scientific gibberish

[Neal Whitman]

I blogged about this a few years ago:
http://literalminded.wordpress.com/2007/10/25/60-hotter/

Actually, it's a short enough post that I'll just paste it in at the bottom,
below Victor's message.

Neal

----- Original Message -----
From: "Victor Steinbok" <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM>
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Sent: Monday, February 06, 2012 12:21 AM
Subject: scientific gibberish


> ---------------------- Information from the mail
> header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Victor Steinbok <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      scientific gibberish
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> What does one mean when he says "twice as cold"?
>
> http://goo.gl/3OFkG
>> "Temps are dropping below -40 Celsius [-40 degrees Fahrenheit] and
>> they have only a week or so left before they have to winterize the
>> station," he said. "I can only imagine what things must be like at
>> Vostok Station this week."...
>> When the winter arrives in the next few weeks, the temperature can
>> _get_twice_as_cold_. Vostok Station boasts the lowest recorded
>> temperature on Earth: -89.4 degrees Celsius (-129 degrees Fahrenheit).
>
> [facepalm]
>
>     VS-)
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

A few years ago, I wrote about phrases like ten times less, and how
something like this makes sense only if you interpret is as something like,
"one tenth as much". This week, Jan Freeman writes about the same issue in
her column, and notes that not only is the fractional interpretation easily
understood; people have been saying "X times less" to mean "1/X as much" for
at least two centuries. Nevertheless, she warns that it is still possible to
make numerical comparisons that make no sense, and gives some examples. To
them, let me add these, which I got from Doug's DVD of Before the Dinosaurs:
Walking with Monsters.


In the segment on the early Permian Period, it states that the average
global temperature was "20% colder than today." In the segment on the late
Permian Period, it states that the average global temperature was "60%
hotter than today." Before I say more about these statements, let me talk
about measuring length. To say something is X% longer or shorter than
something else is not a problem, whether you're measuring in inches,
centimeters, or anything else. You add or subtract X% to or from the
original number, and it doesn't matter whether the number is 1 inch or 2.54
centimeters because both scales are starting from the same zero, an
agreed-upon absolute minimum length.


But unless you're using the Kelvin scale, where absolute zero really is
zero, it doesn't make sense to make any comparison by multiplying the
degrees by some fraction or percentage. If the temperature were 0 degrees
Celsius, then 20% colder or 60% hotter would still be 0 degrees Celsius. But
take the same temperature and name it with the Kelvin scale - 273.15
kelvin - and then 20% colder and 60% hotter are (respectively) 218.52 kelvin
and 437.04 kelvin. The video doesn't say which temperature scale the writers
have in mind, but I'm guessing it's not Kelvin.

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