Split Thread Conspiracy theories about unconventional usage of notation

[Vixen]

No, Vixen. There's no "OR, alternatively...".

This has been explained to you several times already.

If you choose - for reasons only known to yourself, because literally nobody discussing science/engineering concepts uses it - to use the prime system to notate time units, then the unit for minutes of time is - AND IS ONLY - the single prime ('). The double prime ('') is not, and has never ever been in the entire history of human communication, used (correctly) to notate minutes of time.

This whole fiasco is truly a microcosm of your analysis in this thread. You repeatedly continue to insist that black is white, long after it's been explained in detail that white is white and black is black. It makes reasonable debate next to impossible.

Wait. Didn't you say elsewhere that you had never in your life seen the term " to express time.


However, now you are an expert.

 

[Vixen]

What poster were you quoting when you said that the Estonia sank in 35 minutes without a trace?

No-one has claimed it sank without a trace. That's a frankly bizarre accusation to make.

Much like your accusation that people made callous jokes about the victims of the Estonia disaster.

Captain Essa Makela of the on-scene commander ship did indeed express surprise there was no trace of the Estonia when his vessel arrived at the location where it had sunk. So maybe it is only bizarre to you because of your own lack of knowledge. Perhaps consider that as a possibility before hurling abuse.

 

[Jack by the hedge]

The phrase "sank without a trace" has a meaning that goes far beyond what the rescuers found, which was that the ship itself had sunk (however surprising they found that). We can spend ten pages or more debating what precisely "sunk without a trace" means if everyone's keen.

 

[Vixen]

There very much is not. In fact, the whole value of the primes-as-cuts system is lost if you can arbitrarily redefine which is the first cut, second cut, and so forth. For angles and time, the symbol ″ (double-prime) meaning "second cut" (i.e., of an hour or of a degree) is baked into both the notation and the accompanying nomenclature. 35″ is "thirty-five seconds," or more completely, "thirty-five second-cuts from a degree" or "thirty-five second-cuts from an hour." For time and angles, double-prime is never anything but a second, because it is never anything but the second cut from the corresponding base unit. That's literally why the notation is two primes.

Yes, we all learned about the Babylonian sexagesimal number system in high school. That's old news. The fact that it's neither a base-10 (fingers and toes) or a base-2 (binary subdivisions) illustrates the problem the primes-as-cuts notation is meant to solve. Most modern science and engineering is done in decimal multiples and divisions for good reasons. But back when there was a plethora of units and derived quantities in common and long-historical usage, we needed a more carefully regulated notation.

The primes-as-cuts system starts with a base unit. The base unit is always symbolized by a properly identifying abbreviation, never by a prime. The commonly-employed subdivisions of each were notated according to the "first cut," or first subdivision, using a single prime ′. That unit is further subdivided--the "second cut"--and notated with the double prime ″. You can have a third cut, a fourth cut; indeed as many cuts as are helpful. The notation simply expands ad nauseam by adding more primes.

Of course, when writing up a technical report or an exam paper, you do make clear what exactly what units your figures or notations represent; for example, US$, GBP, EUR, feet, inches, metres. Once done you can then drop the explanatory notation as in a spreadsheet. The issue of base-10 whilst a subset of base-60 nonetheless IMV is an inferior one in terms of elegance, because when you come to express it in quarters (as with time, £.s.d [e.g. 17/6 being exactly 3/4 of a pound]) you would have to imagine the quarter mark at 2.5 or 7.5 and thus introduces additional decimal points, mixing up notations.

The notation is elegant enough. The underlying systems are the problem because the divisions are not uniform. Traditional English units often come from binary subdivisions of a base unit. But we don't use all the intermediate cuts. A gallon divides into four quarts, which divides further into two pints. So you can say "3 gal 2′ 1″" to mean "three gallons, two quarts, and 1 pint." Note how the abbreviation "gal" indicates gallons of volume--the base unit--and sets up the customary sequence of divisors for the cuts.

That works because you have made clear that gallons is the base unit, which means as soon as the first prime (in your example [I would call it first prime]) reaches 7 or over, then it is expressed as a further whole number in gallons, i.e., 4 gals x' y". That works. Why wouldn't it. Like wise if you state one day to be first base then 1' 20" easily translates into one day 20 hours, if you want to write shorthand for the rest of the piece.

