Read dropzone’s comment again, infinity is a stupid number. We have the real number system and when we include imaginary numbers we get complex number system. Further, when we add stupid numbers we get the perplexing number system. Don’t you know anything about the Liberal Arts?
Also, from our friend sevensevensevensevenmushroom: “You are asking a series of tough questions. I think you are working with general relativity and quantum physics, perhaps even with their unification.” And: “Next you are talking about vector spaces. I think they are relevant when dealing with general relativity and quantum physics.” He’s a mathematician and a physicist!
ooops
This, absolutely. 
But really, once you accept the existence of infinity what can you do with it? What about π? I use it all the time. Does it matter to me that it goes on forever? Nope, since any more than three decimal places more than I’m going to use is unnecessarily precise. Pi to a thousand places is a silly number as far as I’m concerned, but since we already classify it as irrational, pi being both irrational and silly is unnecessarily redundant. How about e? I hate logarithms* and have never used it, but being transcendentally irrational is cross enough for a number to bear without calling it silly, too. Plus it’s not even a number, but a letter.
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- I took Trig right when pocket calculators started to get cheap. The prof laughed at people who had wasted their money on scientific calculators, saying they’d be up a creek if, on a trip up a creek and away from a store, their batteries died. When someone who may not have been me asked, “Why would someone need to run calculations while on a canoeing trip, and why would they bring a book of log tables along,” he remained silent.
Whoa … I’m just an uneducated construction laborer and even I know what a vector space is. From a 3-4-5 triangle, it’s an easy step to n-dimensional matrices.
It is?
I don’t get it. And what would be wrong with a 3-4-6 triangle (for instance)?
It just wouldn’t be right.
Prove it to 7777777’s satisfaction. He’ll show you that you are wrong, if it takes 50 pages of bullshit.
5-12-13 triangles are good too … everything else ya just beat with a hammer until it fits.
A 6-7-10 split is a bitch, though. I nailed it once.
ETA: No that was a 7-10. I was pretty good picking up a 6-7-10, but a 7-10 means you have to ride the rim of the gutter most of the way down.
Technically, if the ball enters the gutter, it’s dead, no pin fall is counted. Making the 7-10 split requires a pin to bounce back out of the pit taking out the other pin. A better way to make two shots at it, taking one pin at a time. Just depends on how drunk the other bowlers are. My favorite is getting a strike without actually hitting the head pin.
Once upon a time I was good at arcing a spinning ball in between 1 and 3. Unfortunately, that’s what gave me so much practice not picking up 7-10 splits. I had forgotten all about bowling and that I’m a college-educated bowler–I got PE credits and everything. A while back I was watching my daughter and her friends bowl and one of the girls was open to advice, so I showed her how you pay no attention to the pins; you line up the shot on the arrows, then turn and walk away cool as a cucumber because, with practice, you know just where the ball is going. She improved.
Just hitting the 0.999… pin was good enough for me.
Back when I bowled competitively, I stuck with a straight initial delivery at position 4.999… to hit the 0.999… arrow followed by a gentle left curve right into the pocket between the 0.999… and 2.999… pins. Some plebeians insisted on aiming between the 1 and 3 pins, and they never could understand why my approach was better.
That said, the lack of practice with more extreme reactivity inherent in a straight delivery probably hampered my ability to pick up the trickier splits. Still, I was always pretty good at hammering down a 5.999…-6.999…-9.999… split. For all that, though, I never scored above 249.999… in my life.