Bay 12 Games Forum

Well, the thing is, the UN doesn't want to settle this conflict, mainly because the UN has always been first and foremost a highly advanced battleground for abstract proxy wars.

Of course it could be done if the will were there. They managed to dismantle Yugoslavia.

All right, with that in mind, I should be able to
trade 3 minerals for 1 alloy,
built 1 colony ship,
colonize Ugeso-aka Ca,
build a mine there,
and still send my scout south.

I can't tell if I'm being subtweeted here.

Hypothetically, if I am, that would NOT be what I meant, but I don't want to rehash it.

Also, grave breaches could still be breaches of graves, although both that and the "violations" version would be verging on newspaperese.

Look, all I can say is, the West Bank may not be a great place to live, but it's nothing like Gaza. This implies that, however much I am not a fan of Israel personally, Hamas is the real cause of the problem.

And the UN is a scam.

Trying to find a reason Putin wouldn't pull out the nukes at the first sign of a terminal illness, I stumbled upon the true reason for the War.

Putin's daughter was knocked up by the cousin of Ukraine's President.

Though they have the same last name, there's actually no relation.

Oh, this was a thing.

I shall seize the position of jury foreman by violence.

I actually removed that alternative, as the most "obviously not". Despite the fact that I also have problems with "this bus route is serviced every twenty minutes or more" (like... every two hours? That's more than 20 minutes.)[1].

That's just a syncope of "more often". I agree that that one is literally ambiguous, though. I'm not denying the possibility of ambiguity, as you seem to think, I'm just saying you're going out of your way to read some statements as ambiguous by drawing alternative interpretations that don't even make grammatical sense.
Well, in this case, to mean two hours, you should have said "every twenty or more minutes", but I'd allow that one.

That's really the thing in general. You don't seem to be able to allow for the fact that language is flexible, but not totally arbitrary. Your supposedly misleading interpretations for the cases I've objected to are not possible under ordinarily understood English grammar. For example, it is not possible that a comparator like "25% less" or whatever could be referring to an unspecified previous reduction rather than an absolute reference point, because for it to mean that, it would have had to have been specified.

It doesn't. "There were ten cars and lorries on that road" means ten vehicles that were each either a car or a lorry, not ten of each. I didn't write "25 'A+B's". But clearly such language (or even pseudo-lingustic notation) is ambiguously misinterpretable. Which was my point, albeit described in language which can be... ambiguously misinterpreted?

If you say that there are ten cars and trucks on the road, you are not using any multiplication. The sentence is operating purely in the realm of addition. If you said there were ten times as many cars and trucks on the road as yesterday, you would not mean that there were five times as many cars and two times as many trucks - that would be stupid. You would mean that all cars and trucks have been multiplied by ten.

Look, I'm sorry, but this is like an ongoing problem I've noticed. Your symbolic reasoning seems to be noticeably weak. You just casually equivocated between counting things and multiplying them with no apparent awareness of the difference. I don't know how to explain these things in less abstract terms for you.

Well, Celsius (and several other scales) did actually start off "measuring coldness", partly due to finding cold, hard water (especially) a more tangible manifestation of temperature than its hotter phases and the method of translating temperature-dependant expansions of materials via a useful method of display. The Delisle scale remains (due to not much use, in the years since the 'positivity' of heat was established) pretty much the only one not flipped round. I rather like the Delisle scale!

But that's negation, not reciprical (a better example that creeps into the real world might be Mhos as the counterpart to Ohms).

Right, that's... not what I'm talking about. Maybe look up thermodynamic beta.

And, to further confuse us, gives us statements such as "it's twice as cold today". e.g. -5°C => -10°C? But that's 268K => 263K, not 134K. And if you prefer to deal in °F, that's starting at 23ish, so... maybe instead halve it to a far colder 11.5°F? Or are we talking a range of C° (or F°, or Re°, or Rø°, or De°; luckily, in this regard, it doesn't actually matter much which) twice as much below a separately implied standard temperature[2] as the one we're comparing to? (Same sort of problems with "twice as hot", of course. Likely to be very scale-dependent as to the meaning.)

Probably better just avoiding "twice as cold", although something now sitting at "half as many Kelvin" probably is special enough for the people involved knowing how best to make sure everyone knows what that means, whether we're talking now liquified 'gas' or a not quite so energetic a solar plasma. (With no good example in the mid-range where both before-and-after are really within easy human experience... the ice forming around a Yellowstone geyser in the depths of winter?)

I mean, talking about something being twice as cold only makes sense on an absolute scale, yes. If someone said that 64° real numbers is twice as warm as 32°, that would obviously just be wrong and make no sense, because it's neither physically twice as warm in terms of thermodynamic temperature, nor subjectively twice as warm to typical human sensation. (Incidentally, for most human sensation, subjective feelings of multipliedness generally follow a log scale, like with sound - where 20dB feels twice as loud as 10, etc.; I don't know of any research applying this to heat but it would not surprise me if the same thing applied.)
But that doesn't mean that the multiple is undefinable, it just means that it's not something that's likely to be useful in anyone's day to day life. But thermodynamically, something is twice as cold as something else if its thermodynamic beta is twice that of the other one. There is still a clearly defined meaning.

