h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A532126

This is my first submission for peer revue. The topic grew out of several conversations I have contributed to dealing with the nature of mathematics and the relativity of semantics.

I would welcome all criticism and you may all feel free to deal with any aspect of what I have written.

Thanks,

Barton

Apart from checking spelling it seems fine
Unfortunately I haven't the brains to comment on the content
'nette

Hmm - can I suggest a title change to something which actually explains what you're talking about?

A quick edited entry search reveals that we have a large number of entries about numbers: http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/Search?searchstring=numbers&searchtype=article&showapproved=1&dosearch=Search+the+Guide will get you there quickly - and, as they say at http://www.h2g2.com/writing-guidelines - "duplication is best left to genetic scientists, not writers".

There's lots of stuff that the guide doesn't include information on: but I'm afraid in this case you've been beaten to the punch. If you think the existing entries are missing important info, why not drop in on the relevant fora and post your wisdom there?

Having just checked the search you listed and rejected the largest part of the results for obvious lack of pertinence,, I read through the remainder and discovered that those few articles did,in fact, cover the same ground as the first part of my submission to some degree or another. None of those, however (except the entry titled, Numbers -- which did, in large part do what I had wanted to do in the first part of my entry) covered the same ground that needed to be handled to set up the second part of my entry.

That brings us to the point of opposing my entry to the one on Numbers which I would not wish to supplant in any case. So, the duplication is not nearly as severe as you suggest except, perhaps to suggest that all those other entries should appear as sub-threads connected to the entry called, Numbers.

However, my intent was not to be definitive on the nature of numbers (I'm afraid there is nothing in the Guide separte or combined that has any chance of being so labeled.) but, rather, to use that moderately well known set of mathematic labels, to begin to make a point about the nature of language and how we have failed to understand it. Obviously, then, the other critques are the more pertinent ones.

Spelling errors? Oops. Please point them out to me since I thought I could trust my spell checker and probablly did not proof as well as I should have. (Please be aware that I was born and bred in the US of A and we haven't agreed with the British on what constitutes the English language since they gave up on us and went home in disgust.) Of course, I will go back over that again. That was the minor point.

Don't understand? That's a real problem and one which I do take seriously. Did I totally confuse you or just seem totally confused? Did I simply loose your interest to the point that you stopped reading before you reached the end? Did you understand what I was saying and find it too trivial to be worth the effort?

Your further comments are welcome as are those of anyone else.

Barton

Yep - I thought it would be obvious which entries were relevant and which were not, so I didn't bother to insult your intelligence by saying which...

Sorry - I overstepped my mark: I thought you were intending the entry to be fundamentally about numbers, and the comments about the mathematical dialect and the teaching of arithmetic were something of an aside - from what you've said, I guess it is instead the other way round - so it goes.

I do think you'd be better off relying on the existing entries to explain what, say, "rational" numbers are - which would make it possible to be much more succinct in this section. By cutting down on the amount of groundwork that you have to lay, you'll be able to focus much more strongly on your real message. Any entry which takes fully half the page before it starts talking about the "real issues" has a problem...

On a side note, you just sort of launch off into the groundwork - but I think you could expand the introduction a little more to tell people what the entry is all about before they start reading - you mention this a bit, but it's not terribly clear - or at least it wasn't to me. *shrug*

Totally off-topic: there is definitive stuff in the guide - its just that you haven't found it yet...

Lucinda,

You are correct, the title is too cryptic (read: nonsensical) to be useful. I will change it.

And, you are probably right that there is far too much math for an article ultimatly about language/linguistics (and I'm certainly NOT going to put the whole first section in a footnote.

Perhaps a better approach would be to start with something on the order of:

Before you read any further, please check out these entries in the guide - - - - - so that we can start with a common vocabulary.

And then beef up the rest with more illustrations.

I just hate handing out home work.

Comments appreciated. I'll be rethinking the whole thing.

Thanks.

Other comments still solicited.

Barton

Barton

Lucinda,

I *know,* I haven't read the whole Guide, doing so is as theoretically impossible as writing the definintive entry on math/number theory. Neither one is, or is likely to ever be, finished.

I'll keep brousing my way through the guide, though. But, please keep in mind that any entry that totally satisfies me as being definitive won't be the same to someone who actually */knows/* what he/she/it is talking about. (say, maybe, Stephen Hawking or Marvin Minsky) :>

Even then, the really interesting thing about authorities is that they always seem to come in plural packages.

