"You left your homework home again, I'll meet you after 3rd period to drop it off - last time (right) I'm doing this"
So, you're going to disrupt a whole class of 20-30 children for this?
One of my professors in college would drop you a grade-point every time you disrupted the class with a phone call. It was actually a very popular program.
Actually, one doesn't need to. One can receive a text message with the phone's speaker off, and then read it when class is over.
The problem, as I see it, is phone use during class... Not phone possession during class. The trick is making sure students understand that it is never OK to use the phone during class. In my experience school teachers aren't good at instituting such "zero tolerance" policies - nobody likes to be the one who has to lay down the law like that.
I can sort of understand why schools would lean toward banning phones in the school altogether - it's too easy for someone to realize they have an incoming call and ask to be excused to use the bathroom or something so they can go talk on the phone... Teachers and school administrators are expected to be using that time to educate the kids. Allowing students to goof off reflects badly on them and the work they're doing.
There has been some dissatisfaction with this decision, as some see cookies as an imperfect system. However one government official to whom we spoke via telephone said the resolution was "good enough for me." We had hoped to ask some further questions but all we heard was some sort of ruckus accompanied by a sound like "om nom nom" just before the phone connection was lost.
Benevolent or not, a dictatorship is a dictatorship. It can be a great way to get things done (really, I think clearly establishing leadership is essential for establishing a coherent direction for a project...) but of course people won't always be happy under such circumstances.
Or you could stop using pedantry as an excuse to not understand the correct usage of language (because that's the opposite of pedantry), and realize that "X times smaller" means "1/X times larger".
The fact that I am being pedantic does not imply that I am wrong. Inverse measures simply don't work well as the basis for quantitative comparisons. Not given our long-standing decision to measure the size of things linearly, as opposed to using the inverse scale.
"times larger" means the same thing whether you take the two words separately or together. "times smaller" does not.
It's standard English and has been for hundreds of years.
Yes mathematically it makes no sense, but language isn't mathematics.
In this case, it is. The language in question is describing a mathematical relationship: due to the use of the inverse scale ("smallness") the meaning of that kind of statement is widely understood, but not according to one consistent interpretation.
1 dimension vs 2 dimensions... assuming these galaxies are flat.
1x1 = 1. 10x10 = 100.
10x wider, 100x more area.
That was easy.
Parent post wasn't complaining that a 3-dimensional object that's 10 times wider should necessarily be 10^3 times more massive (though both happen to be true of your mom) - rather, parent post was simply making the point that to say something is ten times smaller than something is fairly nonsensical...
Draw it on a number line: 10 is ten times larger than 1 because it is ten times farther from 0 on a number line. 1 is ten times less than x because it is ten times farther from y on a number line. Go on, fill in the values for x and y.
No, 10 is ten times larger than 1 because the ratio of their sizes is 10:1.
1 is ten times smaller than 10 because the ratio of their sizes is 1:10.
The basic problem is a lot clearer if you're dealing in percentages:
3 is 50% larger than 2. (3 = 2 + 50% of 2) 2 is 33% smaller than 3. (2 = 3 - 33% of 3)
2 is not generally considered 50% smaller than 3, even though 3/2=1.5. Nor is it considered 66% smaller than 3, even though 2/3=66.6%.
The basic ambiguity when talking about relative factors that separate two quantities (particularly when attached to concepts like smaller, colder, etc. - inverse scales) is what your baseline of measurement is. Largeness is a scale that can be readily quantified. It's the scale to which we associate all our units of measure. Smallness has no meaning except as the inverse of largeness. The basic problem is that times and smaller have meanings of their own (multiplication and subtraction, respectively) which don't imply the use of the inverse "smallness" scale.
One could say 1 is 1/10 of 10, or that 10 is 10 times greater than 1: both statements work nicely with zero as the basis point. But to say something is ten times smaller than something, you have to ask, ten times what? Ten times ten would be 100, so ten times smaller than 10 (by that scale) would be 10-100 = -90. One would have to use the nearly senseless statement "Ten times the smallness of 10" to clearly convey 1/x = 10 * 1/10...
