Vixen
Penultimate Amazing
Don't diss Middlesex. Middlesex gave you Reg Dwight, aka Elton John.
You can't say Middlesex never gives you nuffing.
Split Thread Conspiracy theories about unconventional usage of notation
- Thread starter Steve
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Don't diss Middlesex. Middlesex gave you Reg Dwight, aka Elton John.
You can't say Middlesex never gives you nuffing.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
No, copy-pasting from actual UTF-8 or IEC 8859 text (as opposed to images of text) doesn't rewrite the characters. No, WhatsApp doesn't transform the characters that way when you type them. Only two of the many products I tested produced those exact wrong glyphs when you type single and double quotes into them: Microsoft Outlook (but not the web version) and Microsoft Word. And not when you paste into them; you have to type the characters because they're transformed algorithmically key-wise as you type. Yes, I just tested the scenario you proposed.
Does it ever occur to you not to lie? Does it ever occur to you not to keep digging yourself deeper into verifiably false claims?
No, there's no mysterious "maths PhD" who anonymously confirmed your usage. No, there's no practice at a quaint Middlesex school that no one at any other school in the area has ever heard of. You're simply lying, Vixen. And it's insulting that you think we can't see through it.
And that's what this thread is about. You fancy yourself someone who is qualified to challenge the mainstream belief and hold powerful interests accountable. You want to sit in judgment over your betters. You pretend to a moral mandate to uphold the truth, defend the downtrodden, and punish the guilty. But it's all just an act. You can't show that you're smart enough and you can't show that you're honest enough. You're not qualified in any way to do any of what you propose, but it sure seems to please you to think you can.
P.J. Denyer
Penultimate Amazing
Of course the elephant in the room is that conspiracy theorists were able to admit mistakes & revise their worldview when their incorrect information was pointed out, they wouldn't be conspiracy theorists...
Nevertheless, thank you Jay, and others, for your willingness to defy Brandolini's Law, there's always some interesting new knowledge imparted in your posts for those of us who remember what the 'E' in ISF stands for!
Nevertheless, thank you Jay, and others, for your willingness to defy Brandolini's Law, there's always some interesting new knowledge imparted in your posts for those of us who remember what the 'E' in ISF stands for!
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
You can be narcissistic without being a conspiracy theorist. Plenty of people hold their own assumed genius in such high regard as to ignore facts without their ideas being conspiratorial.
You can stubbornly deny fact without being a conspiracy theorist. Plenty of people cling to a desired belief without that belief being conspiratorial, and filter their facts accordingly.
What makes a person a conspiracy theorist is no more than their willingness to concoct, believe, and advocate conspiracy theories. They may also be narcissistic, in which case conspiracy theories can provide the semblance of knowledge that let's them believe they're speaking with authority. And a conspiracy theorist pretty much has to habitually ignore fact. Conspiracies are different from conspiracy theories because conspiracy theories generally fly in the face of fact.
But these categorical arguments are, at best, only convenient labels for a set of traits that we would ordinarily want to observe rather than infer. Being a conspiracy theorist doesn't mean one is also a narcissist. Being a conspiracy theorist doesn't immediately make one ignorant of fact. At best it expresses simply a willingness to theorize uncritically.
The elephant I see in the room is armchair detectives. These are generally people who lack the requisite knowledge, are inexperienced in the relevant techniques, and are often dishonest in their motives. They don't know what they're talking about, but for some reason they believe they should be listened to more than the qualified experts because they hold a higher moral ground; the experts are inevitably corrupt or compromised, and therefore cannot be trusted. But it doesn't take very long to see that the moral mandate is just as false as the intellectual and professional ones. They are willing to misrepresent the facts, misrepresent their competence, and simply lie to get attention. Armchair detectives are also frequently narcissistic, but they aren't always conspiracy theorists.
