mhendo,
I’m afraid you’re going to have to ask the people who use thiis terminology, which I don’t. But for the sake of clarity, I suppose you’d need to reference the Kelvin scale.
“Twice as hot” can at least be used in a correct manner, given an agreement on a refrence scale. Though I’ll bet almost no one bothers: I’m sure that most people would have no problem with saying, “80 degrees is twice as hot as 40 degrees”.
It’s “twice as cold” which drives me up a wall.
Let’s toss another unquantifyable quality in there:
“7 shades whiter”
I caught a commercial this morning for a teeth whitening product that claims it will get your teeth 7 shades whiter with one use. How many shades of white are there? How are they measured? What determines when a shade becomes another shade? And why are all these people obsessing about their teeth?
Drives me crazy…
I’m pretty sure you can use any temperature scale that has 0 as absolute zero. Kelvin works, and is usually the one that scientists use. However, Rankine (degrees are the same size as Farenheit degrees, but 0 is set as absolute zero) would work as well.
Well, you’ll have to convince me that it’s WRONG! WHY is it WRONG!? It can perfectly be interpreted the way I said. Bad style, yes, but I can’t see why it would be WRONG!
It’s mathematically wrong. It’s logically wrong.
Nonsense. It grates on me when people do this, I find it immensely irritating, but there’s nothing wrong with it except that it makes the speaker sound like an idiot. It’s weird, but there’s nothing wrong with the function 1/x, you know.
[squiggly eyed glance at yojimboguy]
Do you discriminate against 1/x? 
[/squiggly eyed glance]
I don’t get it:
…It grates on me… immensely irritating… but there’s nothing wrong with it …makes the speaker sound like an idiot.
If there’s nothing wrong with it, why do you think the speaker sounds like an idiot?
And of course there’s nothing wrong with the 1/x function, it SHOULD be used rather than what I’m ranting about.
“HUUUUUUGE SALE! Many items up to half price”
So they are less than half price then?
Oh, the speaker sounds like an idiot because while I see nothing precisely wrong with saying “twice as close,” I don’t like the way it sounds. It sounds stupid and is inelegant and makes me actually have to think about what they’re saying. I always want to smack them and explain that yes, fine I understand what they mean by “twice as cold,” but they should really be saying “half as hot,” because that sounds a lot better.
Besides, no one said I had to be consistent on this point…
So if it’s 283 degrees Kelvin today, and it’s going to be twice as hot tomorrow… :eek:
My take on the expression:
Last year we made $100
This year, we made four times less.
So, this year we lost $300 then?
>> So, this year we lost $300 then?
I dunno. Why don’t you ask your accountant? 
It could make sense.
“He is 10m away. If he is half as far away, he is 5m away.”
…could become…
“He is 0.1m[sup]-1[/sup] close. If he is twice as close, he is 0.2m[sup]-1[/sup] close.”
Goofy, maybe, but possible.
But I just don’t think Joe Average newsreader is thinking this when he says it. If I’m wrong, please correct me. But I think most people understand away in meters better.
And don’t get me started on temperature!
Who says 80 is twice as hot as 40? Is 2 C twice as hot as 1 C? The problem with this is that the zero point for temperature measured in celcius or farenheit is arbitrary, not absolute. There are negative numbers possible. So, as Sublight pointed out with the money expression, saying something is 4 times less is up to interpretation. I agree with the OP that this is stupid and innacurate. The lightness should be expressed as a fraction or percentage, since the ratio is less than 1.
[word problems I’d like to see]
Ok, you’re driving a bus. A train is moving towards Chicago at 87mph. Assuming that the train left at 3:09p.m., accelerated at a rate of of 5mph per minute, the weather in Seatle sucks, and the train is in Japan… is the bus driver left-handed? Or eating lunch?
[/word problems I’d like to see]
Well, the claim may be bogus, but there is a standard 16-shade dental scale for measuring the whiteness of teeth. The only cites I can find for it are part of various commercial pitches, however, so I won’t plug them here.
The cold/hot ones are just one’s own subject measures of temperature. I measure subjective cold in shivers per second and subjective heat in new beads of sweat per second. This works for me as I am perfectly aware of everything my body does. When ever I say a day is twice as cold as the day before I mean I feel twice as cold which means I feel twice as many shivers in a second as the day before.
The one that bothers me is “extremly uncensored” on the Girls-Gone-Wild commercial. Something can be uncensored, or partially censored to any degree, but I do not think that there are different degrees of uncensored.
It’s time for us to rise up against this, even though we are the vast minority.
Well, sonuvagun… guess I’ve learned something here. But it’s still an annoying commercial and those people on there who are fretting over the whiteness of their teeth need to find a new hobby. Preferably one that’s four times less annoying than their present whine.