We already have dwarf galaxies, so its size doesn't matter. I've never heard of a galaxy class based on color.
Well, according to Probert, Galaxy Class is duck-egg blue with sky blue aztecing... It was just when they filmed it that they desaturated the color a bit to give it the more grayish appearance seen on TV. Also, the smooth hull seen on the early model was intentional, as one would expect that on a massive ship, small details would be almost impossible to pick out. But, of course, that's not what audiences expect: if something looks plain, it looks fake... So later on features like the large lounge windows were broken up into smaller panes, and on the second ship model a lot of surface detail was added.
"Is greater than", as used in math, does not have the same meaning as "is better than".
So how did you figure the intended meaning ?
Ooh, good one. I know what the speaker's intent was, therefore there must be nothing wrong with how he was saying it, right? Damn, I guess you showed me.
Well, not quite. First off, this isn't the first time I've seen this abuse of language. Hence, I get it ('cause I figured it out already) but I do still find it confusing. People will say "a > b" and I'll think "A points at B" or "A leads to B" - these also aren't mathematical concepts, but in the context of an English sentence they're really no less valid than the "is better than" interpretation people are using. And then when people use two of 'em (to say, I guess, "much greater than" - which seems just a silly way to use the symbol) and I look at it in terms of C++ or Bash, and think "read from" or "append to"...
Second, an abuse of language that one can conceptually navigate is still an abuse of language. The "paws/pause" example I gave earlier is a good example here. This is one of the things they taught us to avoid in human-computer interactions classes, specifically because the link between the image and the concept it's supposed to represent isn't direct enough for a good UI. Of course English speakers can figure that one out by reading it aloud: "paws button" - but that doesn't mean it's a good symbol to use for the concept "pause". Likewise, people who fuck up homonyms like "there" or "too", or use the word "literally" in contexts where it doesn't actually apply, or use some combination of negations to various parts of their sentence that winds up inverting its meaning or making it ambiguous - of course the reader can figure out the intent but it's still a lousy standard of communication.
Finally - note that they went through like three posts just trying to get the dumb symbol to show up. Don't know why they had so much trouble - I could write ampersand-g-t-semicolon all day long - but after all that redundant posting trying to get it right, is it really still "shorthand" in this particular case? At that point, isn't it just better to say what you're trying to say with actual words, rather than beat your head against the wall to get a stupid shorthand to work?
I kinda liked that cartoon... except that playing J-pop to aliens confuses them (wait, maybe that makes sense)
Well, when you consider the aliens in Macross are basically humans, shuffled into a life of military service where anything of a sexual nature is forbidden and repressed to the point they don't even remember what it is they're missing out on - then the idea of them freezing up when exposed to images of a cute teenage girl is a bit easier to understand...
Oh, fuck this. Stripping the character. Damn/. We'll go with "!>" then.
You know, you could avoid the whole problem by expressing your thoughts with actual words instead of misappropriated mathematical symbols which don't really fit the sentence you're trying to form...
"Is greater than", as used in math, does not have the same meaning as "is better than". The fact that the readings can take the same meaning is somewhat irrelevant: it's the same sort of thing as using an image of paw-prints in a GUI to represent "pause" - the conceptual link isn't as direct as it should be.
So, please, leave magnitude comparison to domains where they have some meaning... Elsewhere, use words.
If I remember correctly the premise of the sequel is that Enzo and Andraia get lost on the web for a while and grow up to be badasses - and then return to Mainframe for the final battle with Megabyte?
This movie is about South Africa. I know it's difficult sometimes, but try to remember that there are countries on this planet other than the United States of America.
I don't know what you're talking about. I'm quite aware of The South. That's where Forrest Gump lived, and it's where televangelists are from...
You're not thinking alien enough. Aliens, if there are any, will be genuinely alien. StanisÅaw Lem (**) grokked this.
