moby

i need to possibly name a new thing in mathematics that has to do with the expansion of an infinitesimal point to gargantuan proportions and this word occured to me out of the fucking blue and so i check and there it is

ChatGPT's reply

The term "moby" could be a very fitting and evocative name for a concept in mathematics that deals with the expansion of something from infinitesimal to gargantuan proportions. It's intriguing how the term already carries connotations of immense size and complexity, which would parallel nicely with the mathematical concept you're envisioning.

In academic settings, terminology can play a crucial role in how a concept is received and understood. A memorable term can help make the concept more accessible and discussable. Here are some points you might consider when naming your new mathematical concept:

Meaningfulness: Does the term accurately reflect the properties or characteristics of the concept?
Memorability: Is it easy to remember? "Moby" certainly has that going for it.
Originality: Is the term already widely used in other contexts where its use might create confusion? For "moby," its primary associations are outside of mathematics, which could be good in that it won't overlap with existing terms but could also potentially cause confusion.
Ease of Pronunciation: A term that's difficult to pronounce can sometimes hamper discussions about the concept it represents.
Resonance: Does the term evoke the right kind of imagery or feelings that align with the concept? In this case, "moby" seems to resonate well with the idea of something growing from tiny to immense.

If you decide to go with "moby," you'll likely have the opportunity to define it formally in your paper or presentation, allowing you to shape the term's mathematical meaning while also giving a nod to its more colloquial, historical, or even humorous roots. This can make for a compelling narrative that enriches the mathematical work.

On 8/20/23 10:27 PM, Stephen Crowley wrote:

on a whim i queried this and lo and behold

From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (30 December 2018) [foldoc]:

moby

 <jargon> /moh'bee/ (From {MIT}, seems to have been in use
 among model railroad fans years ago.  Derived from Melville's
 "Moby Dick", some say from "Moby Pickle") 1. Large, immense,
 complex, impressive.  "A Saturn V rocket is a truly moby
 frob."  "Some MIT undergrads pulled off a moby hack at the
 Harvard-Yale game."

 2. (Obsolete) The maximum {address space} of a computer (see
 below).  For a 680[234]0 or {VAX} or most modern 32-bit
 architectures, it is 4,294,967,296 8-bit bytes (four
 {gigabytes}).

 3. A title of address (never of third-person reference),
 usually used to show admiration, respect, and/or friendliness
 to a competent hacker.  "Greetings, moby Dave.  How's that
 address-book thing for the Mac going?"

 4. In backgammon, doubles on the dice, as in "moby sixes",
 "moby ones", etc.  Compare this with {bignum}: double sixes
 are both bignums and moby sixes, but moby ones are not bignums
 (the use of "moby" to describe double ones is sarcastic).

 5. The largest available unit of something which is available
 in discrete increments.  Thus a "moby Coke" is not just large,
 it's the largest size on sale.

 This term entered hackerdom with the Fabritek 256K memory
 added to the MIT AI PDP-6 machine, which was considered
 unimaginably huge when it was installed in the 1960s (at a
 time when a more typical memory size for a {time-sharing}
 system was 72 kilobytes).  Thus, a moby is classically 256K
 36-bit words, the size of a PDP-6 or PDP-10 moby.  Back when
 {address registers} were narrow the term was more generally
 useful, because when a computer had {virtual memory} mapping,
 it might actually have more physical memory attached to it
 than any one program could access directly.  One could then
 say "This computer has six mobies" meaning that the ratio of
 physical memory to address space is six, without having to say
 specifically how much memory there actually is.  That in turn
 implied that the computer could timeshare six "full-sized"
 programs without having to swap programs between memory and
 disk.

 Nowadays the low cost of processor logic means that address
 spaces are usually larger than the most physical memory you
 can cram onto a machine, so most systems have much *less* than
 one theoretical "native" moby of {core}.  Also, more modern
 memory-management techniques (especially paging) make the
 "moby count" less significant.  However, there is one series
 of widely-used chips for which the term could stand to be
 revived --- the Intel 8088 and 80286 with their incredibly
 {brain-damaged} segmented-memory designs.  On these, a "moby"
 would be the 1-megabyte address span of a segment/offset pair
 (by coincidence, a PDP-10 moby was exactly one megabyte of
 nine-bit bytes).

 [{Jargon File}]

 (1997-10-01)