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Old 15th January 2023, 09:48 AM   #321
zooterkin
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Originally Posted by Vixen View Post
You know fully well from common repetition that I was referring to thirty-five minutes.

In a post on a chat forum I assumed people understood it took thirty-five minutes to sink the particular vessel referred to below the surface of the water. Thirty-five minutes being the second derivative of the usual - and much more normal - number of hours it takes a ship to sink below the surface of the water. The speed of a ship sinking from view is generally measured in hours. Thus, the first derivative in expressing a ship sinking is the hour, f'.


Do you think you could have a stab at answering the questions that were actually asked in the post you replied to?

Originally Posted by zooterkin View Post
That would depend what you meant when you write 0'6".

Did you mean 0 feet 6 inches? In which case, it would not be the same, since it it is legitimate, if unnecessary, to give the feet. 0'35", if analogous, would mean 0 minutes and 35 seconds. However, that's not what you claimed you meant by 0'35".

Did you mean 0 yards and 6 feet? That would be consistent with your claimed usage of 0'35" to mean 0 hours and 35 minutes. It would also be equally as wrong.
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Old 15th January 2023, 10:02 AM   #322
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Originally Posted by Vixen View Post
You know fully well from common repetition that I was referring to thirty-five minutes.

What you posted said 35 seconds.
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Old 15th January 2023, 10:33 AM   #323
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Originally Posted by Vixen View Post
Thirty-five minutes being the second derivative of the usual - and much more normal - number of hours it takes a ship to sink below the surface of the water. The speed of a ship sinking from view is generally measured in hours. Thus, the first derivative in expressing a ship sinking is the hour, f'.
Rubbish. No one who understands derivatives would write such rubbish.

If f is a single-valued function of one variable, mapping an argument x expressed in units A to its image f(x) expressed in units B, then the derivative of f is not expressed in units A, and is also not expressed in units B. The derivative of f has units B/A.

And the second derivative of f has units B/A2.

Example. Suppose the position (expressed as the number of meters from some arbitrary origin) of some object at time t (expressed as the number of seconds since some arbitrary origin) is given by a function f(t). Then the derivative of f is the object's velocity (expressed as meters per second), and the second derivative of f is the object's acceleration (expressed as meters per second per second).
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Old 15th January 2023, 10:34 AM   #324
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Originally Posted by Mojo View Post
What you posted said 35 seconds.
Nah, it all depends on context. Like, I might mention that there's a small river at the bottom of my garden and it's about 35" wide. Now, obviously the " there must mean feet, as 35 inches would barely be a stream or even a ditch, whereas 35 feet warrants calling it a river.

Geddit now ??
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Old 15th January 2023, 11:04 AM   #325
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Originally Posted by Vixen View Post
You know fully well from common repetition that I was referring to thirty-five minutes.

In a post on a chat forum I assumed people understood it took thirty-five minutes to sink the particular vessel referred to below the surface of the water. Thirty-five minutes being the second derivative of the usual - and much more normal - number of hours it takes a ship to sink below the surface of the water. The speed of a ship sinking from view is generally measured in hours. Thus, the first derivative in expressing a ship sinking is the hour, f'.
I can't understand what the highlighted means.

I am unfamiliar with any usage of the term "second derivative" (or indeed "first" or any other ordinal number followed by "derivative") that is not referring to calculus.

If you are referring to calculus, you'll be needing to differentiate with respect to something. So what exactly is this differentiated with respect to in order to get "minutes"?


This reads like half-remembered some terms from some long-ago schooldays, for someone who has forgotten what the terms actually meant.

It is nearly 30 years since I last used differential or integral calculus at university, but at least, since then I have used the concepts at work to understand measurements or simulations and act on them, and I think on a couple of occasions I have actually performed actual analytical integrations or differentiations as part of this.

ETA: Ninja'd by W. D. Clinger
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Old 15th January 2023, 11:13 AM   #326
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Originally Posted by Vixen View Post
Here's a screen print of the message copied from WhatsApp to gmail. As you can see, the primes have turned themselves facing the wrong way and that is 100% how they show on WhatsApp.
Originally Posted by JayUtah View Post
(why is copy-pasting into a different program somehow a requirement?)
And it finally clicked: you're trying to replay the Justice Sheen PDF story. Because that story was plausible in one case, you have it stuck in your head now that if you copy-paste something from one document to another, it might change some of the characters. And once again faced with having typed something wrong, not realizing it until too late, and not wanting to admit to any conceivable error, you're grasping at that straw again.

I've been trying to figure out why you didn't just screen-shot the WhatsApp conversation to try to prove your point. Why did you have to copy from WhatsApp, paste it into a different program, and screen-shot that program? And the answer is that this is what had to happen in the Sheen story, so copy-pasting is what you think you have to do to make a credible story in this case.

Very often as a knowledgeable skeptic dealing with uninformed and misinformed people, you have to figure which of an infinity of wrong ideas they have in their head. Someone who knows how character encodings work in computers has the one right idea. But someone who doesn't know anything about that bases their understanding of what happens behind the scenes when you copy and paste on who-knows-what.

Here is the letter R. What is actually stored in the computer memory for that letter in this post? It's an 8-bit number, 0x52 in hexadecimal or 01010010 in binary. Why that particular number and not, say, 42? Because we've agreed internationally for decades that the binary value 01010010, interpreted as a letter, will be the uppercase letter R. We call that agreement ISO/IEC 8859-1, which comes from the old ASCII standard from the days of the teletypes. The assignment of these 8-bit values to stand for letters and symbols in a computer's memory, or in digital communications, is called a character encoding. You may have seen other names for similar encodings such as UTF-8 or Unicode.

So back in the day when you were misusing the way primes notation was supposed to indicate time, a teletype that received the binary value 01010010 over its bulky, noisy, slow serial digital connection would put in motion some physical mechanism that would result in a metal type for R being positioned between a hammer and an ink ribbon. Then the hammer would fire, and you'd get an R-shaped ink smudge on the paper.

In the days of primitive computer terminals, the terminal received 01010010 over a slightly better serial line, and this told electronics to aim an electron gun in a certain way to paint a picture of an R in green phosphor. Go watch the old Andromeda Strain. They use this kind of terminal extensively.

We've improved on that a bit. How are you able to see an actual letter R in your browser, in this post, as you read it? Your browser reads 01010010 out of the computer memory in a programmatic context that tells it it's supposed to interpret it as a letter. Then it goes to the data for the typeface you've chosen for your browser and looks up the glyph for 01010010. The glyph is simply the set of instructions that tells the pixel-painting portion of your browser how to make an uppercase R, in that typeface, in pixels.

Here's R in the default typeface. Here it is, R, in a different typeface. And a third: R. You see different pixels painted in each case because the glyph is different in each typeface. But if you could magically peek into your computer's memory where it's holding the text of the post—the binary values, not the picture of the post that your browser has painted out of its typefaces—you'll see 01010010 in all three cases. By default, the browser translates binary values into the proper glyphs using the IEC 8859 encoding.

What's stored for 𝕽, a stylized uppercase R used in mathematics? In this case, not 01010010. Here we've switched encodings (and told the browser so) to use Unicode.1 We need more bits for that, because the encoded value for this character is 0x1D57D in hexadecimal. Not only is it looking up a different glyph, its underlying representation is different from just plain R. It is a different character with a different meaning.

So when you copy and paste, what happens? The glyphs don't get copied. The picture doesn't get copied. The encoded values stored in the underlying bytes get copied. In WhatsApp's program memory, 01010010 for R is packaged up and sent to, say, Firefox where it appears in that program's memory as 01010010. It may look different because Firefox is using a different typeface than WhatsApp to paint the pixels. But the underlying encoded characters do not change.

Put more applicably, if an encoded text byte is 0xBA (the symbol º), copy-pasting it into another program won't change that encoded byte to 0x22 (the basic double-qoute, ").

So what made that happen in the Justice Sheen report on Herald of Free Enterprise? JimOfAllTrades already covered that. What's stored in the PDF file for the symbol º as it appears in the report? Not an encoded character. That PDF is a scanned document. Someone put the paper report on a scanner, and the scanner took a picture of the symbol. That picture is what is stored in the PDF. Sure, your browser—and other programs—know how to receive the binary description of the picture and turn it into pixels for you. But it's just doing the same thing dumbly for every kind of picture: cats, scanned text, people's naughty bits.

Copy-pasting from this works entirely differently. As Jim notes, it's a bit of a software miracle that it can happen at all. When you select and copy the picture of the text, the PDF viewer program is furiously trying to interpret bits of the picture as letters, the way our eyes and brain do. Once it has done so, the data that goes into the clipboard is not the picture, but the encoded value for the character the program thinks the picture shows. If the picture looks like an R, the program puts 01010010 into the clipboard memory. But because this process isn't perfect, sometimes the picture of a º might look more like a picture of a " to the algorithm, so it stores 0x22 instead of 0xBA. Then at the destination, the ordinary character rendering process I described above paints the glyph for " instead of for º because that's what got (wrongly) encoded as the result of the picture-interpreting part of the PDF viewer. The destination has no way of knowing any different.

