Re: [OT] Good, evil and religion [WAS] Re: A way to compile 3rd party modules into deb system?

[Florian Kulzer <florian.kulzer+debian@icfo.es>]

On Fri, May 11, 2007 at 17:13:25 -0400, Roberto C. Sánchez wrote:
> On Fri, May 11, 2007 at 07:41:10PM +0200, Florian Kulzer wrote:
> > 
> > Actually I understand the concept well enough to know that it cannot be
> > applied stringently if one deals with numbers that are divisible by
> > positive integer powers of ten and which are written down as words.
> > Obviously, "ten" and "thirty" fall into this category. Even if you write
> > "30" it is not really clear if you know this value to one or two
> > significant digits. Sometimes people claim that "30" by convention is
> > one significant digit and that you have to write "30." to indicate two
> > significant digits, but this is, as far as I know, not generally
> > accepted in the scientific community. (Scientists and engineers mostly
> > use semi-logarithmic notation anyway, which avoids these ambiguities.) 
> > 
> Writing "30" to mean one significant digit and "30." to mean two
> significant digits is how I was taught.  Of course, that may be a
> deficiency in my public education.

My point was that, since the bible uses "ten" and "thirty", there is no
justification to force the passage cited by Ron into a "one significant
digit" context. If we assume that the biblical texts were meant to be
understood by a general audience, then it seems reasonable to me to
interpret all numbers according to general usage rather than
scientific/engineering usage. In my experience the majority of people
simply round to the nearest integer and they would not think of "thirty"
as signifying "the interval from 25 to 35". (I realize that you probably
felt that your faith was attacked from a scientific point of view and
therefore you considered it justified/prudent/necessary to push the
battle into the realm of science.)

It seems that I also have to point out explicitly that I did not, at any
stage of this discussion, insinuate that the educational background of
anyone had any bearing on the validity of their arguments. You started
to talk about "getting all scientific", so it seemed reasonable to me to
refer to what is and is not, to my knowledge, generally accepted
practice in the scientific community when it comes to specifying
significant digits. 

> > Furthermore, if you want to start patronizing other people about the
> > concept of significant digits then you should probably be more careful
> > yourself not to make statements which could be misconstrued as mix-ups
> > between "significant digits" and "decimals": In your earlier mail you
> > first give the "one significant digit" argument and then you abruptly
> > and without necessity switch to numbers that have three (5.00) or four
> > (10.00 and 30.00) significant digits. Everything you say is technically
> > correct[1] and it is maybe just a coincidence that these numbers have two
> > decimals, but at the very least this is unnecessarily confusing. What is
> > so special about four significant digits when two significant digits are
> > in fact the threshold for putting "ten" times pi out of range for
> > "thirty"? 
> > 
> There is nothing special about choosing three or four significant
> digits.  There are, of course, three significant digits in 5.00 and four
> each in 10.00 and 30.00.  It was coincidence that I chose them like
> that, not intending to be confusing.  BTW, I was not patronizing anyone.

This is now an opportunity to be side-tracked into yet another argument
in the course of which I look up the dictionary definition of "to
patronize" and then we fight about whether your earlier claim that I
"clearly don't understand the concept of significant digits" fits this
definition. To avoid this I propose the following: If you let me
interpret your last statement as "it was not my intention to patronize
anyone" then I am willing to concede that I probably overreacted in my
nitpicking about significant digits. It seems that we will have to
"agree to disagree" about almost everything that was discussed in this
thread, but maybe we can at least bury this particular hatchet.
 
> > [1] You avoided stating how many significant digits these numbers have
> >     in your opinion and, maybe by pure luck, you chose a formulation
> >     which left you enough wiggle room to use more significant digits
> >     than strictly necessary. Being vague enough so as not to be wrong is
> >     not the best way to demonstrate your understanding of a concept,
> >     though.
> > 
> I did not say how many I thought because there is no question about the
> number of significant digits in a number with a decimal point.  It is
> only when you have trailing zeros to the left of the decimal point when
> the situation is ambiguous.  This comes from people either being taught
> incorrectly, being taught something different from the common scientific
> usage or simply forgetting.

-- 
Regards,            | http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer
          Florian   |