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Thread: MitD XV: The Other Dark One
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2020-07-29, 02:04 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: MitD XV: The Other Dark One
Sir_Norbert: let me fix that.
For the vote concerning reorganization of section 3a in first posts, I change my vote slightly. I now vote for D (remove FBS section) would be best, then F (destroy it so everyone finds it useless and ignores it), FI (same), E (remove but make popularity vote section), B, C, CI, Z, I, BI. The change is that I added option I.Last edited by b_jonas; 2020-07-29 at 02:05 AM.
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2020-07-29, 04:26 AM (ISO 8601)
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2020-07-29, 06:43 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: MitD XV: The Other Dark One
In the context of astrophysics, we tend to round numers to the nearest power of ten, though often logarithimically. 2 is basically 1, as is 3, but log(5) is basically the same as log(10), so 5 is basically 10. In this context, 2+2 is still basically 1, so we don't care about being more precise than that; it's only estimates, after all. This is important because we're operating with numbers that are several orders of magnitude apart and their individual uncertainities are so huge that some rounding error doesn't really matter to you. 1 000 001 is no different from 1 000 002 when your uncertainity is +- 100.
In the context of abstract algebra, there are certainly groups and rings with the property that 2+2 = 5. Why, the simplest one is the binary ring where all numbers that aren't 0 are equal to 1.
There are many mathemathical (and in fact, practical, because engineering) problem spaces where mathemathical statements under the common assumptions of the Peano axioms are not true and vice versa. That's why establishing a common reference frame and set of axioms is so important in the first place!
Also, if voting hasn't concluded yet (because this is page 10):
H > B > F > I > ELast edited by Scizor; 2020-07-29 at 06:51 AM.
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2020-07-29, 06:54 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: MitD XV: The Other Dark One
Very, extremely true. But, that would only apply physically, not mentally. He'd get a mature brain, but with no real experience or knowledge to fill it with.
You're not wrong, though, to quote a great leader, "I like the way I phrased it better." I've come to see his presence in the Astral Plane, combined with his story as we know it, along with his child-like demeanor, as collectively the most interesting tidbits of information we have about him. Other folks' mileage may vary. But that's what I've decided to work backwards from. Largely because it seems to me to suggest that as an infant, he could have been in the Astral Plane for an indefinite period of time, and we'd have no way to tell the difference. That's a very intriguing door to open, at least to my mind. But the only reason that would be really interesting if it was significant in some way, and that seems to cry out for him being from the original world.
Though, if it turned out he was a Deep Fried Snickers Titan from the sentient movie theater snack world, I wouldn't complain.
As for why Typhon...he's huge, he's monstrous, he's shape-shifter-y, and he's from the correct time period. Basically, he ticks the boxes I was looking for, in light of what I said previously. I'm not filled with confidence on that score, but then realistically speaking I don't expect my point about the Astral Plane to pan out either. But in this very low-stakes guessing game, that's what I'm putting my lack of money on.
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2020-07-29, 09:13 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: MitD XV: The Other Dark One
As an applied mathematician, you can not assume that an = sign means its mathematical definition.
In computer programming it's an assignment operator, quite different. In daily use, it's approximate.
Yesterday I debugged a code failure, which resulted from 1/3 * 3 being something like 1.0000000000000002 in a particular bit of code (it's worse than that, because the 1 in that 1/3 was actually cos(0)-cos(pi/2) and it turns out that cos(pi/2) was not exactly 0, so it was actually X/3 * 3 + (1-X) that was coming out to be >1 where X SHOULD have been exactly 1, but wasn't.
Yet all the equations and assignments involved had nice "=" signs and should have been correct if we assume that when people use mathematical notation they mean formal mathematics with Euclid's axioms.
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2020-07-29, 09:17 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: MitD XV: The Other Dark One
I mean, i dont have the code to see, but from your description it seems like the entire bug was that an operation intended to be 1/3 * 3 was not actually so because the variables being used to get to that were wrong. Not that 1/3 * 3 doesnt equal 1. IE you didnt actually have 1/3 * 3 in the first place.
Last edited by Keltest; 2020-07-29 at 09:18 AM.
