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20th January 2023, 10:06 AM | #401 |
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You're still wrong.
I very strongly suspect the person you were conversing with didn't spot that you said hours and minutes instead of minutes and seconds. You made no attempt to draw their attention to the point in contention*. If you had asked them specifically instead of just hoping they wouldn't spot it I have no doubt you'd have received a different response. * It's not really in contention, you're just wrong and won't admit it. |
20th January 2023, 10:11 AM | #402 |
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"David Crosby died of the Byrds"?
And you expect us to take the person who wrote that seriously? |
20th January 2023, 10:15 AM | #403 |
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20th January 2023, 11:10 AM | #404 |
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20th January 2023, 12:15 PM | #405 |
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Why should we care what some rando says about how they use prime notations, exactly?
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20th January 2023, 12:21 PM | #406 |
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20th January 2023, 12:23 PM | #407 |
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Without question.
Quote:
But the real tell is the first (purported) message from this person.
Originally Posted by A very confused 'expert'
Vixen landed (finally) on the explanation that ′ for either hours or minutes, and ″ for either minutes or seconds, was something you wouldn't use where an examiner would see it, and therefore isn't an appropriately recognized practice. But à propos of nothing, this purported expert immediately confirms this admittedly non-standard vernacular as the thing to do. Vixen doesn't seem to dispute the standard usage: ′ for minutes and ″ for seconds. And we have documentary evidence for this usage. Why didn't the purported expert confirm the standard usage with no other prompting? Why did they immediately and exclusively confirm the allegedly backwoods vernacular that Vixen wanted to confirm? Doesn't that seem a little suspicious? Worse, now this purported expert is saying they still use the vernacular notation. In order to become the expert, they would have had those confusing and wrong vernaculars beaten out of them. This really is non-negotiable. We don't separate our informal lives from our professional lives along these lines. Once you have to start using standard notations for work, you just keep using them everywhere because it's easier than trying to keep two different notations in your head. I already covered the controversy over hours. The canonical base unit for time is hours. It's never been anything but hours. It cannot be anything but hours. This whole shifting of symbols to the next unit upward is purely Vixen's invention, which she tried to justify with a lot of technobabble she ignorantly stole from differential calculus. The only controversy has been over how to notate the base unit. ° was considered for hours of time, based on how the nomenclature gave rise to this whole system of notation. We call this the "degree symbol," but it's really just part of a different way of notating abbreviations in general. In Italian, some uses of Latin, and other modern languages, abbreviations are formed by superscripting the last portion of a word to the first letter. In contrast, in English, we're more apt to first few significant letters of the word and then a period: ft. for feet, for example.[1] So the Italian word octava gets abbreviated in musical notation by 8va. Note how the real semantic portion of the word—the oct- meaning eight—has also been abbreviated using the numeral. This convenience generally also applies to all the ordinals. The Italian primo ("first") is abbreviated 1°. Secondo and terzo get 2° and 3°, while in French deuxième and troisième are 2me and 3me. It wasn't so much a special symbol as it was just a superscript o. As Wikipedia explains (mostly correctly), the expression 29 °C should be read (facetiously) in old Italian as il ventinovesimo (29°) grado di temperatura, "the twenty-ninth grade of temperature." The superscript has completely transitioned into being a pure symbol and not just the last letter of ventinovesimo. We have to add C or F now, to be scrupulous, but that wasn't always the case. The only remaining example of 45° to indicate il quarantaquinto grado of something not explicitly mentioned is il quarantaquinto grado del circolo, or "the forty-fifth degree of the circle." But we're talking about hours, minutes, and seconds, and the important thing to remember is that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. You'll find a number of sources including Wikipedia who say that ° was once used also to indicate hours. And also some sources that say it still is, in medicine. I have yet to find a single one of my colleagues in medicine, including medical-school professors, who concur. But yes, ° once was used to mean hours. But since it's really just a shorthand to indicate any ordinal and doesn't actually call out any units, there was considerable discussion about whether it should continue to be used that way. Does 0° 4′ 33″ indicate an angle, a time duration, or a very cold temperature to be outside in? Part of the discussion was about dropping ° altogether as an anachronism and not using it to mean anything. d was proposed for angles, still meaning 1/360 of a circle. And retaining the original gradus or "degree" (spelled out) for temperature was proposed. The only thing that stuck was using h to mean hours. ° by itself would continue to mean degrees of arc, and °C and °F would be new symbols to represent temperature. But to understand why this was useful, you have to understand why ° identifying an ordinal grade of anything meant something. 