A 500m shimmering armoured blob that is unaware of anything taking place over less than a week or smaller in volume than a car. A billion coin sized independently mobile units co-operating as part of a single conscious organism that lives for only a few minutes at a time in a lake of frozen carbon dioxide that's periodically heated by a distant star.
The aliens won't need a translator, there will be nothing for us to talk about. What does a microbe have in common with you? Practically nothing. The aliens will have even less in common with us.
Well, those are all interesting ideas - but in the absence of any real data about what aliens are like I wouldn't assume that those ideas are more likely to represent the alien life we'll meet than anything else science fiction has come up with...
At least these aliens are slightly more alien, but they're still bipedal oxygen breathers with bilateral symmetry. I look forward to the District 9 TV series, but not to the romantic relationship between Detective Matt Sikes and (what is now) a giant bug living in the apartment next door.
You know, the whole idea of Sikes getting snuggly with a newcomer always seemed kind of screwed up. I mean, salt water is very dangerous to the newcomers, right? Human sweat is pretty salty...
But that didn't even come close to the silliness of a pregnant George Francisco...
I find it funny that this story's been tagged "gluten free"... My wife has celiac so I tend to think of gluten as something I have to deal with and other people aren't too aware of.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Disclaimer: I used my graphing calculator for porn... BOOBS....
5318008
As for:
"You left your homework home again, I'll meet you after 3rd period to drop it off - last time (right) I'm doing this"
So, you're going to disrupt a whole class of 20-30 children for this?
One of my professors in college would drop you a grade-point every time you disrupted the class with a phone call. It was actually a very popular program.
Actually, one doesn't need to. One can receive a text message with the phone's speaker off, and then read it when class is over.
The problem, as I see it, is phone use during class... Not phone possession during class. The trick is making sure students understand that it is never OK to use the phone during class. In my experience school teachers aren't good at instituting such "zero tolerance" policies - nobody likes to be the one who has to lay down the law like that.
I can sort of understand why schools would lean toward banning phones in the school altogether - it's too easy for someone to realize they have an incoming call and ask to be excused to use the bathroom or something so they can go talk on the phone... Teachers and school administrators are expected to be using that time to educate the kids. Allowing students to goof off reflects badly on them and the work they're doing.
There has been some dissatisfaction with this decision, as some see cookies as an imperfect system. However one government official to whom we spoke via telephone said the resolution was "good enough for me." We had hoped to ask some further questions but all we heard was some sort of ruckus accompanied by a sound like "om nom nom" just before the phone connection was lost.
What are "Supercomputer Lead Sparks"? How are they affected by RoHS? ...I think my parser failed on the sentence after that point.
Benevolent or not, a dictatorship is a dictatorship. It can be a great way to get things done (really, I think clearly establishing leadership is essential for establishing a coherent direction for a project...) but of course people won't always be happy under such circumstances.
Or you could stop using pedantry as an excuse to not understand the correct usage of language (because that's the opposite of pedantry), and realize that "X times smaller" means "1/X times larger".
The fact that I am being pedantic does not imply that I am wrong. Inverse measures simply don't work well as the basis for quantitative comparisons. Not given our long-standing decision to measure the size of things linearly, as opposed to using the inverse scale.
"times larger" means the same thing whether you take the two words separately or together. "times smaller" does not.
10x less volumetric + 100x less massive = 10x less dense
--don't worry, i have enough dense for the both of us :p
18 cheese + 14 degrees Fahrenheit - 2 meters / second = 40 units of nonsensical pseudo-mathematical fun!
It's standard English and has been for hundreds of years.
Yes mathematically it makes no sense, but language isn't mathematics.
In this case, it is. The language in question is describing a mathematical relationship: due to the use of the inverse scale ("smallness") the meaning of that kind of statement is widely understood, but not according to one consistent interpretation.
1 dimension vs 2 dimensions... assuming these galaxies are flat.
1x1 = 1.
10x10 = 100.
