On Sat, May 12, 2007 at 04:01:39AM +0200, Florian Kulzer wrote: > > 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.) > Actually, sort of. The issue was that someone pointed out that the Bible "redefined" pi to be 3. My point was that if people want to criticize the Bible for not being scientific enough, they need to also evaluate the context in a scientific light. If we are speaking in a scientific context, then the numbers thirty and ten, without any further evidence to the contrary, need to be assumed to be only significant to one digit. This is what I was (and I imagine many students were) taught. That is, you cannot assume greater precision for your measurements than your "instruments" allow. In this case, have words recorded on paper. The point is we don't know. Now, if you have ever worked with building materials, you will know that many measurements are given as approximations. For example, a 2x4 is really only 1.5"x3.5". A 4x4 is only 3.5"x3.5". Does that mean that people have redefined the inch? No. It is an approximation. What I was initially getting at is that simply because the Bible does not fit our notion of precision, does not make it wrong. It is *not* a science text. It is a recording of the words of God concerning things He thought were important. > 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. > As I was also trying to do. > > 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. > Ok. Deal. Regards, -Roberto -- Roberto C. Sánchez http://people.connexer.com/~roberto http://www.connexer.com
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