[1] And then there's the seemingly attractive "Across the store: Up to 50% discount!". ie. "never less than half price, but most/all things could still be full price without making us liars". Whereas I always wonder whether I can challenge "Up to 50% off" as 'clearly' "Up to (50% off)" rather than "(Up to 50%) off", to try to get something below half price, rather than above.

Okay, but you see how this is clearly not ambiguous, right? Your "Up to (50% off)" is grammatically impossible, and this always means that up to, but no more than, half may be discounted, not that prices might be up to half of what they would otherwise be. What you're arguing is the equivalent of complaining that "the cat ate the mouse" is ambiguous because it contains the same WORDS as "the mouse ate the cat". The phrase would have to be rewritten in a different order to mean that in English.

[2] Which? The one the day before the -5°C? Room temperature? Body temerature?

Again, you can't invent a referent out of nowhere that wasn't specified. It's just against the rules.

Try the following: "Adjusting the mix as suggested can mean that the engine perhaps needs 2ml less fuel per minute, from the usual 600ml. Adding my new pre-injection heating device makes it 25 times lower." Does it now run on ( 600 - (2x25) = )550ml per minute, or ( 600 / 25 = )24ml? (Which might be[1] fairly good or amazingly good.) Or ( 600 - 2 - (2x25) =)548ml, arguably.

This example isn't comparable, though. Actually, you've left out the most reasonable interpretation, which is that the new pre-whatever makes the fuel reduction twenty-five times lower, so that it now takes 599.92ml per minute. But this example was specifically constructed to build in ambiguity about which number the factor applies to, while the actual case we're talking about can only be interpreted to mean "1/25 the energy consumption of some previous reference implementation".
Incidentally, I'd consider using your phrasing to mean the 550 (or 548) case to be a lie or error, anyway, because the sentence as given cannot grammatically refer to either of those cases.

Related to the <shudder> phrasing, "25x lower energy consumption than what?"
Related to the more direct quote (and link), "25 times better energy consumption than what?"
...it really suggests a prior lowering/bettering of energy consumption that we should know of.

Than some unspecified reference implementation. However, in this case, it grammatically cannot be referring to some previous cut that is now multiplied by 25 - that would make no sense in the English language, because no such cut has gone anywhere near the sentence.

"25x less..." can be even more confusing, where lessening is allowed to flip over into the opposite sign. "The initial fission reactor prototype never produced more power than was pumped into it, returning about 5%. The latest development means that we require 25x less." Could this mean 130% efficiency (the original 5% that was returned and 25 further 5%s returned), more than passing the break-even point? Context gets hidden, possibly deliberate weasle-words used for misadvertising without actually 'telling lies'. Which then creeps into indirect reporting without any hint of the contextual caveat. "...now requires a 25th of the power" (most probably) means it's still needing 3.8% of the original power input to sustain it (95%/25), if it's not 4% (the full 100%, divided). Still a quibble, but not the same gamechanger. (And probably inapplicable to the quoted energy consumptions and costs unless you think a GPU can generate both energy and wealth for you. Well, maybe it could generate wealth, but that's another matter.)

Again, there's no ambiguity here, but you seem to be really mixed up in your head about this situation. If the previous reactor used 20n power to produce n (5%), and now requires 1/25 the power to produce the same amount - the only grammatically possible interpretation of that sentence - then it now uses (20/25)n = 4n/5 power to produce n and has 125% efficiency, which isn't surprising at all because efficiency will always be more than 100% if it is producing more power than it uses (that's the point). Any other meaning would be in error.

(Also, looser linguistic interpretation might mean the claim was originally 25 "As + Bs", which need not even be 25 (abstract magnitudes) of both things (say, incremental cost improvements and power improvements), but could be "ten of one and fifteen of the other" having been applied. Again, more relevent for other advertisable claims than for here, but an additional potential tripwire or snare to look out for, or avoid using if you're not intending to.)

Well, no, you can't sum things and then call that a multiple. Look at your own phrasing, "25 'As + Bs'", and apply the mathematical laws: 25(A+B) = 25A + 25B. It has to be 25 of each. Yes, yes, I know that a journalist could easily get this WRONG, but that doesn't mean that the phrasing is ambiguous, it means that people make mistakes. You're blaming the phrasing for the possibility of someone making a mistake, but I counter that people are stupid and make all kinds of mistakes all the time anyway.

ETA: It's the same thing as the "misleading graphs" thing, really. To a certain sort of person - someone whose idea of communication is heavily concerned with "rules" - being told "don't use that phrasing / draw graphs that way, it's misleading" feels like new knowledge, like a new rule has been learned. But it isn't knowledge at all.