Split Thread Conspiracy theories about unconventional usage of notation

[erwinl]

"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."

Ah! Now, you spoiled my question line to Vixen!

 

[LondonJohn]

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.

Off-topic....and wrong to boot (German pun intended )

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

You seem determined to break every irony-o-meter I buy, even the weapons-grade ones (stolen-Russian-military-equipment-aboard-passenger-ferry-nonsense pun intended )

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.

You know my words are preserved within this thread, right? With that in mind, I suggest you go back and read posts #21-#24 for a full in-context revision of what I wrote and what I meant by it. As usual, you're coming out of this argument ''-best.

 

[GlennB]

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.

This is a lie. In the main Estonia thread LondonJohn said :

"1. Don't you think it would have been intellectually honest to include the Herald of Free Enterprise in your list? After all, it too capsized (and would have entirely sunk if it had been in deeper water) because there was a gaping hole in its bow. Do you know how long - measured from the time of the first ingress of water through the bow - the HOFE took to capsize, Vixen? Shall I tell you? It was 90 seconds."

 

[erwinl]

"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."

And then there is a country like Switzerland, which even doesn't have a capital. Even though it certainly does have a government.

 

[GlennB]

And then there is a country like Switzerland, which even doesn't have a capital. Even though it certainly does have a government.

Interesting. I'd have gone for Bern like a shot, but it seems that de jure there is no capital. This will make a good quiz question

 

[erwinl]

Interesting. I'd have gone for Bern like a shot, but it seems that de jure there is no capital. This will make a good quiz question

It was a surprise to me as well. Bern would have been my choice as well, but apparently the Swiss insist on doing things differently.

 

[W.D.Clinger]

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.

Your 'expert source' is full of ****.

The first single apostrophe in your sentence I quoted is not followed by a space when formatted by this forum's formatting system and displayed by my browser. The first single apostrophe in my sentence above is not followed by a space when formatted by this forum's formatting system and displayed by my browser.

The first single apostrophes in all of the following quotations are not followed by a space when formatted by this forum's formatting system and displayed by my browser.

For example, you keep insisting - contrary to all objective observation - that 'the Herald of Free Enterprise sank from view within 90 seconds' when

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.

Conclusion: Vixen's knowledge of how apostrophes are formatted is on par with Vixen's knowledge of their proper use.

 

[I Am The Scum]

A capital city is defined as being where the seat of government is. The seat of government in France is not in Lyons.

Do you have a source for this? I'm not just going to take your word for it.

 

[JayUtah]

My expert source...

You ignored all the evidence that he is not an expert source. Do you understand that we can tell when you're lying?

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.

No, it's not "WhatsApp formatting." I tested that. Which "formatting systems" add a space after an apostrophe? Name them. I've spent decades writing mathematics notation in pretty much every word processor, text editor, and typesetting system that exists. That has never happened to me. It certainly doesn't happen in WhatsApp, and it certainly didn't happen in the screen shot you posted.

You can't help yourself. You just. Keep. Lying.

Obviously, when you are sending a WhatsApp message you are not writing a peer reviewed paper.

Straw man. Obviously when your goal is to explain authoritatively to someone how properly to use a notation, the overriding goal is to get the notation right—not egregiously wrong.

Whether you're writing peer-reviewed papers or just sending messages in a medium that doesn't make it easy to type special symbols, or doesn't allow them—if you've done this before, you know to use only single quotes to compose multiple primes. After the first couple of times, it just becomes second nature. Your "expert" made a beginner's mistake.

And of course you ignored the meat of the argument. You've been caught in a lie again, so you just dismiss the evidence of it with a single-sentence brush-off and pretend nothing happened.

 

[JayUtah]

I note you see yourself as some kind of gate-keeper. stopping conspiracy theorists, etcetera.

Yes, that's what skeptics do. Naturally we can't stop unscrupulous, uninformed, self-serving people from acting dishonestly, but we can reveal their efforts for what they really are.

You do know that it wasn't me who put either of these threads in the conspiracy section.

They got put into the conspiracy theory section because you posted conspiracy theories in them and continue to do so.

The Estonia ship investigation is a genuine one and has nothing to do with 9/11 or Apollo.

Other people are performing legitimate investigations. You're spewing conspiracy theories.

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.

As I said, I'm heavily involved in science outreach and science communication. I am very aware that people are curious about things they don't yet know. I'm always willing to help them learn it.

You're not one of those people. You're not acting out of curiosity. You think you already know it all, or at least enough to judge the experts. You're trying to be the teacher, not the student. And you're no good in either role.

For example...

Nobody cares about your self-congratulatory stories.

I happen to have an interest in the Estonia accident...