3° meaning the third degree of a circle works because the circle is a natural unit. It's the third degree, or gradus, of a natural object. You can subdivide a circle any which way: by radians, gradians, or septuagesimal degrees. But you can't meaningfully multiply the natural thing like a circle to get some sort of other thing. You can have a multiplicity of circles, which isn't the same thing. Similarly, 3° meaning the third degree of a day works because a day is a natural phenomenon defined by the movement of the earth. You can subdivide it it any which way, such as into vigiliae etc. the way the Romans did, or into six watches and then further into half-hour "bells" (eight to the watch) as the Royal Navy did.[2] 4° 3′ could easily (albeit hypothetically) notate, "three bells into the fourth watch," or 5:30 AM, or 5h 30′ if you're measuring time passed since midnight. The bedrock of the system is that ° (where used, or once used) always indicates the canonical base unit. In that case, that unit always the first division of a natural object or phenomenon. This is how we anchor the notation to the actual amounts we want to measure. When ° is used by itself, the natural object is a circle. So what's the natural object, phenomenon, or whatever for degrees of temperature? That's where the headache starts. Fahrenheit divides a physical phenomenon into 100 first-order degrees, but that phenomenon has been variously described, the most hilarious of which is the range of temperatures experienced in Helsinki or Stockholm or some city. Celsius was originally defined by the physical phenomenon of the liquid material phase of water—an observable phenomenon considered reasonably stable at the time. The range of temperature, from coldest to warmest, that water could exist under nominal conditions as a liquid was the natural phenomenon that anchored the system, and the first subdivision is 100 grades, indicated by °C (to indicate which physical basis is used). And because the basis of the system is that one step broader than ° is a natural unit or behavior, that's why the proposal of reverse primes as multiples was rejected. ‵ would mean, "The first multiple of days." What is that, the week? The month? If ‶ means, "The second multiplication of days," is that 4 weeks to the month? 52 weeks to the year? Once you realize there aren't an even number of weeks in month or days in a year, you see that it's not a good idea. And if ′ can mean hours, what would ° mean (as in how it used to indicate hours)? If ° in the ′-for-hours system means days, then what natural thing is a day the first subdivision of? Further, if the natural basis for temperature is the liquid phase of water, how can you even think of that arithmetically? As I said before, these days we stop using primes after arcminutes and arcsecond, although the system did define angular subdivisions notated by ‴ and ⁗. But since geographers and navigators defined them variously and differently, they quickly fell out of use and were replaced by decimalizing the arcseconds if not by decimalizing the degree of arc itself. The purported expert goes all the way to quadruple prime and says the primes symbols represent "hours, minutes, seconds and so on…" So we have, ′ = hour ″ = minute ‴ = second (never stated, but deduced) ⁗ = ? What unit of time does our purported expert think a quadruple prime stands for? The time measurement to which this system and these units apply stops at the second in all cases. There is no septagesimal division of a second of time that has ever been used, unless you want to consider the U.S. alternating current frequency. There never was an "and so on..." for time notated with prime symbols beyond ″. And we long ago stopped using more than a double prime for bits of a circle. This purported expert is profoundly ignorant of how the system works; how it was invented, revised, and formulated; and why it works. That's a whole lot more egregious than merely not knowing how to approximate primes on a keyboard or in chat the way we've all done it for decades. No. There is no expert advising Vixen. There is only Vixen's increasingly dishonest attempts at saving face. _____________________ [1] This is informal. The abbrevation for feet in American engineering is ft without the period. [2] I know about dog watches. Don't @ me. |
20th January 2023, 12:28 PM | #408 |
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Because she tell us they're no "rando," but instead a person with a doctorate in mathematics and extensive experience in physics and other science. She's proffering him as an expert who confirms her idiomatic usage of ″ to mean either minutes or seconds of time, depending on context.
