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Strange New World Discovered: The "Mega Earth"
astroengine (1577233) writes "Meet 'mega-Earth' a souped-up, all-solid planet that, according to theory, should not exist. First spotted by NASA's Kepler space telescope, the planet is about 2.3 times larger than Earth. Computer models show planets that big would be more like Neptune or the other gas planets of the outer solar system since they would have the gravitational heft to collect vast amounts of hydrogen and helium from their primordial cradles. But follow-up observations of the planet, designated as Kepler-10c, show it has 17 times as much mass as Earth, meaning it must be filled with rock and other materials much heavier than hydrogen and helium. 'Kepler-10c is a big problem for the theory,' astronomer Dimitar Sasselov, director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, told Discovery News. 'It's nice that we have a solid piece of evidence and measurements for it because that gives motivations to the theorists to improve the theory,' he said."
See the top locations for making your next interstellar vacation. Now 20% off!
"2.3 times larger" is grossly ambiguous in at least 2 different ways:
Until we read further, we are left to guess whether that means 2.3 times the diameter, 2.3 times the volume, or what. A few sentences later they clarify a bit, but it's still sloppy writing.
Second, "times larger" is ambiguous in English. If Earth has diameter 1, then a diameter 2.3 times as large would be 2.3. Technically, a diameter 2.3 times larger would be 3.3 (1 + 2.3).
Call that nitpicking if you want, but it's still sloppy writing.
The galaxies are ACCELERATING away from each other, and we don't have a real solid answer for why.
Cosmology, the study of where all these planets and stuff came from and how, is still a young field with really big and really interesting discoveries yet to be made.
For all of those people claiming that there's nothing new to discover, point them to the stars and ask how the hell that happened.
And the state of the art is getting to the point where we don't need placeholders to conveniently fill in the gaps.
Exciting times.
The second one is not at all ambiguous. "2.3 times larger" means "multiply how large the first thing is by 2.3" to absolutely anyone. It's kinda ambiguous when you're talking percent, but not a literal multiplier.
The first one is totally ambiguous, though.
This must be the planet the overlords lived on in "Childhood's End".
"The second one is not at all ambiguous. "2.3 times larger" means "multiply how large the first thing is by 2.3" to absolutely anyone."
No, that would 2.3 times the size. 2.3 times *larger* strongly implies the correct answer (for x=1) is 3.3, not 2.3.
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Funny that we have exactly the same in German. The conclusion from the logical meaning is 3.3, but no one uses it this way. People who value the logical meaning say 2.3 times as large, they just would not use it, and the others use it the way that it is commonly used, although it is illogical.
It was craftily designed (intelligently, even) by Satan to trick man into forfeiting God's love for their fickle and impotent mistress, Science.
It's working great!
Shouldn't this be 1.7 decaearths?
Since the sun is about 333 kiloearths in mass, wouldn't a megaearth be about 3 solar masses? :-)
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
Something that was 2.3 times the size of the earth would be only about 12 times the mass of the earth if it were the same density
since it is 17 times the mass it must be denser than the earth, presumably more iron/nickel than silicate rock.
way too much gravity for 'life as we know it, Jim'\
Is that font 2.3 times larger?
In English it's extra confusing, because 50% more always means 1.5x, 30% off means 0.7x, but 200% more should logically mean 3x, but often means 2x.
Thanos
Employee Of the Month - Cyberdyne Systems Corporation - September 1997
The second one is not at all ambiguous.
If it's not ambiguous, then it's just wrong.
1 + 1.3 = 2.3. Thus 2.3 is 1.3 more (or larger) than 1.
Similarly, 1 + 2.3 = 3.3. I.e., 3.3 is 2.3 larger than 1.
2.3 is 2.3 times 1. But not "times larger". That confuses addition and multiplation.
If the article had said "2.3 times", and left out "larger", it would have been correct.
