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30th December 2022, 03:16 PM | #121 |
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30th December 2022, 04:09 PM | #122 |
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31st December 2022, 05:34 AM | #123 |
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I am flattered you believe I invented a system that mirrors the Ancient Babylonians and that I also made up 'FX'. However, I am not going to lie and take credit for something I followed as mere convention. The former (using " for minutes of time duration) was conventional for me. I have no recollection of having been 'taught' it but we all did it. As for the fx business, this is common internet abbreviation that came into being around about the same time as 'rofl' and the side smile : ) [I had to leave a space as the software keeps converting it into a smiley emoji], predating emojis as we know them to day. I have found a random message in my email archives from such a discussion forum (in those early days you had to set up something like LISTSERV if you wanted a forum discussion group). The following one of many comes from year 2004 and not written by myself:
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And BTW the Ancient Babylonians never had a zero in their counting systems so the addition of stuff like 'hr' is a modernism. Obviously, publishing houses have styles which change over time. However, that doesn't stop people from using informal shorthand. I wonder whether anybody else ever used the following shorthand:
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31st December 2022, 05:41 AM | #124 |
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31st December 2022, 07:08 AM | #125 |
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The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.Bertrand Russell Zooterkin is correct Darat Nerd! Hokulele Join the JREF Folders ! Team 13232 Ezekiel 23:20 |
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31st December 2022, 07:18 AM | #126 |
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31st December 2022, 07:22 AM | #127 |
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31st December 2022, 07:30 AM | #128 |
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The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.Bertrand Russell Zooterkin is correct Darat Nerd! Hokulele Join the JREF Folders ! Team 13232 Ezekiel 23:20 |
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31st December 2022, 07:52 AM | #129 |
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Straw man. I don't claim you invented the system. I claim you're misusing a well-known system out of ignorance and inventing stories of its rules, usage, and origin in order to cover up your error. I have provided the evidence for my claim, which you do not address.
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Please address the evidence provided. You have claimed the use of ″ to indicate minutes of time is a convention used by others besides you. Please show where anyone else has used it. You have suggested that in the case of time, the canonical base unit in primes notation can be renominated as days to make your notation valid. Please reconcile how you think this can be done within the rules you yourself agreed made the system work. |
31st December 2022, 07:57 AM | #130 |
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31st December 2022, 07:58 AM | #131 |
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I have to thank you at least for confirming that that method was used for durations of time, despite dozens of posters claiming they have never come across it in all their days.
As for the 1950's my school was quite 'traditional' (although I wasn't there in the 1950's!). The masters and mistresses wore black gowns and the |
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31st December 2022, 08:00 AM | #132 |
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31st December 2022, 08:16 AM | #133 |
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Careful with that straw now! Everyone in this thread knows that the prime notation system can be used to represent units of time. But 1) prime notation is effectively never used for time units when it comes to scientific discourse; and 2) when prime notation is used for time, minutes of time are always notated with the single prime (') (with seconds of time being notated with the double prime ('') - the clue is in the name there...).
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O. M. G. Was all of the above irrelevant ramble some sort of attempt to impress?? Wow.
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If this is true (which it is not), then your school was substandard in its teaching. Because ' has never been used to represent hours, and '' has never been used to represent minutes. Never. Ever.
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I guarantee you - just as I can guarantee every non-UK participant in this thread - that you'd lose marks in any exam if you used ' for hours and/or '' for minutes. And once again, this nonsense about "...if it was clear to the examiner what you meant" is a clear giveaway wrt your scientific illiteracy: one cannot just use any notation one likes, just so long as one "makes it clear what you meant". There's correct notation and there's incorrect notation. And - unequivocally and inviolably - using '' for minutes is incorrect notation.
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When you wrote 35'', there were only three viable correct interpretations as to "what was meant". Either you meant 35 seconds of time, or 35 seconds of arc, or 35 inches. There are no other possibilities. But then....