But wait, there's more.

When you type the " key on your computer, a binary signal for that keystroke is being given to whatever program has the keyboard focus at that moment on your computer. Most ordinary keystrokes get translated into the encoded character appropriate for that key sequence. So when I hold down the Shift key and press the R key, the binary value 01010010 (for uppercase R) gets delivered to the program as data that it's supposed to do something with. When I hold down Shift and press the key with the single and double quotes, the program gets 00100010, the code for a plain old double-quote.

So what does it do with it? Depends on the program. The vast majority of programs (including WhatsApp and Google Mail) simply add that character code to the current place in the document without further fuss. And then the glyph-painting part of the program paints some pixels in the right place on the screen according to what the typeface glyph says the R should look like.

But some programs try to be clever. A word processing program like Microsoft Word wants to make documents as pleasing as possible. Typographers know that plain old straight up-and-down double quotes " don't look good in type. We want “pretty” marks, where the open-quote and closed-quote symbols (single or double) are slanted, curled inward, or possibly inverted. But we don't want to make the writer hunt around for the right way to do it. “ and ” aren't just alternate glyphs for 0x22. They're completely differently encoded characters. If you look into the computer memory for this post, you won't see 0x22 surrounding the word pretty.

So when Word (and other Microsoft programs) see 0x22, they don't just dump that character into the data they're accumulating for your document. Word tries to see whether you're at the beginning of a sentence or the end of a sentence and instead of storing 0x22, it will store 0x201C or 0x201D instead, representing the encoded character of the open- or closed-double-quotation. Those are entirely different characters than 0x22. It's helping you make your document look more pretty without you having to try too hard.

If you copy and paste from Word, it copies those binary codes, not the 0x22 you originally typed. If you copy 0x22 into Word (as opposing to pressing the keys for "), you just get the plain glyph ". Later, other algorithms in Word might kick in and do the translation, replacing 0x22 with 0x201C or 0x201D. And if you leave the 0x22 in there and copy it out of Word, the translation into the typographic characters does not occur.

WhatsApp doesn't do any of this when you type. Text-entry widgets in Outlook for Web, Google Mail, or this forum don't do any of that. None at all. You only get that pattern of encoded typographical quote marks (not 0x22 or 0x27) when you type into Word. The statement you purport to be from a mathematician was typed into a Microsoft product, which then mangled it.

At my company we vacillate between turning the helpful rewrite features off or leaving them on. We want them to do their thing when we're writing plain English documents. But we don't want them to happen when we're typing technical expressions or symbols. At best they get in the way, and at worst they silently rewrite things incorrectly.

And we never, ever, ever use a single-quote followed by a double-quote, '", to approximate a forward triple prime. You always type three single-quotes, ''', or three backticks, ```, for a reverse triple prime. That's where you slipped up. Your "mathematician"—who clearly exists only in your head for the purposes of this thread—made a cardinal mistake. Your Microsoft typography slip-up just helped us see it more clearly.

So there's the full debunking of your, "It just copied that way, I swear," ploy. This isn't the same situation as the Sheen report, and you don't know enough about how computers work to lie effectively about how your symbols got botched up again.
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1 I'm aware that the single-byte encodings for Unicode are identical to the single-byte encodings for IEC 8859-1, and that likely the browser is just always using Unicode.
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Old 15th January 2023, 11:14 AM   #327
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Originally Posted by jimbob View Post
I can't understand what the highlighted means.

I am unfamiliar with any usage of the term "second derivative" (or indeed "first" or any other ordinal number followed by "derivative") that is not referring to calculus.

If you are referring to calculus, you'll be needing to differentiate with respect to something. So what exactly is this differentiated with respect to in order to get "minutes"?


This reads like half-remembered some terms from some long-ago schooldays, for someone who has forgotten what the terms actually meant.

It is nearly 30 years since I last used differential or integral calculus at university, but at least, since then I have used the concepts at work to understand measurements or simulations and act on them, and I think on a couple of occasions I have actually performed actual analytical integrations or differentiations as part of this.

ETA: Ninja'd by W. D. Clinger
Furthermore to this:

" ...the usual - and much more normal - number of hours it takes a ship to sink below the surface of the water."



What does this phrase mean? Is there a "usual time for ships to sink below the water"? From when does one measure it? Launch? Start of the trip? When the first trouble is reported? Abandon ship is announced?

What dataset is used?

All ships throughout history?

Ships launched in the 20th Century? Do you include the merchant ships sunk in convoys?

Passenger ferries that have sunk?
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Old 15th January 2023, 11:15 AM   #328
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Originally Posted by Vixen View Post
I would just concede that you know better than me in that instance, and thanks for the explanation, not get all upset because your knowledge was superior to mine.
People here do know better than you, and unlike you they can demonstrate that knowledge instead of inventing ever more absurd stories. You refuse to concede.
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Old 15th January 2023, 11:24 AM   #329
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Originally Posted by Vixen View Post
You know fully well from common repetition that I was referring to thirty-five minutes.
No. You wrote
The ship sank in 35".
with no context or further explanation. Since you wrongly thought ″ meant minutes, you have no reason to believe that people thought you were talking about minutes (or any other unit) of time. It correctly means either thirty-five inches of distance (most common) or thirty-five seconds of time (long outmoded usage), both absurd in context. And since your latest story is that your misuse is both minority and unofficial, there is no information—contextual or otherwise—that would lead any reasonable person to understand your intent. As a result they properly laughed at you.

The telltale is when you read the correction and immediately started using ′ properly to mean minutes (of time). You didn't acknowledge being corrected, but you silently started doing the right thing. Only much later, when you had to account for using both ″ and ′ to mean minutes of time, did we get the whole story about using symbols interchangeably and having to properly understand things "in context."

You screwed up, tried to sneak in a correction unnoticed, and then had to invent story after story and deploy one straw man after another to avoid having to concede that you made a mistake.

Quote:
In a post on a chat forum I assumed people understood it took thirty-five minutes to sink the particular vessel referred to below the surface of the water. Thirty-five minutes being the second derivative of the usual - and much more normal - number of hours it takes a ship to sink below the surface of the water. The speed of a ship sinking from view is generally measured in hours. Thus, the first derivative in expressing a ship sinking is the hour, f'.
No, none of this is correct. This is the opposite of how the whole system of primes notation works. And now you're misusing the word "derivative" as well.

Just stop trying to be smart. You're not fooling anyone.

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Old 15th January 2023, 11:34 AM   #330
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Originally Posted by JayUtah View Post
Just stop trying to be smart. You're not fooling anyone.
It's just possible that one person is being fooled.
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Old 15th January 2023, 11:57 AM   #331
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Originally Posted by jimbob View Post
This reads like half-remembered some terms from some long-ago schooldays, for someone who has forgotten what the terms actually meant.
Like every other attempt she's made to pontificate on a technical subject. She's throwing around sciency- and mathsy-sounding words in the hope that someone will think she's smart. It's pure technobabble.

The concept of a derivative from calculus is only tangentially applicable (pun intended), and only because we use primes notation to mark the derivatives of a function. For some function 𝑓(x), its first derivative is notated 𝑓′(x), its second derivative 𝑓″(x), and its third derivative 𝑓‴(x). When we have to write them in IEC 8859-1, we use single-quotes only:
Code:
f'(x), f''(x), f'''(x);
Someone who types '" (i.e., a combination of single- and double-quotes) to approximate a triple prime has revealed herself not to be proficient or experienced in typing math stuff on computers.

There is also the notion of a derived unit. SI has the Sacred Seven basic units, the seven extents we cannot break down into simpler physical phenomena. They are time (seconds, s), length (meter/metre, m), mass (kilogram, kg),[1] electrical current (ampere, A), temperature (kelvin, K), amount of substance (mole, mol), and luminous intensity (candela, cd). Derived units are combinations or special applications of the basic seven units. Torque (newton-meter, N⋅m), for example, is derived from force and distance, and force (newton, N) is itself a property derived from mass, distance, and time.

Deriving properties such as force and defining the units to measure them very often implicates differential calculus, but this is merely accidental. A derived unit in SI need not have arisen necessarily from the calculus derivative of a function. It's just two different uses of the same word, and it has nothing to do with subdividing units into smaller units according to some system, ancient or modern.

Neither of those applies to her gobbledygook. It's just as incoherent and (insofar as it is intelligible) just as wrong as her comical attempt to explain metacentric height. Pure ignorance cloaked in narcissistic bluffery.
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Old 15th January 2023, 03:27 PM   #332
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Originally Posted by I Am The Scum View Post
I'm gonna try something.



