Hmm - I wonder about that.

I don't think that either pi or e contain infinite information. For instance, in the case of pi at least, there exists a recurrence relation that will compute the nth digit of pi. The formula isn't especially complicated, and I don't think that we can say that there's an infinite amount of information in it.

In any case, surely the fact that pi and e crop up endlessly in our mathematical models of the universe, there must be something to them. And if they aren't properties of the universe, then what are they properties of?

For instance. e can be defined as the number such that
d/dx(e^x) = e^x

That's a pretty simple definition, and it so happens that the number that satisfies that definition has an infinite decimal expansion. Does that mean it contains infinite information?

I'm disagreeing with

Because I don't think that the point makes any sense. Our representation of numbers, as in how we write them down, has nothing to do with mathematics itself. Or are you saying that in the system of integers, wherein the counting numbers lie, and what are what we generally refer to as 'whole' numbers, we should also place PI. And presumably e and all those other irrational constants, like every non-rational root for instance.

I suppose my problem is that I simply don't understand your point at all.

Defining x/0 as always equalling 42 is going to lead to contradictions though, so although you can certainly make that definition the mathematics you end up with isn't going to be terribly useful except for making smug comments on slashdot.

Arguments around the definitiveness or otherwise of mathematics are as old as mathematics itself, or possible even older, and aren't going to be resolved on this forum.

I find myself being a kiddo that's wondering what your point might be.

But you can't, for instance, have both PI and e as 'whole numbers' in our generic number systems. And in any case, this is just an argument about the representation of numbers using decimal notation - which is pretty much an arbitrary thing. You could in fact argue that PI and e *are* whole numbers, and we write them as Pi and e respectively. Looks pretty 'whole' to me.

That's because not lighting up doesn't prevent the endgame. My partner's Father, a fit and healthy man who never smoked a day in his life, died of cancer. What can you do? You're going to go from something, and not smoking is no guarantee that what you go of won't be extremely unpleasant.

Those accelerations aren't 'extra' - they are really happening to the phone and so would have to be taken into account too.

The problem isn't that the phone is moved around in the car, the problem is that the accelerometers and gyros of the class that exist in phones are orders of magnitude too noisy and imprecise to be used to dead-reackon for more than a few hundred milliseconds.

There is absolutely no way on earth that any cellphone that exists today uses any of its inertial sensors as part of its GPS solution.

Well partly at least it's the fact that I wrote a long reply enumerating seven specific things that I thought were terrible about the new design, and the comment was eaten by the site.

I wrote a long comment about all this, but the beta site ate it.

1) The reply to comment has a pointless title box labelled 'Reply to Comment'. What's it for? I left it blank in this reply.
2) Once you scroll down in the comments, fully one third of my monitor's width is wasted.
3) Also once you scroll down the indentation of the nested comments occurs on both sides, so that the comments gradually get narrower and narrower. This happens on the old site too, but the incremental indentation is less, and the amount of width to begin with is much greater. I have seen this taken to such extremes on some sites that comments actually become a column of letters.
4) The main page, wherein the stories, are listed has lost its personality. Gone are the icons on the old site that added colour and humour. Gone are the "from the insert-witty-and-relevant-comment-here dept." bylines, which added to the personality of the site. The place is for geeks, so it's supposed to be a bit geeky. It's not supposed to look corporate and neutered.
5) The main page downloaded a total of 1.7Mb when I refreshed. The old page downloaded 1.1Mb - which is still completely insane but it's quite a bit less.
6) The main page gives the impression of wasting large amounts of vertical space - although this is actually an illusion because both the old and the new site fit the same number of stories in each page - it still looks sloppy.
7) When I tried to preview the comment it turned out that I have to put something in the "reply to comment" box. So let's try again.
8) Ah it turns out to be the title, which used to be filled in automatically and is irrelevant anyway if you're replying.

The same is true of the theory that the earth's landmasses were once coagulated into Pangea. The same is true of theories about how the earth was formed, about the nature of distant galaxies, about the origins of language. In fact, the same is true about nearly every theory of the past. Do you treat those with similar distain?

Good for you, but they sure did back in Galileo's time.

There were no scientists before the invention of science. Those Greeks were pretty interesting and pretty clever guys, but scientists they were not. Francis Bacon invented science, and he did it in the 1600's.

Because ignorance hurts us all.

And not only *that*, but all forms are transitional forms.

I would agree here. The common concept of a 'list', be it shopping or todo, is actually closer to the concept of something like a 'bag' - the strange a rarely-implemented datatype from the equally strange and rarely used formal-logic-vs-programming language 'Z'. A list is generally in no particular order, although one might order one's shopping list in the order in which one expects the items therein to be encountered in the supermarket. And a list may contain duplicate items, but usually only in the sense that I wish to purchase five loaves of bread.

Similarly there isn't really anything in common usage that would convey the particular semantics of an 'array'. That is, an array is ordered, may contain duplicate elements, is no more expensive to search through than a list (cache-misses notwithstanding), but is more expensive to remove items from. These are advanced concepts, but any understanding of 'lists' and 'arrays' is incomplete without them.