Text 41042, 69 rader
Skriven 2006-10-10 12:55:00 av Michiel van der Vlist (2:280/5555)
  Kommentar till text 41026 av mark lewis (1:3634/12.0)
Ärende: pi
==========
Hello mark!

On Monday October 09 2006 20:53, you wrote to me:

 MvdV>> How about this one:

 MvdV>> "If two plus two equals five then the moon is made of green
 MvdV>> cheese".

 MvdV>> Would you say that this is a true statement?

 ml> yes, absolutely...

Thank you San, that is the correct answer.

 ml>  because both are false... 2 + 2 cannot equal 5 and the moon is not
 ml> made of green cheese... crusty yellow cheese, maybe... but not green
 ml> O:)

The way you arrived at the answer it is wrong however. Correct is: because the
statement "two plus two equals five" is false.  Period.

 MvdV>> Maybe you would, but most people would say it is not. Everyone
 MvdV>> knows the moon is not made of green cheese don't they? Formal
 MvdV>> logic however says that when the "if" is not satisfied, you can
 MvdV>> put anything after the "then" - true or false - and the
 MvdV>> statement as a whole will always be true.

 ml> i'm really glad that i haven't (yet) been contaminated by "higher
 ml> education", hahaha...

You may riducule it, but that does not make it go away.

Let me put it in a way that you may understand. Consider the following line in
a computer programme written in C:

if ((2+2)==5) printf("pi equals 3.12415);


What value of pi will it print?

 MvdV>> Only someone out to "get me" would make an issue out of a
 MvdV>> simple typo. It could have been construed as a trap had the
 MvdV>> typo been intentional. It was not, so whoever was trapped got
 MvdV>> trapped by his own doing.

 ml> agreed... the reason why i even got involved was because it was a typo
 ml> but you were saying that you didn't write it...

No, I did not say that i did not *write* it. What I denied was having come to
the *conclusion* that pi equals 3.12415...

(Because that was the question: how did you come to the conlsusion that pi
equals 3.124215?)

 ml>  remember, we're talking about plain, right in front of your eyes,
 ml> english... think simply, not convoluted, ok? ;)

No, we are not talking about plain, right in front of your eyes english.

We are talking about a right in front of everybody's eyes obvious typo that
someone tried to turn into me coming to the false conslusion that pi equals
3.12415.


Cheers, Michiel

--- GoldED+/W32-MSVC 1.1.5-b20060315
 * Origin: http://www.vlist.eu (2:280/5555)