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No, really, pi is wrong: The Tau Manifesto (Tau Day, 2010)

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Re: No, really, pi is wrong: The Tau Manifesto (Tau Day, 2010)

#121

Post by Groxx »

vorg wrote: post #119
amalcon wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd ideally prefer to pick one that isn't used in angular things. Because non-English, non-Greek glyphs are somewhat underused for this sort of thing, and because of visual similarity to pi, I'd suggest the hebrew Het or Russian л. However, I really have no problem with continuing to use the multi-glyph symbol 2pi.

Why a multi-glyph symbol 2π when a single-glyph symbol 2π would be better. By creating a new symbol by joining the bottom-right of the 2 to the topleft of the π, we can make a new one-glyph symbol, perhaps put it next to € in Unicode. And instead of saying two words "Two Pi", we could say it as one word "Twopi", with stress on the first syllable, much like the word "teenager" used to be spoken and written as two word…

I like the idea of "Twopi". Looks like it could be pronounced like "Toupee". (yes, it'd be a mispronunciation, but people do that)

Do you also favor the almighty interrobang‽

Re: No, really, pi is wrong: The Tau Manifesto (Tau Day, 2010)

#122

Post by vorg »

klodolph wrote: post #86
tc wrote: post #2

Perfect; to my lisp startup file was just added: (defconstant tau #.(* 2 pi)) Regarding adoption, I think it's worth pointing out that these sorts of conventions can and do shift within a generation. I recall quite clearly while growing up the convention for indicating years = the year one [1] was B.C. and A.D. It seems like over the past few years we've definitively decided on B.C.E. and C.E. instead [2]. All it rea…

AD vs. BC: I prefer using CE with negative numbers, as suggested by ISO 8601. E.g., year -30 CE is year 31 BC.

Too many people would get confused, forgetting to substract 1 from the BC-tagged number, or unsure whether to add or substract 1, or wondering if the other person remembered to subtract 1.

I suggest adding 7000 to all dates, as well as using negatives. So...

2010AD -> 9010

1AD -> 7001

1BC -> 7000

31BC -> 6970

5000BC -> 2001 (except people talk about year ranges, not years, when refering to events that far back, so there'd be no confusion with our current AD references)

Re: No, really, pi is wrong: The Tau Manifesto (Tau Day, 2010)

#123

Post by amalcon »

vorg wrote: post #119
amalcon wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd ideally prefer to pick one that isn't used in angular things. Because non-English, non-Greek glyphs are somewhat underused for this sort of thing, and because of visual similarity to pi, I'd suggest the hebrew Het or Russian л. However, I really have no problem with continuing to use the multi-glyph symbol 2pi.

Why a multi-glyph symbol 2π when a single-glyph symbol 2π would be better. By creating a new symbol by joining the bottom-right of the 2 to the topleft of the π, we can make a new one-glyph symbol, perhaps put it next to € in Unicode. And instead of saying two words "Two Pi", we could say it as one word "Twopi", with stress on the first syllable, much like the word "teenager" used to be spoken and written as two word…

You know, I really don't care that much about the 2pi thing, but this is just cool enough that I might be able to get behind it.

Re: No, really, pi is wrong: The Tau Manifesto (Tau Day, 2010)

#124

Post by pook »

vorg wrote: post #122
klodolph wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AD vs. BC: I prefer using CE with negative numbers, as suggested by ISO 8601. E.g., year -30 CE is year 31 BC.

Too many people would get confused, forgetting to substract 1 from the BC-tagged number, or unsure whether to add or substract 1, or wondering if the other person remembered to subtract 1. I suggest adding 7000 to all dates, as well as using negatives. So... 2010AD -> 9010 1AD -> 7001 1BC -> 7000 31BC -> 6970 5000BC -> 2001 (except people talk about year ranges, not years, when refering to events that far back, so th…

Or we can just adopt the Discordian Calendar and, by increasing confusion, reduce disharmony.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discordian_calendar

Hail Eris!

Re: No, really, pi is wrong: The Tau Manifesto (Tau Day, 2010)

#125

Post by aspiringsensei »

blahedo wrote: post #114
aspiringsensei wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> total rewrite of a lot of papers, including a lot of mathematical books. Somebody at the textbook publishers is smacking their lips at the prospect of selling an entirely new edition with an incredibly minor change.