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....you dug yourself in deeper and deeper, as you recount above. You don't know what you're talking about, and every "explanatory" post of yours merely serves to make that clearer and clearer. |
31st December 2022, 08:22 AM | #134 |
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Oh mannnnnn. Look, I'll try to make it as simple as possible to understand. Imagine you are the captain of a ship. You are standing on the bridge, right in the centre of the bridge, looking straight ahead along the centre line of the ship. OK with the concept so far? Now, picture an imaginary line which runs from your eyes, through the tip of the bow of your ship, and out towards the horizon. Still OK? Anything to the left of that line - even by 1 arcsecond - is port. And anything to the right of that line - even by 1 arcsecond - is starboard. |
31st December 2022, 08:31 AM | #135 |
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In other words you received a second class education in a snooty atmosphere run by pretentious prats who never pulled you up on your non-standard use of primes.
You could have simply said - "Well, we used it that way at school, and nobody ever told us it was wrong, but if it is then I apologise and will stop using it that way in future seeing as it causes confusion." |
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31st December 2022, 09:09 AM | #136 |
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31st December 2022, 10:07 AM | #137 |
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31st December 2022, 10:08 AM | #138 |
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31st December 2022, 10:12 AM | #139 |
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But no-one has confirmed that " was used for minutes. That's your real error here, insisting that ' can be a valid way of designating hours and " can be a valid way of designating minutes.
It isn't, and if you were taught that way at school, then you were taught wrong, despite your snooty Oxbridge educated mortarboard and gown wearing teachers. |
31st December 2022, 12:10 PM | #140 |
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31st December 2022, 12:33 PM | #141 |
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31st December 2022, 01:09 PM | #142 |
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Both can be true. I merely noted that it was not a notation that someone trained in the sciences would use. You have claimed "five years" of physics education (i.e., O-levels, in which the primes notation for time was not taught or tested) and, at other times, you have claimed to be a scientist. I pointed out your use of nonstandard notation merely as evidence that neither of those claims was likely true.
I can find no evidence of the use of primes notation for time after about 1950. I believe multiple people when they say it wasn't taught to them as part of their curriculum, which would have been roughly concurrent with yours. It's therefore quite reasonable to believe that people living today have not encountered that notation, disused and untaught for 70 years.
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This is not your only abuse of primes notation. As others pointed out, you used ″ to indicate degrees. In a post last year, you quoted from Mr Justice Sheen's report on the loss of the Herald of Free Enterprise. Sheen correctly wrote (sec. 9.3) that the ship had rolled to 90º. But you transcribed it as 90″. Did your quaint school also allow ″ to represent any arbitrary unit of angle without context, rhyme, or reason? Granted not everyone wants to take the time to discover how to put the º symbol in a post. But your solution wasn't to write out "degrees," which would have been acceptable. Instead, your solution was to further abuse primes notation and proffer a symbol that means something in angles, but entirely the wrong thing. It's easier to believe you just don't know how primes notation works than it is to believe you were educated this way.
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If you knew it wasn't proper to use ″ for minutes of time on homework or exams, why did you think anyone here would immediately know what it was supposed to mean? It's either a widely-enough accepted standard that one other person would demonstrably have heard of ″ as minutes of time, or used ″ to mean minutes of time, or you're wrong.
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This suggests you believed your notation was correct and common outside the U.S., and what you styled to be the U.S. convention was an unwelcome complication. No, you're just digging yourself in deeper.
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It's worth noting that you were asked There are plenty of examples of you using more conventional notation, e.g. :— You use primes notation only for the time it took MS Estonia to sink, at first incorrectly and then correctly. You could have avoided all ambiguity--for which you were being roundly roasted--by writing out 35 minutes or 35 min--both well-established, widely-used standard notations. Were you trying to emphasize the correct use of primes notation, for that value only, in the hope it would supplant your mistake? Days later you wrote 0.35′. (Someone misquoted you as 0.35″ and others including myself perpetuated it.) When this latest gaffe was pointed out, and an explanation demanded, your answer was Back then your explanation was certainly not
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We belabor it because it is evidence of the level of dishonesty, ignorance, and bluster you have employed at this forum. That in turn speaks to whether you are technically competent and morally qualified to pass judgment on the expert work of others who investigated the sinking of MS Estonia.
