[OT PERSONAL OPINION]
Norman,
I prefer concision to precision. The precision can come later.
Your self serving yammering is neither. It is concisely described by
the following:
"Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge"
Your piles get in the way of understanding. They don't promote it.
I'm tired of slogging through them.
Consequently your emails now go to a special place, with all the
other shite I receive, where they can savor each other and not bother
me until they are flushed.
Others, please pardon me for expressing a personal opinion as this
arrogant person has presumed to do.
I was overcome by the sheer effrontery of his post.
Mea culpa,
Ed Kelleher
At 10:13 AM 09/08/2016, Norman Yarvin wrote:
I tend to take it for granted that everyone, no matter how wise and
experienced, will from time to time commit some blooper, especially in
the context of casual conversation such as occurs on mailing lists
like this. Though social convention in many circles is such that such
bloopers are not acknowledged, they are nevertheless a reality; that
someone could avoid committing them is as improbable as that he could
write computer code without ever writing a single bug. But the fact
that one writes code that has bugs does not mean that one is incapable
of programming; not in the slightest, since that's the normal course
of programming: write code, try it out, find bugs, and fix them.
Likewise, here, there was no insinuation of any fundamental
incompetence, just of being a bit too sensitive to appearances.
So to any lurkers here who are giving Bill an unduly hard time over
this: you try showing up here (or in any other public forum) and
posting your thoughts about rocketry, and we'll see how well _you_ do
at avoiding mistakes in an environment where others have no reason to
pretend that a mistake is anything other than a mistake. And if he is
a bit too sensitive to appearances, it's you who are part of the
cause, so wipe the smugness off your faces.
As for literalism, though, I'm afraid it's rather important. For a
view from the outside, from people who envy us our precision in
language, see the essay "Can a Biologist Fix a Radio?":
https://www.cmu.edu/biolphys/deserno/pdf/can_a_biologist_fix_a_radio.pdf