Where I think armchair detectives resemble conspiracy theorists is in the desire to create a world in which they are the hero. In either case, whatever little knowledge the individual possesses is always sufficient to solve the crime, detect the conspiracy, challenge the experts, and save the world. Conspiracy theories can sometimes provide the shortcut to the illusion of erudition they need to make that world seem more real to them. But the goal is always to convey an impression of the armchair detective as intellectually and morally superior.
Because that's the real motive, armchair detectives enjoy zero respect from actual qualified practitioners. Armchair detectives provide no useful insight, no useful oversight or accountability, no valid criticism, no reasonable dissent, no helpful public discourse. All they do is attempt to garner personal prestige and notoriety at the expenses of their betters' reputations and of public trust in discernible fact. They are merely vandals. Unable to create something praiseworthy themselves, they demand attention instead by spray-painting vulgarities on other people's achievements.
This thread is ostensibly about what unit of time is meant by ″ or which direction you should look when someone says starboard. But it's really about the burden one must meet in order to be taken seriously when one presumes to sit in judgment upon others. Skepticism is about determining whether something is likely true, which in turn touches upon the methods we use. When one's method is simply to tell lie upon lie about easily-verified fact, or about facts attested by demonstrable expertise, we consider that person not to be worthy to judge the work of experts. The knowledge is missing. The honesty is missing. The burden is unmet. We don't have to implicate conspiracy theories in all such exercises, although here that is an additional factor.
You can stubbornly deny fact without being a conspiracy theorist. Plenty of people cling to a desired belief without that belief being conspiratorial, and filter their facts accordingly.
What makes a person a conspiracy theorist is no more than their willingness to concoct, believe, and advocate conspiracy theories. They may also be narcissistic, in which case conspiracy theories can provide the semblance of knowledge that let's them believe they're speaking with authority. And a conspiracy theorist pretty much has to habitually ignore fact. Conspiracies are different from conspiracy theories because conspiracy theories generally fly in the face of fact.
But these categorical arguments are, at best, only convenient labels for a set of traits that we would ordinarily want to observe rather than infer. Being a conspiracy theorist doesn't mean one is also a narcissist. Being a conspiracy theorist doesn't immediately make one ignorant of fact. At best it expresses simply a willingness to theorize uncritically.
The elephant I see in the room is armchair detectives. These are generally people who lack the requisite knowledge, are inexperienced in the relevant techniques, and are often dishonest in their motives. They don't know what they're talking about, but for some reason they believe they should be listened to more than the qualified experts because they hold a higher moral ground; the experts are inevitably corrupt or compromised, and therefore cannot be trusted. But it doesn't take very long to see that the moral mandate is just as false as the intellectual and professional ones. They are willing to misrepresent the facts, misrepresent their competence, and simply lie to get attention. Armchair detectives are also frequently narcissistic, but they aren't always conspiracy theorists.
Where I think armchair detectives resemble conspiracy theorists is in the desire to create a world in which they are the hero. In either case, whatever little knowledge the individual possesses is always sufficient to solve the crime, detect the conspiracy, challenge the experts, and save the world. Conspiracy theories can sometimes provide the shortcut to the illusion of erudition they need to make that world seem more real to them. But the goal is always to convey an impression of the armchair detective as intellectually and morally superior.
Because that's the real motive, armchair detectives enjoy zero respect from actual qualified practitioners. Armchair detectives provide no useful insight, no useful oversight or accountability, no valid criticism, no reasonable dissent, no helpful public discourse. All they do is attempt to garner personal prestige and notoriety at the expenses of their betters' reputations and of public trust in discernible fact. They are merely vandals. Unable to create something praiseworthy themselves, they demand attention instead by spray-painting vulgarities on other people's achievements.
This thread is ostensibly about what unit of time is meant by ″ or which direction you should look when someone says starboard. But it's really about the burden one must meet in order to be taken seriously when one presumes to sit in judgment upon others. Skepticism is about determining whether something is likely true, which in turn touches upon the methods we use. When one's method is simply to tell lie upon lie about easily-verified fact, or about facts attested by demonstrable expertise, we consider that person not to be worthy to judge the work of experts. The knowledge is missing. The honesty is missing. The burden is unmet. We don't have to implicate conspiracy theories in all such exercises, although here that is an additional factor.
