3 ms·

Part of me is saying yes, part of me is saying no. Let me elaborate: It makes all sense that tau should be the number used INSTEAD of pi: It simplifies things

Part of me is saying yes, part of me is saying no. Let me elaborate: It makes all sense that tau should be the number used INSTEAD of pi: It simplifies things even more. (I hope I'm not the only one tired of writing 2*pi in papers.) But that doesn't make pi WRONG: It's defined by C/D, and the formulas make perfectly sense, even though you have to multiply by 2. Besides, it would mean a total rewrite of a lot of papers, including a lot of mathematical books.

aspiringsensei 16y ago
> total rewrite of a lot of papers, including a lot of mathematical books. Somebody at the textbook publishers is smacking their lips at the prospect of selling an entirely new edition with an incredibly minor change.
- nopassrecover 16y ago
  Doubt it, they release annually anyway.
- blahedo 16y ago
  "Incredibly minor": not even close. This is the very worst sort of change to have to make, because you can't do it automatically, and doing it manually is fraught with opportunities for bugs. Not to mention that the natural pedagogical order will change in several cases that a simple "translation" wouldn't reflect. A lot of CS2 books in Java---especially two or three years ago---spent a lot of time and trouble showing how to build a generic linked list using Object, casts and all, and then as a little addendum, introduced "generics" that let you use a specific type. By translating the book from old Java to Java 1.5 without rewriting it, they were losing pedagogical opportunities and introducing confusion. Or the CS2 book in Java that used .clone() all over the place: wtf, until you realise that it's been translated from an equivalent C++ book that used copy constructors a lot. Laaaaame. So yeah, the publisher that treats this as an "incredibly minor change" is one whose books you should avoid.
  - aspiringsensei 16y ago
    Thanks for you response - I didn't think about that at all. Unfortunately most textbook purchasers don't have the ability to "avoid" bad texts.... I wonder if there were a way to rewire the textbook market so that teachers assigned different kinds of things...in other words, so that the teacher assigned a student to read a credible source of information regarding geometric identities rather than section 23.6 of a stated text. Imagine how much more interesting learning would be if students all came to the classroom having reasoned through the knowledge differently? It would be really neat to set up a system that was basically a "hacker news" for whatever piece of information...educators could comment on in-class efficacy & kids could comment on comprehensiveness. You'd need to charge for it (Unless you could source the books for free) but this is interesting conceptually.
  - aspiringsensei 16y ago
    Thanks for you response - I didn't think about that at all. Unfortunately most textbook purchasers don't have the ability to "avoid" bad texts.... I wonder if there were a way to rewire the textbook market so that teachers assigned different kinds of things...in other words, so that the teacher assigned a student to read a credible source of information regarding geometric identities rather than section 23.6 of a stated text. Imagine how much more interesting learning would be if students all came to the classroom having reasoned through the knowledge differently? It would be really neat to set up a system that was basically a "hacker news" for whatever piece of information...educators could comment on in-class efficacy & kids could comment on comprehensiveness. You'd need to charge for it (Unless you could source the books for free) but this is interesting conceptually.
  - JadeNB 16y ago
    > you can't do it automatically Why not? This seems like precisely the sort of change that you can make manually: Every π becomes (τ/2). Granted, this'll produce some weird formulæ, like `C = 2(τ/2)r`; but fixing those little problems is an excuse for still more editions. :-)

aspiringsensei 16y ago

> total rewrite of a lot of papers, including a lot of mathematical books. Somebody at the textbook publishers is smacking their lips at the prospect of selling an entirely new edition with an incredibly minor change.

nopassrecover 16y ago
Doubt it, they release annually anyway.
blahedo 16y ago
"Incredibly minor": not even close. This is the very worst sort of change to have to make, because you can't do it automatically, and doing it manually is fraught with opportunities for bugs. Not to mention that the natural pedagogical order will change in several cases that a simple "translation" wouldn't reflect. A lot of CS2 books in Java---especially two or three years ago---spent a lot of time and trouble showing how to build a generic linked list using Object, casts and all, and then as a little addendum, introduced "generics" that let you use a specific type. By translating the book from old Java to Java 1.5 without rewriting it, they were losing pedagogical opportunities and introducing confusion. Or the CS2 book in Java that used .clone() all over the place: wtf, until you realise that it's been translated from an equivalent C++ book that used copy constructors a lot. Laaaaame. So yeah, the publisher that treats this as an "incredibly minor change" is one whose books you should avoid.
- aspiringsensei 16y ago
  Thanks for you response - I didn't think about that at all. Unfortunately most textbook purchasers don't have the ability to "avoid" bad texts.... I wonder if there were a way to rewire the textbook market so that teachers assigned different kinds of things...in other words, so that the teacher assigned a student to read a credible source of information regarding geometric identities rather than section 23.6 of a stated text. Imagine how much more interesting learning would be if students all came to the classroom having reasoned through the knowledge differently? It would be really neat to set up a system that was basically a "hacker news" for whatever piece of information...educators could comment on in-class efficacy & kids could comment on comprehensiveness. You'd need to charge for it (Unless you could source the books for free) but this is interesting conceptually.
- aspiringsensei 16y ago
  Thanks for you response - I didn't think about that at all. Unfortunately most textbook purchasers don't have the ability to "avoid" bad texts.... I wonder if there were a way to rewire the textbook market so that teachers assigned different kinds of things...in other words, so that the teacher assigned a student to read a credible source of information regarding geometric identities rather than section 23.6 of a stated text. Imagine how much more interesting learning would be if students all came to the classroom having reasoned through the knowledge differently? It would be really neat to set up a system that was basically a "hacker news" for whatever piece of information...educators could comment on in-class efficacy & kids could comment on comprehensiveness. You'd need to charge for it (Unless you could source the books for free) but this is interesting conceptually.
- JadeNB 16y ago
  > you can't do it automatically Why not? This seems like precisely the sort of change that you can make manually: Every π becomes (τ/2). Granted, this'll produce some weird formulæ, like `C = 2(τ/2)r`; but fixing those little problems is an excuse for still more editions. :-)