"Incredibly minor": not even close. This is the very worst sort of change to have to make, because you can't do it automatically, and doing it manually is fraught with opportunities for bugs. Not to mention that the natural pedagogical order will change in several cases that a simple "translation" wouldn't reflect. A lot of CS2 books in Java---especially two or three years ago---spent a lot of time and trouble showin…

Thanks for you response - I didn't think about that at all. Unfortunately most textbook purchasers don't have the ability to "avoid" bad texts....

I wonder if there were a way to rewire the textbook market so that teachers assigned different kinds of things...in other words, so that the teacher assigned a student to read a credible source of information regarding geometric identities rather than section 23.6 of a stated text.

Imagine how much more interesting learning would be if students all came to the classroom having reasoned through the knowledge differently? It would be really neat to set up a system that was basically a "hacker news" for whatever piece of information...educators could comment on in-class efficacy & kids could comment on comprehensiveness.

You'd need to charge for it (Unless you could source the books for free) but this is interesting conceptually.

Re: No, really, pi is wrong: The Tau Manifesto (Tau Day, 2010)

#126

Post by aspiringsensei »

blahedo wrote: post #114
aspiringsensei wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> total rewrite of a lot of papers, including a lot of mathematical books. Somebody at the textbook publishers is smacking their lips at the prospect of selling an entirely new edition with an incredibly minor change.

"Incredibly minor": not even close. This is the very worst sort of change to have to make, because you can't do it automatically, and doing it manually is fraught with opportunities for bugs. Not to mention that the natural pedagogical order will change in several cases that a simple "translation" wouldn't reflect. A lot of CS2 books in Java---especially two or three years ago---spent a lot of time and trouble showin…

Thanks for you response - I didn't think about that at all. Unfortunately most textbook purchasers don't have the ability to "avoid" bad texts....

I wonder if there were a way to rewire the textbook market so that teachers assigned different kinds of things...in other words, so that the teacher assigned a student to read a credible source of information regarding geometric identities rather than section 23.6 of a stated text.

Imagine how much more interesting learning would be if students all came to the classroom having reasoned through the knowledge differently? It would be really neat to set up a system that was basically a "hacker news" for whatever piece of information...educators could comment on in-class efficacy & kids could comment on comprehensiveness.

You'd need to charge for it (Unless you could source the books for free) but this is interesting conceptually.

Re: No, really, pi is wrong: The Tau Manifesto (Tau Day, 2010)

#127

Post by mkramlich »

tc wrote: post #2

Perfect; to my lisp startup file was just added: (defconstant tau #.(* 2 pi)) Regarding adoption, I think it's worth pointing out that these sorts of conventions can and do shift within a generation. I recall quite clearly while growing up the convention for indicating years = the year one [1] was B.C. and A.D. It seems like over the past few years we've definitively decided on B.C.E. and C.E. instead [2]. All it rea…

speaking for US-ians: would the Texas State School Board actually allow the rest of us to switch from BC/AD to BCE/CE? :)

Re: No, really, pi is wrong: The Tau Manifesto (Tau Day, 2010)

#129

Post by [deleted] »

amalcon wrote: post #81
mhartl wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mention torque in the manifesto, but I wasn't specific enough in this case, and I've added an example addressing this issue at http://tauday.com/#sec:four_arguments . The short version is that when necessary you can easily add a subscript to avoid ambiguity, such as tau_R for rotational torque. (Superscripts work, too. Particle physicists deal with pions, which are represented by the letter pi, but all the symbols…

The thing is, torque is a particularly bad thing to conflict with. While you're not using torque every time you work with pi, you usually end up using pi every time you work with torque. edit: It's much like using i for both sqrt(-1) and for current. Electrical engineers need to use both of these all the time, so they often use j for sqrt(-1) instead.

[deleted]

Re: No, really, pi is wrong: The Tau Manifesto (Tau Day, 2010)

#130

Post by blahedo »

There's a much simpler way to say this, I think. It is already the case that we relate everything to the unit radius---hence "radian". (If we tried to relate everything to the diameter instead, a lot of things would break much more deeply, starting with the very convenient derivative of sin(x).)

Given that, ask yourself this: do we want a measure of the semicircle, or of the circle? The former is \pi. The latter is \tau.

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