Nota Bene: when using the notation for feet and inches, the feet immediate become first prime. There is no need to state, say, 6ft, 2' ⅛ ". It is just 6'2 ⅛".

Binary subdivisions are easy to obtain using a simple balance scale or two identical vessels for holding liquids. But why isn't the first cut of a gallon equal to half a gallon? You can have 16 ounces in a pound (mass). That's obviously derived by binary subdivision. But why don't we have names for the intermediate divisions of half-, quarter-, and eighth-pound? Probably just lost to history. But the point is that for each particular base unit, you need to know the traditional cuts. And that sequence of cuts is established by properly notating the base unit with its unambiguous symbol: 'h' for hours, 'º' for degrees, 'gal' for gallons, and so forth.

You'll find that the names for many units derive from physical features, either of the body (hands, feet - as in steps - a yard being from a man's forearm to elbow, or whatever) or of the landscape (a bushell being a typical basket of fruit or veg, an acre being to do with how much land the lord of the manor gave his peasants and so on). You say we need to have the names of the unit however, as above, we don't need to state 'feet' as it is a given we just state 6'.

Likewise location we just say, Lat 60° 27' 16.2360'' N Long: 22° 15' 53.3664'' E. This is so much more elegant IMV than Latitude: 60.454510
Longitude: 22.264824, the 'decimalised' version and no doubt people will be telling me off for using the former. In the former, you don't even need to state it is lat. or long. because the N and the E tells you where it is in respect of Greenwich Mean Time. (To its north and to its east.)

For time and angles we start with the Babylonian sextagesimal subdivisions because they have too much history behind them to let go. The base unit for time is the hour ('h'). The first cut is minutes (of time) and the second cut is--literally--seconds (of time). For angles, the base unit is a degree ('º'). The first cut is arcminutes. We properly use the prefix "arc" to distinguish from time measurement, but we have to concede it's often omitted when the context is unmistakably angle measurement. The second cut (double-prime) is arcseconds.

But at this point we depart from the Babylonians, at least as far as angles are concerned. The third cut of a degree is not a further 1/60 sexagesimal division. 2‴ is not 2/60 of an arcsecond. It's 2/3 of an arcsecond, because the divisor for the third cut of a degree is not 60, it's 3. Similarly the fourth cut of a degree is 1/4 of a "third of arc." We don't use these finer cuts anymore. Even when we use the DMS notation for angles, we just decimalize the seconds. But they exist and have definitions in the primes-as-cuts system.

Time cuts follow the DMS divisors from the base unit of hours ('h'). But that lasts only as long as the first two cuts. After that, there are no more traditional primes-as-cuts divisors for time. Scholars indeed stroke their beards over what geometric factors might lay beneath the correspondence between hours and degrees. But for our purposes it's just an accident.

I disagree that it is 'to do with history' that we don't let it go. Our entire calendar is dependent on this as it makes perfect sense, being based on circular movements of circular bodies. Days, seasons, years, hours, minutes and seconds.

Vixen alludes to "context," but she has the wrong idea about what that context controls. Context tells us what extent we're measuring, and therefore which base unit applies and what sequence of divisors to use to resolve the primes. Context can never redefine what the base unit is for some particular extent. Otherwise the system collapses. Context properly established, we sometimes omit the base unit if its value is zero and we don't therefore need the abbreviation to further expand the context. We don't need to properly title our musical composition 0h 4′ 33″, because we establish by other means that the context is time duration. What is meant thereafter by the primes is unassailably unambiguous.

Ah, but we say X'Y" for feet and inches and likewise time, as in duration thereof.

Science has found a way to be even less ambiguous when measuring time, but that doesn't mean the older notation is imprecise or open to arbitrary reinterpretation. Vixen wants to argue that 35″ can mean "thirty-five minutes (of time)" in context--the context presumably being that of a ship sinking, which we would naturally reckon in minutes and just therefore "know" what the symbol was meant to convey from case to case.

That is simply as wrong as it can be.

Once we've established that the context is a time extent, the base unit is hours ('h') and the second-cut figures are 1/3600 of the base unit. This is immutable. Vixen is simply making stuff up in order to avoid having to admit an error. She's trying to say there's enough wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey in the notation to allow for her errant usage. There isn't. She is wrong, full stop.