“Evil is evil. Lesser, greater, middling, it's all the same. Proportions are negotiated, boundaries blurred. I'm not a pious hermit, I haven't done only good in my life. But if I'm to choose between one evil and another, then I prefer not to choose at all.”
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2020-07-29, 09:20 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: MitD XV: The Other Dark One
This.
Anytime a floating point unit is involved, you have to accept and understand that all numbers are going to be rough approximations of this "ideal" "pure" mathematical number that doesn't, in fact, exist.
Also, how often have you seen a statistical result that list percentages, and a note at the bottom saying something along the lines of "totals may not add up to 100% due to rounding"? That also is an example of situations when 2+2 = 5.
Neither situation is uncommon, or false, or even necessarily in error. It is just a reality that rounding is an every day tool, and with its use, comes a caveat.
Grey WolfLast edited by Grey_Wolf_c; 2020-07-29 at 09:37 AM.
Interested in MitD? Join us in MitD's thread.There is a world of imagination
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2020-07-29, 09:27 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: MitD XV: The Other Dark One
I KNEW a math reference would get the discussion hopping again!
Edit - My wife read that and thought I was insane, but the joke was on her!
Edit2 - Which also reminds me of a story. Every fall, I get together with some old friends for a long weekend. We head to central Vermont from wherever everyone lives now to look at foliage, drink beer, play disc golf during the day and bridge at night. One time we ordered a pizza, and the guy paying (he's an English professor) complained "Ugh, all this stupid math" (and all he was doing was figuring out the tip). Mr Director (not his actual name, but we call him that because he's the "tournament director" and keeps track of the scoring for the weekend. Everything gets scored and there's a winner), who is a Statistics professor (at a different school), commented "You don't understand. You're just about the only one here who isn't an engineer or a statistician. The rest of us would fight each other for the FUN of figuring it out."Last edited by Crusher; 2020-07-29 at 09:37 AM.
"You are what you do. Choose again and change." - Miles Vorkosigan
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2020-07-29, 09:33 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: MitD XV: The Other Dark One
I can when someone says "[x] is just [y] mathematically".
ETA: I also have to note that before someone made such a claim, I made no such assumptions.Last edited by Peelee; 2020-07-29 at 09:35 AM.
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2020-07-29, 10:54 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: MitD XV: The Other Dark One
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2020-07-29, 10:56 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: MitD XV: The Other Dark One
Interested in MitD? Join us in MitD's thread.There is a world of imagination
Deep in the corners of your mind
Where reality is an intruder
And myth and legend thrive
Ceterum autem censeo Hilgya malefica est
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2020-07-29, 10:58 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: MitD XV: The Other Dark One
An explanation of why MitD being any larger than Huge is implausible.
See my extended signature here! May contain wit, candor, and somewhere from 52 to 8127 walruses.
Purple is humorous descriptions made up on the fly
Green is serious talk about hypothetical
Blue is irony and sarcasm
"I think, therefore I am,
I walk, therefore I stand,
I sleep, therefore I dream;
I joke, therefore I meme."
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2020-07-29, 11:02 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: MitD XV: The Other Dark One
Last edited by Crusher; 2020-07-29 at 11:03 AM.
"You are what you do. Choose again and change." - Miles Vorkosigan
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2020-07-29, 11:16 AM (ISO 8601)
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An explanation of why MitD being any larger than Huge is implausible.
See my extended signature here! May contain wit, candor, and somewhere from 52 to 8127 walruses.
Purple is humorous descriptions made up on the fly
Green is serious talk about hypothetical
Blue is irony and sarcasm
"I think, therefore I am,
I walk, therefore I stand,
I sleep, therefore I dream;
I joke, therefore I meme."
-Squire Doodad
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2020-07-29, 01:31 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: MitD XV: The Other Dark One
Nope, the result should have been 1 either way. The error in COS(PI/2) was canceled out by the time the number was used. The actual error that caused the crash was because the divide by 3 followed by multiply by 3 didn't return the same value.
This particular bit of code probably dates back to the seventies (based on purpose, history, and coding style), with several hundred users at any given time, and as far as we can tell this bit of code had never given any problem till this week. [Up until about 10 years ago we distributed source code, it's possible people had hit it in the field prior to that time and not reported as they could fix it themselves. But no one had reported it as far as we can tell.]
