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Palindrome Day 20200202

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Re: Palindrome Day 20200202

#141

Post by dragonwriter »

Retric wrote: post #127
datanerd wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is obvious that dates are not natural numbers. What is your point? A set of dates obviously has an earliest date. The humour here is that an earliest date within the set of uninteresting dates is itself an interesting date by virtue of being the earliest such date in that set.

> A set of dates obviously has an earliest date. Uhh, no you’re thinking in terms of a finite set. From the set of all dates, what’s the latest possible date, or conversely the earliest possible date. The temptation is to say infinite BC is the earliest possible date, but infinity is not a number.

> infinity is not a number

Infinity is not a number, it's a set of numbers, but specific infinities (e.g., the cardinality of the natural numbers, aleph-naught) are individual numbers, just not finite numbers.

Re: Palindrome Day 20200202

#142

Post by geocrasher »

isoskeles wrote: post #78
geocrasher wrote: post #28

This post would not be complete without The Ballad of Palindrome by Riders In The Sky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzvQEstC03o A Spaghetti Western style story, starring your hero, Palindrome.

How would this be a Spaghetti Western rather than just an American Western?

You're right, it was the wrong term.

Re: Palindrome Day 20200202

#143

Post by Z1515M8147 »

hkmurakami wrote: post #3

I hope this is pointed out to kids in classrooms all over the world. Growing up I remember my teachers would point out these cute number tricks/events which contributed to piquing my interest in math and numbers, and eventually engineering.

My high school math tutor's cute thing to point out was that for asymptotic functions like the graph of y = 1/x [1], since the universe is spherical, the asymtotes will travel off the page in a straight line around the universe and eventually meet, coming back onto the graph in another quadrant from the other direction, so in fact it is one single connected line.

I went into engineering and not physics, and never learned enough of the latter to question whether he was serious. Furthermore, since this was the first time any math tutor of mine in 18yrs had ever related anything to the real world, it seemed like magic to me and so I still ignorantly tell people it to this day.

[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Y%3D+1%2Fx

Re: Palindrome Day 20200202

#144

Post by Naracion »

skrebbel wrote: post #35
susam wrote: post #13

The nice thing about today's date, 2020-02-02, is that it is palindrome in three date formats: YYYYMMDD, DDMMYYYY, and MMDDYYYY. This should probably be called "Universal Palindrome Day" because it is a palindrome irrespective of the endianness (big, little, or middle) that is used in various countries. Here is the list of all such dates until the year 9999: 0101-10-10 1010-01-01 1111-11-11 2020-02-02 2121-12-12 3030…

I love the term "middle endianness" and how clearly it highlights how nuts the American date notation is. EDIT: fwiw, in my native language, most numbers from 100 and 1000 are pronounced middle endian, so I'm not complaining.

Out of curiosity, what's your native language?

Re: Palindrome Day 20200202

#145

Post by thaumasiotes »

stevekemp wrote: post #125
thaumasiotes wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about it? It's the name of a holiday. 12/25 is often called Christmas, and yet 9/29 is never called Michaelmas. Same thing.

The parent was making the point that generally Americans refer to dates such as "May 2nd", "April 14th". But one of their biggest holidays is explicitly called "4th of July", changing the ordering.

And a proper name is not good evidence of normal usage. "Christmas" is normal use in an older, Catholic method of identifying calendar dates. Americans don't use that method; most couldn't if they wanted to. But Christmas itself is still identified that way for historical reasons -- the word has gone from being an example of talking about the calendar to being an example of a proper name.

"4th of July" is not a method that Americans couldn't use if they wanted to, but it is an ossified usage that doesn't reflect how Americans generally refer to dates. Like Christmas, it is a proper name of limited evidentiary value.

Re: Palindrome Day 20200202

#146

Post by Retric »

datanerd wrote: post #140
Retric wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A set of dates obviously has an earliest date. Uhh, no you’re thinking in terms of a finite set. From the set of all dates, what’s the latest possible date, or conversely the earliest possible date. The temptation is to say infinite BC is the earliest possible date, but infinity is not a number.

But there is no infinite BC, right? There cannot be any date earlier than the date of the big bang. That establishes a lower bound for the set of dates, does it not?

The Big Bang is an apparent discontinuity, but we have no idea if a universe existed before this one. Alternatively, multiple universes could exist and those alternate universes could be much older. So at least theoretically things much older than our universe could exist.

Re: Palindrome Day 20200202

#147

Post by techbio »

techbio wrote: post #138
eganist wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

101* and they're a hypothetical person who could exist, not a fictional character who could not exist. And really, this whole thing misses the point: if you're describing someone who could exist, you shouldn't put bounds on who the person could be.

Or how many of them there may be? Potentially more than zero, certainly fewer than the (large) number of births today, and the argument is that one pronoun is (in)accurate for an individual...what we need here is “they” because there will as likely be a group of “them” as one alone.

I’ll assume the downvote is due to an inability to analyze basic grammar.