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there is no requirement to normalize any quantity in primes notation. You conceded as much when you wrote 6′ 2 ⅛″ instead of 2 yd 0′ 2-⅛″. In American architecture, however, the AIA and UBC require dimensions 12 in or longer to be expressed on drawings in feet and inches. But this is a narrow requirement that doesn't even apply to all aspects of the American building trades or other areas of commerce. In contrast, the ASME standard is that when inches are used as the primary unit, only (decimal) inches are used even if a dimension amounts to more than a foot. We buy a 32″ door from the lumber yard, which goes into a hole labeled 2′ 8-¼″ on the floor plan. And then we can stand in that doorway and watch a Boeing 707 fly overhead at 500 ft/s whose plans show it to have an inside fuselage diameter of 139.3 in.
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The ship sank in 35″.The most natural modern reading of it is, "The ship sank in thirty-five inches," as absurd also as that would be. You wrongly claimed But you did not establish that the context was time. Your statements were all of the form, "The ship sank in 35″," full stop. Besides, you chose an outmoded method of notating time, and used it incorrectly. It's not your critics' fault that they didn't unravel your tapestry of omissions and errors to properly divine what you might have meant. On the contrary, your ineptitude illustrates exactly why the world insists upon precise and immutable notation. You can make this stop. Just admit you were wrong to write 35″ intending to say thirty-five minutes. Just concede that wrongness is a property that can attach to your beliefs and claims. Or just stop concocting ever more dubious piles of codswallop to pretend you know what you're talking about. |
31st December 2022, 02:35 PM | #143 |
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Indeed, Vixen is jumping on a sort of straw-man conflation between two related statements. "I've never seen ″ used to denote minutes of time," is not the same as, "I've never seen primes notation used for time." The latter is most likely simply the product of being younger than several decades old.
We haven't seen ″ used to denote minutes of time because it's emphatically wrong to do so. ′ is the proper primes notation for minutes. Until Vixen shows evidence for her claim that others used ″ for minutes, her ineptitude is still the best explanation for her usage. In the larger sense, we haven't seen primes notation for time in decades because it has fallen out of favor and been superseded with notation that's easier to use and understand. Zooterkin, I believe, came up with the musical title 4′ 33″ as an example of (relatively) modern usage. Vixen seems to have taken this as vindication that the system was once used (never in dispute), and that her use of ″ for minutes of time is also valid (greatly in dispute).
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31st December 2022, 03:05 PM | #144 |
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2nd January 2023, 04:11 PM | #145 |
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This is like debating with someone who claims Paris is not the capital of France. In fact, the arguer vehemently affirms, he has never heard of Paris and therefore it does not exist! The astonishing thing about arguing against something that is an established fact is that someone should wear their ignorance of Paris as a crown.
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2nd January 2023, 04:15 PM | #146 |
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2nd January 2023, 04:16 PM | #147 |
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2nd January 2023, 04:23 PM | #148 |
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As I said, when I copied and pasted from the Sheen pdf. Microsoft Word transposed the degree sign to inverted commas. Had I noticed or thought it important I would have corrected it, as it is hardly difficult.
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I expect it was a 'text recognition' translation making for poor copy. However, how desperate do you need to be to go through a quoted post from a document looking for a typographical error. As Shirley Conran once said, 'Life is too short to stuff a mushroom'. So now you are going to be claiming for the next umpty-nine posts that I don't know how to notate latitude and longitude. Perhaps it might be better to relax instead? I am disappointed that you haven't apologised to me for falsely accusing me of all kinds of wrongdoing. That is the measure of a man's mettle. |
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2nd January 2023, 05:13 PM | #149 |
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Here's where it was first introduced: http://www.internationalskeptics.com...1#post13681911 |
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2nd January 2023, 05:55 PM | #150 |
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2nd January 2023, 06:10 PM | #151 |
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These are not typos. They are errors in usage accompanied by increasingly fabricated claims that they are nevertheless still somehow correct. You will not admit even the slightest error on your part, which disqualifies you from credibly reviewing the efforts of your betters.