And that's the problem with a lot of scientists, they can only think in what already has been theorized and can't look beyond that.. Just like they say 'laws of physics', there are no solid 'laws of physics' as those 'laws' have only been created by man who just doesn't know every little detail.. Ofcourse it's great to have some guidelines, but as I said, a lot of scientists can't see beyond those guidelines and see them as a definite border.. Well, if we all wouldn't see past those 'laws' then we would still believe the earth was flat...
"2.3 times larger" is grossly ambiguous in at least 2 different ways:
Until we read further, we are left to guess whether that means 2.3 times the diameter, 2.3 times the volume, or what. A few sentences later they clarify a bit, but it's still sloppy writing.
Second, "times larger" is ambiguous in English. If Earth has diameter 1, then a diameter 2.3 times as large would be 2.3. Technically, a diameter 2.3 times larger would be 3.3 (1 + 2.3).
Call that nitpicking if you want, but it's still sloppy writing.
Okay from the Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K...
The sidebar states 17.2 +/- 1.9 M (M = Earth masses)
It also states that the Radius is aproximately 2.35 R (R = Earth radius)
Surface Gravity is a little over 3x that of Earth.
Unfortunately this probably isn't going to be a liveable world. It's only about a quarter of the distance from its sun that the Earth is. It's mean surface temperature is a whopping 400+ degrees Fahrenheit (so yes, paper would auto-ignite there).
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Is that font 2.3 times larger?
que the squintillionth Arker/font hoo-dee-rah.
FYI, Arker will always post in that douchey format. Even if he later decides that his idiocy is, well...idiocy - he's far too invested in his many defenses of his font lunacy to ever give it up.
Same here in Finland, it's an endless battle. One common argument for the "illogical" way is to separate the "larger" and "2.3 times" -- it's larger than the original, and it's 2.3 times the original. Of course, if you want to say "2.3 times the original" then you don't need the extra "larger" qualifier.
My usual argument for the logical way is to ask "what about 50% more". It's obviously not half of the original. The illogicians are quick to point out that the meaning changes when you go below 100%.
For an even worse abuse of linguistic logic, we have a colloquialism (not too common, fortunately) of saying "half more" when meaning "double the original". There is of course some "logic" when considering the inverse number, but now we have three different ways to intepret the same thing >.<
In fact, the case of "double" is interesting in that there is no ambiguity, it's always interpreted as "two times the original". However, Finnish doesn't have a direct native equivalent of "double", so we even get the confusion of someone saying "two times larger" when meaning "two times as large". Fortunately, we do have a loan of "double" ("tupla, tuplasti"), but it hasn't quite replaced the "two times" expressions.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
I vote for the existence of unobtanium on that planet. 2.3 times the size of the Earth? Who cares? The fact that it has a much greater mass means that there has to be something else there (at least in the mind of most scientifically uneducated humans)... :-)
Of course, truth is often much more prosaic and unexciting. Ain't SciFi grand? :lol:
Can't we all agree to down-mod Arker to well-deserved oblivion? It seems like the only decent thing to do.
"Times larger" is not ambiguous. "X is Y times larger than Z" means "X is Y times Z larger than Z. "Y times" is in relation to Z. There is no other correct way to interpret it. It's often used and interpreted incorrectly, but that doesn't make it ambiguous - it makes marketers liars and people morons.
Of course, there's the completely senseless uses as well. "X is Y times smaller than Z" where Y is greater than 1 implies a negative sieze for X, and "DSL is 10 times slower than cable" implies a negative speed for DSL (then there's the whole issue of internet "speed" when we're really talking about bandwidth).
Science cannot explain the existence of this planet, therefore God made it!
Checkmate, atheists!
It's really a bad stroke of luck for humanity that English is the de facto international language. The English language is pretty messed up in more ways than one. For example, in the English language it's often impossible to know how to properly spell a word without learning it through use and experience. Unlike for example the German language, where you can practically always tell how to spell a word by how it is written.
They're like kittens. They're knocking planets about right and left.
Nobody can prove that's not what's behind the expanding universe. Deal with it.