Barton

I have deleted this article pending rework.

Thanks for your comments.

Barton

Don't bother deleting it - if someone's dumb enough to make the same comments as have already been made here, just ignore them - it's there loss...

Lucinda,

I hvae restored it, but do not completely disparage what has been written here. I clearly failed in saying what I wanted to say and their comments have truly been helpful to me in deciding what is wrong with it.

I am not sure that I will completely revise it ( I have made some minor changes already) but I do feel that it began to fall apart near the end of the next to the last section. I lost my focus and ended up making points that weren't really pertinent to my main purpose.

Right now, I need to re-read it ten or twenty times till I know if I can save it or if I need to junk it.

Barton

I have made some changes to this article and would appreciate more comments to help me with a final revision.

Thanks,

Barton

A couple nitpicks...

Imaginary numbers are normal numbers multiplied by the square root of -1. Eg, '5.4i'. Complex numbers are the result of adding an normal and imaginary number, EG, '32 + 4.5i'. This kinda illustrates your point, doesn't it?

You should do footnotes as lalatralala - you don't need a between the tags...
--

I wonder if other examples might be given of similar jargon in other fields, numbers are the most fundamental example of course, but there are plenty of others. I don't know whether they would add anything to the argument though - but maybe worth thinking about?

I will accept your nitpick on imaginary numbers even though I distinctly remember that any number that includes /i/ is an imaginary number and that 4.5i is properly expressed as 0+4.5i. That memory is from far too many years ago to trust and I am too lazy to go dredge up my early math books (if they haven't moldered away -- it would have to have been mold, they were too dry for a mouse to nibble on.) If I make the other change you mention, this will pretty much go away, won't it?

I had figured out that I don't need the paragrah tags, but I included them because I used the tags for some of the notes (and one note uses both types of tags.) Are the unnecessary tags why there is so much white/blue space in the footnote section? If so, I definitely need to remove them. If not, well, they are already there, aren't they? (I'm FLATTERED. You actually looked at my code?!)

I am sitting here trying to imagine myself simply citing the appropriate articles, where the articles exist. Or, simply citing "Numbers" which does a decent job on all of them, and I just don't see how it would work. I still need to present the math definitions in some form in order to contrast them with the 'ordinary' definitions. Makes me squirm -- a lot. I am still considering it.

Other jargon examples: Law is the most obvious case (see my comment in the section on Internet Adoption), but talk about opening a huge and rancid crate of fish! More examples, more definitions; more definitions, more tedium. AND, it's ever so hard to be droll about law without becoming *very* depressed. Psychiatry is a pregnant option (or is that too Freudian an image?)-- aren't there enough articles about psycho-babble? Have they done any good? Although I seem to keep explaining to people about 'crazy,' 'insane,' and 'psychotic.' Fishing jargon, military jargon, theatre jargon, ranching jargon: pretty obscure. 'Spy' jargon is too confused with cant. Religious jargon could offend far too many people who confuse it with faith-based Truth. Perhaps a simple list at the end --categories and examples -- as points for consideration would work. What do you think?

I have made some more changes to the article to reflect all the comments but these last points to date. (Any I haven't addressed, I'm either 'supressing' or ignoring.) If your patience will bear it, another go at the article will be appreciated.

Barton

Well, at the simplest level you could always just include what you've already written, but add the links in too...

You could also mention physics: an "Ideal Gas", for example - or indeed the various "Laws of motion". Then there's "Entropy", and "Inertia" and "Momentum", "Relativity" all of which have specific meanings seperate from the normal meanings.

Well, I'll wait to see what anyone else thinks...

I'm going to be reworking more of this and I will be citing the Numbers article and others dealing with the math.

I will also be adding entries on other instances of jargon intruding into conversation and how they also demonstrate the problem.

It may be that I can then find a way to remove that substantial portion of my article that deals with the workings of numbers.

It does seem to me, more and more, that this is not really a proper entry for the Guide and should not be considered as such. it's too much a lecture and not straight forward enough.

[Sigh]

Look for changes by the week end.

Barton

Don't give up - I really think this entry can make it in the guide - after all the phenomenon you talk about is real, and deserves to be commented on...

