Telescope Conjecture Disproved (Mathematics)

I had a calculator (Casio) in the late 70s/80s that miscalculated and power of 2 over 2^29. It would be off by +/-2 or +/-4. Doing microchip programming and that screwed up a bunch of stuff.
 
p0lka said:
On a lighthearted note, if you can ride a bike you're doing 12th dimensional physics :D

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I’ve seen that bicycle analogy and while it makes some sense it still doesn’t help me comprehend a large number of dimensions.
 
lionking said:
I’ve seen that bicycle analogy and while it makes some sense it still doesn’t help me comprehend a large number of dimensions.
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Well of course not. It's ludicrous to suggest our brains are really doing mathematics in twelve dimensions when we ride a bicycle.

And even if they were, that mathematics is totally inaccessible to our conscious minds.
 
W.D.Clinger said:
...snip...

Investigating that bug, the programmers found it wasn't a bug in their own code, but was a bug in the PDP-10's Fortran library. A certain trigonometric routine was flat-out incorrect in that quadrant. That error had gone undiscovered until the PDP-10 computer series was approaching the very end of its useful life.

Imagine all of the scientific papers whose calculations are called into question by that bug.

During the 1980s and 1990s, standard libraries shipped by both Apple and Microsoft contained at least half a dozen similar errors. I hope those libraries are more reliable now, but I don't really know.
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I once produced an office suite of programs that included a spreadsheet program, only after release did we learn it couldn't add up decimals correctly in some circumstances. That ended up being tracked down to the Amiga C libraries that Commodore provided. Oh the good old days!
 
This seems relevant. :D




After decades of studying the curve and the procedure that generates it, the consensus explanation is "it's just like that."
 
p0lka said:
The middle one doesn't make any sense, it doesn't define k :D
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There is (of course!) an "Explain xkcd" web site. Speaking of the first panel of "2529: Unsolved Math Problems", it says
Finally she asks whether the problem statement is ill-formed; considering that it's mostly gibberish, this may be true.​
 
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