Re: So, I got my OW Cert


Grumman-581 wrote:
On Sat, 1 Jul 2006 16:28:48 -0400, "Lee Bell"
<pleebell2@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I suspect you are mistaken regarding whether it's most people or only some
people, but you never know these days.

Call me a pessimist if you will, but I don't put that much value in
the 'average' intelligence... Too many people get by high school with
only the minimal science requiremets and that seldom includes
chemistry or physics... Hell, if I remember correctly, less than 30%
of the U.S. population has a bachelor's degree... Of those with such
degrees, it might not be unreasonable to assume that qutie a few of
those were liberal arts majors and as such are less likely to have
ever had a course in which they needed to differentiate between mass
and weight...

So what exactly is it that your education failed to tell you, since you
can't understand the simple fact that when we talk about buying a bag
of sugar with a "net weight" of 2 kg or of 4 lb or whatever, that we
don't give a damn whatsoever about how hard it is pressing down on the
table? We are only interested in how much stuff we have.

That's the way we've been using the word weight, quite properly and
legitimately, ever since the word entered the English language over
1000 years ago, meaning the quantity measured with a balance.

That quantity--which we quite properly still call "weight"--is the
quantity physicists like to refer to as "mass". It is not, and it
should not be, a force--that's what weight means whenever anybody talks
about the "net weight" of anything; that is a term of commerce, not of
physics.

Note, of course, that this is proper and legitimate, linguistically and
legally and historically correct. Fortunately, nobody was ever damn
fool enough to give any physics teacher any say-so as to what "weight"
means when we buy and sell goods by weight.

Of course, like the word "weight", the word "mass" is also an ambiguous
word, one with several different meanings. Usually the ambiguities
cause less of a problem with the word "mass" since there is only one of
its meanings which is normally quantified with a number to express its
magnitude, whereas with the word "weight" that is done for both its
meanings as a synonym for physics jargon mass and for its various
meanings related to force.

But the ambiguities in the word mass are one reason why we don't
abandon our perfectly good word we already use for this quantity when
we call it weight in commerce, and when we measure our body weight in
the medical sciences and in sports. We don't wan't people getting
confused with the meaning of mass that bodybuilders use when they
discuss muscle mass, and we don't want the confusion with the meanings
of mass closely related to everyday use of the word "massive" as an
indication that something either occupies a lot of space or a lot of
our field of view.

Gene Nygaard

.

Relevant Pages

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  • Re: Nobody noes it _yet_
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