I’m one of them, haha. My archives are nice and organized, but anything related to a current project I’m working on either lives on the desktop or lives at ~, depending on which machine I’m using. Automated output type files go into a structure (like any kind of processed or cleaned data), but figures? References? Drafts? FFA on the desktop. For whatever reason I just cannot function with an organized workspace

Seriously, why would anybody bother putting their papers in a folder when the desktop is just right there?

At least the program can run in polynomial time. They tried to do the same for yall stamp collectors moms but quickly realized that problem was NP hard!

(Perfect, no notes)

Nonsense. An astrophysicist wouldn’t be caught dead hanging out in public with their dealer and somebody who thinks counting past 1 is pointless.

(/s but also shit talking is fun so pop off if this made your blood boil and you’ve got a witty retort)

She got blue, I’d let her smash

I used to have repeated ingrown problems with one of my big toes. The eventual solution was the doctor chemically burning my nailbed in that toe and now I don’t have a toenail there and it doesn’t grow back at all

“Everything I don’t like is ai”

Grow up. The imgflip watermark is clearly visible in the meme, and it’s an ancient meme format.

Euclidean geometry enjoyers in shambles

I guess n would be infinite in the limit I’m looking for. I’m looking at this in like a “musing about theoretical complexity” angle rather than actually needing to use or know how to use pi on modern systems.

For the record, I realize how incredibly pedantic I’m being about the difference between the irrational pi and rational approximations of pi that end up being actually useful. That being said, computational complexity has enough math formalism stink on it that pedantry seems encouraged

You sound like an involved and caring father. Rock on, dude

Do said atomic instructions produce pi though, or some functional approximation of pi? I absolutely buy that approximate pi is O(1), but it still seems like a problem involving a true irrational number should be undecidable on any real turing machine

Is it actually? I’ll admit im pretty rusty on time complexity, but naively I’d think that pi being irrational would technically make even reading or writing it from memory an undecidable problem

“is not like you do calculations by hand anyway”

… get off my lawn, whippersnapper.

That’s because your engineering ass needs things to be physical and sane. Physics is a field for the mentally unwell to sink further into insanity while incoherently scribbling greek letters on every available flat surface.

On a more serious note, yeah you absolutely have to be careful about where you apply really ambitious simplifications like that. There are plenty of mathematical regimes where you can use natural units (this is the term to look up if your interest extends further) and simplify your reference frame by a hell of a lot though. Setting the speed of light to 1 is also a hell of a drug, and brother I’ve got an addiction

You’re a monster. I love it

The real comment mvp. You deserve every positive vote my post got

Somebody else already said it, but that’s what the title is.

Longform: a lot of calculations that happen in astro deal with distances so large so large that only order of magnitude changes actually meaningfully affect the end result. To connect to a more common topic, here’s a joke.

“Whats the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars?”

“About a billion dollars”

This joke works for the same reason; 1 billion is so many orders of magnitude larger than 1 million that (1,000,000,000 - 1,000,000 = 1,000,000,000) is only incorrect by ~0.1%, even though substituting 0 for 1 million in that equation seems ridiculous on the face of it. Substituting 1 for pi has similarly minimal errors (tbh it usually matters waaaaaaaaay less than .1% error) in a lot of astro math

Realizing that my father was a coward killing goat herders from a billion dollar jet, not a hero like I thought growing up.

The most important thing I’ve ever been told about quantum is “shut up and calculate.” Results don’t seem physical? That’s quantum. Results don’t make sense? That’s quantum. Shut up and calculate

Christian scientists on their way to tell you about how their evidence free belief in magic shouldn’t affect how you view their ability to derive truth from evidence