She has not qualified this expert, nor permitted voir dire. She has not bothered to explain how this purported expert keeps making beginner's mistakes and displaying other suspicious behavior. She has not explained how the usage this purported expert endorses runs contrary to the unambiguous and well-understood rules by which the system operates, and to the philosophy of measurement and notation in general. Worst of all, she has not provided a single verifiable example of her idiom used by anyone outside this forum. She just keeps lying. |
20th January 2023, 12:53 PM | #409 |
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Oh absolutely. The fact that this person, if they indeed exist, has not been identified in any way that would enable us to confirm their reported credentials is the biggest hint to me that they are in fact some rando.
If I were to say that my father, who has a maths degree, argues that primes cannot be used the way Vixen is claiming I could provide you with his name and the dates of his study at Southampton University and you could look him up and confirm that he does indeed hold the requisite degree. I haven't mentioned the subject to him, although I suspect he would not be agreeing with Vixen, but my point still stands that I could provide evidence of his study in the relevant field. Likewise, if the discussion were on international politics I could provide my own name, and dates of study, and even a photo of my degree in international relations to confirm that yes, I have studied the topic at hand. I'm not claiming to be an expert by any means, but I would argue that I have more knowledge in the area than some random person off the street. If I had just claimed that "someone I know" has a maths degree and said X you could quite rightly tell me you didn't believe me because I had not evidenced any of what I had claimed. So the point still stands, why should we accept what some rando says about prime notations, especially when it contradicts reality? |
20th January 2023, 12:59 PM | #410 |
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20th January 2023, 07:58 PM | #411 |
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I used to wonder how a thread on this forum could possibly be on its 32nd iteration. My experience in this thread has been very informative.
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21st January 2023, 04:04 AM | #412 |
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I’ve just read this whole derail. It is everything about what is good and bad about this whole forum. The bad centres on only one member.
Other regular participants in this thread have far greater forbearance than I could have possibly managed. Well done. |
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21st January 2023, 11:30 AM | #413 |
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FWIW, our science teacher in Third Form (what you would call 9th grade in the US) had us using ° ' and " for hours, minutes seconds. That is a convention I stuck with for many years, right through my engineering training in the Air Force (they used the same units at Technical Training School) until I started programming Apple ][ computers in the mid-1980s, at which point I quickly switched to using H:M:S (or rather HH:MM:SS because time on the computer programs I was writing was always designated with leading zeros for 24 hour format).
I have never, ever seen " used for minutes in any context (whether related to time or angular distance), and would certainly consider that to be incorrect if I saw it being used that way. |
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21st January 2023, 12:20 PM | #414 |
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I'm in a profession that requires proof of credentials for regulatory purposes. But in lesser contexts, sometimes all you need is a conversation with someone to know if they're really an expert. There are certain things you can't fake unless you were there and went through it. For example,
* JayUtah smiles knowingly. That's how you show someone that you know the proper notation because you lived it. |
21st January 2023, 07:54 PM | #415 |
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21st January 2023, 10:59 PM | #416 |
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21st January 2023, 11:51 PM | #417 |
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If you're not a scientist but you think you've destroyed the foundation of a vast scientific edifice with 10 minutes of Googling, you might want to consider the possibility that you're wrong. Its TRE45ON season... convict the F45CIST!! |
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23rd January 2023, 08:15 AM | #418 |
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So how about it, Vixen? Do I get to converse with your "expert" directly without your interference? Or is your obvious sock puppet going to continue to spew his unqualified, uninformed ignorance from the shadows?
Can you provide a verifiable example of others using ″ to mean minutes or seconds according to context? Or are you just going to keep making up stuff? |
23rd January 2023, 09:21 AM | #419 |
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23rd January 2023, 09:30 AM | #420 |
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Funny how this guy deflects and evades in exactly the same idiomatic way you do. And in any case he has failed to confirm your claim that ″ can be used to indicate minutes of time, despite his earlier claim that he used it that way commonly.
