Please add a limit to how long posts can be

Another thread I never saw...

Is this an actual problem? When I find posts annoyingly long it's always because of included youtube videos and the like, not text.

(End of forum part, stop here if you want. Start of math part.)

About infinity:

The IEEE floating point ∞ and −∞ aren't numbers; they are indications of overflow or illegal operations (such as dividing by zero), provided to programmers because there are numerical algorithms that have some sensible thing to do when they get those answers. For example, 1/∞ reports 0. ∞◯n where n is finite and ◯ is +,−,×,/ reports ∞. ∞+∞ is ∞, but ∞−∞ reports NaN ("Not a Number") because the result is ambiguous, like 0/0.

Although ∞ isn't a number, there are infinite numbers — infinitely many of them, in fact. The first one, the "smallest infinity," is called ℵ₀ (pronounced "aleph null"; aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It is the number of integers there are, and also the number of rational numbers, but not the number of real numbers. The number of real numbers is called C for "continuum." When Cantor developed the theory of transfinite numbers (that's what these things are called), an obvious question to ask was whether C=ℵ₁, or putting it the other way, whether there are any transfinite numbers bigger than ℵ₀ but smaller than C. This was an unsettled question for something like 75 years (you can look up the dates if you really want to know), but while I was in high school it was settled in a frustrating way: It turns out that the axioms of set theory are consistent with or without C=ℵ₁. So it's now settled that the question has no answer. This was given a half-page article in page 1 of the second section of the NY Times, back when it was a great newspaper. I remember vividly being really excited, both that the problem had been solved and that the Times wrote an article for a lay audience that gave a serious explanation of the question and its answer.

If you have the least interest in mathematics, this is a really fun and accessible branch that they won't teach you ever unless you're a math major. Start by looking up "infinite hotel paradox." Don't start with the Wikipedia article that's the first hit. :~)

(This post is 35 lines long. :~/ )

Well then the height of the video would be included.
About infinities, there's a really interesting charpter about it in Alex's Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos

i've heard of that! it was about a hotel that he had to put an infinite amount of people in using different methods

Yeah exactly, it's an introduction to set theory.

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