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I'm correct. I know I'm correct because the things of which I speak are part of my licensed profession, and part of what I taught in college. You can make this stop. Either provide the evidence that your vernacular usage is something that others besides you used and recognized, or just say, "I made a mistake." Whining that you're the victim of ill treatment and begging to be let off the hook will only steel my resolve to hold you accountable. |
2nd January 2023, 06:24 PM | #152 |
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No. You aren't presenting obvious fact, and your critics are not arguing against obvious fact.
You are the one finally having to admit that your vernacular usage of primes notation for time was—at best—employed only at your unnamed school at an unnamed time and place, and that you recognized at the time it shouldn't be used for wider contexts. You are the one admitting that primes notation is firm and fixed for feet and inches, such that the primes can be used by themselves. But somehow the minutes and seconds primes notation—for time only—can be redefined on a whim by something as ambiguous as "context." Essentially you're the one arguing that Paris isn't the capital of France, that it's instead a town called Boubou, and that everyone at your school (but no one else) used it so it's okay, and that it can either be Boubou or Paris depending on context. Are you quite well? |
3rd January 2023, 01:35 AM | #153 |
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3rd January 2023, 02:48 AM | #154 |
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Stop trying to change the subject and context. We were talking about a physical ship and a physical side of the vessel. The topic at hand was at which point would water came over the physical starboard side of the vessel when it listed at 45° in context of the sea, and at which point it is likely to capsize.
Answer that question. |
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3rd January 2023, 02:57 AM | #155 |
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Here is the Sheen Report:
https://assets.publishing.service.go...se-MSA1894.pdf Copy and paste Part 1 para 1.2 onto word doc yourself and you will see that it is Microsoft that transposes the ° into a ". |
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3rd January 2023, 03:00 AM | #156 |
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3rd January 2023, 03:04 AM | #157 |
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You claim to trump me because you are a licensed professional. I am a chartered professional and not given to dishonesty of any form.
So you have falsely accused me of inventing a prime system and of inventing an FX acronym. You refuse to take it back even though you admit in a rare flash of frankness that you have heard of primes to denote time duration after all. |
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3rd January 2023, 03:14 AM | #158 |
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3rd January 2023, 03:55 AM | #159 |
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3rd January 2023, 04:04 AM | #160 |
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Not quite accurate. The profession in which I am licensed encompasses the proper way to use units and notation to express measurements of physical properties such as time. My further experience as a teacher of my profession requires me to understand the history and origins of these measurement and notation systems.
Because of this expertise I can say that your use of ′ to denote hours of time and ″ to denote minutes of time is incorrect. ′ properly denotes minutes of time. ″ properly denotes seconds of time. I have explained why at length several times.
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I have supplied evidence to support my accusation, which you have not addressed. Yours is the affirmative claim, i.e., that your usage is acceptable and used by others besides yourself. You've been asked for evidence of that claim, but have refused to provide any. What you have offered instead is a shifting set of stories and additional claims that have the effect of backpedaling. I documented this thoroughly, and you did not address it.
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The point remains that it is your habit to adhere to your original beliefs long after the evidence shows them to be untenable.
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I never disputed that primes notation can be used to denote time. I simply said it's not something someone trained in the sciences would use, and not something in common modern use by anyone. This remains my position. Your claim is that primes notation for time can use ′ to indicate either hours or minutes, and that ″ can indicate either minutes or seconds, each depending on a notion of context rather than by the established standard. You have claimed this usage was common and accepted where you were schooled, and variously that it was used by others in a manner similar to yours. You've been asked a number of times to show evidence of this claim and you have refused. You have not been accused falsely or without evidence. On the other hand, you have made an affirmative claim for which you will not supply evidence. |
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