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My posts are my intellectual property (and in case you don’t know it I invented LOL, before that people had to just smirk). Now who do I have to theaten to sue around here to get someting done about it?
[QUOTE=The Great Unwashed]
It’s not impossible to…
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[some argy-bargy ensues… , then:]
[QUOTE=The Idiot Fool Comedy Jester Troll Thing]
You deliberately use double negatives aye?
You are not very clear and forthright then.
Answer my questions else
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LOL²
I dunno, a friend of mine is a materials scientist and he made a similar point once. I had metal dice and he said that they’re inherently more biased than the plastic mold kind because the structure of the plastic mold is a single, complete crystalline structure*, not to mention the metal subtly deforms more easily than the plastic does. However, even with the plastic mold kind, treated with all the care a casino does, it’s relatively impossible to make a “truly” fair die intentionally because of tiny microscopic imperfections.
Of course, he presented this as more of a hair splitting thing and said that we’re talking differences in probability so miniscule they’d pass any sensible gambling commission inspection. Not declaring that probability was irrelevant due to this fact.
- I’m probably butchering his exact point, but it was something like that.
For a die with dimples for pips, 6 will come up more often than 1 in 6. The opposite side, the ace, is heavier and tends to end up down. This is mitigated by making the ace pip larger and/or deeper, or engraving the name of the casino on that face.
Casino dice do not have indented pips. They are drilled and then filled with colored plastic of the same density as the die.
Of course, no die is perfect, but you would probably have to throw an average casino die tens of thousands of times to get a statistically significant sample of its bias.
Wait, no! I’ve got it! .999… is the answer to “14 k of g in a f p d”!
…Somehow.
“A hectare short of a league”
14 kinds of goodness in a full Pit debate…about the value of 0.999…
Zero is not an infinitesimal. That is an abuse of the term. My comments were exactly on-point given the actual definition of ‘infinitesimal’ in this context.
If you define “mammals” to include ladybugs, you don’t get to jump on someone when they say all normal mammals have a maximum of four legs.
nm
Zero is very commonly considered an infinitesimal, but regardless, the blame for that wording is on me. Terminology aside, in substance, watchwolf49 was entirely agreeing with you: you both were of the position that if A and B differed by an amount less than 1/n for each finite n, then A and B were equal. That is what they were saying in their original post. I think you snapped at watchwolf49 too quickly, and then later viewed everything through that lens, seeing contradictions instead of evidence that your initial appraisal had been mistaken.
Snipped, yeah, but not by much.
What’s the problem? Is it wrong to say “If A and B differed by zero, then A and B were equal”? It’s just the way the language works, that “not differing” is the same as “differing by …”, for a particular value of “…”.
ETA: On edit, I see that bobot’s intention may be to re-express a kind of 0.999… = 1 skepticism, which is not what I intend to get into in this thread. I mean, I don’t intend to be in this thread in any great capacity; I just happened to notice the miscommunication between watchwolf49 and Derleth and thought I’d bring it to attention.
Just having fun. I agree that when things differ by zero, they are equal. The Board should have a thread about which decimal number with more digits than a zero equals zero. 
…999.999…
Don’t start that!
I think the problem here is you’ve not clarified the context your statement applies to. You state that infinitesimals are not elements of the real numbers, therefore they do not exist. Better if you had extended this out to say they do not exist within the real numbers. This makes your strawman argument beg the question.
There’s far far easier ways to deal with real numbers than infinitesimals; if 3/3 = 1, then 0.999… = 1. Infinitesimals can be used to prove this, and this proof is consistent with the twenty or so other proofs. Use of the term is not abusive in the context of this proof.
My claim is that the infinitesimal is not well understood by many people. It’s more complicated than taxonomy even.
Well, that didn’t take long.
Anybody want to hazard a guess on how long it is before this new one either starts spouting inchoate government conspiracy theories/hurls abuse about ivory tower intellectuals vs the “real world”/religious witnessing/some other equally inane blather?
For fuck’s sake. I’m going to guess that in one or two pages, he’s going to start rambling incoherently about how mathematicians don’t really understand infinity and what it means in the real world (e.g., the bit about the dosage of an antidote).
Thanks for the reminder, Great Anitbob, we can bring the NSA into the thread here in the Pit. I have no idea what 7777777 was blathering about. Technically, what the NSA does as a matter of publicly available written law is not a secret government conspiracy.