[R] [FORGED] Re: How to correct documentation?

John Sorkin
Sun, 25 Oct 2015 04:14:13 -0000

Bert
Talking about Loglan and problems with the imprecise nature of English, which
sense of sanction do you mean

to authorize, approve, or allow: an expression now sanctioned by educated usage.
to ratify or confirm: to sanction a law.
to impose a sanction on; penalize, especially by way of discipline

> John David Sorkin M.D., Ph.D.
> Professor of Medicine
> Chief, Biostatistics and Informatics
> University of Maryland School of Medicine Division of Gerontology and
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> On Oct 24, 2015, at 7:43 PM, Bert Gunter <bgunter.4567 at gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> I sanction this discussion.
>
> (Google on "auto-antonyms")
>
> Cheers,
> Bert
> Bert Gunter
>
> "Data is not information. Information is not knowledge. And knowledge
> is certainly not wisdom."
>   -- Clifford Stoll
>
>
> On Sat, Oct 24, 2015 at 4:26 PM, Duncan Murdoch
> <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 24/10/2015 6:07 PM, Rolf Turner wrote:
>>>> On 24/10/15 21:10, Jim Lemon wrote:
>>>> Hi Ming,
>>>> In fact, the notation lb/1000 is correct, as the values
represent the
>>>> weight of the cars in pounds (lb) divided by 1000. I am not
sure why this
>>>> particular transformation of the measured values was used, but
I'm sure it
>>>> has caused confusion previously.
>>>
>>> I disagree --- and agree with Ming.  The notation is incorrect.
Surely
>>> "lb/1000" means thousandths of pounds.  E.g. 12345
lb/1000 is equal to
>>> 12.345 lb.
>>>
>>> I'm sure that others will come up with all sorts of convoluted
lawyerish
>>> arguments that the case is otherwise, but as far as I am concerned,
any
>>> *sane* person would interpret "lb/1000" to mean
thousandths of pounds.
>>
>> And we insane ones would read "lb/1000" literally as
"pounds divided by
>> one thousand".
>>
>> The problem is that English is ambiguous.  In many, many ways.  We
>> should rewrite all the help files in Loglan.
>>
>> Duncan Murdoch
>>
>>> If in the unlikely event that the documentation for some data set
said
>>> "Weight (gm/1000)", I'm pretty sure that this would
be interpreted to
>>> mean milligrams and *not* kilograms!
>>>
>>> Since the description of the data was presumably taken from that
given
>>> in the original source ("Motor Trend" magazine) it would
probably be
>>> inappropriate to "correct" it.  However a note/warning
should be added
>>> to the mtcars help file indicating that Motor Trend got things
upside-down.
>>
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>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see
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> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.

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