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Alicorn comments on P(X = exact value) = 0: Is it really counterintuitive? - Less Wrong
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Comments (49)
I implicitly meant a continuous distribution. Clarified that in the post now.
As someone who lives in the dangerous and uncharted part of the world called "outside the US', I prefer centimeters. ;)
This one isn't even a matter of neglecting to convert; it's a cultural divide - while I expect you knew what Matt meant, it's entirely possible he didn't know how to translate it for you. Presumably you don't round to the nearest 1.5875 millimeters. What do metric users round to when measuring lengths? Millimeters? Those are little - even littler than sixteenths of an inch! Do most metric rulers even mark them, or do they just mark halfway points between centimeter lines? I don't know.
Yes, millimeters are typically marked, with a special mark half-way at 5mm. Once you're beyond 1m in length one might skip them, but even then rulers often have them. Small things are normally measured in millimeters as well, though usually some tolerance is expected. For example, one of my rings has a diameter of 21.7mm and was advertised as such. Of course, if you don't need this precision, you round to whatever decimal place you care about and use the nearest unit (like in any system). I don't think of millimeters as particularly tiny, more like the basic unit of "smallness".
(And I fully agree with lucidfox. Imperial units are insane.)
Huh, really, that's a cultural divide? I was taught how to do metric measurements in every science class I took, and I knew how to use millimetres before then because I've never seen a ruler that didn't have them marked. Is this truly uncommon knowledge in the US? o.o
I've used metric rulers, in science classes mostly, but I don't think I've used one in years. When I have to measure things, I use a tape measure, which only has inches marked.
Huh, fascinating. Even my cheap "gift from a job" tape measure does metric, so this is news to me :)
A lot of American rulers are marked in both inches and centimeters, though I don't know what the proportion is compared to rulers which are just marked in inches.
Depends. In casual use, typically centimeters. But yes, as muflax said, metric rulers have individual millimeters marked, and typically they mark half-centimeters with slightly longer bars.