"...by an infinitely small (but non-zero) amount...." To paraphrase a popular space opera "Never underestimate the power of the infinity." Infinity is a mind-numbingly large (or small) thing. A totally incomprehensible value. Anyone who can actually understand it's magnitude, would be insane. It is one of the many things in life that one must not try to completely investigate but rather to, at some point, simply accept. I always enjoyed a story that a teacher of mine told about a class of juvenal delinquents that he once enjoyed and tried to inspire. He told them that they could not walk from one end of a class room to the other. He felt that in a class of "normal" kids, the students would have sat, smiling, waiting for the teacher to go on, but in this class one of the kids popped up, walked to the back wall, then to the front then said "shows what you know, sucker" and sat down to the applause of his classmates. The teacher then went on to explain that in order to walk from one end to the other, you first must walk half way. But then to complete the task, you have to walk half the remaining distance, and so on (here it comes) * infinitely * so that you never actually reach the other end, because you always have half way left to go. The kids thought about it and then one said, "that's bull shit teach, I know can still walk all the way" and another said "no man, he's right, you can get that close, but you actually never get there!" And before the shanks came out, the teacher said "Does it really make a difference? Can you get close enough that it doesn't matter? If you just keep walking WILL YOU STILL BREAK YOUR NOSE!!!???" and the kids were willing to accept that it probably isn't a good thing to understand that you can't actually get from one wall to another. Anyway, the point is, if you can believe that you can walk from one end of a room to the other, then you can believe that infinitely small IS zero and that 4.999 repeating is 5 and that you need to round even to avoid bias. In fact, this is the main difference between engineers and technicians. The difference between things making sense and things working. James Newton, PICList Admin #3 mailto:jamesnewton@piclist.com 1-619-652-0593 phone http://www.piclist.com ----- Original Message ----- From: David VanHorn To: Sent: Saturday, June 02, 2001 18:03 Subject: Re: [OT]: Brain Burp Rounding?? At 07:39 PM 6/2/01 -0500, michael brown wrote: >---- Original Message ----- >From: "Thomas McGahee" >To: >Sent: Saturday, June 02, 2001 11:19 AM >Subject: Re: [OT]: Brain Burp Rounding?? > > > > Sigh.... I did not say .99999 I said .99999 REPEATING. > > As in **forever**. > > > > Do not get confused between the VALUE of a number and its > > representation. Whether you like it or not, mathematically the mumber > > 1 exactly equals .9 repeating. hold on jack.. That's as nonsensical as saying that 2=3 for large values of 2. I have a problem with that. 0.99(followed by any finite or infinite number of nines) is by definition, not equal to 1.0 The value of 0.99(inf..) is less than 1.0 by an infinitely small (but non-zero) amount. -- Dave's Engineering Page: http://www.dvanhorn.org I would have a link to FINDU here in my signature line, but due to the inability of sysadmins at TELOCITY to differentiate a signature line from the text of an email, I am forbidden to have it. -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The list server can filter out subtopics (like ads or off topics) for you. See http://www.piclist.com/#topics -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different ways. See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.