Second
I think you meant "where you can practically always tell how to spell a word by how it is pronounced".
Obviously if a word is written you know how it's spelled right?
Sorry did you just say you can tell how to SPELL a word ...by how its WRITTEN. Thanks Captain Obvious.
Riiiiiight! ;)
Obviously, I'm not a native English speaker myself.
"Unlike for example the German language, where you can practically always tell how to spell a word by how it is written."
I assume you mean by how it is pronounced, not by how it is written (if you see how it is written you also see how it is spelled.)
That said, we should remember that languages that manage to stay close to phonemic (like German, Spanish, etc.) have done that, not by magically being immune to language change, but by enforcing and regularly updating a centralized definition and excluding a lot of their own diversity, whether geographic, socioeconomic, or temporal. Even German has quite a bit of variation as you go from the alps to the Danish border - English is spoken from England to New Zealand by way of India, and by way of New England on the return trip!
And I think a very real part of what makes English attractive IS the fact that it was already too big for any 'national academy' to control and dictate.
Also think about how much you would actually lose by any attempt to make the spelling phonemic. For example homophones are currently only confusing in speech, they would become ambiguous even in writing. To, too, two? Nope, just one word, tu. What about other words where one dialect may preserve a distinction but another does not? Which one will we reflect in writing? And which one is going to get stuck with significantly depressed scores in school as a result?
Peepel tat lrn tu rajt foneemik Eenglish wil av trubel reeding ol buks tu. Tink bowt tat.
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I don't think you said what you meant to say. Please rephrase, because I suspect you have something of value to share with the community.
Gender. As in the blessed lack thereof.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
No, except for that one error there, you are way too concise to be a native English speaker... try tossing a bit of ambiguity and some slang in there once in awhile... or is that "a while"... damn...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
That's because English took a large number of words from other languages and kept the spelling from the origin language. It's easy to figure out a word in German because the word is German. In English, a word could come from German, or Latin, or French, or Greek, etc.
There's one I see regularly that baffles (and disappoints) me: on the top of the flush valve for public urinals (sorry, I'm a compulsive reader) it says "This 1-pint-per-flush valve saves 87% more than standard 1-gallon valves". What the hell does "saves 87% more" mean? Uses 87% less, fine - but saves 87% more??? WTF???
You're being pedantic.
diameter and volume would be the same since ones used to calculate the other.
"larger" is used to denote size. So it's the correct word to mean a larger diameter/volume
"What the hell does "saves 87% more" mean? Uses 87% less, fine - but saves 87% more??? WTF???"
The only way that could make any sense would be if they were measuring the water that does NOT cycle through in a flush, i.e. the amount that is 'saved' between flushes. Since the idea is actually to 'flush' the system saving more in that context would be a bad thing.
They appear to be trying to say that it uses less water, as you say, but the wording is so horribly confused I dont think I would accept it as an English utterance. Those are English words strung together but the sentence as a whole has no meaning.
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A little bit pedantic, but it certainly matters as they vary as different powers of the radius. Having 2.3 times the radius would be almost 12.2 times the volume. If the volume was only 2.3 times the Earth's volume, then the radius would only be 1.32 times larger.
"2.3 times smaller" would mean divide. Larger is directional. I've never heard "times larger" used otherwise. Neither the Charlottean transplants nor my Appalachian relatives were ever confused about that.
"A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head."
It actually could mean something: if there used to be an older 2-gallon-per-flush valve, then the 1-gallon valves save 1 gallon - and the 1 pint valves saves 1.87 gallons (compared to the 2-gallon valves), which is 87% more than the 1-gallon valves did. But I seriously doubt that's what they mean, and even if they did, do they actually expect people to do that math while they're peeing?
Your last phrase proves your point in the way that different people understand things differently. I always thought 2.3 times larger means that whatever the reference is will be multiplied by 2.3, so if reference is 1, then end result is 2.3.
