Messages

It was a joke but I was playing the straight man. The  would've ruined it for everyone.

I think Blizz should be banned from arguing because he clearly has the unfair advantage of always being right in a sensible way. Totally unfair.

You didn't understand what I was trying to say. Science != exact science. An exact science has no room for creativity. You can use creativity to maybe find new ways to solve problems, but 2 + 2 will always be 4. It will never be 4.2 just because you feel a bit creative that day.

Oh, yep. K. We're not trying to change numbers though. The numbers are fine. We're just trying to change the way they're represented. We're not changing the value of 2 Pi, we're just calling it something less confusing for people learning about the subject. I'm committed to my opinion because I had a lot of trouble with trig and circles when I had to think in Pi. I know that, for me at least, Tau works better, so why shouldn't it be used? You wouldn't define the number 1 as 2 h where h is 1/2, because it's just 1 and there's no need to complicate it. So why would you define a full revolution as 2 Pi when it can just be Tau?

I noticed something in this discussion. All the people who have learned math in-depth (at least to some extent or a specific area) are actually against Tau while the rest is pro-Tau.

I'm an enthusiast

[and]

Perhaps the analogy was too drawn-out. I did stray from my point quite a bit. The analogy overall was... ridiculous to begin with, and perhaps a little inspired by lack out thinking statements through

math has no artistic value, it's an exact science, not something you bring creativity into.

I disagree. Science != !Creativity (forgive me if there's a less stupid way of writing that expression, I haven't done any programming in a rather long time XD)
I understand why you say that. However, I do not agree.

You could say it's not about beauty or simplicity, it's about usability

Yes, you could say that. But beauty and simplicity should be made the best of, because they make things easier to understand, especially in a situation where there is nothing to lose. Pi works, Pi is usable, yes. But Tau also works just as well, Tau is just as usable, and it makes things more elegant and nice and all of those words I've already said. Besides, isn't simplicity a large role in usability anyway? The simpler formula is the more usable one. And we know that mathematical beauty is basically simplicity and elegance of concepts that seem complex or confusing at first glance.
Mathematical beauty is comparable to music. When something works (usability), that's expected, it's what music is supposed to do. When something sounds nice (beauty), that's good. When something is interesting, something achieved by veiling complexity with simplicity, that's great. But when a piece works, sounds good, and is interesting musically, that's the epitome of musical perfection. It's better. Why would we settle for Mozart's 40th (which works, is simple and sounds nice) when we can have Beethoven's 3rd (which works, is interesting and sounds awesome. Sorry, bit of opinion going on here. But I think my point's been made) ? The same idea applies to this argument of Tau vs Pi. Again, I'll say that I only care about this argument in the domain of trigonometry and circular functions. I'm neutral about this in any other domain of mathematics. I just think that students should be given the opportunity to understand trig and circles in the best possible way, and to me, that's with Tau.

I think this has gotten to the point where we're arguing about arguing instead of arguing about Tau and Pi and maths and stuff.

(Also, was that analogy any better or am I just digging my grave here?)
(Also also, I shouldn't have chosen Mozart's 40th as my go-to average piece. It's just the first piece that came to mind. Don't get me wrong, it's a fantastic piece. It's just that Beethoven's 3rd is my favourite piece of classical music.)
(Also also also, I am spending way too long on these posts and I think I'm just repeating myself in progressively stupider ways. So I'm gonna go to sleep.)

But math isn't always elegant. In fact more often than not, it's a mess.

If you could have your house painted by either Michelangelo or a colony of wasps dipped in food dye rolling around on your walls, which would you choose? I'd say you'd probably choose the renowned Renaissance painter whose work is remembered five and a half centuries after his death over a swarm of angry arthropods each trying to have their way with your wall.

And that's what this boils down to. You're right in saying that when people say that maths is beautiful and elegant they're stretching the truth and forgetting all about the ugly, hairier side of things. But we are given a choice here. A choice to have a beautiful set of equations that are all logical, sensible and (for some people, myself included) pleasing to think about - a house painted by the orange Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle - or to have a set of equations that all make sense, all work, but are completely missing the point and have a glaring mistake that just gets in the way - a facade constructed by a raging horde of vespines drenched in pigment. And even though there have been wannabee hornets rolling all over it for several millenia, it's never too late to get your Italian in there to make your garage look like the Sistine Chapel - while Pi may have been the convention since the time of Archimedes, it's still not too late to rectify his mistake.

In short, Pi = pissed off hornets drunk on acrylic, and Tau = a god-damn teenage mutant turtle painter who dual-wields nunchaku. It may seem that I've warped this argument in favour of my side (mainly because, well, I have), but my point remains objective and valid; the only reason Tau shouldn't be used over Pi is because everyone's already used to Pi. Nobody sees the fault with the abstractly-thrown-together wasp wall because they've been looking at it for two and a half thousand years - they're used to it. But show them your beautiful Renaissance art and they'll have a whole new appreciation for your living room. Or mathematics. Whatever.