Vixen, I am now claiming that Paris is not the capital of France. How would you go about showing that I am mistaken? I actually want you to do this. Take your best shot.

Note to others: I am asking Vixen to prove me wrong, not anyone else.
You are correct. Paris, Tennessee is not is capital of France.

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Old 15th January 2023, 04:17 PM   #333
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Originally Posted by jimbob View Post
Is there a "usual time for ships to sink below the water"?
Obviously she's alluding to the what she's copied from Björkman: the incorrect notion that a ship that rolls past its critical roll angle will turn turtle completely and float for several hours.

But really—as your questions bear out—no two ship sinkings are alike in all their particulars. Some do float for hours. Some sink in minutes, like Vasa and Lusitania. The orientation of the ship in the water is irrelevant. There is literally only one factor that determines how fast a ship sinks: the rate at which buoyancy is lost.

So the first problem with Vixen's proposal is tying her notion of context to a variable that's frankly all over the map. There is no "customary" time it takes for a ship to sink, and it's patently absurd to claim it's always on the order of hours.

But the biggest problem is the utterly ludicrous idea that symbols change which units they stand for based on anything like "context," especially a context that's merely implied, or based on such variable, subjective concepts as what is "customary." This is completely antithetical to the whole practice of measurement and notation as it has evolved over literally thousands of years.

The best kind of notation is self-identifying. Leonardo includes a scale in his drawing of the Vitruvian Man, in diti and palmi (4 diti to the palmo). And the symbols di and pmi in some other Italian texts of the period always clearly refer to diti and palmi, respectively, and cannot reasonably be confused. 5 pmi is always "cinque palmi," never "cinque piedi" or "cinque diti." Closer to home, ft never means anything but feet. kg never correctly means anything but kilograms. They can't. We love self-identifying abbreviations.

Vixen is quite okay with ′ never meaning anything but feet of distance and ″ never meaning anything but inches of distance. And because that is correct, and these symbols have fixed meanings, we can dispense with yd. But it illustrates exactly why we can never reuse ″ to mean, say, feet. The symbol is not self-identifying, and allowing it to variously mean this or that depending on an unsure "context" leaves the system entirely useless. It's already bad enough that ″ means both seconds and inches.

The trend even 200 years ago was to get rid of ambiguous symbols. º once did also stand for hours in the primes notation for time, but it was quickly pushed aside in favor of h for hours. (Vixen's head-canon "mathematician" is just plain wrong.) And in some notations of that same period, a superscript d meant degrees of arc, precisely so that º wouldn't need any context in order to know whether you meant time or angles. Today the convention is that º only ever means degrees, whether of temperature or of arc. But that's still distasteful to those of us who really need precise notation, so for temperature we still require the scale notation, º F or º C. º by itself formally can mean only degrees of arc.

Adding ambiguity to ′ and ″ isn't cricket. Just because they aren't self-identifying doesn't mean they can take on any meaning. It means instead that their nominal meanings must be respected as a matter of edict. Adding maximum ambiguity by allowing implied contexts to change which units those symbols mean is as far away from science, commerce, and engineering as you can get. Whether for time, angles, or distance, the indulgence of non-self-identifying symbols is thoroughly tied to the inviolable principle that these symbols never take on different meanings. You learn once that ″ means seconds of arc (or, anciently, of time), or inches of distance, and that never changes. The usefulness of the system for any purpose relies upon this.

But what a flip-flop we're seeing today. In order to give us a story so vernacular we couldn't refute it, Vixen tells us ″ for minutes was something people used informally at her school, and that you knew you shouldn't use it for anything that an examiner was going to see. That means those folks knew it went against some kind of rule. But now by flinging around "second derivative" and other inapplicable concepts, she's trying to go back the other way. Now she's trying to say there is some kind of formalized basis for using ″ for minutes, something that someone somewhere would have written down, something for which there should be evidence of its wider use. And if that's the case, why wouldn't the examiners at her school have accepted it on homework?

She just can't help herself. It's just one incompatible story after another. And for some reason she can't grasp that this is conclusive evidence for us that she's making stuff up. She can't keep the story straight.
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Old 15th January 2023, 04:24 PM   #334
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Originally Posted by Elvis666 View Post
You are correct. Paris, Tennessee is not is capital of France.

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Waffle, umbrage taken,

<FX: Unloads bales of straw>

My school accepted Paris, Texas as a correct answer to the question. Obviously this is correct when read in the context of Wim Wenders being an European film focus-puller (which my school accepted as interchangable with director, but you wouldn't know that: I went to a different school, in Canada Middlesex).

<FX: adopts a smug pose, and accidentally sets fire to the mountain of straw with sparks of erroneous notation>

I totally meant to do that. Anyone that suggests that I didn't is just a meanie.
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Old 15th January 2023, 05:52 PM   #335
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So Vixen, are you still claiming that you are perfectly willing to acknowledge your errors when they are pointed out to you?
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Old 15th January 2023, 09:11 PM   #336
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Originally Posted by Vixen View Post
Look, if you make a post in passing stating that, say, Lyon is a capital city, I am sure I would definitely correct you.
Alright. That's my claim. Lyon is a capital city. Has been for decades. Please correct the error, as you said you would. Prove me wrong.
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Old 16th January 2023, 12:48 AM   #337
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Originally Posted by JayUtah View Post
And it finally clicked: you're trying to replay the Justice Sheen PDF story. Because that story was plausible in one case, you have it stuck in your head now that if you copy-paste something from one document to another, it might change some of the characters. And once again faced with having typed something wrong, not realizing it until too late, and not wanting to admit to any conceivable error, you're grasping at that straw again.

I've been trying to figure out why you didn't just screen-shot the WhatsApp conversation to try to prove your point. Why did you have to copy from WhatsApp, paste it into a different program, and screen-shot that program? And the answer is that this is what had to happen in the Sheen story, so copy-pasting is what you think you have to do to make a credible story in this case.

Very often as a knowledgeable skeptic dealing with uninformed and misinformed people, you have to figure which of an infinity of wrong ideas they have in their head. Someone who knows how character encodings work in computers has the one right idea. But someone who doesn't know anything about that bases their understanding of what happens behind the scenes when you copy and paste on who-knows-what.

Here is the letter R. What is actually stored in the computer memory for that letter in this post? It's an 8-bit number, 0x52 in hexadecimal or 01010010 in binary. Why that particular number and not, say, 42? Because we've agreed internationally for decades that the binary value 01010010, interpreted as a letter, will be the uppercase letter R. We call that agreement ISO/IEC 8859-1, which comes from the old ASCII standard from the days of the teletypes. The assignment of these 8-bit values to stand for letters and symbols in a computer's memory, or in digital communications, is called a character encoding. You may have seen other names for similar encodings such as UTF-8 or Unicode.

So back in the day when you were misusing the way primes notation was supposed to indicate time, a teletype that received the binary value 01010010 over its bulky, noisy, slow serial digital connection would put in motion some physical mechanism that would result in a metal type for R being positioned between a hammer and an ink ribbon. Then the hammer would fire, and you'd get an R-shaped ink smudge on the paper.

In the days of primitive computer terminals, the terminal received 01010010 over a slightly better serial line, and this told electronics to aim an electron gun in a certain way to paint a picture of an R in green phosphor. Go watch the old Andromeda Strain. They use this kind of terminal extensively.

We've improved on that a bit. How are you able to see an actual letter R in your browser, in this post, as you read it? Your browser reads 01010010 out of the computer memory in a programmatic context that tells it it's supposed to interpret it as a letter. Then it goes to the data for the typeface you've chosen for your browser and looks up the glyph for 01010010. The glyph is simply the set of instructions that tells the pixel-painting portion of your browser how to make an uppercase R, in that typeface, in pixels.

Here's R in the default typeface. Here it is, R, in a different typeface. And a third: R. You see different pixels painted in each case because the glyph is different in each typeface. But if you could magically peek into your computer's memory where it's holding the text of the post—the binary values, not the picture of the post that your browser has painted out of its typefaces—you'll see 01010010 in all three cases. By default, the browser translates binary values into the proper glyphs using the IEC 8859 encoding.

What's stored for 𝕽, a stylized uppercase R used in mathematics? In this case, not 01010010. Here we've switched encodings (and told the browser so) to use Unicode.1 We need more bits for that, because the encoded value for this character is 0x1D57D in hexadecimal. Not only is it looking up a different glyph, its underlying representation is different from just plain R. It is a different character with a different meaning.

So when you copy and paste, what happens? The glyphs don't get copied. The picture doesn't get copied. The encoded values stored in the underlying bytes get copied. In WhatsApp's program memory, 01010010 for R is packaged up and sent to, say, Firefox where it appears in that program's memory as 01010010. It may look different because Firefox is using a different typeface than WhatsApp to paint the pixels. But the underlying encoded characters do not change.