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Vixen
Penultimate Amazing
Please grow up. That was the copy and text from WhatsApp.
I haven't 'challenged' the mainstream. I happened to write a post and someone challenged me. If people trawl through my posts looking for typos or whatnot, then I am very flattered to be considered 'the smartest guy on the room', to be the cause of such insecurity, that people feel driven to do this.
HG Wells once said, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
I am the man outside of that land with the 20-20 balanced vision of two eyes (so to speak).
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Actually, he wrote a story inspired by the proverb, in which the saying was subverted because the people in the land of the blind were so well adapted that the sighted man was actually at a disadvantage.
All of which is irrelevant, since you don't actually have more insight or knowledge than your interlocutors.
You make blatant errors which you rarely acknowledge. On the rare occasions, you attempt to minimise the errors.
Jack by the hedge
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Mojo
Mostly harmless
I Am The Scum
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This might actually be the weirdest thread on the entire forum, and that's really saying something.
Vixen
Penultimate Amazing
Rubbish. If I make an error I have zero problem in saying so. Your trying to force me into saying I have erred when I know I have not just highlights your own desire to bend others to your will. Perhaps look into yourself to understand why you have the urge to do this.
Vixen
Penultimate Amazing
It revolves around my having said in a post that a ship sank within 35". A poster from Canada said he had never heard of prime notation for time and when it turned out there was such a thing, it has evolved into a massive personal attack with people suddenly claiming they knew of it all along, despite several having clearly proclaimed they had never come across it in their life.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Please stop lying about even the most trivial things. You are not the teacher. You are not the mother. You are a conspiracy theorist with delusions of grandeur pretending you can sit in infallible judgment over your betters. It's arrogant and rude. You've made the mistake of doing so in a skeptics forum among people with both the skills and the motivation to test your judgment. You're not really the adult in the room here, so keep your condescension to yourself.
No, it wasn't. I tested your claim. The evidence is against you, as usual. I did find out exactly what caused the glyphs to be rewritten. That's because I was justly chagrined at being unable to reproduce the º-becomes-"" experiment and having to withdraw the claim out of an abundance of fairness. I learned from it and resolved to be more diligent in testing your claims, because I'm interested in being right even if I have to change my mind in order to accommodate new evidence.
The only products that produce that exact pattern of wrong glyphs are Microsoft editors: Word, and the HTML markup editor in the Windows-native Outlook. Copying and pasting do not produce the results you claim. Again you seem to think that no one can find out that you're lying.
Regardless, a "maths PhD" will have considerable experience producing uncommon symbols in writing, as do I, and a desire to be correct as matter of second-nature effort. You get very attuned to when your tools are doing the wrong thing in an effort to "help" you do something else. We don't type ' followed by " to get a triple prime, because it looks wrong and (as you saw) often gets rewritten and therefore is wrong. We type three single quotes, ''', if you can't get the right glyph, ‴.
A lay person, however, would be more inclined to enter the easiest thing to type and—when his editor rewrites it to be more pretty—say, "Meh, good enough." It's not good enough; it's wrong. And you're telling us a highly educated mathematician is okay with that, who also has experience in physics. That's not credible. It's more consistent with a layperson who cobbled up something in a hurry.
At first you told us ″ for minutes of time was a standard, and insinuated that the U.S. must use a stricter standard that confused the issue. Then you said it was accepted in your school, as long as the examiners could tell what you meant from context. Then you said it was only informal usage, although no one from your neck of the woods agrees. And now you're telling us some anonymous person whom you think we should consider an expert is hearsayishy confirming your usage is correct, contrary to the explanations of people whose credentials and experience actually relevant and not in question.
Do you think we can't see that you keep changing your story to make it harder to refute? You're trying to find a bluff that works, not trying to ascertain the truth or prove your claim with testable evidence.
