can be sent using different codes, such that, once transcribed into meaning by the receiver, it is the same message. For an example, we can imagine whole books of English where every letter is simply shifted one space down, A becomes B, Z becomes A, etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus
The story, which is worth a read, posits a bunch of librarians living in a massive (but finite!) library. Each book in the library has a given number of characters per page, and a given number of pages. The library doesn't repeat, it simply contains every possible combination of characters per book, in different books. This represents 10^4677 books. For comparison, estimates of the number of protons in the visible universe are around 10^78-82. — Count Timothy von Icarus
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