So yeah, point proven: TFS should be referring to absolute numbers and then infer relative numbers from that.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
you mean: piipol tät leern tu wrait foneemik inglish vil hav trable riiding ool buuks tuu. Tink abaut tät.
If far advanced civilizations do plant scale engineering, maybe we can find the aliens with the new data of exoplanets.
Do you use awhile alot?
Learn to love Alaska
Of course, if you want to say "2.3 times the original" then you don't need the extra "larger" qualifier.
That doesn't work when people say things like "2.3 times smaller". So "2.3 times the size of" is ambiguous if it could be larger or smaller.
I'm not arguing it's correct. I'm arguing that I hear it, thus it's in use.
In fact, the case of "double" is interesting in that there is no ambiguity, it's always interpreted as "two times the original". However, Finnish doesn't have a direct native equivalent of "double", so we even get the confusion of someone saying "two times larger" when meaning "two times as large". Fortunately, we do have a loan of "double" ("tupla, tuplasti"), but it hasn't quite replaced the "two times" expressions.
How odd. In English, we have double, triple, treble, quadruple, quintiple, and so on. I'm not sure how far up it goes, but I can't recall hearing much past triple.
Learn to love Alaska
And what if it said "2.3 times smaller"? How is "2.3 times" any more unambiguous when "2.3 times smaller" is in common use (even if you don't like it, that doesn't change reality). "2.3 times larger" is unambiguously "2.3 times the original size". At least everywhere I've lived.
Learn to love Alaska
Thanks for that. I didn't get around to reading yet, but my guess was that it would have been closer. The sun's gravity would pull loose gases, and the atmosphere could be burned or blown off. Leaving the low density gas giants for more remote orbits.
Learn to love Alaska
"Times larger" is not ambiguous.
Correct. In unambiguously means "X is Y times Z". The only people who think otherwise 100% understand it as written and object on pedantic grounds. Oh, and someone looked it up, in this case, they said X is 2.3 times larger than Earth, meaning X=2.3*E. So you are not only theoretically wrong, but we can verify this use with actual numbers, and you are provably wrong as well.
Learn to love Alaska
The old standard was 1.6 lpf - does that help derive 87?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Humorist P.J. O'Rourke once wrote that English doesn't just take words from other languages; English chases other languages into dark alleys and mugs them for their words.
Do not different Germans have different pronouncements? Or do Austrians, Swiss, North and South Germans all have the same pronouncement? Just in England there are numerous dialects with someone from the south barely able to understand someone from the north, then there are the Americans who not only have different pronouncements but even spell many words differently, as well as Canadians, Australians, various small Caribbean nations, all who have English as their first language but can barely understand each other if talking fast.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Marketing people would much rather use the word "more" than the word "less", and bigger numbers rather than fractions. So in trying to say "uses one-eighth as much", it comes out as "saves 87% MORE than".
Other people have commented on the lousy "size of Texas"-style "2.3 times larger than Earth" bit, but there's so much more wrong with this. There's the now standard "artists representation" header artwork/slideshow teaser that doesn't even have any sort of disclaimer that it's not a representation of any kind of this planet. There's also an appalling lack of any of the figures people really want to know such as what the surface gravity would be on this planet. I'm getting about 3.3 G based on the diameter and mass they give. Surface area is about 5 times that of Earth. The year is about 1 and a half Earth months. The temperature is over 200 degrees celcius, close to the melting point of tin.
"Marketing people would much rather use the word "more" than the word "less", and bigger numbers rather than fractions. So in trying to say "uses one-eighth as much", it comes out as "saves 87% MORE than"."
I think you hit the nail on the head, but you are being too kind. We can use fewer words and simply say "marketing lies.'
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So, how far from the mother start the planet is? A lightening star should clear those precious gasses around it as it coughs up the first waves of solar wind. Oh, yes a quarter of AU, according to wikipedia. Mystery solved!