I was speaking of the MS Estonia thread, where you do nothing except challenge the mainstream. To do that, you rely on a palette of incoherent and incompatible conspiracy theories whose only unifying principle is that they dispute the JAIC methods or findings.
But on the topic at hand, you're still challenging the mainstream. I'll let others focus on your misuse of port and starboard. On the point of what ″ means for time, you are fine with the mainstream convention for distance. ′ always means feet and ″ always means inches. The system works because those meanings never change. And you're okay with the mainstream angular measurements. ′ always means arcminutes and ″ always means arcseconds. The system works for this measurement too, because the meanings of the marks never change. You don't have to specify yd or º because ′ and ″ are unambiguous.
Everyone else in the world who knows primes notation for time knows to use ′ for minutes and ″ for seconds. And because it's part of the same system, it works because the meanings of those marks never changes. We have examples where the base unit, h, is omitted, and the meaning remains unambiguous. This is the mainstream, and you're happy with it up to now.
But now you—and only you—tell us that ″ can mean either minutes or seconds of time according your brain-canon of "context." Every real scientist who hears something like that throws up a little inside. You have no evidence for your claim. You have no other examples of ″ meaning minutes. You have no explanation for why this particular application of primes notation—and this one only—is allowed to violate what you concede are rules for disambiguation.
You don't seem to realize that in your haste to pile bluff upon bluff, you're very much admitting to challenging the mainstream. Your first story was that only the U.S. required ″ to mean only seconds of time, and that your usage was, in fact, more mainstream. But then you had to walk that back and say it was a convention that was accepted only at your school, so long as the examiners could tell what you meant. So not mainstream usage, but something understood only at your school. Then you backpedaled even further: you didn't actually use ″ to mean minutes of time for anything you handed in for grading. It was just what you used informally in your notes and such. So even less mainstream. You even insinuate that knowing not to use ″ for minutes in homework meant you knew it wasn't acceptable.
You literally can't keep narrowing the acceptable usage of ″ for minutes without arguing that it's against the mainstream. "I used it informally at school, but we knew it wasn't correct," is as narrow as usage can get. You're literally admitting the mainstream is correct to insist that ″ should mean only seconds, but you are excused for doing it privately while somehow expecting that everyone here should have unmistakably known what you mean. That is literally a challenge to the mainstream in order to safe face.
No. The whole purpose for this thread is your claim that using ″ for minutes of time is not a typo, but is instead something you wrote on purpose, and that you're so much smarter than everyone else for knowing that you could do that. It is that your use of "port" and "starboard" are not mistakes, but correct designations, and everyone else is obtuse for not seeing how.
You're in a forum whose stated purpose is to challenge claims. No one "happens" to post anything. You're either posting something with the expectation that it will be challenged, or you're posting a challenge to something you think isn't right. If you're whining just because people are challenging your claims, you're very much in the wrong place. And especially if you're posting conspiracy theories expecting to be praised for your erudition and integrity instead of mercilessly debunked, you're very much not in the right place.
In this thread we're deliberately focusing on your minor, inconsequential mistakes. We know they're mistakes. Dropping the bluff and admitting you originally made a mistake would actually improve your credibility here, as we measure it. These mistakes really have nothing to do with your major theories in any of the threads you contribute to. Saying, "Oops, I thought ″ could also mean minutes and you can see where I corrected myself," doesn't mean you have to let up pressure on the JAIC.
This is how we determine whether your objection to something is due to your having thought critically about it, or to your just wanting to appear infallible and authoritative. Sticking to your guns on even the most trivial errors and deploying one absurd, incompatible story after another helps us draw a conclusion in your case. And that in turn helps us determine whether claims you make on your own authority should be given credence. They shouldn't; you're just trying to look smart, not actually discover the truth. You're incapable of admitting even tiniest mistake, and therefore utterly impervious to evidence that disputes a belief you hold
And this why we, who are properly qualified and experienced, correctly do not respect you armchair detectives. You, personally, are neither knowledgeable enough or honest enough to adjudicate the investigative work of the JAIC, Meyer Weft, or anyone else investigating a transportation accident.
