JesseCuster
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Um, you know the highlighted terms are from differential calculus, right?
Wikipedia said:
Split Thread Conspiracy theories about unconventional usage of notation
- Thread starter Steve
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Jack by the hedge
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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.
wollery
Protected by Samurai Hedgehogs!
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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.
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).
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.
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).
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
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.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
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.
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. 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.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
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 say
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?Anonymous 'Expert' said:
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?
MarkCorrigan
Героям слава!
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?
LondonJohn
Penultimate Amazing
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- May 12, 2010
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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
D). When of course - as I stated explicitly right from the start - my position was, and always has been, that1) 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.
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JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
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.
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.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
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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Vixen
Penultimate Amazing
Not 'debunked' at all, if you go to the thread.
Vixen
Penultimate Amazing
Nothing to do with calculus. My bad using that term.
Vixen
Penultimate Amazing
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.
Vixen
Penultimate Amazing
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:
Vixen
Penultimate Amazing
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
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.
Vixen
Penultimate Amazing
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.
Vixen
Penultimate Amazing
Jimbob, as by the criteria in the relevant thread, see here:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=13980087#post13980087
Vixen
Penultimate Amazing
A capital city is defined as being where the seat of government is. The seat of government in France is not in Lyons.
erwinl
Illuminator
- Joined
- Sep 5, 2008
- Messages
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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
Last edited:
"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."