My Dear Phellow Phriammers, Over the years I have asked you some doozies. Still, I am pretty sure this the stupidest question I have ever asked this forum, so I am at your mercy.
I am in one of those situations where language and mathematics are rubbing together and driving crazy. Let say that my patio is ten steps down from my back door. I have two cats, Dee and Ess, and Dee is dominant to Ess. So, if I go out to let them in, and I find Ess on step -2 and Dee on step -8, I know I have an unstable situation. I fear that I will have a cat fight as Dee rushes past Ess to claim his rightful position by the preferred cat bowl. Intuitively, I would rate the degree of instability as a positive 6. How would I compare the two numbers mathematically to get +6? But let’s say that for theoretical reasons I now want to conceive of the situation as a degree of *stability*, with negative stability corresponding to instability. Now, according to my index, the situation is a minus 6. How would I compare the two numbers mathematically to get a -6? The situation I am trying to model here is the origin of the notion of static stability in meteorology. Static Stability has a lot to do with differential lapse rates, the degree to which temperature declines with increasing altitude. Lapse rates are minus numbers. So a parcel is unstable if it has a lower lapse rate (a less minus lapse rate?) than surrounding parcels, and the greater the absolute value the difference between them, the greater the instability. I asked “George” (GPT) to help me with this, but he (?) suggested I just take absolute values and give them whatever sign I want. However, somebody told me, way back when, that taking absolute values was not kosher in mathematics. (Why else would the variance be the mean SQUARED deviation about the mean?). So there it is. Yeah. I know. Nick
-. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://bit.ly/virtualfriam to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/