The fact that you silently dropped the ″ usage and started using the correct ′ for minutes tells us you knew you were wrong, but that you hoped no one would press the issue and require you to admit it. Only later did you start making stuff up to say you were really right all along by using both. You went back and saw that you first used ″ wrongly and then switched to the correct ′ and realized you had to invent a story that accounted for both usages, hence the unscientific invocation of "context." You painted yourself into a corner to begin with, and you just can't stop. You'd rather keep bluffing your way farther into a self-soothing delusion than live in reality where others are smarter and more credible than you.
No, we observe that you think you're the smartest person in the room, and won't let anyone forget that you think so. But you really just aren't smart enough to make the claims you're making on your own authority. You don't know what you're talking about, and you think all your absurd bluffs are working. It's hard to interpret these remarks as anything but an admission that all you're doing here is stroking your own ego.
I'm fully qualified and licensed in my field, and have practiced it successfully now for decades. Your claims here and in the other threads where you and I both participate are well within my field of expertise. I'm very capable of knowing as a matter of fact whether you're right or wrong on any of those points.
But in your fantasy kingdom, I and others must be "insecure," while you crown yourself with crackpot conspiracy theories and pretend you're competent to judge the work of experts. Then you tell lie upon transparent lie to protect your fantasy-kingdom sovereignty, like a child with crumbs on her face claiming that invisible nargles must've raided the cookie jar. But sure, we're the immature ones...
Pathetic.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Demonstrably false.
You can either admit your mistake (i.e., that ″ cannot be correctly used to mean minutes of time) or provide evidence that you are correct as you claim. You want a third option where you're still considered infallible despite all evidence to the contrary. Who is really the one bending others to her will?
I'm perfectly happy with my role as a skeptic by nature, an engineer by license and qualification, and a scientist by occupation. You should be the one questioning why you're constantly trying to get people to accept you as something you clearly are not.
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JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
No. You keep relying upon this straw man.
You claimed ″ should have been understood to mean minutes of time while others facetiously took you to mean inches of distance.
You are not being challenged because you used primes notation for time when others understandably were unfamiliar with it. You are being challenged because you used primes notation incorrectly and continue to maintain that you were not wrong to do so.
I Am The Scum
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That is literally not what happened. You said 0.35'. It's right there in the OP.
Vixen
Penultimate Amazing
That's not where it started. That was my - admittedly not very successful - attempt to explain it to the Canadian poster. No good deed goes unpunished.
She said both
Which does show a lack of care in writing.
I presume, Vixen, that you meant the ship sank within 35 minutes*, but at the moment I have no certainty what you mean.
*And not 0.35 minutes (21 seconds) also not 35 seconds
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And I have no problem with people making typos of otherwise having brainfarts, but I do expect acknowledgement of the mistake and acknowledgement of the correct answer.
0.35' is not the same as 35', and neither are equivalent to 35"
0.35' is not the same as 35', and neither are equivalent to 35"
Vixen
Penultimate Amazing
The 0.35' was an attempt to conform to the demand that the first prime should be transcribed as zero (the hour) and the minute the first prime. This was because people claimed they couldn't understand how 35 could be a double prime and the hour a single one. Far from making it clearer, it caused Heap Big Confusion.
0'35" would be the unconventional way in the same way 0'6" is unconventional for height or length.
In any case, you knew perfectly well what I meant. On realising that primes were indeed used for time, rather than admit I was right, the detractors tried to claim they knew this all along but the fault lay with me because all they could find on google (yes, laugh and weep) was a US musical composition called 4'33" so tried to claim that this was the only correct way to use primes (four minutes thirty-three seconds). This claim is borne out of sheer ignorance and an inability to admit to that ignorance. They turned to JayUtah who dashed their hopes by confirming primes for time did exist but as someone who only ever used them for rowing duration had no further knowledge.
In the land of the blind...
All this to cover the back of one person who tried to disingenuously claim it referred to the depth of the sea.
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