Something for π day

Science and Technology
21

Actually, here I totally disagree: To me, it makes total sense to give directions with cardinal points or in clockwise/anti-clockwise. I wish, we had copied that from the British (and Americans) like we copied the roundabouts.

As long as you know a place well, giving the ultimate target makes sense, if not, generalized directions are the far better choice.

Actually not: People, who had trouble with Maths in school, usually had incompetent teachers, and they tend to have problems with basic mathematical concepts: Sets, relations, functions etc. which in turn translates into having problems with calculating numbers.

I have tought too many years of private Maths lessons to not feel sympathy towards people who struggle with these concepts.

However, I agree on another level:
Calculating numbers is not Maths
as
Programming is not Computer Science

22

Right, Mina. Compass directions are simple and easy to understand. Numbers are pretty simple to manipulate if your earliest teachers were competent. Luckily I had parents who taught me and made me use directions, numbers, and practical things. My kids also learned them. The solution to this overall problem might be improving parenting skills. Oh, and as Americans, my kids and I learned the metric and the imperial systems at the same time. Neither is inherently superior, but it’s harder to get confused in the metric system.

23

I do not believe you are not joking.

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24

What’s annoying in the context of measurement conversions is the fact that there are plenty of tools and websites which convert measures exactly, but, as far as I know, none that does it approximately and according to how people in real life use them.

Say, my flat’s ceiling is 2.50m high. Easy enough to convert: 8.2’ or 98.5’’. But how would an American express that in real life? 8 1/5 ft, 8 1/4 ft, 8ft 2in, 8ft 3in, 8ft 2 1/2in, 2yd 2ft 2in?
I have no idea and the internet is not much help.

I have been thinking about setting up a website or an app for rough conversions for quite some time, but whilst the technolgy isn’t an issue, getting data about how people use imperial units, their fractions and combinations is really tough.
I haven’t given up, but the more I dig into that, the more cumbersome it gets.

If somebody had a link to “How to use imperial units properly”, it would be appreciated.

Funnily enough: British units for volumes and weights have often the same name as the American ones, but are still different.

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25

I’d say it’s pretty simple if you find the right sources. In your specific case, if I were you, I would watch a couple of house flipper (or how the hell those shows are called) episodes, where they surely talk a lot about measurements of the house they are trying to buy or sell. Then I would look up on Quora or a similar site, how people do the 1/4 ft thing.

Then I would put 1 and 1 together and I would have my data. :smiley:

26

Sure, always.

Rather not. I prefer to spend more time e.g. playing with my children.

This is something that makes sense for a specific case, but in order to teach it to a computer, you need real rules. I have actually tried your suggestion years ago and it ended in wild discussions between the different Quora posters.

so much for

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27

building codes are different for each and every countries.

For the heck of the discussion, I often raise highbrows when

  1. confronting an American novel translated in French where files(5) miles are eight(8) kilometers and seagulls are mouettes instead of goélands.

  2. My sister in law asks me how to convert a pound of flour into milimeters. :laughing:

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28

Why the eyebrow raising? Seems accurate to me.

29

There are no kilometres in USA, That is why @Mina.

I like a translation but I do not like an adaptation.

A French reader should be able to see a mile and a yard when the character sees them and the same : an English reader should be able to connect to the mental state of a French car/bicycle driver making distance in kilometres.

30

With miles, you are probably right, thanks to TV. But yards - definitely not: I’d say, 2/3 of all Europeans have no idea what a yard is. In Latin America (except for Mexico), my guess is that hardly anybody knows that measure.

Do you know how much a legua is, a werst or a Prussian mile? (5km/1km/7.5km)

In a novel, it can make sense to keep original terms in order to create a certain flavour, but generally speaking, numbers should be intelligible.