Yeah?

@Blizz - I partially agree with you. Tau should be used in circle functions and trig functions, because otherwise it's harder to understand and frankly it's stupid. In all other cases, read: where mathematics is not made confusing and tedious and ugly by it, Pi could and probably should be used.

I am not debating for the usage of Tau in all mathematics; that'd be silly, considering how much Pi is used. No, I'm simply saying that Tau should be used as the fundamental constant in trig and circular functions if anything. This is because there are only 2 things in this area of study that is associated with Pi and not 2 Pi; that being the area of a circle (Pi r^2, even though that is really (Pi D^2)/4 which isn't very pretty either) and the periodicity of the tangent graph, which I don't think should even be considered important.

The thing with the area of the circle is that it's 1/2 Tau r^2. While some may say that this isn't in it's most pristine form, terms of this form appear all the time, in fundamental equations in physics. Distance fallen = 1/2 g t^2, Spring energy = 1/2 k x^2, Kinetic energy = 1/2 m v^2, and the area of a circle is 1/2 T r^2. As for the tan graph, we see that, one, it is one equation out of dozens that pertains to T/2 (so is therefore virtually negligible), two, periodicity in T/2 is the same thing as periodicity in T anyway, and three, it still makes more sense to think of it in terms of T. "Why does the tan graph asymptote to infinite at pi over tw- OH, I SEE. IT'S THE Y CO-ORDINATE AT THAT ANGLE OVER THE X CO-ORDINATE. PI/2 IS T/4, AND I CAN SEE FROM LOOKING AT A CIRCLE THAT Y OF T/4 IS 1 AND X OF T/4 IS 0, SO TAN(T/4) OR TAN(90 degrees) IS 1/0, AND I KNOW FROM NOT BEING AN IDIOT THAT THAT'S +- INFINITY. HOW ABOUT THAT. HOW OBVIOUS AND EASY TO UNDERSTAND WITH TAU," says the loud student who yells everything that he observes.

But yeah, I don't really give a toss outside of circular and trig functions. I just think it makes more sense.

Tau. For teaching trig functions and the like, at least. I've talked to my maths teacher about it, and he agrees with me, but the thing is they can't just change the system like that. So I always have to think that, for example, pi/2 is a quarter of a circle, not half, even though that's stupid, and tau/4 is a quarter of a circle which is sensible and logical. For all other uses, I don't really care. I just think that the circle constant, when talking about circles, should be the ratio of the radius to the circumference, not the diameter to the circumference, because the diameter is less fundamental and less useful in the formulas associated with circles and trigonometry. To probably misquote Vihart, pi makes trigonometry ugly.

Circles are incredible, beautiful geometric shapes that display many of the most awesome things mathematics has to offer. Students should be taught about them in such a way that they realize this beauty. Tau is the tiara to the circle's fantasy princess, while pi is a bucket of mud. Tau makes circles and trig more beautiful, easier to understand, more appreciable, and just better, while pi makes it ugly and confusing and tedious. And no, it's not that all tedious. But the point of mathematics is to have things done in the simplest, most elegant way. Pi gets in the way of achieving this. Using pi as the circle constant is like using G/2 as the value used for gravity on Earth. Sure, it works, it gets the job done, but it could be better, there's every chance to make it better, so why wouldn't we make it better?

the idea of tau is a solution in search of a problem.

For the most part, I agree with this, and I understand it. But there is a problem it solves, one I have encountered personally. Tau makes things easier to understand for people just starting to learn about the associated topics. Take it from someone who just started to learn about trig functions and circle functions just a year ago; if I was taught Tau right from the beginning, understanding it would've been f easier. But it wasn't until I stumbled upon and affixed myself to Tau that it all became clearer and more logical.

Merry Blizzmas.

Darth Pacman.
Duh.

I'd appreciate it if you didn't post the walkthrough to me.

Nice script. Nifty that you made it compatible with all 3 RGSSs.
A little tip in REGEXP, and it barely matters, but instead of [0-9] you can just use \d, i.e.:

/\\[Cc]\[(\d+)\]/

You can also make it case insensitive if you add an i after the slash at the end.

/\\c\[(\d+)\]/i

Again, nice and nifty script. My only other tiny problem with it is that you overwrote the set_text method. While it's not that big a deal, you could've done the same thing just by going:

alias coloured_descriptions_stxt set_text
def set_text(t = '', a = 0, *args)
  t.gsub!(/\\[Cc]\[([0-9]+)\]/) { "\001[#{$1}]" }
  coloured_description_stxt(t, a, *args)
end

Not 100% that would work though... :S

The Approaching Curve
Our cracking voices became part of the music.
The car pressed on faster through the night. As our voices lowered,
The cadence again overtook the air.
Up ahead there was a curve approaching.
She made no indications of slowing.

I teared up the first time I heard that

I haven't posted here in a while. #_#

Spoiler: ShowHide

Pleaaaaaaaaaaaase, ladies! There's enough Blizzard to go around for everybody!

