281–290 of 352 posts
This is interesting, but I have to quibble with this: > If you express this value in any other units, the magic immediately disappears. So, this is no coincidence Ordinarily, this would be extremely indicative of a coincidence. If you’re looking for a heuristic for non-coincidences, “sticks around when you change units” is the one you want. This is just an unusual case where that heuristic fails.
This is interesting, but I have to quibble with this: > If you express this value in any other units, the magic immediately disappears. So, this is no coincidence Ordinarily, this would be extremely indicative of a coincidence. If you’re looking for a heuristic for non-coincidences, “sticks around when you change units” is the one you want. This is just an unusual case where that heuristic fails.
For example, I think for human counting, base 12 is about as easy as base 10, but gives good ways to express division by 3, in addition to division by 2 or 4. It also fits better with how we count time, like how there are 60 seconds in a minute, 12 months in a year, etc... but I imagine those might be revised as well.
Anyways, I'm curious to hear what others think.
This article reasons that it is not a coincidence because of the “seconds pendulum” definition of the meter, which would necessitate the values being equal because of the pendulum time period equation. That all makes sense to me, and I agree. But here’s what’s odd to me: We ended up not choosing the seconds pendulum approach (for reasons mentioned in the article). Instead they chose to use “1 ten-millionth of the Ear…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Modern mathematics is more likely than not going to define pi as twice the unique zero of cos between 0 and 2, and cos can be defined via its power series or via the exp function (if you use complex numbers). None of this involves geometry whatsoever.
What do you mean? Cos is an inherently geometric function.
If society were tasked one day with reinventing standards and units, it doesn't matter why, what do you think are some things they would change? For example, I think for human counting, base 12 is about as easy as base 10, but gives good ways to express division by 3, in addition to division by 2 or 4. It also fits better with how we count time, like how there are 60 seconds in a minute, 12 months in a year, etc... b…
Compare to metric units, always base 10 and always easy to convert mm to cm to m and so on.
Now that we live in a digital world - why do we consistently reinvent date/time libraries? To me that's proof enough the concepts are just hard to work with and over a long span of time verify your calculation is correct.
Another interesting coincidence (or perhaps a decades-long dad-joke troll perpetrated by German-speaking scientists) is that 1 hertz is roughly equal to the frequency at which a human heart (“Herz” in german, with a nearly indistinguishable pronunciation to “Hertz”) beats.
That seems rather low rate. Regular rate in rest is 60 to 100. Which only lower bound is roughly 1Hz, while upper rate is quite far what I would understand German to understand as roughly.
Athletes have much lower resting rate. So if we take feral humans from 50Ky ago their rest heart rate would have been much closer to the 60 bpm.
Regarding "Catholic meter": its definition depends on time measurement. How did they ensure that "seconds" of different clocks were equal?
The traditional definition of the second before modern timekeeping was 1/86400 of a day. I’m guessing that was precise enough for their purposes.
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I volunteer for the Mars mission as a weight loss tool.
Surviving on Mars will probably involve some mass loss, too.
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Another one would be philosophy: there’s nothing, something and everything. Or logic: ∃, ¬∃ and ∀. Just rambling here, but seems like universal concepts across fields.
Chiming in from theoretical linguistics: it is impossible for natural languages to "count", i.e. make reference to numbers other than 0, 1 or infinity. As an example, there are languages where prenominal genitives are impossible (0). Then, there are languages, such as German, where only one prenominal genitive is possible (1): > Annas Haus > *Annas Hunds Haus Finally, there are languages, such as English, where an in…
> Anna's mother's sister's dog's house
> Das Haus des Hundes der Schwester der Mutter von Anna.
It's difficult to parse though. We only get to know about Anna at the end of the sentence. Consequently, we avoid such sentences or use workarounds.
> Von Annas Mutters Schwester dem Hund sein Haus.
If you ever use such a construction German speakers will correct your bad language but they will perfectly understand the sentence's meaning.
A quick search brought me to this presentation: https://www.linguistik.hu-berlin.de/de/staff/amyp/downloads/...
The take-away seems to be: "German does not work like English" (slide 8) so be careful when comparing PreGen in German and English.