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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."
I guess the government needs to do something about this
One of the things that always bothered me about this is the ambiguity of the approximation as well. Two interpretations:
More than 500 times but less than 1500 times, using the interpretation Parent suggests, suggests ratios of 0.00067-0.00200.
More than a ratio of 0.0005 but less than a ratio of 0.0015, suggests 667-2000 times.
How much overlap is there between these two ranges? 55.5% (667-1500) of the total range (500-2000) is overlap. The same is true for writing it as ratios: the range from 0.00067-0.00150 is 55.5% of 0.0005-0.0020.
This is tangentially related to why getting 40% off from someone charging 50% over MSRP is better than buying at MSRP. Without thinking about it, one might expect to spend 10% more in the first case (50% - 40% = 10%), but they're actually saving 10% instead (1.5 * 0.6 = 0.9).
Also, what would it mean if they were one time smaller than our galaxy (instead of a thousand times smaller)? How big would they be?
Until now I hadn't realized that there are actually people out there RIGHT THIS MINUTE who are several times more bored than I am. (Not, upon pain of death, to be confused with "several times as bored", or, God forbid, "several times less interested".
The "Runaway Galaxies" was the name of my garage band in the 70s.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.