Saw it on facebook

I don't like that. D:<

So that they can effectively do the same to sites not based in the U.S., like MegaUpload was.

MegaUpload was based in Hong Kong. I don't know how the U.S. government took it down.

Anonymous has caught wind. Anonymous is pissed. REALLY PISSED. And tell me class, what happens when Anonymous gets pissed?
DDoS. DDoS happens.

http://gizmodo.com/5877679/anonymous-kills-department-of-justice-site-in-megaupload-revenge-strike

Update: Anonymous says they've also knocked off the RIAA's site--looks down for us at the moment as well.

Update 2: Universal Music Group has also fallen off an e-cliff.

Update 3: Goodbye for now, MPAA.org.

Update 4: Affected sites are bouncing in and out of life, and are at the very least super slow to load. Anon agents are currently trying to coordinate their DDoS attacks in the same direction via IRC.

Update 5: The US Copyright Office joins the list.

Update 6: This Anon sums up the mood in their "official" chat room at the moment:

    Danzu: STOP EVERYTHING, who are we DoSing right now?

Update 7: Russian news service RT claims this is the largest coordinated attack in Anonymous' history--over 5,600 DDoS zealots blasting at once.

Update 8: the Anonymous DDoS planning committee is chittering so quickly, it's making my laptop fan spin.

Update 9: Major record label EMI is down for the count.

Update 10: La résistance est international--French copyright authority HADOPI bites the dust under Anon pressure.

Update 11: The Federal Bureau of Investigation has fallen and can't get up.

But Anonymous can only do so much... Let your congressman know that a vote for SOPA is at least 50% votes for his opposition.

Going to wikipedia won't do much today, it's locked in probably the biggest protest imaginable on the internet against SOPA. The problem with this bill is that it's written by people who either don't care or understand what it'll do to the internet, and it's written for people who are too scared of the internet to think that it has feelings.
This bill will affect 2 BILLION PEOPLE ACROSS THE WHOLE WORLD. Everybody should do their part in stopping idiots in Washington who don't realize what they're doing to the world. Sign petitions, talk to your local government guy if you're in America, send death threats to senators, whatever it takes to stop SOPA or PIPA.

Yeah, I didn't think it was all that difficult or special, and the pattern became clear really quickly. I'd just never seen it before, never heard any special correlation between roots of powers of x. But because I love mathematical beauty, I just had to figure it out for myself. Thanks for telling me that Blizz.

Also winkio was totally right XD

My brother and I stumbled across something interesting whilst playing around with wolfram between watching Digimon and gaining weight. For some reason we got onto square roots of 2 to power x. I noticed that when x is even, then result is always whole, and when x is odd, the result is always the same as x-1, multiplied by sqrt(2). I also noticed that the whole number in the result doubles with every even number x. To illustrate what I'm saying...
sqrt(2^0) = 1 -> As 2^0 = 1.
sqrt(2^1) = 1 * sqrt(2) -> Previous result multiplied by sqrt(2)
sqrt(2^2) = 2 -> Original result (1) doubled.
sqrt(2^3) = 2 * sqrt(2) -> Previous result multiplied by sqrt(2)
sqrt(2^4) = 4 -> Last whole number result (2) doubled.
sqrt(2^5) = 4 * sqrt(2) -> Previous result multiplied by sqrt(2)
sqrt(2^6) = 8 -> Last whole number result (4) doubled.
sqrt(2^7) = 8 * sqrt(2) -> Previous result multiplied by sqrt(2)
And so on in that fashion. I'm not surprised by this, but I found it intriguing, and I'm almost certainly not the first one to find it (but I've never seen it before). My brother, however, was really fascinated and challenged me to write a little formula to calculate the result of sqrt(2^n). I've decided to take him up on that and try and write it in Ruby.
The first thing I realized I had to do was determine if n was even or odd. Easy stuff there (i = n % 2), no problem. The easy part is the even formula. That's still pretty easy (x = Math.sqrt(2 ** n)).
The part that stumped me a bit was the odd formula, but I figured out eventually, whilst typing this topic, so it's actually kinda pointless because I was going to ask for help but now I don't need it.  I ended up going with x = Math.sqrt(2 ** (n - 1)) * Math.sqrt(2), but any improvements would be accepted before I rub my brother's face in this relatively simple fomula.
Here's the method:

def whocares(n)
  i = n % 2
  if i == 0
    x = Math.sqrt(2 ** n)
  elsif i == 1
    x = Math.sqrt(2 ** (n - 1))
    x = x.to_s + (" root 2") # Or x *= Math.sqrt(2)
  end
  return x
end

Does anyone know anything about this formula? Is it famous and I'm just stupid? Are there any improvements that could be done?

Anyway, thanks for being a sound board without even knowing it. I just happened to solve this pretty simple problem too soon.  I'mma post this anyway.

3. Meet Iggy.

I love you?