Manfred comments on Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism - Less Wrong

147 Post author: Yvain 13 September 2010 09:36PM

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Comment author: CronoDAS 29 February 2012 12:30:09AM 2 points [-]

As the "old" computer science joke goes, 2 + 2 = 5 (for extremely large values of 2).

Comment author: Manfred 29 February 2012 01:08:21AM *  0 points [-]

The physicist-typical version is that 3=4, if you take lim(3->4).

Comment author: TobyBartels 01 March 2012 05:15:34AM 2 points [-]

This reminds me that the difference between a physicist and astronomer is that a physicist uses π ≈ 3 while an astronomer uses π ≈ 1.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 March 2012 10:52:55AM *  4 points [-]

I remember someone in a newsgroup saying the average person is about one metre tall and weighs about 100 kilos, and when asked whether maybe they were approximately a bit too roughly, they answered “I'm an astronomer, not a jeweller.”

(And physicists sometimes use π ≈ 1 too -- that's called dimensional analysis. :-) The problem is when the constant factor dimensional analysis can't tell you turns out to be 1/(2π)^4 ≈ 6.4e-4 or stuff like that.)