Words we cannot abide.

everthewatcher said:
A smartphone?
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Well, it is now. But when the first pocket calculator came out there was no such thing as a smartphone. I only have a non-smart phone - only simple +-/* sums. I do have a calculator and it would, should I want it to, fit in my pocket.
 
You sure do. your posts are littered with them. Four times in 35 posts in this very thread. :D That is unless my pocket calculator has let me down.:(
As that is only approximately 11.428571428% of your posts, I suppose that does count as 'always'.:rolling:
 
Trev said:
approximately 11.428571428%
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Why such a high degree of precision for "approximately"? 11.43% is adequate. ;)
Aha. That reminds me of something else that annoys me. Those TV adverts that have (in the small print) "57.3% of 103 women agree". Why not just say 59 out of 103 agree?
 
EEPhil said:
Why such a high degree of precision for "approximately"? 11.43% is adequate. ;)
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I know, but I was just showing everyone that I was using my smartphone as a pocket calculator, and taking the result to the ridiculous precision that it provides.

Is the 1/2" the approximate or the 12.7mm or both? :rolling:
 
There was an article in Practical Electronics I know for a fact was written in America, where measurements were given in the form "25mm (1 in)". To be correct, that should have been "1 in (25.4mm)".

I think it's Scientific American where I have seen something like "about 1,000 yards (914m)" - when "900m" would have been of the same order of approximation as the "1,000 yards".
 
EEPhil said:
Well, it is now. But when the first pocket calculator came out there was no such thing as a smartphone. I only have a non-smart phone - only simple +-/* sums. I do have a calculator and it would, should I want it to, fit in my pocket.
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I still have the octalator I used in my former IT career of over 25 years. Call it that because the most common use for it was to convert octal numbers from huge computer dumps into decimal. Sadly, it no longer works which may be just that the solar powered battery bit the dust or maybe just from neglect when I retired. Now got a semi-scientific calculator app on my phone if I need to do anything more complicated than work out how much change I should get when I pay for my shopping ... even that is now on its way to redundancy with the increasing ubiquity of contactless payment cards.
 
Not exactly a word, but.
The new law on driving electric scooters on the road is to limit their speed to 15.5mph. WTF is that about.
Ah I see. It's 24.945kph. So I suppose is the nearest approximation of 25kph. Why don't these idiots realise that road measurements and speeds are in miles and mph in the UK.
Tossers. Rounding 25kph is stupid. None of our other speed limits are 'rounded' metric speeds. Why start now.
Trying to enforce the speed limit will be impossible even if it were set at a logical (for UK) 15mph.
Bloody madness.
 
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I wondered about that - thanks for saving me the trouble of working it out.

Personally, I resent paying the road fund licence and insurance to then share the road with cycles and other non-paying and uninsured individuals. I've seen a lot of these motorised scooters (illegally) on the roads around Bristol during lockdown... and (illegally) on the footpaths where you can't hear them coming. I clocked one at 30mph, no helmets either. When I were a lad, it was sissy to be seen on a scooter over the age of 6.

I take my supported user on a walk in a country park on the edge of Bristol, but the amount of wheeled traffic is stunning. You can't tell me it's for exercise - walking is better exercise. They don't feel safe on the roads, so they make it unsafe for pedestrians on footpaths instead.

There's a big push for carbon reduction by converting commuters to these things, but tell me what's going to happen the moment the weather turns bad (and roads have been clogged up for cars by cycle/scooter-friendly measures).
 
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Black Hole said:
There was an article in Practical Electronics I know for a fact was written in America,
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I think I may have said this before on these forums. What annoyed me about the American journals (back in the 1980s and 90s for sure) is that you would submit a paper in British English and it would get converted to American spellings. (Flipping IEEE journals!). In the UK we allowed through American spellings into UK journals without comment. When reviewing papers I never corrected American spellings. I did correct strange quotes used by some of our German friends.
 
Black Hole said:
They don't feel safe on the roads, so they make it unsafe for pedestrians on footpaths instead.
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Cyclists, runners and blind-corners are a recipe for disaster. I'm certainly fed up with the number of times I've had to dodge a cyclist on the pavement. There is no excuse. Either they are on a very quiet road - ie. not much traffic and no danger, or they cycle through a path with a rather large "No Cycling" sign. I don't feel safe on the ruddy pavement!
 
Black Hole said:
What??? Why???? Laziness!
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(Do you think the ???s will upset Trev? ;) )
Don't think that was within the rules of the peer review. It's up to the journal editor or maybe the publisher to set the rules and I'm not aware the IEE (at the time) or John Wiley & Sons. - the two publishers that dared to let me peer review - had set such rules. I was on the editorial board of some conferences, but these were American sponsored - difficult to bite the hand that adds some expertise to my CV!
 
EEPhil said:
...r in British English and it would get converted to American spellings.
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Same with the US-published versions of books by British authors. A local charity shop used to have quite a few of these donated and when reading it jars to see a US spelling in a clearly British setting.
 
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