this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2025
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Science Memes

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If you are here asking: "Is this a science meme?"

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Science isn't a filing cabinet of facts, it's a conversation. For example, a photo of an eel or other localized wildlife counts because most people never see one, and wonder is the first step of inquiry. A car meme counts if it makes you curious about what's under the bonnet. If you want to talk about something you noticed in the world, chances are someone else wants to talk about it too.

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Virgin Physicists (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world to c/science_memes@mander.xyz
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/27589038

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[–] bus_factor@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There's less and less reason to do it (and it's never 5). On systems without floating point you might want to round it a bit, but only if the specific thing you're doing allows it, and even then you're more likely to do a fixed-point approach by using e.g. 314 and dividing by 100 later, or adjusting that value a bit so you can divide by 128 via bitshift if you're on a chip where division is expensive. However, in 2025 you almost certainly should have picked a chip with an FPU if you're doing trigonometry.

And while rounding pi to 3 or 4 is certainly just a meme, there are other approximations which are used, like small-angle approximations, where things like sin(x) can be simplified to just x for a sufficiently small x.