Put more applicably, if an encoded text byte is 0xBA (the symbol º), copy-pasting it into another program won't change that encoded byte to 0x22 (the basic double-qoute, ").

So what made that happen in the Justice Sheen report on Herald of Free Enterprise? JimOfAllTrades already covered that. What's stored in the PDF file for the symbol º as it appears in the report? Not an encoded character. That PDF is a scanned document. Someone put the paper report on a scanner, and the scanner took a picture of the symbol. That picture is what is stored in the PDF. Sure, your browser—and other programs—know how to receive the binary description of the picture and turn it into pixels for you. But it's just doing the same thing dumbly for every kind of picture: cats, scanned text, people's naughty bits.

Copy-pasting from this works entirely differently. As Jim notes, it's a bit of a software miracle that it can happen at all. When you select and copy the picture of the text, the PDF viewer program is furiously trying to interpret bits of the picture as letters, the way our eyes and brain do. Once it has done so, the data that goes into the clipboard is not the picture, but the encoded value for the character the program thinks the picture shows. If the picture looks like an R, the program puts 01010010 into the clipboard memory. But because this process isn't perfect, sometimes the picture of a º might look more like a picture of a " to the algorithm, so it stores 0x22 instead of 0xBA. Then at the destination, the ordinary character rendering process I described above paints the glyph for " instead of for º because that's what got (wrongly) encoded as the result of the picture-interpreting part of the PDF viewer. The destination has no way of knowing any different.

But wait, there's more.

When you type the " key on your computer, a binary signal for that keystroke is being given to whatever program has the keyboard focus at that moment on your computer. Most ordinary keystrokes get translated into the encoded character appropriate for that key sequence. So when I hold down the Shift key and press the R key, the binary value 01010010 (for uppercase R) gets delivered to the program as data that it's supposed to do something with. When I hold down Shift and press the key with the single and double quotes, the program gets 00100010, the code for a plain old double-quote.

So what does it do with it? Depends on the program. The vast majority of programs (including WhatsApp and Google Mail) simply add that character code to the current place in the document without further fuss. And then the glyph-painting part of the program paints some pixels in the right place on the screen according to what the typeface glyph says the R should look like.

But some programs try to be clever. A word processing program like Microsoft Word wants to make documents as pleasing as possible. Typographers know that plain old straight up-and-down double quotes " don't look good in type. We want “pretty” marks, where the open-quote and closed-quote symbols (single or double) are slanted, curled inward, or possibly inverted. But we don't want to make the writer hunt around for the right way to do it. “ and ” aren't just alternate glyphs for 0x22. They're completely differently encoded characters. If you look into the computer memory for this post, you won't see 0x22 surrounding the word pretty.

So when Word (and other Microsoft programs) see 0x22, they don't just dump that character into the data they're accumulating for your document. Word tries to see whether you're at the beginning of a sentence or the end of a sentence and instead of storing 0x22, it will store 0x201C or 0x201D instead, representing the encoded character of the open- or closed-double-quotation. Those are entirely different characters than 0x22. It's helping you make your document look more pretty without you having to try too hard.

If you copy and paste from Word, it copies those binary codes, not the 0x22 you originally typed. If you copy 0x22 into Word (as opposing to pressing the keys for "), you just get the plain glyph ". Later, other algorithms in Word might kick in and do the translation, replacing 0x22 with 0x201C or 0x201D. And if you leave the 0x22 in there and copy it out of Word, the translation into the typographic characters does not occur.

WhatsApp doesn't do any of this when you type. Text-entry widgets in Outlook for Web, Google Mail, or this forum don't do any of that. None at all. You only get that pattern of encoded typographical quote marks (not 0x22 or 0x27) when you type into Word. The statement you purport to be from a mathematician was typed into a Microsoft product, which then mangled it.

At my company we vacillate between turning the helpful rewrite features off or leaving them on. We want them to do their thing when we're writing plain English documents. But we don't want them to happen when we're typing technical expressions or symbols. At best they get in the way, and at worst they silently rewrite things incorrectly.

And we never, ever, ever use a single-quote followed by a double-quote, '", to approximate a forward triple prime. You always type three single-quotes, ''', or three backticks, ```, for a reverse triple prime. That's where you slipped up. Your "mathematician"—who clearly exists only in your head for the purposes of this thread—made a cardinal mistake. Your Microsoft typography slip-up just helped us see it more clearly.

So there's the full debunking of your, "It just copied that way, I swear," ploy. This isn't the same situation as the Sheen report, and you don't know enough about how computers work to lie effectively about how your symbols got botched up again.
____________
1 I'm aware that the single-byte encodings for Unicode are identical to the single-byte encodings for IEC 8859-1, and that likely the browser is just always using Unicode.
As I keep saying that is how primes appear on WhatsApp. Here is a screen print of the original WhatsApp message so please stop falsely accusing me of wrongdoing.

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Old 16th January 2023, 12:58 AM   #338
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Originally Posted by jimbob View Post
Furthermore to this:

" ...the usual - and much more normal - number of hours it takes a ship to sink below the surface of the water."



What does this phrase mean? Is there a "usual time for ships to sink below the water"? From when does one measure it? Launch? Start of the trip? When the first trouble is reported? Abandon ship is announced?

What dataset is used?

All ships throughout history?

Ships launched in the 20th Century? Do you include the merchant ships sunk in convoys?

Passenger ferries that have sunk?
If you would care to join us on the Sinking of the Estonia thread, it will become readily apparent to you that for a ship to sink without trace* in less than an hour is most unusual. When a boat capsizes, it generally floats upside down (think ordinary rowing boat or kayak) If it is torpedoed, as in war situations, the bow, stern, hull or beam will often be seen sticking out o the water for anything from five to eighteen hours up to as long as five days, as happened with a similar ferry to Estonia a couple of years earlier.


*I.e., no visible trace of it on the sea surface.
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Old 16th January 2023, 01:05 AM   #339
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Originally Posted by MarkCorrigan View Post
So Vixen, are you still claiming that you are perfectly willing to acknowledge your errors when they are pointed out to you?
As a hard-headed realist I have zero problem in correcting errors.
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Old 16th January 2023, 01:33 AM   #340
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Originally Posted by Vixen View Post
If you would care to join us on the Sinking of the Estonia thread, it will become readily apparent to you that for a ship to sink without trace* in less than an hour is most unusual. When a boat capsizes, it generally floats upside down (think ordinary rowing boat or kayak) If it is torpedoed, as in war situations, the bow, stern, hull or beam will often be seen sticking out o the water for anything from five to eighteen hours up to as long as five days, as happened with a similar ferry to Estonia a couple of years earlier.


*I.e., no visible trace of it on the sea surface.
I imagine that is well and truly debunked on that thread. Probably including the obvious point that not all vessels are equal. My daughter kayaks, sometimes with a sea kayak, that or a surfboard will not sink even if upside down. A roll-on roll-off ferry, with a vehicle deck and consequent large structural gaps to accommodate the speedy entrance and exit of commercial vehicles is going to be far more susceptible, especially if something has happened to the doors protecting these gaps into the vehicle deck.
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Old 16th January 2023, 04:36 AM   #341
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Originally Posted by Vixen View Post
You know fully well from common repetition that I was referring to thirty-five minutes.

In a post on a chat forum I assumed people understood it took thirty-five minutes to sink the particular vessel referred to below the surface of the water. Thirty-five minutes being the second derivative of the usual - and much more normal - number of hours it takes a ship to sink below the surface of the water. The speed of a ship sinking from view is generally measured in hours. Thus, the first derivative in expressing a ship sinking is the hour, f'.
Um, you know the highlighted terms are from differential calculus, right?

Originally Posted by Wikipedia
In calculus, the second derivative, or the second order derivative, of a function f is the derivative of the derivative of f.
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Old 16th January 2023, 05:21 AM   #342
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Originally Posted by MarkCorrigan View Post
So Vixen, are you still claiming that you are perfectly willing to acknowledge your errors ...
Originally Posted by Vixen View Post
As a hard-headed realist I have zero problem in correcting errors.
Continuing evasion noted, hilariously.

Mousebender: You do have some cheese, do you?
Wensleydale: Certainly, sir. It's a cheese shop, sir. We've got...
Mousebender: No, no, no, don't tell me. I'm keen to guess.
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Old 16th January 2023, 07:13 AM   #343
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I think it's important at this point to go back to a much earlier post by Vixen.

I've removed the vast majority of the post as it is irrelevant, but feel free to go back and read the whole post to make sure the quote I've taken isn't out of context.