Nope. Not making up, that is what we always did. Quite conventionally.

Before we close, it's valuable to understand why we notate feet and inches as first and second cuts. Isn't the base unit of distance the foot in the English system? No, it's the yard. When the extent is distance, the base unit is the yard ('yd'). The first cut, ′, is feet (1/3 yd) and the second cut, ″, is inches (1/12 foot). And if you've read the Wikipedia page, you know there's a third cut of a yard, the ligne, or 1/12 of an inch (for certain values of "inch"). In modernish usage, American engineers forced to work in legacy designs simply decimalize the inch. American carpenters stick with the traditional binary subdivisions of an inch, expressed as fractions.

Only if you want to make clear yards are being brought into it. Then that works for me: 3' 2" 11"' as long as we are all clear the first is in yards. Saves an awful lot of writing things out in full.

In America the foot has supplanted the yard as the practical base unit of distance measurement, and has its own abbreviation ('ft'). American surveying is done in decimal feet, and surveyors' tapes are so marked. But we don't change the primes-as-cuts notation, nor do we normalize to yards for long distances in feet. I own a piece of property whose legal description gives it as 75.4′ wide. We retain yards primarily for our inaptly-named football and for naval engagements.

The whole primes-as-cuts system was meant to encompass feet, gallons, degrees, hours, noggins, firkins, and so forth, with all the baggage of their historical derivations and compositions. It's higgledy-piggledy enough without trying to say that a second-cut may mean a "cask" in one case and a "hogshead" in another. That never happened.

But as usual we have to address the prospect of debating with someone who (a) is plainly underinformed and (b) will never admit even the tiniest error. Such a proponent can never arrive at the truth, and their motives are properly suspect. The intentions here are far from good; the proponent's evident intent is to pretend to be someone they are not and berate others for not gratifying that desire even when the facts disagree.

In the UK and especially Europe, feet and inches are not in common usage. We have the metre, the centimetre, hectares (= apx 2.5 acres), kilometres, etc.

I see nothing wrong with yards, feet, inches and miles. I doubt I could get used to Fahrenheit or acres again (although easy enough to convert in one's head). The square foot to measure prroperties annoys me as we have everything in square metres here, so when I see the US press talking about 44,000sq feet, I get very cross indeed.

 

[Mojo]

I have never claimed that port and starboard are perpendicular to each other.

Never?

A boat is only a half circle in shape, thus if port is at 45° and starboard at 135°, it is indeed standing perpendicular to the deck and now parallel with the water's surface when turned 90°.

 

[Mojo]

I get it now. You want me to be the butt of your jokes. It makes you sound a bit insecure that you need to find a butt for your jokes.

I was, on that occasion, being facetious. What you were actually doing was portraying attacks on your conspiracy theories as attacks on the victims in order to avoid having to address them.

 

[Vixen]

Never?

The port and starboard sides may not be rigidly perpendicular to the deck of a ship (the sides extending outwards as they usually do in a ship) but I see nothing wrong in this statement. Nowhere have I said that port was perpendicular to starboard as you falsely claimed in your attempt to raise a laugh.

If you are going to mock at least make an attempt to be accurate.

 

[Vixen]

I was, on that occasion, being facetious. What you were actually doing was portraying attacks on your conspiracy theories as attacks on the victims in order to avoid having to address them.

It is not a conspiracy theory. It is a matter of fact that the Estonia incident is being reinvestigated. It is hardly my fault if people such as yourself perceive the original JAIC report to be set in stone and nobody should dare question it.

 

[JesseCuster]

What poster were you quoting when you said that the Estonia sank in 35 minutes without a trace?

No-one has claimed it sank without a trace. That's a frankly bizarre accusation to make.

Much like your accusation that people made callous jokes about the victims of the Estonia disaster.

Captain Essa Makela of the on-scene commander ship did indeed express surprise there was no trace of the Estonia when his vessel arrived at the location where it had sunk. So maybe it is only bizarre to you because of your own lack of knowledge. Perhaps consider that as a possibility before hurling abuse.

You claimed that your usage of the idea of the Estonia sinking in 35 minutes "without a trace" was quoting another poster on these forums.

