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The sinking of MS Estonia: Case Reopened Part VII

MarkCorrigan said:
Oh god the cannonball thing. The argument over muzzle velocity V projectile velocity...
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I had an (albeit good-natured) argument with a golf buddy several months ago about how/why the velocity of a golf ball off the club face can be substantially greater than the velocity of the club face at impact. He was thinking that surely the club face must necessarily accelerate the ball to the impact velocity of the club face and no faster. I eventually managed to explain it though :)
 
Andy_Ross said:
In time and angular measurement, the prime notation ′ is minutes, and the double prime ″ is the second

An hour is h
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Indeed, in my pre-caffeinated state I had this post in mind...
JayUtah

Split Thread Post in thread 'Conspiracy theories about unconventional usage of notation'

Jack by the hedge said:
You're still wrong.
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Without question.

I very strongly suspect the person you were conversing with didn't spot that you said hours and minutes instead of minutes and seconds.
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I very strongly suspect the person she is conversing with is a sock on her hand. You are correct in that the question is being asked of this purported expert in a way that seems to perpetuate ongoing ambiguity. The question is whether, by any established convention, ″ can mean either minutes or seconds depending on context. It is not whether any person once used ″ to mean seconds.

But the...
...which explains why º always refers to the basic division of a physically-derived extent. A day—as an extent of time—is defined by a physical phenomenon (the time take by Earth to rotate once) just as the extent of temperature is defined as the liquid phase of water, and the extent of rotation is defined by the physical circle. This is why º must mean degrees of arc or degrees of temperature and why º once had to mean hours (allegedly in medical practice). The subsequent divisions notated with ′, ″, ‴, ⁗, etc. do not "shift" according to context in these systems. Vixen admits that this is true for lengths and angles, but simply invents her own head-canon for why we should allow this for time. It's pure, face-saving nonsense. You can read that whole 11-page thread to see just how desperate and nonsensical her arguments became.

h is the SI abbreviation for hours. min is the SI abbreviation for minutes. s is the abbreviation for seconds. But of these only seconds is strictly canonical. Inasmuch as SI abhors non-decimal multiples of basic units, the customary sub-day multiples are tolerated depending on the implied precision. But, for example, we still reckon rocket engine firing times strictly only in seconds (and their decimalizations) in official documents.

One hill I propose incidentally to die on is the use of spacing. NIST mandates a space between the numeral and its units. I am forever seeing lengths rendered as 10mm instead of 10 mm. Consequently, durations should be rendered such as, 4 min 33 s, or 15 h 21 min 44 s if you're listening to Wagner. But alas we too often will see 4h to indicate four hours.

Myriad said:
The common colon notation for time (nn:nn) is used despite sometimes being ambiguous without context. 1:54 as the runtime of a movie is just under two hours, while 1:54 as the length of a song is just under two minutes.

I've hypothesized that Vixen is recalling the potential ambiguity of colon-delimited time being pointed out in a class, and misremembering it as being taught that there were multiple interpretations of prime and double-prime.
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Without commenting on the hypothesis, I'll point out that this is why colon notation for time duration is almost completely disallowed in scientific writing for just this reason. However, there is an international standard for notating date and time (ISO-8601) that allows the time portion to be notated with a colon as in hh:mm:ss. In appropriate cases the seconds portion may be omitted, in which it's understood that dd:dd means hours and minutes, never minutes and seconds.

Those are for calendrical time points. To complicate matters immensely, ISO-8601 specifies a notation for calendrical time durations that is entirely incompatible with SI. These are more useful to commerce than to science.
 
Myriad said:
The common colon notation for time (nn:nn) is used despite sometimes being ambiguous without context. 1:54 as the runtime of a movie is just under two hours, while 1:54 as the length of a song is just under two minutes.

I've hypothesized that Vixen is recalling the potential ambiguity of colon-delimited time being pointed out in a class, and misremembering it as being taught that there were multiple interpretations of prime and double-prime.
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Myriad, you are quite welcome to spend valuable time writing out nn:nn. I recall LondonJohn insisted one should write out, HR; MIN or SEC. As Shirley Conran once said, 'Life is too short to stuff a mushroom'.
 
