CTS: Being Wraith #4

Firstly, much sympathy to ill and busy people who weren't able to come. But CTS was good! I wasn't sure about the topic, but as I hoped it provoked much interesting debate from all directions.

We were being quiet for the benefit of revisors, and the speaking object actually worked. The only way to guarantee attention was to whisper but with a commmittee member maintaining the order to pass it in people were good at making points and passing on and not being talked over. I think having one person controlling it is what is often missing, also the extra reason not to talk loudly.

Refinements I'm not sure if we need:

* A way to request and be granted short interjections without just coming out with them to offer a reasonable number of jokes and factual corrections.
* A way to maintain the "next" order. Have a chairman watching, or ask each person to note the first person to wave after they do.
* A way to get quiet people to talk. Obviously, many people just normally don't have anything to say, and when they do say it, but I'm sure there are *sometimes* people who would say something but get ridden past by the discussion.

And then we went to the pub, which was nice. There was quite a good turnout -- we don't have many new members at all, but the current crowd is quite good at turning up to places at the moment.

¿What ees this?

I propose that english should use ¿ and ?. They will bracket the part of the sentence that is a question, and a question mark on the last word displaces the full stop as we do now.

For instance:

* ¿Where are going?
* ¿Where? are you going.
* ¿Where are you going?, we need to talk before you leave.
* I really have to wonder ¿Where are you going?

This is barely more typing, and will often remove some ambiguity, and allow more structure to be put in sentences. OK, I'm mainly joking -- you can always restructure the sentence to not need to emphasise the questioning part, or to put it at the end. But isn't it interesting?

You could do the same thing with ¡ and ! to emphasise a single word like ¡this!, but in fact we already do that with *these*. The only benefit of ¡!ing is that ¡they could be ¡nested!!, but in fact that probably only appeals to mathematicians, and definitely would make them unnecessarily complicated :)

ETA: This is similar but not the same as the spanish use of ¿ and ? iirc.

Moniak

I'm used to ringing up a company and speaking to people who don't understand my english very well, and to ringing up a company and speaking to a friendly scottish lady. Ringing up a company and speaking to a a friendly scottish lady who doesn't understand my english is a new one on me :)

Interroequals

The ¿? post made me think of another symbol I like, =?= (Handwritten as a ? superimposed over an equals, I've never typed it before.)

If you have two expressions and want to work out which is bigger, the normal technique is to try to simplify them separately, or subtract one from the other and establish >0 or <0, isn't it? The point of =?= is that with = or > or >=, you assume the this line implies the next line[1], but with =?=, The next line implies this one, when you replace =?= with any of =, >, <, <=, >=

For instance, option A costs (x+1)²+x and option B costs 2x²-2, which is better?

(x+1)² =?= 2x-2
x²+1 =?= -2
x² =?= -3
x² > -3

I like it because:

* You can use both expressions together, and if half-way simplified versions cancel somewhat with each other you can take advantage of that.
* You can write the two expressions side by side, and don't have to introduce extra values.
* The status of the expression is clear: being compared to the other. If you subtract the two, you won't have a =?= reminding you to stop when it's clearly positive/negative
* It's easy to work out on the fly, but to make rigorous doesn't need to be rewritten, you can just change =?= to < and insert "<=" is implied by operators. It sort of working backwards, but it's easier than reversing your order to use conventional implication, because then your final line is inserted into your proof as if by magic, and too much magic makes it confusing to read.

Is there another symbol which does this no-one told me? Or another writing convention which has these advantages? I admit it's because I'm lazy and like things easy -- maths is hard enough in general without artificial difficulties :)

PS. It's an interesting thought. Little tricks like this (but commonly used, more useful ones) are an informal body of knowledge, the stuff it's hard to teach without watching someone do it -- in all subjects you need some amount of "apprenticeship" in addition to any amount of teaching.

[1] The tricky point many young students are taught only in retrospect is that the next line often but not always implies the current one. For instance, "x=-y" leads to "x²=y²" but the reverse (while true for *these* values of x and y) isn't a valid inference.
[2] Hey, "bar" works there!