So who were you quoting? It's a simple question.

 

[JesseCuster]

How does writing 35 minutes as 0.35" put anything into context to make anything understandable?

Does 0.35" mean 0.35 seconds? 0.35 minutes? If you're still using " as a notation for minutes (which it isn't) then 0.35" would be 21 seconds.

Steve was puzzled as to the difference between " in feet and inches" and " in terms of time. He believes it only means height and depth. I added the 0 in front of the 35" to give him an idea that the first prime was in hours (hence to base-60). As it was under one hour, it didn't need to be stated. (As in when one writes 6" for six inches but no feet.) Alas, it was all in vain and seemed to cause even greater confusion and I must apologise as what I see as perfect logic others will have had a completely different education and see nowt but confusion and chaos. There is no shame in this. I sometimes had to ask for maths help from my more mathematical family in obtaining my professional qualifications.

But that doesn't answer the question. What does 0.35" mean when you say it? Are you saying that decimal points are used to indicate hours when expressing time? That 0.35" means 0 hours and 35 minutes? That's just adding wrong to wrong.

The reasonable way to read 0.35" (assuming for the sake of argument that you're using " as a notation for minutes) is zero point three five minutes, or 21 seconds as I said. Who ever uses 0.35" to indicate zero hours and 35 minutes?

Are you claiming that when you wrote 0.35", you were attempting to write "zero hours and 35 minutes" in some sort of notation that would be understood? You're really piling the wrongness up here.

 

[JayUtah]

Of course, when...

Most of your post is irrelevant pontification. Stop trying to be the teacher. I, on the other and, am the teacher. I have taught engineering at the college level, including the history and practice of measurement. Little of my post was irrelevant; it was intended to establish the historical basis for why you could not arbitrarily reinterpret the primes notation as you attempted to do. No, you may not simply decide for yourself that the base unit for some extent is something else.

Nope. Not making up, that is what we always did.

What you made up in a frantic ploy to save face was that you could arbitrarily change what ″ means for measuring time. It means seconds because it's the second cut of an hour. It has always meant seconds. It never means anything but seconds.

 

[JayUtah]

It is not a conspiracy theory. It is a matter of fact that the Estonia incident is being reinvestigated.

Straw man. You're interested only in the conspiracy theories and whether you can claim some sort of intellectual or moral high ground for advocating them.

It is hardly my fault if people such as yourself perceive the original JAIC report to be set in stone and nobody should dare question it.

Straw man. No one has claimed the JAIC findings are the last word on the subject.

You, however, are using conspiracy theories in order to pretend you are technically competent to question the JAIC. You are not, and neither are your conspiracy-mongering sources. You're using ongoing interest in the sinking to promote the conspiracy theories that have been around since the ship sank, with no effort made toward reconciling them into a better explanation for why it sank. Further, you're using your pretext at knowledge to further pretend to be morally superior because of some greater devotion to the victims and survivors.

You use conspiracy theories as a fairly flimsy ploy to boost your own ego. That's why you can't admit even the slightest, most insignificant error. You're not interested in being right. You're interested only in appearing to be right, no matter what you have to make up in order to achieve that illusion.

 

[Mojo]

The port and starboard sides may not be rigidly perpendicular to the deck of a ship (the sides extending outwards as they usually do in a ship) but I see nothing wrong in this statement. Nowhere have I said that port was perpendicular to starboard as you falsely claimed in your attempt to raise a laugh.

Are you unable to subtract 45 from 135, or do you simply not know what "perpendicular" means?

 

[JayUtah]

I added the 0 in front of the 35" to give him an idea that the first prime was in hours (hence to base-60).

I don't believe you. If you knew the primes notation, you would know how to use it to properly express the base unit and the previous cuts to correct any ambiguity. But you don't know the notation, probably never did, and still don't. Further, you refuse to be educated. You're just throwing random symbology around, apparently hoping someone will think you know what you're talking about. And when your betters correct you, you pile fanciful story upon story trying to make people think you somehow "knew it all along."

All your arguments are rooted in you pretending to be something you're not and then to wax indignant when no one buys it.

Alas, it was all in vain and seemed to cause even greater confusion and I must apologise as what I see as perfect logic others will have had a completely different education and see nowt but confusion and chaos.

Oh, stop it.

