Uh… pass. Good luck to the rest of yall though

“Everything I don’t like is ai”

Grow up. The imgflip watermark is clearly visible in the meme, and it’s an ancient meme format.

Euclidean geometry enjoyers in shambles

I guess n would be infinite in the limit I’m looking for. I’m looking at this in like a “musing about theoretical complexity” angle rather than actually needing to use or know how to use pi on modern systems.

For the record, I realize how incredibly pedantic I’m being about the difference between the irrational pi and rational approximations of pi that end up being actually useful. That being said, computational complexity has enough math formalism stink on it that pedantry seems encouraged

You sound like an involved and caring father. Rock on, dude

Do said atomic instructions produce pi though, or some functional approximation of pi? I absolutely buy that approximate pi is O(1), but it still seems like a problem involving a true irrational number should be undecidable on any real turing machine

Is it actually? I’ll admit im pretty rusty on time complexity, but naively I’d think that pi being irrational would technically make even reading or writing it from memory an undecidable problem

“is not like you do calculations by hand anyway”

… get off my lawn, whippersnapper.

That’s because your engineering ass needs things to be physical and sane. Physics is a field for the mentally unwell to sink further into insanity while incoherently scribbling greek letters on every available flat surface.

On a more serious note, yeah you absolutely have to be careful about where you apply really ambitious simplifications like that. There are plenty of mathematical regimes where you can use natural units (this is the term to look up if your interest extends further) and simplify your reference frame by a hell of a lot though. Setting the speed of light to 1 is also a hell of a drug, and brother I’ve got an addiction

You’re a monster. I love it

The real comment mvp. You deserve every positive vote my post got

Somebody else already said it, but that’s what the title is.

Longform: a lot of calculations that happen in astro deal with distances so large so large that only order of magnitude changes actually meaningfully affect the end result. To connect to a more common topic, here’s a joke.

“Whats the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars?”

“About a billion dollars”

This joke works for the same reason; 1 billion is so many orders of magnitude larger than 1 million that (1,000,000,000 - 1,000,000 = 1,000,000,000) is only incorrect by ~0.1%, even though substituting 0 for 1 million in that equation seems ridiculous on the face of it. Substituting 1 for pi has similarly minimal errors (tbh it usually matters waaaaaaaaay less than .1% error) in a lot of astro math

Realizing that my father was a coward killing goat herders from a billion dollar jet, not a hero like I thought growing up.

The most important thing I’ve ever been told about quantum is “shut up and calculate.” Results don’t seem physical? That’s quantum. Results don’t make sense? That’s quantum. Shut up and calculate

Christian scientists on their way to tell you about how their evidence free belief in magic shouldn’t affect how you view their ability to derive truth from evidence

My brothers wife. Started a conversation with me one day like “you know, my 2yo stepbrother has autism, and you don’t act anything like him. I don’t think you really have autism.” I’m sure our difference in behaviour is because I don’t have autism, not the fact that I’m literal decades older than him

“Drugs” is a pretty wide net, and yeah most of them would make it more difficult. Someone who isn’t me once told me that psychedelics make it a lot easier to follow really abstract thought, and that comes in handy when trying to imagine theoretical geometries our brains and other sensory equipment didn’t evolve to comprehend

No no, I think there’s a misunderstanding here. If you can accurately describe to me what an n-brane is or have ever used terms like “deformation in the local topology”, I assume you’ve done SIGNIFICANTLY more psychedelics than most people. I’ve never had easier access to psychedelics in my life than when I spent most of my time near the math buildings at uni.

The only way I can handle it is by treating myself as two people. The adult in me that grew up and the obstinate 17yrold in a frayed dead kennedys shirt with general disdain for any and all forms of authority. I bribe him with some kind of reward and if he says no or tries to get around it I get to take control and win in our battle of wills. I have to keep the shithead happy enough that he doesn’t riot and burn the place down, but ultimately the adult runs the show. Treating my bad habits as a separate person who is my rival works well for me. It is kinda funny that I’m essentially "bread and circus"ing myself

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