Oh, and before I forget, particle physicists talk about quark "flavours" and "spin" and a whole bunch of similar terms - plus they have things like "gluons"...

Hi Barton, Phew! That's some article, clearly took a lot of work.

I'm afraid though (waits for flying ) that it kind of comes across as a bit - er what's the word - confused? It seems to start off explaining what different types of numbers there are and what they mean, it kind goes off on a philosphy tangent for a while and then concentrates on (and I think this is what the article is REALLY about) use of correct languauge in the correct context. I think it might be a bit heavy going for your average reader as it is. .
I think you could probably split this into two or three seperate articles if you really wanted to and believe me, I know how much work goes into an article of this length, so I wouldn't want to see it all deleted.
I agree with Lucinda, include other technical Jargon as this will reduce confusion over it being an article about number theory. I can help out with a lot of science jargon (particularly physics and chemistrywise) if you like. I think it just needs simplifying really, it has too many footnotes too - if you look at one halfway down, its hard to find where the original reference was again and this breaks the flow of reading it.
For example, what are flavour and beauty in Quarks? They are simply properties of these particles observed spectroscopically that needed a new variable in their equations to explain them. They'd run out of the dimensions of x,y,z, time and spin (an angular momentum) and so they simply came up with silly words instead.
Did you know in chemsistry there's a molecule called Arsole?

Anyway, I did enjoy reading it but it seems more a personal philosophical viewpoint the way it is at the moment. I think it needs to be clearer to get into the guide.

Please don't hit me.

Orcus

Lucinda and Orcus,

Don't forget charm, although that term seems to be on its way out. The theorists seem to have begun to abandon the fancy that made the early theory so interesting.

For instance, the word 'quark' came out of Finnegan's Wake.


We've gone from spin (right, left, up, down, top, bottom), to flavours (charm, beauty, strangeness -- no, there was never chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry), to the 'latest' quantum chromodynamics (red, green, blue, -red, -green, -blue) with colour being carried by gluons.

As you say, Orcus, they had to name these parameters something (sorry, the quarks have not been observed sprectroscopically -- they are too small and nearly impossible to separate at this time. The few that have been 'observed' have simply been deduced from statistical data and they were the really 'huge' ones. Most of these particles are still only theoretical.) The current wooly carpet analogy for the number of dimensions required demands more terms for directions than human experience can cope with. In other words, they're faking it.

Unfortunately, while a real point can be made about the confusion following from these new definitions to old names. The subject is too complicated and I do not *begin* to be competant to simplify what I only barely begin to think I sorta might kinda maybe perhaps have a vague fuzzy glimmer about. (I had just finally got together a pretty good explaination of why the old 'atoms are little solar systems and solar systems are atoms' pseudo-symetry was all wrong. Now a 12 year-old can explain it better than I can.

Orcus, you don't need to duck. I agree with you on most of the points you make. And, I agree with Lucinda's points as well.

(Incidently, if you have been scrolling down and back up again to find my footnotes, try clicking on the numbers from either end. You pop should pop right back to where you left off.)

We don't need another article on numbers, but I do need to start with the definitions. If I *just* start with the definitions, those who aren't comfortable with them will simply do what they did in school, turn them off, and they won't have that verfremdungseffekt that they need to have before they can understand the significance of the problem. (assuming, of course, that I get the point across the way I'm doing it.)

The article is too long and confusing AND misleading. More importantly, it isn't an article. It's a flip opinion piece trying to be meaningful after wasting too much time on the wrong thing. The only way to even half-way make it work would be to make it a third again as long and that terrifies even me.

I am going to try to blow away the horse by-product and come back at it again. This time I will start with the main issue, proceed into instances, and end with a summation as an article should do.

This structure can't be fixed, not by me. I'm just going to tear it down and see what I can salvage from the lumber.

Thanks for your contributions and suggestions. Hopefully, I'll have time to attack this project this week. If not, well, the anticipation should be delicious.

Barton

Hi again, ha well, you clearly know more about Quarks than me so I'll shut up.

I didn't know that about the footnotes, that does make life easier (in my own articles no less) so thanks for pointing that out. Tis a shame to rip apart so much work but you're the author, its up to you in the end.

It is an interesting read, there are a lot of points I hadn't really thought about before so I look forward to the next version