There's no "perfect logic" in misusing one notation to correct your ignorant misuse of another. The better conclusion is that you don't know what you're doing and you're desperate to convince people otherwise.

Your latest story is that you've cobbled up a new homegrown notation to "clarify" your original meaning. How on earth is anyone supposed to understand a notation you just made up on the spot and didn't explain until now? Especially when it's identical to a notation that already exists. You have literally no reason to think that anyone would interpret 0.35″ as anything other that 32/100 of a second.

And no, you can't chalk your compounded ignorance up to differences in education. The problem is not that you were educated differently than your critics. The problem is that whatever education you may have been offered on the subject of the physical world and how to measure it seems not to have availed much--you're scientifically illiterate.

There is no shame in this.

You should be ashamed. You have no clue what you're talking about, no respect for people who do, and an ill-deserved sense of moral superiority for marching your ignorance about on parade.

I sometimes had to ask for maths help from my more mathematical family in obtaining my professional qualifications.

Yet somehow you're able to determine for yourself that Anders Björkman's technical arguments are sound. You admit you need help to pass for a profession predicated on numeracy, yet you're so adverse to accepting correction here from your betters that you'd rather tell one absurd story after another than face up to your incompetence.

 

[LondonJohn]

Wait. Didn't you say elsewhere that you had never in your life seen the term " to express time.

Nope, that's not what I said. Perhaps you'd benefit from going back to read what I actually did say before ascribing quotes to me?

However, now you are an expert.

I most certainly know enough about a) prime notation and how it's used, and b) internationally-universal preferred notation for units of time, to consider myself confidently proficient in those matters, yes. And compared to your woeful (and continuing) ignorance, I'd definitely qualify myself as relatively expert.

 

[LondonJohn]

Nota Bene: when using the notation for feet and inches, the feet immediate become first prime. There is no need to state, say, 6ft, 2' ⅛ ". It is just 6'2 ⅛".

Nota Bene (LOL) this latest piece of ineptitude

 

[JesseCuster]

Nota Bene: when using the notation for feet and inches, the feet immediate become first prime. There is no need to state, say, 6ft, 2' ⅛ ". It is just 6'2 ⅛".

Re: The highlighted nonsense:

6ft = 6 feet
2' = 2 feet
⅛" = 1 eighth of an inch

So 6ft, 2' ⅛ " is 6 feet, 2 feet and an eighth of an inch. Which is a rather bizarre way to communicate a length or distance. It's definitely not a correct or coherent way of stating 6 feet, 2⅛ inches.

Not only is there no need to state it, it shouldn't be stated at all because it's incoherent nonsense.

 

[Vixen]

You claimed that your usage of the idea of the Estonia sinking in 35 minutes "without a trace" was quoting another poster on these forums.

So who were you quoting? It's a simple question.

Perhaps a link would help?

 

[Vixen]

But that doesn't answer the question. What does 0.35" mean when you say it? Are you saying that decimal points are used to indicate hours when expressing time? That 0.35" means 0 hours and 35 minutes? That's just adding wrong to wrong.

The reasonable way to read 0.35" (assuming for the sake of argument that you're using " as a notation for minutes) is zero point three five minutes, or 21 seconds as I said. Who ever uses 0.35" to indicate zero hours and 35 minutes?

Are you claiming that when you wrote 0.35", you were attempting to write "zero hours and 35 minutes" in some sort of notation that would be understood? You're really piling the wrongness up here.

That should have read 0'35". Anyway nobody puts in the zero, as in 0'6"; one just says 6".

Just because you have never heard of duration of time being expressed in terms of 35" that doesn't make it wrong.

 

[Vixen]

Most of your post is irrelevant pontification. Stop trying to be the teacher. I, on the other and, am the teacher. I have taught engineering at the college level, including the history and practice of measurement. Little of my post was irrelevant; it was intended to establish the historical basis for why you could not arbitrarily reinterpret the primes notation as you attempted to do. No, you may not simply decide for yourself that the base unit for some extent is something else.



What you made up in a frantic ploy to save face was that you could arbitrarily change what ″ means for measuring time. It means seconds because it's the second cut of an hour. It has always meant seconds. It never means anything but seconds.

It is something I have always done. I had no idea you and others had never heard of it.