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ultima on 02 August 2013
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ebw said:
ultima said:

Yes, I've done a lot of discrete mathematics. My explanation was with respect to the link you provided: intervals of real numbers. I'm sure you know that the real numbers are in no way discrete.

As for the discrete case, it still does not apply. When you calculate the number of meters inside a swimming pool along its length, you start at one end, and you start at zero. You do not start some voodoo magic by starting at one before you unrolled your measuring tape. Once again, answer me, how many generations are there from father to son?

Also, I did not ask explicitly, but I kind of insinuated that I wanted to know the passages over which you were arguing. It'd be nice if you could provide them.

From one math major to another, you should be ashamed about the poor quality of your analogies.  Generations are measured in discrete units which makes your comparisons to time and length specious.  This dispute has nothing to do with Lebesgue measure.  You are assuming that "generation" necessarily means a displacement, when in English the term is more commonly used to refer to a group of people (e.g. "this company was run by three generations of Smiths").  There's no need to drag math into a discussion that is merely about semantics of prepositions.

No need for me to feel ashamed. Notice that I did not use intervals for the actual argument. It was more of a trivia thing I threw in, because he sent a link to the wikipedia article about intervals of real numbers. In other words, math wasn't dragged into it; once again, it was just a random fact that removing endpoints from a non-trivial interval of real numbers does not change its length. In fact, I didn't even reveal I was a math major until the post with the link. Also, I never mentioned the Lebesgue measure.

Also note that I wasn't using time and length in their continuous form, but rather discretizing them. With time, I was counting whole hours. With length, I was counting whole meters.

Lastly, the meaning of the statement comes down to semantics. But, the way it was worded was strongly suggestive to me. Because from father to son is one generation in my book. Even still, I kept asking for the source so I could read and interpret it from the base material.