It's more then that, read some older texts, perhaps early 18th century, and you will see many words with legal but different and often variable spelling. Even now what different groups of people consider correct spelling in English varies. "The centre of the grey coloured licence devise had a strange connexion to an organisation that had its dialogue paralysed as if by diarrhoea." Is an example of a correctly spelled nonsensical sentence that could trigger spelling nazis here.
Dictionaries weren't commonly used until the middle of the 18th century and later dictionaries attempted to change various spellings, often for no other reason then nationalism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I always figured he doesn't want anyone to read his posts so I usually just skip them. Much easier then struggling with his weird choice of font.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Vests wow~~~good~~
The real problem (or interesting thing about this if you don't like "problem") with this is scaling. 2.3^3 = 12.2. If this mystery planet is 2.3 times the size of Earth, one would expect it to have 12.2 (give or take a hair) times the mass of Earth, presuming that it has a similar core structure. It is almost half again more massive. This in turn suggests that the mantel is proportionally less of the total volume of the sphere, or rather, that it has a disproportionately larger core (nickel-iron core densities are 2-3 times the density of the mantel). At a guess, the core alone -- if it is nickel-iron as seems at least moderately reasonable -- is at least half again larger than the size of the Earth. Alternative, its core could contain an admixture of much heavier/denser stuff -- tungsten, lead, gold -- and not be so disproportionate.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
At 11 billion years of age, it clearly hosts one of the oldest civilizations in the universe. At an apparent mass of 20x Earth, which is quite impossible for a planet of this vintage, it is clearly a Dyson sphere built round a black hole constructed by the stellar engineer Omega as a power source for Rassilon's space-time capsules.
The reason it is in Draco is that it was shunted from its original universe into ours during the Third Time War.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The diameter is 2.3x. The mass is around 20x. The density is about 1.5x. The length of year is a shade under 1/3. The surface temperature is estimated at 10x. The gravity is around 4x. The magnetic field at Earth's current age was probably 3.375x. Tea time is a universal constant.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I wouldn't know how to make sense of "2.3 times smaller" in any context. Except maybe... you have things A, B, and C, and B is smaller than A, as is C, and the A-C = 2.3 * A-B. But I wouldn't know what to make of it if you just said "C is 2.3 times smaller than B!" without the comparison to A. And I don't know how you would phrase that comparison... "C is 2.3 times smaller than A than B?" That's just confusing.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
It's a large planet orbiting a star. It has no massive hydrogen/helium atmosphere, and that's a mystery, WHY? Well, let's see, park a planet about 20 million miles from its host star for ELEVEN BILLION YEARS and see how long the atmosphere hangs around, in the face of ELEVEN BILLION YEARS of stellar evolution, coronal mass ejections, and all the rest of it, and they're PUZZLED as to why it's not hte size of Neptune?WTF? I'm surprised it still exists at all...
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The real problem with current planetary formation theory is the silly expectation that catastrophic formation is rare and stable systems within a specific range are the norm. Likely catastrophic impact is the norm and when analysing planetary formation theory to align measured outcome's we have to be able to exclude unusual outcomes and put them down to catastrophic impacts rather than attempt to adjust the theories.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Everywhere I've lived, people have used 2.3 times smaller to mean X/2.3. Yes, it's bad English, but it's in common use.
Learn to love Alaska
Obviously if a word is written you know how it's spelled right?
hav u ever lookt at faceblog? u cant now if a werd is corektly speeled from haw it iz writen.
Piipl thät löörn to vrait foneemik inglish vill häv trabl riiding ool buks tuu. Think abaut thät. Fiksd it!
Do not different Germans have different pronouncements?
Standard Czech spelling is also strictly phonetic. When speakers of some local Czech dialects pronounce a word differently, they also write it differently. Loanwords often get adopted into Czech with their original spelling but the spelling then gradually changes to conform to standard spelling rules. Those spelling changes happen naturally because people simply prefer the standard rules over some weird foreign spelling.
One could argue that your error is not actually an error.
I am a native English speaker, and I know that there are multiple accepted spellings to many words depending on which region you are in, what slang has recently been adopted as common usage, if it's an advertisement or whether or not the writer likes pictures of cats.
