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Assume v. Presume

EEPhil said:
Hmm. I was going to make a point about buying carpet. "I want 6 square metres of carpet", but you'd have to be more precise. "I want a piece of carpet 2m by 3m". Or, in the case of the builders merchants "I want a piece of plywood 2 x 3 metres". Surely you wouldn't ask for 6 square metres or 6 metres squared. You might ask for 6 metres square - meaning 6 x 6. But you wouldn't write this down as 6m². Wouldn't you write this as 6m x 6m - or just maybe 6x6m if you're lazy?
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Some things need to have precise dimensions of course, but many things do not. Turf is bought by the square metre, for example.
 
Black Hole said:
Some things need to have precise dimensions of course, but many things do not. Turf is bought by the square metre, for example.
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Well, if you had said turf in the first place...what have we been arguing about all this time.

So, these people on the Gadget Show were buying turf...
 
For the umpteenth time, the correct terminology for the Gadget Show should have been 2000-odd square metres (which is the accepted norm in ENGLISH LANGUAGE OR LITERATURE. It is not 2000 metres square (which would be 4,000,000 square metres) or 2000 metres squared (which is a direct transliteration of the maths notation, and unclear whether it means 2000(m²) or (2000m)² unless you can hear silent parentheses - get Victor Borge onto it).

When I said the Gadget Show team are f*****g idiots I didn't really expect anyone to leap to their defence.
 
Black Hole said:
For the umpteenth time, the correct terminology for the Gadget Show should have been 2000-odd square metres (which is the accepted norm in ENGLISH LANGUAGE OR LITERATURE. It is not 2000 metres square (which would be 4,000,000 square metres) or 2000 metres squared (which is a direct transliteration of the maths notation, and unclear whether it means (2000)m² or (2000m)² unless you can hear silent parentheses - get Victor Borge onto it).

When I said the Gadget Show team are f*****g idiots I didn't really expect anyone to leap to their defence.
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That's some lawn!
 
Trev said:
You ONLY get the choice of being pedantic in this thread.
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True. But I did say "In everyday life" and (being pedantic, and possibly annoying) I don't think this thread qualifies to be classed under that heading.
 
MdS (straying into real science AGAIN!) claims that the word "degrees" as applied to temperature came into use because the early thermometers were spiral (for the pedants: helical). Sounds fishy to me.

Temperature Kelvin is supposed to be an absolute thermodynamic scale where zero really is zero, and the triple point of water trips in at 273.16K. Or is that "degrees Kelvin"? "Degrees" has become so associated with temperature, that the general population (by which I mean the press, and even on occasion Scientific American) fail to distinguish between the absolute scale and the relative scales of Celsius/Centigrade and Fahrenheit and use °F, °C, or °K.

Fahrenheit himself is likely to have used just "degrees" (or presumably the Polish/Dutch/German equivalent) and it only then became degrees F to distinguish it from scales used by other workers in the field (with no universal calibration, every experimenter would have a different home-made thermometer and a different calibration - each lab could only compare temperatures there and not communicate temperatures with other labs until they agreed on a calibration).

What am I reaching for here? It's a bit of a struggle trying to crystallise it. I was of the sheep-like opinion that Kelvin is Kelvin not degrees Kelvin. The more I think about it the more I come to the conclusion that, even though based on a fundamental understanding of thermodynamics, the Kelvin scale still measures temperature not heat (heat is a quantity, temperature is not - like charge and voltage in electrical systems) and continues to have its gradient and offset defined arbitrarily (just arbitrarily as offset = Absolute Zero and gradient = gradient of the Celsius scale) so it is not unreasonable to express temperature as "degrees Kelvin".
 
Black Hole said:
What am I reaching for here? It's a bit of a struggle trying to crystallise it. I was of the sheep-like opinion that Kelvin is Kelvin not degrees Kelvin. The more I think about it the more I come to the conclusion that, even though based on a fundamental understanding of thermodynamics, the Kelvin scale still measures temperature not heat and continues to have its gradient and offset defined arbitrarily (just arbitrarily as offset = Absolute Zero and gradient = gradient of the Celsius scale) so it is not unreasonable to express temperature as "degrees Kelvin".
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I suppose the secret is in whether you write 400⁰K or 400K.

(And that first one is 400 raised to the power of zero, by the way, which everyone knows equals 1, so you can write 1K for all temperatures.)


(And what about 400 radians K, he asks himself?)
 
Mike0001 said:
(And that first one is 400 raised to the power of zero, by the way, which everyone knows equals 1, so you can write 1K for all temperatures.)
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What if the temperature is
latex.php
? There are are least two different ways of evaluating
latex.php
to get different answers depending on how you sneak up on it.
 
gomezz said:
What if the temperature is
latex.php
? There are are least two different ways of evaluating
latex.php
to get different answers depending on how you sneak up on it.
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Correction: there are at least two ways of defining 0 raised to power 0 or alternatively it is undefined.
 
You cannot raise the letter 'o' to the power of the letter 'o' anyway, so it's deffo undefined.
 
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