Re: Palindrome Day 20200202

#148

Post by Symbiote »

tikej wrote: post #88
lucideer wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You listed two details on one line to make the German notation seem non-crazy. A more "logical" notation, as per the gp's comment would start: 1. Exact street location (house + street)

In Poland We do it exactly as you said: Street_name street_number/house_number Postal_code, City, Country

The typical English-influenced way to do it starts with the number,the most specific thing.

  10 Downing Street
  London
  SW1A 2AA
(The postcode is least-specific first: SW is South West London, 1 is the district nearest Central London, and the 2 would usually be a few streets and the AA 5-10 houses, but this is a unique code for an address that gets a lot of post.)

Re: Palindrome Day 20200202

#149

Post by CrazyStat »

eganist wrote: post #133
CrazyStat wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of lengthier literary works describe characters who could exist with a nontrivial degree of probability--indeed, with probability approaching one. All it takes is a minor character with minimal identifying information, which happens all the time. A store clerk who the main character briefly interacts with, for example. Should these characters not be gendered? Also you're ignoring the mis-diapering issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man , regarding your literary works argument, but I'll bite. The person described could exist, so gendering them is inappropriate if we're to fix our issues with inclusion in tech. If you're asserting that the person described is definitely fictional, sure, give them any gender. But they're not, they're a hypothetical person with non-trivial likelihood. Characters in novels have a…

Thanks, I'm familiar with the concept of a straw man argument. I obviously don't think my argument is a straw man. Linking the Wikipedia page is the same kind of dismissiveness that I noted earlier. In any case I'm glad you expanded on your argument, and I'll take the time to reply.

I'm skeptical that the specificity of events in the story matters much. For example, if I were to write a fictionalized novel about the 2016 US presidential election involving killer robot dinosaurs, would the specificity of the events involving killer robot dinosaurs mean that none of the people described in the book "exist" in the sense of corresponding to real-world people?

If I were to misgender a minor character named Caitlyn Jenner would that be ok because it's all fictional? There isn't anybody named Caitlyn Jenner who actually exists in a world with killer robot dinosaurs, after all.

This is obviously a contrived example, but we run into the problem in historical fiction all the time. A historical fiction novel might describe the main character visiting a friend and interacting with a servant, say. The main character and their friend might both clearly correspond to known historical figures, and the visit might be a real event recorded in the history books, but the servant is probably a construction of the author's mind, since servants generally don't get much space in recorded histories. If the servant is not described in too much detail, there is a high probability that the description corresponds to a real person. Is it inappropriate to gender the servant? Does it matter how closely the novel hews to what really happened?

-----

Just to be clear, if the author of the joke decides not to gender the subject of his joke that's perfectly fine, quite possibly preferable. But I think your position--that gendering the subject of the joke is inappropriate and should be corrected--is untenable when you start interrogating what the principled basis for that position might be and what implications there are for other situations (for example, characters in novels).

Doing that interrogation is not a straw man argument. It's the principled way to investigate ethical questions.

-----

I see you've already decided not to continue the discussion, so I guess we'll leave it there.

Re: Palindrome Day 20200202

#150

Post by skrebbel »

Naracion wrote: post #144
skrebbel wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the term "middle endianness" and how clearly it highlights how nuts the American date notation is. EDIT: fwiw, in my native language, most numbers from 100 and 1000 are pronounced middle endian, so I'm not complaining.

Out of curiosity, what's your native language?

Dutch.

Afaik all Germanic languages except English¹ (and close relatives) have the same thing. Ie this stuff is the same in Dutch, German, Swedish, Danish², etc.

We don't say "Twenty-three" but "Three-and-twenty". So far so good, but we do the hundreds, thousands etc just like English does. Thus, 123 is pronounced "hundred-three-and-twenty", i.e. precisely as nuts as what Americans do with dates.

¹) I assume that English fixed this at some point along the way (maybe due to French influences?), because the special number names between 10 and 20 do follow continental Germanic rules, eg compare "sixteen" and "twenty-one". We mainland Europeans like to mock the English speaking world for their insane unit systems, but at least their numbers make sense.

²) Danish has it worse. They have the same insane number ordering plus insane number names.

3 is "tre", 30 is "tredive". 4 is "fire", 40 is "fyrre". So far so good. Like in many languages, 10x sounds a bit like x.

But 6 is "seks", and 60 is "treds" (!). To make matters worse, 5 is "fem" but 50 is.. "halvtreds" (!!). Similarly 9 is "ni" and 90 is "halvfems". In Danish, for x ["", "halv"][x mod 2] + ceil(x / 20). I tried mocking the language by saying "fems" instead of "hundrede" but I just got blank stares.

And I'm lucky enough to have grown up on the same insane middle endianness as the Danes. I can't imagine how impossible Danish numbers must be to learn for eg an English speaker. Every time my wife says a number in Danish I spend half a minute doing the math, "she said something with 'tre' in it, so threes, but it ended with an s, so three times twenty, oh but wait there was 'halv' in front of it so subtract 10, ah, fifty". But she didn't say that, she said "to-hundrede-tre-og-halvtreds". By the time I'm done with the math I already forgot the other digits :-)

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