So no, in English you cannot always tell how to spell a word by how it is written.
Apart from "devise" and "connexion" that sentence is perfectly valid British English, which is awesome.
So when you see 50% larger, you expect something half its usual size?
Sorry, parent should have been in reply to it's GP - my bad...
Exactly. Its probably just the remaining core of a gas giant that has slowly spiraled in over the eons.
Nope. Gender doesn't really change much. (e.g. Georgian not only lacks gender, but even words like he/she/it are the same, yet it's much more complex than English)
Lack of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G... , no need to morph words depending on this and that, makes English somewhat simple..
And actually it's got where it's got historically and not because it's easier or harder to use, thanks to British Empire.
Russian is widely used in former Russian Empire, even though it's much more complex to learn. (7 cases AND things have gender AND lots of exceptions in the grammar AND the need to morph words most of the time following puzzling rules)
No, it's because other grammars reform frequently, while English is very conservative.
English pronounciation has changed over the centuries but the spelling of words hasn't kept up with this. Eg: the silent 'k' in "knight" used to be pronounced back in chaucers time.
Every language has its quirks. While with German you might be able to tell how to spell a word on how it's spoken, on the other hand what gender a noun has in German is completely nonsensical (and German goes one step further than the Romance languages in having a neuter gender, so now you have three possible genders to guess at!) whereas in English the gender of nouns is entirely straightforward and logical.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
homophones are currently only confusing in speech
Their prices are pretty bewildering, too; $849 for the 5s 64GB?!
Using larger or smaller for quantitative comparisons is simply wrong. As you point out, as large is both proper and unambiguous.
By that logic, if something is the same size as something else it must then be one times larger, which is just silly.
Not on the internet you don't.
You may be misattributing that quote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Nicoll
In 1990, in the Usenet group rec.arts.sf-lovers, Nicoll wrote the following epigram on the English language:
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.[5]
Hmmm ... calculus was a very long time ago, but the volume of a sphere goes up according to 4/3 pi r^3. They are related, but not the same.
So if you double the diameter, you more than double the volume.
I would say "twice the diameter" and "twice the volume" are very different metrics. Twice the weight is also different.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The best discoveries in science come when someone looks at something and says "that's not right..."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
(so yes, paper would auto-ignite there).
Ah, home sweet home.
Reason why there is hope for the future generation #364:
"I wish my grass was emo so it could cut itself."
Only once in awhile.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
I'll have to break out my copy of the book, but I'm pretty sure O'Rourke said it first.
People like to make out that English is totally bizarre, and it is...until you compare it with other languages - that's when you realise they all have comparative problems. All human languages have spelling dramas, a million irregularities, etc.
You think English spelling is bad? Ask a Mandarin speaker to write a simple word, like "knee". Watch the dictionary come out.
Or which of the 37-odd conjugation sets are you going to use for that French/Spanish word?
Spanish speakers will wax lyrical about the regularity of the language, totally phonetic spelling, too - hang on was that: "s" or "x"? And that other sound, is that spelled "y", "j", "ll", or "dch"? And how come the conjugation of "ir" starrts with "voy" and ends up as "fue"? How is that regular?
Pronouncing those 400 letter long compound German words isn't fun, either. Try spelling them out over the phone.
Now and again...
http://www.dailywritingtips.com/a-while-vs-awhile/
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
And also that sentence is mostly valid Canadian English. And Australian English. Basically all the English variants except for American (whose status as "English" is sometimes contested).
Technically the volume expands at a rate of 4 pi r^2 with respect to the radius ( d/dr 4/3pi r^3 ). But yeah, should be obvious to people anyway based on 4/3 pi r^3 alone.
I had that font selected somehow years ago, made a few posts with it, realized how attention-whoring it looked, gave it up.
Diameter? Area? Mass?
Let's assume they meant diameter. Does this mean the planet has a diameter of 3.3 Earth diameters? That's the logical conclusion, since it's "2.3 times LARGER THAN", not "2.3 times AS LARGE AS".