No, you don't have merely an "interest." You're an armchair detective who has set herself up as a judge over those who are and were qualified to investigate the accident. You're woefully ignorant in the subjects one would need to do that properly, but you seem to want to be taken seriously. You're habitually dishonest in your effort, but you seem to want to be thought of as holding the high moral ground. You're trying to make yourself look smart by imagining you've uncovered a conspiracy to sink MS Estonia and fudge the subsequent investigation. You're advocating, not wondering.

...and whilst you can yell all you like that I am not allowed to

Straw man. You're allowed to say whatever nonsense you want. But you don't have the right to do that and pretend it obliges others to agree that you're smart, that you're right, or that you're honest—or that your claims have any real-world value.

...there is nothing you can do about it.

If the hill you're going to die on is that you ought to be able to enjoy telling lies in order to make yourself look good, then good luck with that. It's not going to stop me and others from holding your feet to the fire.

 

[JayUtah]

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.

You've misrepresented literally everyone's story on this point.

In contrast, your story about how you came to know about it and use it is full of holes and changes willy-nilly as those holes are pointed out. Your story about how others use it the way you did is devoid of evidence, and now you've invented an "expert" to try to stand in place of that evidence.

You're really not in a position to hold others accountable for dishonesty.

″ does not stand for minutes. ″ has never stood for minutes. You present no evidence that ″ can sometimes stand for minutes. Experts do not agree that "apostrophes" can be used in a way that ″ means minutes.

This thread is about holding you accountable for your lies, not about whether you can spin the facts this way or that to show that you're still smarter than everyone else.

 

[JayUtah]

Conclusion: Vixen's knowledge of how apostrophes are formatted is on par with Vixen's knowledge of their proper use.

Indeed, in addition to publishing notation-intensive materials, I've also laid out, typographically designed, and published ordinary materials for commercial print jobs, going back to the early 1980s. I've used a wide variety of typesetting systems, from desktop software-based systems to professional high-volume print systems. My father-in-law runs the offset print shop for a small town in Montana. The claim, "most formatting system insist in adding a space after either a single apostrophe or a double one," is patent nonsense. I have yet to encounter a single "formatting system" that does this, much less "most" of them.

I wonder if she doesn't mean they add some space (pixels), rather than adding a space (the 0x20 character). That seems to be the only way to square her comment with the actual excerpts and screen shots she posted. Those don't have a space between the “”. There are ordinary spaces surrounding them; is the claim that those were somehow added automatically? This happens when you accept predictive text in some cases, but not for punctuation in my experience.

Yes, proportionally-spaced fonts on any modern computing device will perform some amount of kerning. This means when you type ' and " together, as in '", you're very unlikely to get a result where the kerning between the ' and the " matches the space between the two marks in the ". This is precisely why we have always approximated ‴ by using three single-quotes, '''. It obviates the kerning problem entirely and very quickly becomes second nature when you write a lot of mathematics.

Ironically the kerning for the actual typographical quotation-mark glyphs “ and ” tends to err on the side of scooting them even closer to the adjacent characters.

In any case, even if take her statement as true, I can't see how this serves her argument. Regardless of whether some "formatting system" adds some space (kerning) or a space (smart text entry), it doesn't change the fact that putting ' and " together to approximate ‴ is something a mathematician or physicist knows not to attempt. And as usual we're hampered by trying to figure out what Vixen is trying to say through her gross ineptitude at applying proper or precise terminology.

 

[Vixen]

Do you have a source for this? I'm not just going to take your word for it.

It goes to show there is no one convention. Maybe Grammarly or Merriam-Webster can advise us all as to what we may or may not do in defining a capital city.

2
a
: being the seat of government
London is the capital city of England.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/capital


So Erwinl and GlennB et al are simply WRONG about the Netherlands and Switzerland because Merriam-Webster says so.

 

[Vixen]

You ignored all the evidence that he is not an expert source. Do you understand that we can tell when you're lying?



No, it's not "WhatsApp formatting." I tested that. Which "formatting systems" add a space after an apostrophe? Name them. I've spent decades writing mathematics notation in pretty much every word processor, text editor, and typesetting system that exists. That has never happened to me. It certainly doesn't happen in WhatsApp, and it certainly didn't happen in the screen shot you posted.

You can't help yourself. You just. Keep. Lying.



Straw man. Obviously when your goal is to explain authoritatively to someone how properly to use a notation, the overriding goal is to get the notation right—not egregiously wrong.

Whether you're writing peer-reviewed papers or just sending messages in a medium that doesn't make it easy to type special symbols, or doesn't allow them—if you've done this before, you know to use only single quotes to compose multiple primes. After the first couple of times, it just becomes second nature. Your "expert" made a beginner's mistake.

