On Fri, 11 Nov 2011 02:15:31 -0000
"Lieutenant Scott" wrote:

On Thu, 10 Nov 2011 23:04:46 -0000, Davey
wrote:

On Thu, 10 Nov 2011 22:54:22 -0000
"Lieutenant Scott" wrote:

On Thu, 10 Nov 2011 22:15:11 -0000, Davey
wrote:

On Thu, 10 Nov 2011 20:23:51 -0000
"Lieutenant Scott" wrote:

On Wed, 09 Nov 2011 10:55:00 -0000, Davey
wrote:

On Wed, 09 Nov 2011 00:14:59 +0000
Frank Erskine wrote:

On Tue, 8 Nov 2011 22:54:15 +0000, Davey
wrote:

On Tue, 8 Nov 2011 21:02:32 +0000
Ian Jackson wrote:

In message
m,
"dennis@home" writes


"Chris J Dixon" wrote in message
.. .
Jules Richardson wrote:

On Tue, 08 Nov 2011 01:38:12 +0000, Grimly Curmudgeon
wrote:

url:http://www.buy4now.ie/woodiesdiy/productdetail.aspx?
pid=14046&loc=P&catid=110.0

Reflecting cold? That's an interesting concept.

It's like photocopying cold to make it warmer...

Perhaps it comes from the same school of thought that
tells us electric current flows in the opposite
direction to the electrons.

Oh come on, everyone knows its the holes that go that
way.

And that light bulbs work by sucking the darkness in.

I think it's time to resurrect the Phlogiston theory.

And miasma/contagion :-)

Actually the idea of hot/cold isn't too silly.

In the morning I open the living-room curtains to let the
darkness out, which is just the reverse logic to letting the
light in.

It's all relative/relativity really innit...


Relatively speaking, yes it is.

So how do we deal with those people who annoyingly describe
something as being 'three times smaller' than something else?

That's just a minor English usage point, and nowhere near as
silly as the other above reversals.


Maybe, but it's still annoying.

Why? It's just stating the factor that you multiply or divide
with.

How would you rewrite the following anyway?:
"Tom's cock was three times longer than Jim's, but Jim's nose was
five times smaller than Tom's."


"Tom's cock was four times the size of Jim's, but Jim's nose was a
fifth of the size of Tom's".
If that is what you mean by 'five times smaller', of course.

That's just ridiculous. Why do you find "five times smaller" so
difficult to understand? "Five times" is simply quantifying the
ratio.


Tim Streater expressed it perfectly. It's a nonsense way of expressing
a relationship, as I showed with the first part of the sentence.
--
Davey.