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Re: physics/pedagogy of coffee-mixing



At 02:28 PM 6/25/00 -0500, brian whatcott wrote:

Hehehe....John is providing an amusing illustration of the dangers of using
simplifying assumptions, another favorite device of physicists....

And that is how I show that his incisive qualititative analysis is wrong.

I stand by the correctness of my analysis.

His misdirection here, is in taking "a spoonful" to mean a fixed number
of molecules of tea or coffee.

This was not intended to be a misdirection. I was trying to make a point
about physics and pedagogy. My point does not require playing word
games. The solution I gave follows from the question I gave, by following
the directions and giving each word its most ordinary natural meaning.

If Brian's point is that nothing in the world is exactly perfect, OK, fine,
I agree with that. If his point is that no matter what you are doing, you
can always do it drastically wrong, OK, fine, I agree with that, too. But
my solution holds to an arbitrarily high degree of approximation, and the
more carefully you follow the directions the more accurately it holds.

In Ludwik's model of discrete balls, my solution holds exactly.