10x wider, 100x more area.
That was easy.
Parent post wasn't complaining that a 3-dimensional object that's 10 times wider should necessarily be 10^3 times more massive (though both happen to be true of your mom) - rather, parent post was simply making the point that to say something is ten times smaller than something is fairly nonsensical...
Draw it on a number line: 10 is ten times larger than 1 because it is ten times farther from 0 on a number line. 1 is ten times less than x because it is ten times farther from y on a number line. Go on, fill in the values for x and y.
No, 10 is ten times larger than 1 because the ratio of their sizes is 10:1.
1 is ten times smaller than 10 because the ratio of their sizes is 1:10.
The basic problem is a lot clearer if you're dealing in percentages:
3 is 50% larger than 2. (3 = 2 + 50% of 2)
2 is 33% smaller than 3. (2 = 3 - 33% of 3)
2 is not generally considered 50% smaller than 3, even though 3/2=1.5. Nor is it considered 66% smaller than 3, even though 2/3=66.6%.
The basic ambiguity when talking about relative factors that separate two quantities (particularly when attached to concepts like smaller, colder, etc. - inverse scales) is what your baseline of measurement is. Largeness is a scale that can be readily quantified. It's the scale to which we associate all our units of measure. Smallness has no meaning except as the inverse of largeness. The basic problem is that times and smaller have meanings of their own (multiplication and subtraction, respectively) which don't imply the use of the inverse "smallness" scale.
One could say 1 is 1/10 of 10, or that 10 is 10 times greater than 1: both statements work nicely with zero as the basis point. But to say something is ten times smaller than something, you have to ask, ten times what? Ten times ten would be 100, so ten times smaller than 10 (by that scale) would be 10-100 = -90. One would have to use the nearly senseless statement "Ten times the smallness of 10" to clearly convey 1/x = 10 * 1/10...
Hmmmmm, interesting point. So how would you scientifically calculate the asshole "saturation point" when their effectiveness plateaus off?
I'd ask your mom what it takes to saturate her asshole. She has plenty of practical data to draw upon.
We already have dwarf galaxies, so its size doesn't matter. I've never heard of a galaxy class based on color.
Well, according to Probert, Galaxy Class is duck-egg blue with sky blue aztecing... It was just when they filmed it that they desaturated the color a bit to give it the more grayish appearance seen on TV. Also, the smooth hull seen on the early model was intentional, as one would expect that on a massive ship, small details would be almost impossible to pick out. But, of course, that's not what audiences expect: if something looks plain, it looks fake... So later on features like the large lounge windows were broken up into smaller panes, and on the second ship model a lot of surface detail was added.
"Is greater than", as used in math, does not have the same meaning as "is better than".
So how did you figure the intended meaning ?
Ooh, good one. I know what the speaker's intent was, therefore there must be nothing wrong with how he was saying it, right? Damn, I guess you showed me.
Well, not quite. First off, this isn't the first time I've seen this abuse of language. Hence, I get it ('cause I figured it out already) but I do still find it confusing. People will say "a > b" and I'll think "A points at B" or "A leads to B" - these also aren't mathematical concepts, but in the context of an English sentence they're really no less valid than the "is better than" interpretation people are using. And then when people use two of 'em (to say, I guess, "much greater than" - which seems just a silly way to use the symbol) and I look at it in terms of C++ or Bash, and think "read from" or "append to"...
Second, an abuse of language that one can conceptually navigate is still an abuse of language. The "paws/pause" example I gave earlier is a good example here. This is one of the things they taught us to avoid in human-computer interactions classes, specifically because the link between the image and the concept it's supposed to represent isn't direct enough for a good UI. Of course English speakers can figure that one out by reading it aloud: "paws button" - but that doesn't mean it's a good symbol to use for the concept "pause". Likewise, people who fuck up homonyms like "there" or "too", or use the word "literally" in contexts where it doesn't actually apply, or use some combination of negations to various parts of their sentence that winds up inverting its meaning or making it ambiguous - of course the reader can figure out the intent but it's still a lousy standard of communication.
