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Cosmologists Find Eleven Runaway Galaxies
An anonymous reader writes: Discovery News reports that 11 homeless galaxies have been identified by Igor Chilingarian, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and Moscow State University, and his fellow astronomers. "The 11 runaway galaxies were found by chance while Chilingarian and co-investigator Ivan Zolotukhin, of the L'Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planetologie and Moscow State University, were scouring publicly-available data (via the Virtual Observatory) from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the GALEX satellite for compact elliptical galaxies."
When someone says, "The new battery is ten times smaller than the old battery," yes ... we can guess that part of what's meant is, "The new battery is a tenth the size of the old battery."
Except you're not guessing. There is no confusion that it might mean something else. You've seen this pattern dozens, if not hundreds of times before, and it always means the same thing.
The reason we have lots of vocabulary words, adjectives, and constructions is so that we can be nuanced and more precise in simple communication.
Yes, English has many nuanced words, but smaller is not one of them. It means comparatively small. It is one of the more basic and common words, and has a simple meaning.
you're communicating that the old battery is small,
No, you're not. It is perfectly reasonable for someone to say something like, "The Small Magellanic Cloud is the smaller of the two Magellanic Clouds," without implying it is smaller than a breadbox or even small in general.
It's no different than people who say, "I could care less," when they mean exactly the opposite
It is very different from that phrase. That phrase has a literal meaning exactly opposite the intended meaning. The phrase "ten times smaller" doesn't have multiple interpretations (unless contorting things as GP said). Even if we ignore that, and take your meaning that it implies both items are small for some reason, that is still not the opposite of saying one is not as large as the other.
Fine, you don't like the wording. But you're trying pretty hard to post hoc rationalize a justification instead of just admitting you don't like it... then you run with it and project what that must about people who don't share your dislike.
Actually, using a "runaway galaxy" as a mode of space travel solves a lot of issues. Steering is kinda imprecise, though, and you can forget about brakes.