And of course you ignored the meat of the argument. You've been caught in a lie again, so you just dismiss the evidence of it with a single-sentence brush-off and pretend nothing happened.

I have been advised by my expert pal that one can use Microsoft Equation Editor to format maths symbols.


He's not going to do it in a WhatsApp message.

 

[Mojo]

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.

Link, please.

 

[JayUtah]

Rubbish. If I make an error I have zero problem in saying so.

So when will you admit that you wrongly used the phrases "first derivative" and "second derivative" when describing the manner in which you think one can use primes notation to denote time units?

That's a straight-up error. In no way is that correct usage, and obviously we will not be accepting yet another excuse along the lines of it's being some marginally-acceptable vernacular where you come from. You're simply, unequivocally wrong. Admit it, and put your money where your above-quoted words are.

Here's what I think happened. In your desperation to find some kind of way in which ′ can mean either hours or minutes and ″ can mean either minutes or seconds, you turned to other uses of the primes symbols—probably those listed in the Wikipedia article. That source correctly notes that we use the primes symbols to denote the successive derivatives of a function. But it doesn't prominently say that this is only for differential calculus, and that the phrases those symbols stand for in this context—first and second derivatives—are phrases and concepts that exist only in differential calculus. That brief statement comes under the heading Use in mathematics, statistics, and science, so why wouldn't you believe that usage and those phrases are generally applicable to science, including the symbols that stand for time units.

Correctly saying 𝑓 ′(x) and 𝑓 ″(x) denote the first and second derivatives of 𝑓(x) in differential calculus gives no justification whatsoever for saying that in the expressions 42° 10′ 25″, 50′ 6-⅜″, or 4′ 33″, the values labeled with prime symbols are "derivatives" of anything else in those expressions, or of anything at all. The relationship between 𝑓(x) and 𝑓 ′(x) has absolutely nothing whatsoever in any way, shape, or form to do with the relationship between 42° and 10′. The word "derivative" does not apply. The special terms "first derivative" and "second derivative" (and so ordinally forth) cannot apply, because throughout the realm of everything mathematics touches those phrases are reserved for invoking differential calculus.

 

[Vixen]

So when will you admit that you wrongly used the phrases "first derivative" and "second derivative" when describing the manner in which you think one can use primes notation to denote time units?

That's a straight-up error. In no way is that correct usage, and obviously we will not be accepting yet another excuse along the lines of it's being some marginally-acceptable vernacular where you come from. You're simply, unequivocally wrong. Admit it, and put your money where your above-quoted words are.

Here's what I think happened. In your desperation to find some kind of way in which ′ can mean either hours or minutes and ″ can mean either minutes or seconds, you turned to other uses of the primes symbols—probably those listed in the Wikipedia article. That source correctly notes that we use the primes symbols to denote the successive derivatives of a function. But it doesn't prominently say that this is only for differential calculus, and that the phrases those symbols stand for in this context—first and second derivatives—are phrases and concepts that exist only in differential calculus. That brief statement comes under the heading Use in mathematics, statistics, and science, so why wouldn't you believe that usage and those phrases are generally applicable to science, including the symbols that stand for time units.

Correctly saying 𝑓 ′(x) and 𝑓 ″(x) denote the first and second derivatives of 𝑓(x) in differential calculus gives no justification whatsoever for saying that in the expressions 42° 10′ 25″, 50′ 6-⅜″, or 4′ 33″, the values labeled with prime symbols are "derivatives" of anything else in those expressions, or of anything at all. The relationship between 𝑓(x) and 𝑓 ′(x) has absolutely nothing whatsoever in any way, shape, or form to do with the relationship between 42° and 10′. The word "derivative" does not apply. The special terms "first derivative" and "second derivative" (and so ordinally forth) cannot apply, because throughout the realm of everything mathematics touches those phrases are reserved for invoking differential calculus.

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=13989851#post13989851

Please do keep up.

 

[zooterkin]

Here is just one of many.

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=13980189#post13980189

Unsurprisingly, that doesn’t say what you claimed it did.

 

[JayUtah]

You can call me whatever name you like as long as you don't call me 'early in the morning'.

Nobody is calling you names. They're simply correctly describing your activity on this forum. Your behavior departs markedly from your stated motives.

You're not merely curious, you're attempting to teach others and judge the work of experts. That implies you have the appropriate skills and knowledge to do so, but you patently do not. That activity merits criticism.

You are a conspiracy theorist. If that label offends you, too bad; it's accurate. Because you are a conspiracy theorist, you are being treated as conspiracy theorists are customarily treated among skeptics. If this offends you, too bad; it is the expected and appropriate procedure at this forum.

 

[JayUtah]

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=13989851#post13989851

Please do keep up.

I overlooked that post. My bad. Thanks for linking to it.