Originally Posted by Vixen View Post
So not sure where the ' and " came from for hours and minutes, or alternatively minutes and seconds. Both were considered OK. You wouldn't really use this notation in homework or exams but OTOH you wouldn't lose marks if it was clear to the examiner what you meant.
It appears to me that Vixen isn't even saying here that it was something that was actually taught, or part of the curriculum.

I would also question how often such notation might have been used for Vixen to be able to state that both forms were considered okay, and specifically, if it was something you wouldn't use in homework or exams, how often was it actually used in homework or exams that you could know you wouldn't lose marks from it.

It also suggests that you would have lost marks if it wasn't clear what was meant which was, after all, pretty much the primary complaint about Vixen's use of the prime notation in the first place.

Further, even if Vixen's teachers were willing to let it slide in a homework, how could Vixen know what an exam marker would or wouldn't allow in this regard. Exam markers are anonymous (for hopefully obvious reasons) and marked exam papers are not returned to the student unless the grade is disputed (did Vixen or any of Vixen's classmates ever dispute an exam in which primes were used in this way?). Unless of course Vixen meant internal school exams, in which case it is again the teachers doing the marking and letting it slide, not a proper examiner.

The upshot of all this is that even if we were to concede (we won't) that the use of a single prime for hours and a double prime for minutes were ever acceptable (they weren't), then Vixen's use of the double prime for minutes of time was still an unacceptable use (by Vixen's own criteria), because it wasn't clear that minutes were the unit to be signified (as Vixen noted was necessary to not lose marks).
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Old 16th January 2023, 07:59 AM   #344
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Originally Posted by Vixen View Post
As a hard-headed realist I have zero problem in correcting errors.
I agree you're hard-headed, but you're by no means a realist. You seem to have only a passing correspondence with reality. And, as others have noted, the question is not whether you will correct errors—you seem to relish correcting everyone from your throne of infallibility—but whether you will confess to errors you make.
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Old 16th January 2023, 09:22 AM   #345
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Originally Posted by wollery View Post
It appears to me that Vixen isn't even saying here that it was something that was actually taught, or part of the curriculum.
Using primes notation correctly for time is something I can see having been taught, but really only as an interesting historical tidbit. It wasn't taught in U.S. schools in 1970. I've been unable to find any published use of primes for time later than the mid-1950s, but I can understand someone teaching it preventatively, in case students might encounter it in an old book on, say, rowing. But in the U.S. in 1970 we were already teaching h for hours, min for minutes, and s for seconds as proper SI units, because we all knew in the 1970s that the U.S. was soon to adopt the metric system. [Pause for laughter]

Using ′ to mean either hours or minutes of time, and ″ to mean either minutes or seconds of time, depending on implied context? No, I can't see that having been taught anywhere at any time, especially if Vixen admits it was simply a vernacular at her school.

Most importantly, early science education takes great pains to stamp out variants and vernaculars, because we follow the adage that insisting (sometimes even pedantically) on correct and standard usage makes it easier on students in the future.

Quote:
It also suggests that you would have lost marks if it wasn't clear what was meant which was, after all, pretty much the primary complaint about Vixen's use of the prime notation in the first place.
Exactly. The very ambiguity that she engendered by writing
The ship sank in 35".
is precisely what science education has struggled to eradicate in all its systems of measurements and notations.

Quote:
...because it wasn't clear that minutes were the unit to be signified (as Vixen noted was necessary to not lose marks).
She insists it should be understood from the context, and the context in this case is a sinking ship, and ships take hours to sink, therefore (somehow) ′ should have been understood to mean (omitted) hours and ″ to mean minutes, and neither h nor º was required to designate the base unit because everything has somehow shifted one position over.

It's absurd to think that anyone responsibly engaged in science education in 1970 would have permitted—much less taught—any such nonsense.
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Old 16th January 2023, 12:35 PM   #346
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Originally Posted by Vixen View Post
As I keep saying that is how primes appear on WhatsApp. Here is a screen print of the original WhatsApp message...
So we can finally dispense with the copy-paste straw man. You were asked at the very beginning to post the original conversation in context. Thank you for finally doing so.

And I think you mean screen shot. A screen print is how you make funny T-shirts.

Quote:
...so please stop falsely accusing me of wrongdoing.
I'll do so when you address all the evidence, not just what might be responsible for re-encoding text. How the typographical quotes got there is less important than why they remained, and what they say about the person who wrote the message. If we give you the benefit of the doubt and accept the possibility some unknown program or setting somewhere along the line re-encoded the text to produce the typographical quotes, you still haven't addressed the more pressing parts of the argument.

You purport this to be a conversation with someone whom you desire us to accept as a highly academically qualified mathematician and a physicist, and therefore an expert on mathematical and/or physics notation. The conversation includes a statement from him that you expect us to receive as authoritative and which—although it's a bit ambiguously worded—you insinuate proves your claim that ″ is acceptable as either minutes or seconds of time.

A mathematician would not refer to the primes as "apostrophes," because they aren't. You already told him you were looking for information on "primes," so there's no reason he wouldn't use the correct term. And the statement, "Primes uses apostrophes...," is curiously phrased. A more mathsy way of saying it would be, "The notation uses primes..." Prime is the name of the symbol, not the name of the notation.

A mathematician would not cobble up a triple-prime out of a ' and a ". We approximate ′ with a ' and ″ with a " frequently as long as those are the only two in use, such as for angle measurements or feet and inches. When we're working in a more general context, where we'll need triple-primes and greater, the convention for decades has to use only single primes as approximations for all of them: ' for ′, '' (two single-quotes) for ″, ''' for ‴, and so forth.

Why? First because mixing symbols almost always looks wrong on the screen or in print. Your "mathematician" seems to acknowledge this by saying to ignore the spacing. But that's the tell. That's not a new problem. We've been dealing with trying to write math notation in ASCII since the early 1980s. Spacing for three or more primes is a solved problem. We just use single-quotes if we need the full gamut of primes.

Second, you can plug that ASCII/IEC-8859 approximation (e.g., 35''', using only single-quotes) directly into programs like LaTeX and it gives you the proper typesetting. Someone who practiced mathematics and physics, either professionally or academically, starting in the 1980s and extending until the first rudimentary support for equations in word processing, would have written many papers requiring considerable mathematical notation. Until comparatively recently, programs like LaTeX were the only option. This was my bread and butter, both in academia and professional practice.

And during that same period, we all had to deal with communicating mathematics notation amongst ourselves using primitive text-only methods. We still do. There were, and still are, conventions for it, such as writing usec when we can't use the proper SI μs. And writing ''' (three single-quotes) when we can't use . Combinations of ' and " in a single symbol were never used.

So to bring this back to the point, you're telling me that a person we're supposed to respect as a highly qualified mathematician and physicist—and an authority on notation—is going to choose the one wrong way out of several methods he would have had to employ in his career. And then to expressly acknowledge the reason why it's the wrong way! No, I'm not buying it.

And the "smart" editors only made things worse. Typing ' gets you the typographical single-quote (either open or close), but depending on what the editor thinks you're doing it might give you the wrong one. In some typefaces, the open-single-quote glyph looks enough like a single forward prime. But you only have to get bitten once by the glyph resembling a reverse prime in a different typeface to stop letting it happen. And when you see “” after typing two counts of ", you know that's wrong. It's not just that it doesn't look good or isn't the "proper" symbol, ⁗. It's that “ is the wrong symbol—in this case one that has the opposite of the desired meaning. And mixing them is mathematically nonsensical. You only need to deal with difficult (human) editors and typesetters once to eschew the auto-correct altogether, and to affirmatively correct it when it nevertheless happens.

So again, you're telling me that a purported expert on mathematics and physics notation is going to let those marks get rewritten incorrectly—in an explanation of how to use the notation properly!? Just no. I expect someone I'm being asked to qualify as an expert in mathematical notation to understand that “ is the opposite of ” especially as it is used to indicate multiples and subdivisions, and not to allow such confusing mis-notation to go out as an explanation.

"It uses 'apostrophes'..."

Here's the really strange part. You're proffering this guy as a fully-qualified mathematician and physicist, and someone you want us to accept as a recognized or recognizable expert on the proper usage of primes to indicate subdivisions of time, because the proper and standard use of notation would at this point be second nature to him. You didn't predispose him for why you wanted the information you were asking, but his first and only thought is to say
Originally Posted by Anonymous 'Expert'
‘ and “ and ‘“ and “” [...] used for hours, minutes, seconds, and so on...
Funny how this highly qualified expert first goes to the backwoods, vernacular usage you say wasn't okay for homework. How would he even know about it, if you admit it was just your informal variant? He doesn't default to the usage everyone else accepts as the inviolable standard: ′ for minutes and ″ for seconds. Why not explain the universally accepted standard first, and then go into whatever variant or vernacular usages you might want to ask about?