Finally - note that they went through like three posts just trying to get the dumb symbol to show up. Don't know why they had so much trouble - I could write ampersand-g-t-semicolon all day long - but after all that redundant posting trying to get it right, is it really still "shorthand" in this particular case? At that point, isn't it just better to say what you're trying to say with actual words, rather than beat your head against the wall to get a stupid shorthand to work?
I think Robotech is being made into a movie too.
Anything "Robotech" should just die already...
I kinda liked that cartoon... except that playing J-pop to aliens confuses them (wait, maybe that makes sense)
Well, when you consider the aliens in Macross are basically humans, shuffled into a life of military service where anything of a sexual nature is forbidden and repressed to the point they don't even remember what it is they're missing out on - then the idea of them freezing up when exposed to images of a cute teenage girl is a bit easier to understand...
Oh, fuck this. Stripping the character. Damn /.
We'll go with "!>" then.
You know, you could avoid the whole problem by expressing your thoughts with actual words instead of misappropriated mathematical symbols which don't really fit the sentence you're trying to form...
"Is greater than", as used in math, does not have the same meaning as "is better than". The fact that the readings can take the same meaning is somewhat irrelevant: it's the same sort of thing as using an image of paw-prints in a GUI to represent "pause" - the conceptual link isn't as direct as it should be.
So, please, leave magnitude comparison to domains where they have some meaning... Elsewhere, use words.
Which protoculture? The one that gets you high and drives your space fortress, or the one that brings sex back to your civilization?
Man, don't even talk to me about that garbage from Robotech...
If I remember correctly the premise of the sequel is that Enzo and Andraia get lost on the web for a while and grow up to be badasses - and then return to Mainframe for the final battle with Megabyte?
What culture?
PROTOCULTURE!
This movie is about South Africa. I know it's difficult sometimes, but try to remember that there are countries on this planet other than the United States of America.
I don't know what you're talking about. I'm quite aware of The South. That's where Forrest Gump lived, and it's where televangelists are from...
Yes, just what we need. More "I'm a more (illegal) immigrant/minority whining.
Why is Michael Jackson the "King of Pop"? Because he kept saying he was.
The fact that he sold 750 million records might also have had something to do with it.
So.. it sounds like the premise of the Sci-Fi series 'Alien Nation'.. which was a very good series.
It was on Fox before Sci-Fi Channel existed... (And, as others mentioned, it was a movie before that...)
You're not thinking alien enough. Aliens, if there are any, will be genuinely alien. StanisÅaw Lem (**) grokked this.
A 500m shimmering armoured blob that is unaware of anything taking place over less than a week or smaller in volume than a car. A billion coin sized independently mobile units co-operating as part of a single conscious organism that lives for only a few minutes at a time in a lake of frozen carbon dioxide that's periodically heated by a distant star.
The aliens won't need a translator, there will be nothing for us to talk about. What does a microbe have in common with you? Practically nothing. The aliens will have even less in common with us.
Well, those are all interesting ideas - but in the absence of any real data about what aliens are like I wouldn't assume that those ideas are more likely to represent the alien life we'll meet than anything else science fiction has come up with...
At least these aliens are slightly more alien, but they're still bipedal oxygen breathers with bilateral symmetry. I look forward to the District 9 TV series, but not to the romantic relationship between Detective Matt Sikes and (what is now) a giant bug living in the apartment next door.
You know, the whole idea of Sikes getting snuggly with a newcomer always seemed kind of screwed up. I mean, salt water is very dangerous to the newcomers, right? Human sweat is pretty salty...
But that didn't even come close to the silliness of a pregnant George Francisco...
I find it funny that this story's been tagged "gluten free"... My wife has celiac so I tend to think of gluten as something I have to deal with and other people aren't too aware of. :)
Yes, but they were the one for you, New England!
Once they were absorbed into NYNEX that just didn't have the same ring to it...