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You have no consistent story for your misuse of ″ to indicate minutes of time. You have no example of or evidence for any such usage beyond yourself. Your anonymous "expert" has been exposed as uninformed and suspiciously similar to you. Are you simply no longer willing to defend your claim? |
23rd January 2023, 09:37 AM | #421 |
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23rd January 2023, 09:48 AM | #422 |
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23rd January 2023, 09:50 AM | #423 |
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So you see, your "expert source" (whoever he or she might be...) explicitly states that ' denotes minutes and '' denotes seconds. How are you doing with your search for a reliable source showing that '' can be used for minutes "in certain contexts"? And if by "out" you mean "out to lunch", I completely understand and commiserate. |
23rd January 2023, 09:51 AM | #424 |
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It's not abuse and it certainly isn't unwarranted. You keep claiming that people are being mean and abusing you but it only ever happens when you're being pressed to support your arguments. That you have no problem denigrating others makes the ploy all the more obvious.
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23rd January 2023, 10:09 AM | #425 |
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If you think you are being abused, report the post for moderation. Otherwise quit whining.
You are not being abused. You are being held accountable for inconsistent and factually disprovable claims you have made. Asking you to supply evidence for those claims, and pointing out your inability and unwillingness to do so, is not abuse. It is, in fact, how unsupported claims are detected and rejected. Doing so is the stated goal of skeptics and the major objective of this forum. By continuing to post in this forum for thousands of posts, you are effectively consenting to the process. You have claimed ″ can be properly used to indicate either seconds or minutes of time, depending on "context." You have claimed that this is something your critics should have known, and something that others besides you have done historically. Do you have any verifiable evidence for your claim? If so provide it, or admit that your usage is incorrect, and was incorrect when you first undertook it in this forum. This thread exists in the larger context of your proposal to judge the work of others in fields in which you cannot demonstrate even minimal competence. Your willingness to concede the relevant errors when challenged speaks to the degree to which you can expect to command attention for that judgment. Your conduct during the examination of your factual allegations—which includes your willingness to change your story, invent clearly fradulent "experts," and complain wrongly of "abuse"—speaks to your motives for judging the work of your betters. It cannot be, as you state, merely to raise questions or to legitimately challenge work that you argue is not acceptable in the relevant expert fields. Do you concede that ″ cannot correctly be used to indicate minutes of time? Do you concede that you are unqualified to question the work of experts in the fields of physics and forensic engineering? Do you concede that your behavior in this and other threads questions your integrity to do so with unbiased motives? If the answers to each of these questions is no, then supply evidence to support your claims and quit whining that skeptics are properly asking for it. |
9th April 2023, 11:45 PM | #426 |
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10th April 2023, 03:56 AM | #427 |
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I am not really sure why this has been singled out for a thread of its own. It arose because someone across the pond had never heard of primes being used to signify duration of time. At least JayUtah was honest enough to admit to having heard of it. Whether correct or erroneous, I am unsure why people didn't just move on. Today, of course the US-led generation are now forced to spell the thing out almost in full as people have no idea of convention, so one has to write 'hr' and 'min' when in the old days of writing stuff by hand shorthand notation was the friend of scholars, although, thankfully, I don't go so far back as to have had to use the slide rule, as some of my accountancy tutors had had to prove proficiency in same in exams. There was a moment of horror when near long-forgotten logarithms turned up, in having to demonstrate proficiency in calculating learning curves. I have to say, it was actually nice to put maths into everyday practice.
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10th April 2023, 04:32 AM | #428 |
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10th April 2023, 08:53 AM | #429 |
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Singled out solely because a moderator made it so. The length of this thread has been due entirely to your unwillingness to admit a simple, otherwise inconsequential mistake.
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It persists because many seem to consider this incident an indication of your overall annoying behavior at this forum. We've lost count of the number of topics you're ignorant of, yet insist on pontificating about in the apparent desire to appear smart and superior. You've chosen to do so amidst skeptics, who are both motivated and equipped to test dubious claims. Then you play the victim whenever you're questioned or exposed. It's not everyone else's fault that some believe such immature behavior should not pass unchallenged in a skeptics forum. If you're now—at long last—willing to admit that ″ does not mean minutes of time and never has—anywhere at any time—then maybe we can get somewhere. But since you still seem to be trying to prove your own superiority by selectively recalling the facts, you're still going to meet with proper resistance. [Blah blah slide rules blah blah] |
10th April 2023, 09:14 AM | #430 |
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10th April 2023, 04:19 PM | #431 |
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Vixen, why are you lying yet again?