Anyone who's read the standard and done his history homework on this notation knows of the controversy over what º should mean (degrees or hours or both or something else entirely) and whether h for hours and d for degrees might have been better in both cases. And nowhere do we read that the primes can just shift left or right as needed, or that can sometimes mean hours, as you both now say it can.

How convenient that your 'expert' defaults to the one nonstandard, unofficial, vernacular usage you need authority for, without the slightest bit of prompting from you, and for which there is not one shred of documentary evidence?
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Old 16th January 2023, 05:05 PM   #347
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Originally Posted by Vixen View Post
As a hard-headed realist I have zero problem in correcting errors.
Not what I asked, but I assume you mean correcting your own errors when they are pointed out to you.

So, can I get an acknowledgement of your error in claiming that Combat 18 was created by MI5, or that they were infiltrated by Ray Hill?
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Old 16th January 2023, 05:17 PM   #348
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Originally Posted by JayUtah View Post
Using primes notation correctly for time is something I can see having been taught, but really only as an interesting historical tidbit. It wasn't taught in U.S. schools in 1970. I've been unable to find any published use of primes for time later than the mid-1950s, but I can understand someone teaching it preventatively, in case students might encounter it in an old book on, say, rowing.

Exactly. And a propos this: I still can't decide whether it's woeful miscomprehension or a deliberate (attempt at) misdirection that Vixen has repeatedly tried to misrepresent my (and, I think, others') position as that of someone who was initially denying that primes notation could ever even apply to time units - and that I belatedly had to use google to find this out (). When of course - as I stated explicitly right from the start - my position was, and always has been, that

1) I know full well that primes have had historical usage in notating time units;

2) I also know full well that I've never encountered primes being used for time unit notation in the fields of science, engineering or finance through my fairly extensive and high-level career crossing all three disciplines and advanced university study (meaning that the very attempt of Vixen to use primes for time notation in this thread immediately stuck out like a sore thumb, and contradicted her claims to be scientifically literate); and

3) The jaw-dropping - and more than slightly amusing - part of this has been a) Vixen's crass error in employing the double prime to express minutes of time, b) when she then doubled-down on claiming that this was not an error because she was taught at school that this was acceptable "depending on context", and c) when she then trebled-down by utterly refusing to own/admit her error and continuing to insist that she was right and we were all wrong....



Quote:
But in the U.S. in 1970 we were already teaching h for hours, min for minutes, and s for seconds as proper SI units, because we all knew in the 1970s that the U.S. was soon to adopt the metric system. [Pause for laughter]

Hehehe



Quote:
Using ′ to mean either hours or minutes of time, and ″ to mean either minutes or seconds of time, depending on implied context? No, I can't see that having been taught anywhere at any time, especially if Vixen admits it was simply a vernacular at her school.

That's because it's a lie that's been created to try to avoid admittance of a mistake. Even though my English-school education seemingly post-dated Vixen's by at least several years, I can categorically guarantee that nothing of the sort was ever taught - indeed I was explicitly taught that while primes for time units had been used in the (distant) past, they were considered long-since arcane. And if Vixen's school was even a quarter as good as she constantly claims it was, there's no way whatsoever that she'd have been taught in the way she claims.



Quote:
Most importantly, early science education takes great pains to stamp out variants and vernaculars, because we follow the adage that insisting (sometimes even pedantically) on correct and standard usage makes it easier on students in the future.

Indeed. Because Vixen's claim is a transparent lie.



Quote:
Exactly. The very ambiguity that she engendered by writing
The ship sank in 35".
is precisely what science education has struggled to eradicate in all its systems of measurements and notations.

Yes.



Quote:
She insists it should be understood from the context, and the context in this case is a sinking ship, and ships take hours to sink, therefore (somehow) ′ should have been understood to mean (omitted) hours and ″ to mean minutes, and neither h nor º was required to designate the base unit because everything has somehow shifted one position over.

It's absurd to think that anyone responsibly engaged in science education in 1970 would have permitted—much less taught—any such nonsense.

Totally correct. It never happened.

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Old 17th January 2023, 01:05 PM   #349
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Originally Posted by LondonJohn View Post
Exactly. And a propos this: I still can't decide whether it's woeful miscomprehension or a deliberate (attempt at) misdirection that Vixen has repeatedly tried to misrepresent my (and, I think, others') position as that of someone who was initially denying that primes notation could ever even apply to time units - and that I belatedly had to use google to find this out ().
The American lecturer Dale Carnegie said that every person wants to be great. Winning those people as friends and influencing their behavior means finding out what they think "being great" means to them, and helping them to achieve it. It's different for everyone.

In some people, this process gets sidetracked. They want to be great, and they have in mind (consciously or unconsciously) what they think being great means. But instead of achieving it in real life, they imagine what it would be like for them already to have achieved it. Then they live in that delusional world and follow shortcuts to make that world seem as real as possible. They satisfy themselves with pretending to be great in ways they're clearly not, and trying to get other people to go along with it.

That often includes activities like grasping onto conspiracy theories and straw-manning other people's activities and statements to make them seem inferior in the exact ways those people want to be great. Conspiracy theories tell them things they think lay people don't know who have ever only learned the mainstream narrative. Warping people's acts and words so say instead, "Oh, you didn't know that? Well, be sure to give me credit for educating you!"

Some people define greatness as intelligence, cleverness, and insight. But instead of surrounding themselves with people and experiences that will actually increase their intelligence and insight—as Carnegie would have wanted—they cheat and surround themselves with crackpot theories that have the appearance of cleverness and are much easier to attain. And they seek out interactions they can spin to make it sound as if they've been smarter than the other participants regardless, rather than use the embarrassment of error to resolve to be genuinely smarter. These little scenes make the delusion seem more real to them, and make themselves seem as if they've achieved the greatness they sought. Play-acting isn't as real as real life, but it's more satisfying than merely sitting in the armchair telling themselves over and over again how smart they are.

This is why conspiracy theorists rely so heavily on straw men and other forms of misrepresentation. They need the participants in the drama they've concocted toward their goal of greatness to play the roles the theorists have written out for them. That usually necessitates a lot of shoe-horning. But the goal is still to make it seem like people have followed the script when they really haven't. In extreme cases it comes down to bald-face lying about what others have said or done.

Quote:
And if Vixen's school was even a quarter as good as she constantly claims it was, there's no way whatsoever that she'd have been taught in the way she claims.
But for people who have short-circuited the path to greatness with a lot of supposition and fiction, there's no problem just bubbling up a new continent for their fantasy world. Fantasy worlds rarely suffer from simply adding more fantasy. With enough practice, some of these people really do come to believe the stories they make up to account for why their attempts to actually be great have fallen short. Did something wrong? Heavens, no! They just come from a background where that "error" was actually a variant practice that was exclusive, particular, and even better than the mainstream. And voilà! the claimant is once again greater than everyone.

"Oh, you didn't know primes could be used for time? I did, and that makes me better than you and therefore great in the way I want to believe I'm great."

"Oh, you didn't know ″ could be used for minutes? Well, that's because you Americans have corrupted the practice and I'm the one doing it right, or maybe it's because it's this traditional thing we did at the very posh, traditional school I went to and only those of us at the school knew about it, or maybe I'm all at sea, but you're still thick for mocking me instead of somehow still not figuring out what I must have meant."

Literally every step in the interaction has to be spun to result in the claimant being so much greater than the critics. At the very end it's just meta-gloating.

"You all are being so pedantic about my stubborn defiance of fact; you all must be so insecure compared to me, but I have 20-20 vision in the land of the blind, blah, blah, blah."

Make no mistake, this thread has nothing to do with measuring time. The MS Estonia thread has nothing to do with getting to the bottom of a tragedy. They're all about shoring up the O.P.'s ego by pandering to the way they think they're already great. This thread is about seeing to what absurd lengths (measured in the proper units) someone will go to maintain ego over clearly demonstrable fact.
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Old 17th January 2023, 05:20 PM   #350
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Originally Posted by JesseCuster View Post
Um, you know the highlighted terms are from differential calculus, right?
The science-oriented fields invite a lot of crackpot theories, some of them conspiracy theories. Engineering attracts crackpot claims for why we didn't go to the Moon or why this or that technology can't possibly work, or why this or that other proposal should be entertained. Physics attracts crackpot theories saying Einstein was wrong, or how quantum mechanics explains some woo belief. And lately medicine, epidemiology, and immunology have suffered a deluge of crackpot and conspiracy theories about diseases and vaccines.

When someone shows up claiming to have a breakthrough theory that rewrites the relevant sciences, or claiming to have conclusive evidence that the mainstream theory in some science is wrong, the problem in either case is usually that the claimant doesn't know enough about the relevant sciences or professions to begin with. They don't know enough to understand why their theory won't work. Or they don't know enough to understand how their refutation isn't valid.