Mojo said:
It not to do with the "relevance" of parameters, it's to do with common usage. Going to your "£, s. d" example, "£" always meant pounds, "s" always meant shillings, and "d" always meant pennies. Nobody ever said, "you get twenty of these for a pound, and I was correct to say they are 1d each because "d" can mean shillings", which is effectively what you have been doing.
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Exactly. People use 'common usage' with little thought and no understanding of the logic behind 'common usage'. That is why when someone uses shorthand based on perfectly sound logic and mathematical priniciples, they are thrown into a state of confusion. I shouldn't have been surprised, given I used to get trained barristers at work asking me to calculate 10% for them. Initially, I thought they were joking. But they were not! Ah well, keeps me in work.
 
Vixen said:
Myriad, you are quite welcome to spend valuable time writing out nn:nn. I recall LondonJohn insisted one should write out, HR; MIN or SEC. As Shirley Conran once said, 'Life is too short to stuff a mushroom'.
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Evasion noted.
 
Vixen said:
Exactly. People use 'common usage' with little thought and no understanding of the logic behind 'common usage'.
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Like, for example using the word second and the equivalent symbol " without ever realising the two ticks in the symbol are related to the word being the ordinal number two. (Or getting the symbol wrong and not noticing for the same reason.)
 
Vixen said:
Exactly. People use 'common usage' with little thought and no understanding of the logic behind 'common usage'. That is why when someone uses shorthand based on perfectly sound logic and mathematical priniciples, they are thrown into a state of confusion. I shouldn't have been surprised, given I used to get trained barristers at work asking me to calculate 10% for them. Initially, I thought they were joking. But they were not! Ah well, keeps me in work.
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No. Mojo is not in any sort of agreement with you on this matter - quite the contrary. The fact you can't even see that is amusing in itself.
 
JayUtah said:
...which explains why º always refers to the basic division of a physically-derived extent. A day—as an extent of time—is defined by a physical phenomenon (the time take by Earth to rotate once) just as the extent of temperature is defined as the liquid phase of water, and the extent of rotation is defined by the physical circle. This is why º must mean degrees of arc or degrees of temperature and why º once had to mean hours (allegedly in medical practice).
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This I had never stopped to think about or realise - thanks for a bit of welcome Saturday erudition and education!
 
Vixen said:
Exactly. People use 'common usage' with little thought and no understanding of the logic behind 'common usage'. That is why when someone uses shorthand based on perfectly sound logic and mathematical priniciples, they are thrown into a state of confusion.
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No.

As the thread I linked to illustrated at length, your claim that ″ can be used contextually to indicate either minutes or seconds has no basis in either formal or common usage. It is simply something you invented in order to wriggle away from what otherwise would have been an inconsequential error—your admission of which would have precluded all this hub-bub that you seem to find so personally vexing. Your claims are based neither in logic nor in sound mathematical principles. As illustrated, again, at length, they fly firmly in the face of such virtues.

Further, your insistent on replaying that same years-old argument when you know full well it was thoroughly and conclusively debunked in a separate thread is extremely disappointing. Granted you have asked for some quarter owing to your admittedly faulty memory. But that thread was 11 pages long and contained a substantial volume of claims, counterclaims, and evidence which you now seem determined to ignore. If you want to engage in serious debate, you simply must find a way to remember what was previously shown.

Vixen said:
I shouldn't have been surprised, given I used to get trained barristers at work asking me to calculate 10% for them. Initially, I thought they were joking. But they were not! Ah well, keeps me in work.
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My spouse is a lawyer who knows calculus, so is isn't a universal rule that lawyers are bad at math. One of our friends in the same firm graduated fourth in his law school class and has an undergraduate degree in computer science.
 
Vixen said:
Exactly. People use 'common usage' with little thought and no understanding of the logic behind 'common usage'. That is why when someone uses shorthand based on perfectly sound logic and mathematical priniciples, they are thrown into a state of confusion. I shouldn't have been surprised, given I used to get trained barristers at work asking me to calculate 10% for them. Initially, I thought they were joking. But they were not! Ah well, keeps me in work.
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This is gibberish that doesn't even remotely come close to responding to the post you quoted.

He was pointing out why you were wrong and why your analogy was nonsense.
 
LondonJohn said:
This I had never stopped to think about or realise - thanks for a bit of welcome Saturday erudition and education!
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Most people don't, because the logic of bygone days is often superseded for very good reasons. And even when it persists, some essential elements fall by the wayside. This leaves holes in those systems that impair abstracting that logic by observation. I personally find the history of measurements intriguing beyond what is required to teach my profession, such as why American shoe sizes are still reckoned in barleycorns. It's both entertaining and informative.

