• 2 Posts
  • 14 Comments
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.




  • I use the app Inoreader for that. No idea if it’s the best, just the first one I tried and I’m happy with it.

    Then you just subscribe to the feeds you are interested in. Almost every blog or news site has an RSS feed. Just make sure you don’t subscribe to any that make dozens of posts per day, or you’ll end up overwhelmed. My personal favorite feeds are the top 10 daily hacker news and a few youtubers I like.


  • Totally relate to that. I love discovering new things and reading many different people’s thoughts on a topic, but every platform based around scrolling on a feed is too addictive to me. If I use them too much I can already start to feel some cognitive abilities decline after a few days. The slow pace of lemmy is really nice.

    You might also be interested in curating an RSS feed for yourself if you haven’t already.