For the moment, let's leave aside the usual, "I'm just asking questions!" or, "This is just common sense," or "You don't have to be an expert in <field> to see this is wrong." (Yes, you pretty much do have to be an expert in the field to speak credibly about it—especially if your plan is to pass judgment on expert work in it.)

One of the easiest ways to distinguish between a sincere (if possibly amateur) claimant and an insincere one is their use of nomenclature. Sincere claimants will have looked up or asked about the right terminology. If they stumble through something, and an expert corrects them, they will accept the correction.

Insincere claimants use incorrect terminology and stick to their guns. They'll insist, for example, that we should accept their made-up words for concepts we already had words for—and in the worst cases, that those made-up words are in fact the ones the experts use. They'll misuse and misapply existing terminology, such as Vixen did in the MS Estonia thread when she mixed up the material-science properties of elasticity and plasticity. And that includes borrowing inapplicable terms from unrelated fields to "spice up" their offerings and make them seem more technical.

No. "First derivative" and "second derivative" have absolutely nothing to do with the first and second subdivisions, or "cuts," of the canonical base units for some extent. Yes, a derivative is a ratio of differentials, and ′, ″, etc. did once stand for division. But that's as congruent as saying cooking and woodworking are the same because both use sharp utensils. "First derivative" is a term invented for differential calculus. It's used only in differential calculus. It has no meaning in science or mathematics outside of differential calculus. It has nothing to do with outmoded notational systems, no matter how Vixen bluffs her way toward mathiness.

And the pathetic last resort of the insincere claimant is always, "Well, that's the way I was taught," or "That's the way we did it where I came from." It's the classic impasse in bad-faith debate, where the proposed resolution is, "We're both right," or "We're both wrong."

No. ″ does not mean minutes. ″ has never meant minutes. ″ cannot be redefined by "context" to signify minutes. ″ was not some once-permitted vernacular for either minutes or seconds in some now-defunct Fluffbridge Preparatory Academy in the Middlesex hills. (I'm assuming Middlesex is hilly; I've never been there.)

Proper use of terminology and concepts from a field remains one of the best ways we can tell whether to take someone seriously in it. Flagrant misuse of terminology is the best way to know that someone is purposely faking it.

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Old 18th January 2023, 02:04 AM   #351
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Originally Posted by jimbob View Post
I imagine that is well and truly debunked on that thread. Probably including the obvious point that not all vessels are equal. My daughter kayaks, sometimes with a sea kayak, that or a surfboard will not sink even if upside down. A roll-on roll-off ferry, with a vehicle deck and consequent large structural gaps to accommodate the speedy entrance and exit of commercial vehicles is going to be far more susceptible, especially if something has happened to the doors protecting these gaps into the vehicle deck.
Not 'debunked' at all, if you go to the thread.
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Old 18th January 2023, 02:11 AM   #352
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Originally Posted by JesseCuster View Post
Um, you know the highlighted terms are from differential calculus, right?
Nothing to do with calculus. My bad using that term.
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Old 18th January 2023, 02:15 AM   #353
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Originally Posted by JayUtah View Post
So we can finally dispense with the copy-paste straw man. You were asked at the very beginning to post the original conversation in context. Thank you for finally doing so.

And I think you mean screen shot. A screen print is how you make funny T-shirts.



I'll do so when you address all the evidence, not just what might be responsible for re-encoding text. How the typographical quotes got there is less important than why they remained, and what they say about the person who wrote the message. If we give you the benefit of the doubt and accept the possibility some unknown program or setting somewhere along the line re-encoded the text to produce the typographical quotes, you still haven't addressed the more pressing parts of the argument.

You purport this to be a conversation with someone whom you desire us to accept as a highly academically qualified mathematician and a physicist, and therefore an expert on mathematical and/or physics notation. The conversation includes a statement from him that you expect us to receive as authoritative and which—although it's a bit ambiguously worded—you insinuate proves your claim that ″ is acceptable as either minutes or seconds of time.

A mathematician would not refer to the primes as "apostrophes," because they aren't. You already told him you were looking for information on "primes," so there's no reason he wouldn't use the correct term. And the statement, "Primes uses apostrophes...," is curiously phrased. A more mathsy way of saying it would be, "The notation uses primes..." Prime is the name of the symbol, not the name of the notation.

A mathematician would not cobble up a triple-prime out of a ' and a ". We approximate ′ with a ' and ″ with a " frequently as long as those are the only two in use, such as for angle measurements or feet and inches. When we're working in a more general context, where we'll need triple-primes and greater, the convention for decades has to use only single primes as approximations for all of them: ' for ′, '' (two single-quotes) for ″, ''' for ‴, and so forth.

Why? First because mixing symbols almost always looks wrong on the screen or in print. Your "mathematician" seems to acknowledge this by saying to ignore the spacing. But that's the tell. That's not a new problem. We've been dealing with trying to write math notation in ASCII since the early 1980s. Spacing for three or more primes is a solved problem. We just use single-quotes if we need the full gamut of primes.

Second, you can plug that ASCII/IEC-8859 approximation (e.g., 35''', using only single-quotes) directly into programs like LaTeX and it gives you the proper typesetting. Someone who practiced mathematics and physics, either professionally or academically, starting in the 1980s and extending until the first rudimentary support for equations in word processing, would have written many papers requiring considerable mathematical notation. Until comparatively recently, programs like LaTeX were the only option. This was my bread and butter, both in academia and professional practice.

And during that same period, we all had to deal with communicating mathematics notation amongst ourselves using primitive text-only methods. We still do. There were, and still are, conventions for it, such as writing usec when we can't use the proper SI μs. And writing ''' (three single-quotes) when we can't use . Combinations of ' and " in a single symbol were never used.

So to bring this back to the point, you're telling me that a person we're supposed to respect as a highly qualified mathematician and physicist—and an authority on notation—is going to choose the one wrong way out of several methods he would have had to employ in his career. And then to expressly acknowledge the reason why it's the wrong way! No, I'm not buying it.

And the "smart" editors only made things worse. Typing ' gets you the typographical single-quote (either open or close), but depending on what the editor thinks you're doing it might give you the wrong one. In some typefaces, the open-single-quote glyph looks enough like a single forward prime. But you only have to get bitten once by the glyph resembling a reverse prime in a different typeface to stop letting it happen. And when you see “” after typing two counts of ", you know that's wrong. It's not just that it doesn't look good or isn't the "proper" symbol, ⁗. It's that “ is the wrong symbol—in this case one that has the opposite of the desired meaning. And mixing them is mathematically nonsensical. You only need to deal with difficult (human) editors and typesetters once to eschew the auto-correct altogether, and to affirmatively correct it when it nevertheless happens.

So again, you're telling me that a purported expert on mathematics and physics notation is going to let those marks get rewritten incorrectly—in an explanation of how to use the notation properly!? Just no. I expect someone I'm being asked to qualify as an expert in mathematical notation to understand that “ is the opposite of ” especially as it is used to indicate multiples and subdivisions, and not to allow such confusing mis-notation to go out as an explanation.

"It uses 'apostrophes'..."

Here's the really strange part. You're proffering this guy as a fully-qualified mathematician and physicist, and someone you want us to accept as a recognized or recognizable expert on the proper usage of primes to indicate subdivisions of time, because the proper and standard use of notation would at this point be second nature to him. You didn't predispose him for why you wanted the information you were asking, but his first and only thought is to sayFunny how this highly qualified expert first goes to the backwoods, vernacular usage you say wasn't okay for homework. How would he even know about it, if you admit it was just your informal variant? He doesn't default to the usage everyone else accepts as the inviolable standard: ′ for minutes and ″ for seconds. Why not explain the universally accepted standard first, and then go into whatever variant or vernacular usages you might want to ask about?

Anyone who's read the standard and done his history homework on this notation knows of the controversy over what º should mean (degrees or hours or both or something else entirely) and whether h for hours and d for degrees might have been better in both cases. And nowhere do we read that the primes can just shift left or right as needed, or that can sometimes mean hours, as you both now say it can.

How convenient that your 'expert' defaults to the one nonstandard, unofficial, vernacular usage you need authority for, without the slightest bit of prompting from you, and for which there is not one shred of documentary evidence?
My expert source explains that 'It is WhatsApp formatting' and that most formatting system insist in adding a space after either a single apostrophe or a double one.

Obviously, when you are sending a WhatsApp message you are not writing a peer reviewed paper.
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Old 18th January 2023, 02:19 AM   #354
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Originally Posted by MarkCorrigan View Post
Not what I asked, but I assume you mean correcting your own errors when they are pointed out to you.

So, can I get an acknowledgement of your error in claiming that Combat 18 was created by MI5, or that they were infiltrated by Ray Hill?
Please start a new thread if you wish to discuss this. For a one-off answer, please refer to Gerry Gable's article in SEARCHLIGHT a few years back.


