Text 41086, 108 rader
Skriven 2006-10-10 20:48:22 av mark lewis (1:3634/12.0)
  Kommentar till text 41042 av Michiel van der Vlist (2:280/5555)
Ärende: pi
==========
 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...

 MvdV> Thank you San, that is the correct answer.

"san"??

 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:)

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

haha... that's called "short circut boolean evaluation" in several programming
languages... depending on the situation, i have written code that required that
shortcircut to be turned off so that both/all evaluations took place and not
just the first one...

ie: which of the following is true...

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

 "The moons is made of green cheese if two plus two equals five"

 "If the moon is made of green cheese, then two plus two equals five"

 "Two plus two equals five if the moon is made of green cheese"

;)

 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...

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

this i'm very aware of... and it is sad, too, because it tends to interfer with
things at times... ie: i'm always ruining folk's shows they are watching
because i see and hear things that just can't be and i point them out... the
problem is that the show is ruined for someone... them or myself...

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

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

 MvdV> What value of pi will it print?

it won't print anything at all ;)  [i can read some C but i'm a pascal kinda
guy O:) ]

 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...

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

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

and that's where the controversy began... that's kinda like the following
question...

  "do you want beef or chicken for dinner?"

how would you answer the above if you had no preference? 

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

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

sure we are because now we're getting in to the syntax and symantics of english
and how something it read and perceived...

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

well, i can't say who saw the message you wrote first but i do know that i
deleted my first reply which covered this exact same... i deleted it because i
didn't want to play on that merry-go-round and didn't have time to even try...

FWIW: the question about beef or shicken for dinner, many's the time that i
answer "yes" to it and similar O:)

)\/(ark

 * Origin:  (1:3634/12)