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10th April 2023, 05:12 PM | #432 |
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10th April 2023, 05:43 PM | #433 |
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Indeed!
Vixen forgets that there are actual, real-world qualified and licensed engineers on this forum, some of whom have degrees in their specialist fields.... we deal with things like Standard Form, SI units, and scientific and engineering notation in our work on a daily basis... WE KNOW WHAT WE ARE ******* WELL TALKING ABOUT!!! This argument reminds me of Dara OBriain's quip about dentists; "A bloke who's a professor of dentistry for forty years does not have a debate with some eejit who removes his teeth with string and a door" When a lay person such as Vixen is told by several licensed engineers that she is wrong on some aspect of engineering, THEN SHE IS WRONG! End of story! |
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10th April 2023, 09:36 PM | #434 |
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It's not really an engineering question, since no one has used primes notation for timekeeping for 50 years. But for some applications—like preparing students to take the FE exam—the history and practice of notation becomes important.
Vixen tried to be clever by using an outdated notation. She used it wrong, confused a bunch of people by doing so, and has never stopped smugly insisting she's the one trying to teach people something they didn't know. I'm just amazed at how effortlessly someone can lie and still claim to hold the high moral ground. |
11th April 2023, 12:35 AM | #435 |
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11th April 2023, 03:46 AM | #436 |
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Our Subaru Forester displays the time it has been in "gas saver" mode (I.e., engine stopped while not moving) in Xh Y' Z" format. It's the only thing I've seen lately that does it this way.
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11th April 2023, 05:09 AM | #437 |
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And unsurprisingly, it still uses what was the old convention. Not one where double primes meant minutes instead of seconds.
And this subject could have been avoided simply by Vixen admitting that the initial use of double primes to denote minutes had been a typo (face it, most people have brainfarts or typos sometimes). But the doubling down, as well as frankly laughable claims about everyone else's ignorance was telling. |
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11th April 2023, 07:42 AM | #438 | |||
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Congratulations! You may have found a rare modern example of that notation.
You can see for yourself in this instructional video posted on Subaru's YouTube channel.
At around 1:33 you can see the time interval in primes notation at the top of the multifunction display in the center of the binnacle. It's counting seconds upward. Hour and minute are zero in this example, but 0h is not displayed at all and instead you see 00′ for minutes. Then at 1:41 you see the driver cycling through menu options and a trip duration is briefly displayed as 00h 01′. Don't blink, or you'll miss it. This isn't the engine-off duration, as nearly as I can tell, but rather the ongoing trip duration shown briefly as the driver goes to bring up the auto-start controls. This would have been the perfect time to use Vixen's purported, "It depends on context." In the previous display, seconds are counting upward as they pass. They're clearly seconds. In the second display, hours and minutes would have been the natural units for a trip duration, and could have reused ′ and ″ in that capacity if it were kosher to do so. But in this case—and as is appropriate for all cases—the designers have kept the proper units and the proper notation. That way there's little potential for misunderstanding, as people have realized for centuries while using this notation.
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Vixen, like so many other useless armchair detectives, seems to want to pretend she's ferreting out a hidden truth and holding powerful interests accountable to it. Certainly we neither cannot nor should not prevent people from taking an interest in and commenting upon things that happen in our world. But for a select and annoying few, this exercise seems to take the form of pontificating from a position of abject ignorance and going to extraordinary and childish lengths to make it stick, at the expense of people who genuinely do know what they're talking about. It becomes more about aggrandizing the self-appointed detective than about finding out what really happened. It's more about a person's fanatical desire to seem to get the right answer, no matter what the facts say. Dragging out her crackpot notions of how properly to use primes notation and who knew it first is just an example of such self-centered behavior. And if you behave that way in a skeptics forum, you'll be criticized for it. Behaving that way, knowing what criticism is likely to follow, and then complaining about being "abused" by such criticism... Well, there's a word for that. |
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