This careless use of comparatives drives me nuts. Throw in some bogus percentages and I'm ready to gnaw my knuckles.
By that logic, if something is the same size as something else it must then be one times larger, which is just silly.
This.
Thank you.
You are assigning a logic when none exists. "one times larger", as you say, would be a restatement as "same size", so you wouldn't say it.
Learn to love Alaska
The statement is inconsistent for other reasons. if something is the same size, then it isn't "larger", one times or no times. It's a linguistic divide by zero.
X is 2 times larger is X=2*Y
X is 2 times smaller is X=Y/2
X is 50% larger is X=1.5*Y
X is 1.1 times smaller is X=Y/1.1
It's unambiguous and in common use. Nobody is ever confused by it, but pedantic jackasses complain about it. Much like "American" being used to describe those from the USA. Some claim that it could apply to anyone from The Americas, not just the USA, but I've never met any native English speaker who took that definition. So, do you think "American" is or isn't ambiguous?
Learn to love Alaska
Those two things go hand in hand. English absorbed the words from other languages precisely because it spread to so many parts of the world.
space is inflating.
Or time is contracting.
Did you set c to 1 and miss all the excitement?
--
The universe - it's made of mistakes all the way down - Scott Meyer
X is 2 times larger is X=2*Y
I know how it works and I understand your logic.
It's just shitty English.
Look... let me qualify that last comment:
It isn't about the math. It's about the English.
When something is said to be larger than something else, it is larger by a quantifiable amount. The question is: what is that amount? The amount by which it is larger is the difference between the two sizes.
So... if the amount the diameters differ (the amount it is "larger") is equivalent to 2.3 Earth diameters, then the total diameter must be 3.3.
However, 2.3 times (without the "larger") is unambiguous: 2.3.
I didn't invent English. Other people did.
"connexion" is perfectly valid British English though Google informs me it went out of style about 60 years ago. May have got carried away with devise as an alternate to device.
They were pretty strict about using proper spelling back when I was in school as it was a way to avoid being considered an American
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It isn't about the math. It's about the English.
OK, English, not the math or logic.
When something is said to be larger than something else, it is larger by a quantifiable amount. The question is: what is that amount? The amount by which it is larger is the difference between the two sizes.
OK, logic, not English
So... if the amount the diameters differ (the amount it is "larger") is equivalent to 2.3 Earth diameters, then the total diameter must be 3.3.
OK, it's the math, not the English.
I didn't invent English. Other people did.
OK, it's the English, not the math/logic.
Simply put, the English is logically inconsistent. But it is internally consistent in use. Irregardless, I could care less what you think about words and phrases. If they are used enough and are universally understood, then it's "correct" even if wrong. That's what you are missing. It's unambiguous and improper, but universally understood.
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In fact, the case of "double" is interesting in that there is no ambiguity, it's always interpreted as "two times the original". However, Finnish doesn't have a direct native equivalent of "double", so we even get the confusion of someone saying "two times larger" when meaning "two times as large". Fortunately, we do have a loan of "double" ("tupla, tuplasti"), but it hasn't quite replaced the "two times" expressions.
How odd. In English, we have double, triple, treble, quadruple, quintiple, and so on. I'm not sure how far up it goes, but I can't recall hearing much past triple.
Of course we have a construct for this, for example two is "kaksi", time (of repetition) is "kerta", so double is "kaksinkertainen". But it's a bit awkward, as it is basically just saying "two times" instead of a shorter idiom.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Of course we have a construct for this, for example two is "kaksi", time (of repetition) is "kerta", so double is "kaksinkertainen". But it's a bit awkward, as it is basically just saying "two times" instead of a shorter idiom.
English borrows from other languages. "Double" is the only special, then it's tri-ple, quadru-ple, quinti-ple. It's basically greek/latin roots of numbers, with "ple" on the end, even duo-ple almost works for double. We just steal smaller words to combine.
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