Re: Temporal database - no end date

Larry Coon wrote:
> Marshall wrote:
>
> > You assume correctly. He admitted the possibility of 2.3 children,
> > but clings to the notion that time works differently for some
> > unexplained reason.
>
> Just to add to what you said, it's easy to overlook the
> distinction unless you really think about it. 2.3
> children are not actual children, but rather a statistic
> expressed in units of children. So just because children
> are constrained to integer quantities (biological
> anomalies aside), that doesn't translate to statistics
> describing children being similarly constrained. The
> same goes for time. Even in a quantized model of time,
> the fact that time itself is discrete doesn't mean that
> statistics describing time need to be discrete. MTBF is
> not time; it's a statistic expressed in units of time.

 Indeed!

 And the last time I checked, we don't store and reason about actual children in a database, any more than we store and reason about actual time.

 We store and reason about statistics. Received on Sun Jan 21 2007 - 16:33:10 CST