As I mentioned before, the day is a self-defining period. The circle is a self-defining amount of rotation. The liquid phase of water is a little more arbitrary, but still comes down to a physical phenomenon that has an observable condition at either extreme.

The Romans divided days into hours and nights into watches (3 hours). The Royal Navy divided the local noon-to-noon period into watches too, but of different lengths than the Roman watch—4 hours instead of 3—and further into bells (periods of 30 min, or one-eighth watch). Swatch attempted to establish a global time system of 1000 "beats" per day. Of these only hours (24 per day) have remained as the coarsest subdivision of the natural unit. But none of that absolves the reader of understanding that º will ever, always, and irrevocably be the first, coarsest division of a physically-defined extent. For time, º always means hours, (later h). ′ always means hours. ″ always means seconds. As long as that notation was used, that's what those symbols meant. Always, because the logic of the system demands it.

Vixen proposes an alternate universe in which the entire logic of the system is thrown into the leaf-shredder, and a nonsensically analogous, ambiguous, unworkable system of shifting symbols is applied only to the case of measuring time—and only unofficially in her quaint corner of the empire. All this to avoid accepting a proper correction! Of all the hills she could choose to die on, this one is by far the stupidest. It would be great to continue discussing the new evidence and developments in the investigation, but we're stuck having to chip away at Vixen's stubbornness before she can participate in good faith.
 
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JayUtah said:
...snip...

h is the SI abbreviation for hours. min is the SI abbreviation for minutes. s is the abbreviation for seconds. But of these only seconds is strictly canonical. Inasmuch as SI abhors non-decimal multiples of basic units, the customary sub-day multiples are tolerated depending on the implied precision. But, for example, we still reckon rocket engine firing times strictly only in seconds (and their decimalizations) in official documents.

...snip...
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You probably need to have had an education in a STEM subject to know that....
 
JayUtah said:
Most people don't, because the logic of bygone days is often superseded for very good reasons. And even when it persists, some essential elements fall by the wayside. This leaves holes in those systems that impair abstracting that logic by observation. I personally find the history of measurements intriguing beyond what is required to teach my profession, such as why American shoe sizes are still reckoned in barleycorns. It's both entertaining and informative.

As I mentioned before, the day is a self-defining period. The circle is a self-defining amount of rotation. The liquid phase of water is a little more arbitrary, but still comes down to a physical phenomenon that has an observable condition at either extreme.

The Romans divided days into hours and nights into watches (3 hours). The Royal Navy divided the local noon-to-noon period into watches too, but of different lengths than the Roman watch (4 h), and further into bells (periods of 30 min, or one-eighth watch). Of these only hours (24 per day) have remained as the coarsest subdivision of the natural unit. But none of that absolves the reader of understanding that º will ever, always, and irrevocably be the first, coarsest division of a physically-defined extent. For time, º always means hours, (later h). ′ always means hours. ″ always means seconds. As long as that notation was used, that's what those symbols meant. Always, because the logic of the system demands it.

Vixen proposes an alternate universe in which the entire logic of the system is thrown into the leaf-shredder, and a nonsensically analogous, ambiguous, unworkable system of shifting symbols is applied only to the case of measuring time—and only unofficially in her quaint corner of the empire. All this to avoid accepting a proper correction! Of all the hills she could choose to die on, this one is by far the stupidest. It would be great to continue discussing the new evidence and developments in the investigation, but we're stuck having to chip away at Vixen's stubbornness before she can participate in good faith.
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No, I haven't proposed any 'alternate universe in which the entire logic of the system is thrown into the leaf-shredder'. I was doing what I had always assumed was conventional. On another occasion, I expressed a possessive in terms of "Boris' new car", for example. A poster reacted with outrage and insisted it should be, "Boris's new car' and produced an example from a tabloid paper to demonstrate he was right. But I have always done it the first way. It is hardly my fault if others have a different convention. Anyone would think I had upset them on purpose. As IMV I have done nothing wrong, I don't see why I should change, given I did do the courtesy of introducing what my abbreviations, annotations and acronyms refer to, before using them, as per convention. We were always advised, 'state your assumptions', which is what I do.
 
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