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31

I like reading Russian novels (translated into English) where they use the traditional Russian distance measurement, which is a “verst” which is almost exactly one kilometre…

I’ve been using google to do conversions for me nearly as long as google’s been around… e.g. type in search field “10 megabits per second in megabytes per second” (because I’m lazy) or “35 kilometres in miles”, but I’ve yet to figure out how to use it to measure “things” using the “feral hogs” gauging system :

Screenshot from 2021-03-19 14-33-00
Screenshot from 2021-03-19 14-33-00733×254 24.2 KB

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32

Only slightly related to π but, I hope, relevant within the topic of “Science and Technology”:

Inside Out

The branch of differential geometry within mathmatics, primarily deals with manifolds.
Manifolds are, roughly speaking, smooth surfaces without edges.

Typical two-dimensional manifolds, are, e.g., the surface of a sphere, a doughnut or a pretzel, but manifolds don’t need to be two-dimensional, they can have 1, 2, 42 or any number of dimensions.
They are allowed to intersect with themselves, but are not allowed to have sharp corners, so a circle or an ellipse is a 1-dimensional manifold, so is the number 8 or the infinity symbol, but not the typical rain drop falling, because of the spike at the top, nor are squares, triangles, etc.
Imagine 1-dimensional manifolds like closed strings (strings like laces or ropes, not formed of letters).

When dealing with manifolds, one of the first questions to arise is the one: Can I smoothly transform manifold A into manifold B? With smooth transformations we mean to apply local and continuous translations and stretchings. Stretching to infinity or compressing of a part into a single point is not allowed.

It can be proven that for one-dimensional manifolds, you can not transform a clockwise drawn circle into an anticlockwise drawn circle.
With two dimensional manifolds, you can not transform a doughnut (one whole) into a pretzel (three holes). However, it was proven a long time ago that you can transform a sphere into another one with the former inner side on the outside, but for decades nobody knew, how. This is not a trivial problem!

In 1976, a group of mathemticians found a way of doing it and created a computer animated movie. Here it is, and it is gorgeous example of very early computer graphics and therefore my justification for posting this here:

Enjoy!

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33

I might add that, despite of always being fond of natural sciences, science fiction and computers, I had never seriously considered studying mathematics until seeing this movie in class… Then, after this catalytic encounter, one thing led to the other and I ended up with … mathematics.

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34

ISO 8601 specifies YYYY-MM-DD, optionally YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss. You can leave out the punctuation when it’s known to be a date (for example in a database). ISO has been standard in astronomy for more than 2 centuries. In informatics it has the obvious advantage of being automatically sorted. I tried and failed to get my big multinational company to adopt it at the time of the year 2000 project, because of the risk of incidents worse than eating an out-of-date yoghurt.

As things stand, a prudent company policy for correspondence and other documents would be to standardise on a format with the month in words: in French today is 22 mars 2021, which goes well with lundi 22 mars 2021, nicely separating words and numbers. The month could be abreviated to 3 letters in English, but not in all other languages (French: juin, juillet (June, July)). Your IT system should be able to parse out the ISO representations, if it isn’t too lazy :wink:

The Y2000 event caused difficulty in Eastern Asia and other places because they use(d) YY/MM/DD (so when was 03/04/05?).

Drifting a bit OT, I note that nobody has solved the decimal and thousands separator problem. ISO specifies a comma for the decimal separator (which we use in France) but tolerates a point on the line. At school in the 1950s we had a point half way up the line, which can mean multiply in maths. I won’t enter into the chaos of thousands separators. These two characters have their own Unicode numbers, U+2396 U+066C respectively, but nobody has managed to assign unique glyphs. I don’t expect that ridiculous situation to change in my lifetime.

35

I retrieved an excellent article that dates from 1995, was referred to during the Y2K kerfuffle, and is still being updated:
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html

36

@crl
UK: 10,000.00
DE: 10.000,00
CH: 10’000.00

37

I had a desire to study mathematics, but then just the desire did not go anywhere. Still, I prefer to study something more functional chtoli, some kind of programming language or some technical issues related to modern electronics.

38

I am convinced this applies to education, as well.

39

@callpaul.eu
If you have to determine leap year then divide the year by 4 simple this was taught to me when I was Physics student in High School .

40

Sadly it is not that easy as you have to take in 100 and 400 years and when it starts …

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