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 . And I would rate the degree of instability as a positive 6. How would I compare the two numbers mathematically to get a minus 6. But let’s say that for conceptual reasons I 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 minus 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. But lapse rates are minus numbers. So a parcel is unstable if it has a lower 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, but 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?).
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