We have tests for round-off errors and for values that are supposed to be between -1 and +1 actually being in that range buried all through the code, but not for this one, because it had never previously given any problem [it took a very unusual input case to generate it this time, I'm tempted to ask the user what he was doing, but I really don't want to know].
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2020-07-29, 01:35 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: MitD XV: The Other Dark One
It looks like you're close; only slightly off on two.
Spoiler: Short VersionBut:I'll note that Kish's later post was a reiteration, not an alteration; E was before F in the original post.
But:
Spoiler: Full VersionMatches? Name from vote table Vote from vote table Relevant posts Grey Wolf - Z
- D
- E
- C
- H
- !(A, F)
MartytheBioGuy - A
- C
- B
- !E
Kish - B
- C
- A
- Z
- E
- D
Crusher - C
- B
- Z
Sir_Norbert - C
- B
- I
- Z
- !(D,E)
lio45 - A
- Any(G,H)
- C
- !Z
InvisibleBison - A
- B
- C
Neponde - H
- C
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catagent101 - C
- D
- Z
dmc91356 - C
- B
- F
- I
- Z
Squire Doodad - A
- Z
3powers(sic) - A
- D
- C
- B
- Z
Spirare - A
- F
- !(D, E, H,Z)
Jasdoif - A
- E
- Z
- D
Malloon - E
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- Z
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2020-07-29, 01:57 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: MitD XV: The Other Dark One
My wife is a cost analyst, when she's venting about work, she mentions people having fits over the fact that if they're using a purchase price of (say) $5,295,230.06 for 7 units, then the unit cost is claimed to be $756,461.44, and if you multiply that back together it is CLEARLY $5,295,230.08 not the stated $5,295,230.06, and this sort of error is totally unacceptable, and she needs to correct it at once.
Note that she's not supposed to correct the actual price (that's real), she needs to make the spreadsheet multiply the unit cost by the number of units and come out right. Which involves having fractional penny costs in the unit cost, which can make other numbers elsewhere in the process break because the spreadsheet was designed to deal with actual amounts of money by people aware that there are no fractional pennies (or in some cases it's making stuff come out to the nearest dollar rather than penny).
Apparently, the kind of mind that worries over a couple of pennies in a multimillion dollar cost estimate, and wastes time trying to deal with it, is not the kind of mind that easily comprehends the words "round off error" as an explanation of stuff not working the way they think it should.
[Edited to add: To be fair, there are automated error checking tools involved, if they don't like something it flags and isn't supposed to pass. So we should actually be blaming the writers of the tools.]Last edited by Doug Lampert; 2020-07-29 at 01:59 PM.
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2020-07-29, 02:02 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: MitD XV: The Other Dark One
Yes, I treat accounting data requests very differently from how I treat statistical data requests. The former are why I store numbers that come to me with 5 decimal places in structures that accommodate 15. I have more than once been asked to articulate why sales of equipment in the hundreds of millions of currency units are off by a centesimal currency unit.
Grey WolfInterested in MitD? Join us in MitD's thread.There is a world of imagination
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2020-07-29, 02:43 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: MitD XV: The Other Dark One
Here's another thing to think aobut whenever bringing up a semantics argument about numbers:
The circumference of a circle of C=2rπ, right? On a perfectly flat plane with a perfect circle?
Now then. What's an example of a perfectly flat 2-D plane? Does it exist?An explanation of why MitD being any larger than Huge is implausible.
See my extended signature here! May contain wit, candor, and somewhere from 52 to 8127 walruses.
Purple is humorous descriptions made up on the fly
Green is serious talk about hypothetical
Blue is irony and sarcasm
"I think, therefore I am,
I walk, therefore I stand,
I sleep, therefore I dream;
I joke, therefore I meme."
-Squire Doodad
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2020-07-29, 03:01 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: MitD XV: The Other Dark One
Hah. Look at those people trying so very hard to show everyone how on top of the details they are. Smiley said in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy something like “The biggest zealots hide the most internal doubt.”
