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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • I’m kind of dissatisfied with the answers here. As soon as you talk about actually drawing a line in the real world, the distinction between rational and irrational numbers stops making sense. In other words, the distinction between rational and irrational numbers is a concept that describes numbers to an accuracy that is impossible to achieve in real life. So you cannot draw a line with a clearly irrational length, but neither can you draw a line with a clearly rational length. You can only define theoretical mathematical constructs which can then be classified as rational or irrational, if applicable.

    More mathematically phrased: in real life, your line to which you assign the length L will always have an inaccuracy of size x>0. But for any real L, the interval (L-x;L+x) contains both an infinite number of rational and an infinite number of irrational numbers. Note that this is independent of how small the value of x is. This is why I said that the accuracy, at which the concept of rational and irrational numbers make sense, is impossible to achieve in real life.

    So I think your confusion stems from mixing the lengths we assign to objects in the real world with the lengths we can accurately compute for mathematical objects that we have created in our minds using axioms and definitions.


  • When people want to enter a bus, especially a crowded one, it makes a lot more sense to wait for the people who want to get out of the bus to leave first.

    This one is so baffling to me, it’s really changed my view of how stupid some people really are. What do they even expect, that the other passengers magically disappear? It’s really not an abstract problem if the other passengers are trying to leave right in front of you. Trying to enter a bus is also not a rare situation, so you’d expect people to understand this at least after the first few times. Unbelievable.