Post #2299477

2024-05-03 11:12 UTC

@andrewt@mathstodon.xyz @lily@glaceon.social I hate everyone's obsession with the golden ratio so much. It's an interesting number mathematically but for literally none of the reasons anyone thinks it's interesting. They'll go impose a spiral or ratio onto literally anything, it won't even be aligned, there's enough tolerance that they can get away with it, and they're like "wow cool universal constant" when no, you're just doing designerist numerology

Replies (4)

@andrewt@mathstodon.xyz 2024-05-03 11:41

@astrid@fedi.astrid.tech @lily@glaceon.social the *amount of people* that think A4 paper is in the golden ratio is maddening. there is more than one interesting number! A4 is in √2, not ϕ! Although whatever you do don't tell the designers that or they'll be calling it "tritone paper" and insisting it's cursed

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@sgf@mastodon.xyz 2024-05-03 12:34

@astrid@fedi.astrid.tech @lily@glaceon.social @andrewt@mathstodon.xyz What I particularly like is /why/ people get all golden ratio on music (*): An octave has: Five black notes. Eight white notes. Thirteen notes. 5, 8, 13, Fibonacci, Φ! Unfortunately, the 8 and 13 double count the first/last note, and it's really about the twelfth root of two. So you've got a whole branch of musical numerology based on incorrect 1-based indexing! ((*) Sorry, Andrew, if this is what you were referring to, but I didn't see it explicitly mentioned.)

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@futurebird@sauropods.win 2024-05-04 14:47

@astrid@fedi.astrid.tech @lily@glaceon.social @andrewt@mathstodon.xyz https://mathstodon.xyz/@UnsolvedMrE/112383294922587477

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@mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz 2024-05-04 14:48

@astrid@fedi.astrid.tech @lily@glaceon.social @andrewt@mathstodon.xyz And the funniest thing is that this bullshit has been going on for literally hundreds of years, to the point that it becomes a bullshit tradition you can refer back to.

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