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.dun...@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. > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list -- To UNSUBSCRIBE and more, see https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.