Journal Entries
Irrational numbers.
Posted Mar 24, 2003
Somehow, as an offshoot to a conversation about the existence of God, I ended up trying to explain why I "don't believe in irrational numbers." I'd like to use this journal entry to flesh out some of my ideas.
And bear in mind, this is only recreational theoretical mathematics. I'm not a mathematician.
I placed "don't believe in irrational numbers" in quotes above because that is the simple way to put it. What I actually believe is that irrational numbers do not correspond to anything in the real universe. Why do we have numbers/numerals in the first place? At first they were just for counting things. Someone needed a shorthand way to keep track of how many cows they had. Eventually, the hash marks got to be too inconvenient, so someone created one symbol that represented a larger number of hash marks. And, voila, numerals are born.
Later, people wanted to be able to measure other things that couldn't be simply counted, probably mostly for comparison's sake. Perhaps a greedy king wanted to make sure that he owned more land than all of the other lords combined. Perhaps an giving king wanted to equally divide his land among his 17 lords. Axiom by axiom, mathematics was born. Necessity once again is the mother of invention.
So where did irrational numbers come from?
Irrational numbers, of course, are infinitely long non-repeating decimals. Pi is an irrational number. Any rational number times any irrational number equals an irrational number. You can't multiply two irrational numbers because, frankly, you need to be able to figure out (much less see) what each of the numerals in a number is before you can really multiply. At any rate, if you could multiply two irrational numbers, you would probably get another irrational number.
So, if we accept that pi times the diameter of a circle gives us the circumference of that circle, then it is impossible for a circle to have both the diameter and the circumference be rational numbers. That seems like a bunch of malarkey to me.
Please dont' respond to this yet. I have more to say. . .
Discuss this Journal entry [1]
Latest reply: Mar 24, 2003
Misspelled Road Signs
Posted Jan 22, 2003
I've been noticing a lot of misspelled road signs recently. Usually they are what one would call typos, transposed letters and such. Is this a product of the computer age? Is this just simple human error? Or does this signify a deeper insipid laziness amonst sign-makers? Could this be the first sign of the fall of civilization?
I imagine it won't be long before we see street signs that are written in chat-room-speak. It won't be long before we see "All lanes stop 4 school bus" signs.
Discuss this Journal entry [1]
Latest reply: Jan 22, 2003
Atheism? Agnosticism? Rubbish-ism?
Posted Jan 15, 2003
Of late (as in the past ten years), solidifying my philosophical beliefs has been a subject of constant concern. I just don't know what to believe anymore.
That's not entirely true . . . I've given up on institutionalized religion. Maybe not the whole thing, but I have given up relying on someone else to tell me what to do, and how to act. I was a sophomore in college when I came to the sudden realization that no one ELSE really knows what's going on, either. It was a lot like the first time you saw your elementary-school teacher at the grocery store, and you realized that they actually have a life -- that they don't, in fact, actually live at the school. It was a very liberating, but also a very scary, thought. It was liberating because I was no longer bound by the precepts and misconceptions and prejudices of others. But it was scary, because it really meant I was out there all alone looking for the answer.
In college I discovered and ate up Ayn Rand's Objectivism. It made a lot of sense to me. Since then, now that I have placed some distance between her and me, I have seen some of the flaws. Objectivism doesn't leave a lot of room for compassion. It also doesn't leave a lot of room for instinct or intuition. So, for a while, I considered myself a quasi-Objectivist.
Since then I have been going back and forth on the whole God question. I was a firm atheist when I graduated from college. Then I realized that for every philosopher, some other philosopher always comes along and finds the holes. Applying that to atheism, I decided that I was an atheist, but left open the possibility that I was wrong. So, I wasn't a very devout atheist.
Then it hit me (epiphanies always sneak up on me and then pounce when I'm in the middle of doing something else) -- a single sentence that I had never actually heard before, at least that I could remember, that summed it all up: Our relationship with some supernatural being is much less important than our relationships with each other. It really stemmed from the fact that, to paraphrase something I believe Kurt Vonnegut said, whether God exists or he doesn't, how does that affect how I should act?
I wonder if there is already a philosophical theory that delves more deeply into this idea?
Discuss this Journal entry [15]
Latest reply: Jan 15, 2003
Andyman
Researcher U215635
Write an Entry
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a wholly remarkable book. It has been compiled and recompiled many times and under many different editorships. It contains contributions from countless numbers of travellers and researchers."