And another fun story. Shortly after college I started a small company with a former roommate. I put together the books despite having never taken an accounting class and they were, as you’d guess, a mess. We decided, without knowing anything, that at the end of every quarter I’d reconcile them. To the penny. I still have nightmares about that."You are what you do. Choose again and change." - Miles Vorkosigan
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2020-07-30, 09:50 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: MitD XV: The Other Dark One
Context matters. When counting things 2 is probably exactly 2. When measuring it rarely is. By itself "2 + 2 = 5" doesn't indicate if it is counting lights or combining measurements.
But how, one might ask, would two measurements of 2 total 5?
(I think you know this, but I'm throwing it out for discussion purposes. And because I typed it before re-reading and realizing that.)
In an analysis class I had once involving best fit curves and yada yada, the first thing taught was significant digits. If a measurement was 2.348* it was important to remember that it represented anywhere from 2.3475 to 2.3484, and this rounding would need tracked through any graphing or maths done later. This was because no matter how well calibrated a measuring instrument was it had a limit to what it could measure, whether a wood ruler where the lines were a quarter of a millimeter wide or some fancy instrument that still could only get to within 5 Angstroms. Any such inaccuracies would essentially multiply as different measurements with possibly different errors were combined.
More relevant to the current discussion it meant that 2 mm <> 2.0 mm <> 2.0000 mm as the last was far more accurate. So each measurement could be thought of as 2 [+/- 0.5] mm, 2 [+/- 0.05] mm and 2 [+/- .00005] mm. And 2 [+/- 0.5] mm + 2 [+/- 0.5] mm = 4 [+/- 1.0] mm, meaning that the two things that were measured at "2 mm" could easily be "5 mm" when combined together.
* I'm choosing to use the underline convention to indicate the last significant digit throughout. While it might be more common to change units or using exponential notation it's easier to see how I get to 2 + 2 = 5 if I do it this way.
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2020-07-30, 10:04 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: MitD XV: The Other Dark One
Last edited by Peelee; 2020-07-30 at 10:04 AM.
Cuthalion's art is the prettiest art of all the art. Like my avatar.
Number of times Roland St. Jude has sworn revenge upon me: 2
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2020-07-30, 10:05 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: MitD XV: The Other Dark One
Offer good while supplies last. Two to a customer. Each item sold separately. Batteries not included. Mileage may vary. All sales are final. Allow six weeks for delivery. Some items not available. Some assembly required. Some restrictions may apply. All entries become our property. Employees not eligible. Entry fees not refundable. Local restrictions apply. Void where prohibited. Except in Indiana.
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2020-07-30, 10:22 AM (ISO 8601)
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2020-07-30, 10:59 AM (ISO 8601)
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Offer good while supplies last. Two to a customer. Each item sold separately. Batteries not included. Mileage may vary. All sales are final. Allow six weeks for delivery. Some items not available. Some assembly required. Some restrictions may apply. All entries become our property. Employees not eligible. Entry fees not refundable. Local restrictions apply. Void where prohibited. Except in Indiana.
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2020-07-30, 11:18 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: MitD XV: The Other Dark One
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2020-07-30, 11:41 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: MitD XV: The Other Dark One
Not entirely; there are contexts where the degree of rounding does not coincide with number of significant figures in base 10. If I say to someone "I'll meet you at Starbucks at 2", I certainly don't mean I intend to arrive exactly at 2, but rather, within five minutes either side (and I would expect it not to be treated as a serious breach of promise if I'm up to ten minutes late).
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2020-07-30, 11:46 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: MitD XV: The Other Dark One
Cuthalion's art is the prettiest art of all the art. Like my avatar.
Number of times Roland St. Jude has sworn revenge upon me: 2
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2020-07-30, 11:56 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: MitD XV: The Other Dark One
OK, I really didn't want to comment on this, but "without context" is impossible. From what I see, claiming that numbers "without context" are to be taken as the platonic ideal numbers is adding a context - the platonic ideal number, mathematically exact, context.
In my everyday life, number are not the platonic ideal of a number. They are fuzzy things that are approximated for ease of handling. And specially when discussing if 2+2 = 5, you can't strip context, because that's where the conversation started - in the context where 2 + 2 may equal 5.
Grey WolfInterested in MitD? Join us in MitD's thread.There is a world of imagination
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