Also here:

Quote:
It is possible that C18 was set up by British Intelligence as a 'honey trap' -to attract and identify the potentially most violent fascists and monitor their links with similar Nazi 'terror' groups around the world. It is also true that since the end of the Cold War MI5 are keen to identify 'terrorist' threats to maintain -and expand- their influence.
https://libcom.org/article/strange-s...-dan-woinsaker
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Old 18th January 2023, 02:29 AM   #355
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Originally Posted by LondonJohn View Post
Exactly. And a propos this: I still can't decide whether it's woeful miscomprehension or a deliberate (attempt at) misdirection that Vixen has repeatedly tried to misrepresent my (and, I think, others') position as that of someone who was initially denying that primes notation could ever even apply to time units - and that I belatedly had to use google to find this out (). When of course - as I stated explicitly right from the start - my position was, and always has been, that

1) I know full well that primes have had historical usage in notating time units;

2) I also know full well that I've never encountered primes being used for time unit notation in the fields of science, engineering or finance through my fairly extensive and high-level career crossing all three disciplines and advanced university study (meaning that the very attempt of Vixen to use primes for time notation in this thread immediately stuck out like a sore thumb, and contradicted her claims to be scientifically literate); and

3) The jaw-dropping - and more than slightly amusing - part of this has been a) Vixen's crass error in employing the double prime to express minutes of time, b) when she then doubled-down on claiming that this was not an error because she was taught at school that this was acceptable "depending on context", and c) when she then trebled-down by utterly refusing to own/admit her error and continuing to insist that she was right and we were all wrong....






Hehehe






That's because it's a lie that's been created to try to avoid admittance of a mistake. Even though my English-school education seemingly post-dated Vixen's by at least several years, I can categorically guarantee that nothing of the sort was ever taught - indeed I was explicitly taught that while primes for time units had been used in the (distant) past, they were considered long-since arcane. And if Vixen's school was even a quarter as good as she constantly claims it was, there's no way whatsoever that she'd have been taught in the way she claims.






Indeed. Because Vixen's claim is a transparent lie.






Yes.






Totally correct. It never happened.

Unfortunately, you have a propensity of strongly supporting things that are obviously and patently untrue. For example, you keep insisting - contrary to all objective observation - that 'the Herald of Free Enterprise sank from view within 90 seconds' when you have been told it was lying on its side resting on a sandbank, easily visible by all right up to the time of its being salvaged.


Why anyone deliberately takes an untruthful stance indicates to me someone happy to be less than honest as a means of attack.


You did strongly aver that never in your life had you come across prime notation for time nor knew anyone who had used any such thing.
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Old 18th January 2023, 02:39 AM   #356
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Originally Posted by JayUtah View Post
The American lecturer Dale Carnegie said that every person wants to be great. Winning those people as friends and influencing their behavior means finding out what they think "being great" means to them, and helping them to achieve it. It's different for everyone.

In some people, this process gets sidetracked. They want to be great, and they have in mind (consciously or unconsciously) what they think being great means. But instead of achieving it in real life, they imagine what it would be like for them already to have achieved it. Then they live in that delusional world and follow shortcuts to make that world seem as real as possible. They satisfy themselves with pretending to be great in ways they're clearly not, and trying to get other people to go along with it.

That often includes activities like grasping onto conspiracy theories and straw-manning other people's activities and statements to make them seem inferior in the exact ways those people want to be great. Conspiracy theories tell them things they think lay people don't know who have ever only learned the mainstream narrative. Warping people's acts and words so say instead, "Oh, you didn't know that? Well, be sure to give me credit for educating you!"

Some people define greatness as intelligence, cleverness, and insight. But instead of surrounding themselves with people and experiences that will actually increase their intelligence and insight—as Carnegie would have wanted—they cheat and surround themselves with crackpot theories that have the appearance of cleverness and are much easier to attain. And they seek out interactions they can spin to make it sound as if they've been smarter than the other participants regardless, rather than use the embarrassment of error to resolve to be genuinely smarter. These little scenes make the delusion seem more real to them, and make themselves seem as if they've achieved the greatness they sought. Play-acting isn't as real as real life, but it's more satisfying than merely sitting in the armchair telling themselves over and over again how smart they are.

This is why conspiracy theorists rely so heavily on straw men and other forms of misrepresentation. They need the participants in the drama they've concocted toward their goal of greatness to play the roles the theorists have written out for them. That usually necessitates a lot of shoe-horning. But the goal is still to make it seem like people have followed the script when they really haven't. In extreme cases it comes down to bald-face lying about what others have said or done.



But for people who have short-circuited the path to greatness with a lot of supposition and fiction, there's no problem just bubbling up a new continent for their fantasy world. Fantasy worlds rarely suffer from simply adding more fantasy. With enough practice, some of these people really do come to believe the stories they make up to account for why their attempts to actually be great have fallen short. Did something wrong? Heavens, no! They just come from a background where that "error" was actually a variant practice that was exclusive, particular, and even better than the mainstream. And voilà! the claimant is once again greater than everyone.

"Oh, you didn't know primes could be used for time? I did, and that makes me better than you and therefore great in the way I want to believe I'm great."

"Oh, you didn't know ″ could be used for minutes? Well, that's because you Americans have corrupted the practice and I'm the one doing it right, or maybe it's because it's this traditional thing we did at the very posh, traditional school I went to and only those of us at the school knew about it, or maybe I'm all at sea, but you're still thick for mocking me instead of somehow still not figuring out what I must have meant."

Literally every step in the interaction has to be spun to result in the claimant being so much greater than the critics. At the very end it's just meta-gloating.

"You all are being so pedantic about my stubborn defiance of fact; you all must be so insecure compared to me, but I have 20-20 vision in the land of the blind, blah, blah, blah."

Make no mistake, this thread has nothing to do with measuring time. The MS Estonia thread has nothing to do with getting to the bottom of a tragedy. They're all about shoring up the O.P.'s ego by pandering to the way they think they're already great. This thread is about seeing to what absurd lengths (measured in the proper units) someone will go to maintain ego over clearly demonstrable fact.
I note you see yourself as some kind of gate-keeper. stopping conspiracy theorists, etcetera. You do know that it wasn't me who put either of these threads in the conspiracy section. The Estonia ship investigation is a genuine one and has nothing to do with 9/11 or Apollo.

You seem unaware that many people are naturally curious and as such will take an interest in things that are beyond the comprehension of the pedestrian. For example, I once went to a summer camp type place in Devon with my sibling. My sibling had the camp personnel gasping with shock because my sibling had brought along a heavy library book about a sub-population of 'untouchables' in China, dense and turgid and we had no connection to China. Most of the other kids there could barely read or write so we were assigned to write their postcards home for them, mostly along the lines of 'Please send me 10/-'. Anyway the point is whilst just about everybody was amazed that a nine-year-old kid should be interested in reading such stuff, why should they be censored from doing so?

I happen to have an interest in the Estonia accident and whilst you can yell all you like that I am not allowed to, there is nothing you can do about it.
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Old 18th January 2023, 02:48 AM   #357
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Originally Posted by jimbob View Post
Furthermore to this:

" ...the usual - and much more normal - number of hours it takes a ship to sink below the surface of the water."



What does this phrase mean? Is there a "usual time for ships to sink below the water"? From when does one measure it? Launch? Start of the trip? When the first trouble is reported? Abandon ship is announced?

What dataset is used?

All ships throughout history?

Ships launched in the 20th Century? Do you include the merchant ships sunk in convoys?

Passenger ferries that have sunk?
Jimbob, as by the criteria in the relevant thread, see here:


http://www.internationalskeptics.com...7#post13980087
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Old 18th January 2023, 02:54 AM   #358
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Originally Posted by I Am The Scum View Post
Alright. That's my claim. Lyon is a capital city. Has been for decades. Please correct the error, as you said you would. Prove me wrong.
A capital city is defined as being where the seat of government is. The seat of government in France is not in Lyons.
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Old 18th January 2023, 03:29 AM   #359
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Originally Posted by Vixen View Post
A capital city is defined as being where the seat of government is. The seat of government in France is not in Lyons.
Are you absolutely certain of that?
It's common, that's for sure, but it's not a hard rule, you know.

Edit. Added highlite to clear up my point
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Last edited by erwinl; 18th January 2023 at 03:35 AM.
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Old 18th January 2023, 03:42 AM   #360
GlennB
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Originally Posted by Vixen View Post
A capital city is defined as being where the seat of government is. The seat of government in France is not in Lyons.
"Amsterdam is the capital city and most populous city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Its status as the Dutch capital is mandated by the Constitution of the Netherlands though it is not the seat of the Dutch government, which is The Hague."
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