I do hope you're teaching him grammar. Or, rather, how not to end sentences.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

don't end a sentence with a smiley. Got it!!!??!?!?!...

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

Where are you supposed to put them?!

The problem's not the smiley, it's that you should be using an interrobang:
‽

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“There’s nothing that spells progress in large, friendly letters like trying to combine two totally incompatible technologies.” – David Szondy, Tales of Future Past.

"Interrobang?"

Nice!

I think..?

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If I set the budget, we'd have Ares and more. Unfortunately, I don't set the budget, and Ares is just too expensive and too far out for us to accomplish our goals within the budget we were given.

If we halt the ISS, all versions of Ares, and transport Orion and Altair aboard DIRECTv3's Jupiter family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles, we just might make it back to the Moon by 2020.

He's advanced in all areas but I leave most of his English to his English teachers. I do proof read his work and comment on his writing. Funny enough when he was 3-4 I was thinking about trying to teach him to read but the ladies at child care told me not to because I could screw it up. I shouldn't have listened to them. But he started reading a lot once he got into kindergarten.

When posting I write like I talk. Using punctuation like "?!?!?!" is a literary device.

So what do people use to indicate a sentence is both a statement and a bit of a rhetorical question?
I like the ?!?!?!
The longer longer it is the more my emphasis is.

They use a question mark and let the words demonstrate the rest, or else they clearly phrase it as a question and end it with a period. (I prefer the former.) However, you get one punctuation mark to end a sentence. Using more than one is like using both x and * at the same time to represent multiplication. It's wrong and silly-looking.

And trying to write without a fundamental understanding of grammar is like trying to do physics without a fundamental understanding of arithmetic. You may be on the right track, but at the heart, you're still wrong.

ETA--oh, yeah. And "proofread" is one word.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I disagree. Although pleasantly. I consider myself successful trader, and some of my employees are also successful traders. We don't use, and never have used, any maths higher than simple arithmetic. There are many ways to trade, as I'm sure you know.

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This pendulum back and forth (heh) is puzzling me. Just out of curiosity Jeff, how do you mean to measure it's period without doing at least some maths in your head? Even observation requires some counting.

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What mathematics do you think I would need to do? Here, I'll measure
the period of a pendulum... Just a moment... about 1-3/4 seconds for my
little Swiss Army knife hanging on a thread. What math do you think I
used to get that result?

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"

"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves

Ok, now that seems like a trick question. Which probably explains why I haven't been able to understand the interchange. Arithmetic is not mathematics?

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What arithmetic do you think I used? I'm not aware that I used any.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"

"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves

Thanks for being the grammar police for me!

No no no no! <- note only 1 punctuation. Though I think using the word "no" 4 times does not meet the requirements of a sentence either.

Anyway, is there a rule about starting a sentence with that word? you can measure thing by gut feel like Verschuur measures correlations between WMAP data and local neutral hydrogen and doesn't care if his gut feel isn't actually supported by the numbers.

You've counted, and operated on, rational numbers.

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Sounds to me like you're saying someone doesn't need maths when forming an opinion about someone else's maths.

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Perfessor language, I like the use of !? I see nothing wrong with ??? or !!! and surely you agree with the use of ...

And I think, yes, you do need math. It's a tool that helps with abstracting. I suppose you could ask the same about language.
I'm sure that without language or math, one could develop some talent playing piano or predicting pendulum periods by changing different variables. But the lack of these tools would be a great hindrance.

I'm puzzled.

Yes, the periods of pendulums that are to hand can be observed. But it is the accumulation of such observations that enables a predictive theory to be formed. That theory enables a formula to be constructed that will yield an estimate of the period of a pendulum given its length.

I would have said that this involved mathematics - isn't the substitution of a value into a formula mathematics?

(And the theory is also backed up by an applied mathematical theory of pendulums, although this is not required in standard cases.)

It's wrong. It doesn't matter if you like it or not. As to that last, it's the ellipsis. It is a separate punctuation mark (oddly, yes, it's considered one mark), and it doesn't end a sentence. If you are ending a sentence with it, you have to put a period at the end. For heaven's sake, why are people so snippy about an expectation that they at least attempt correct grammar? We fight all sorts of ignorance here, but I am expected to keep quiet about the very one that we need most--proper communication.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Gillianren: I often see usages that I would hope to avoid. But one reason for never drawing attention to them, at least in the context of a forum, is that they provide me with so much reliable information about the writer.

Wot? I has a PH Friggin D in the maths!.!.!

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

I have had more than a few people disagree with this sentiment and thank me for the work I put in on the subject, including several who have asked me to correct them every time.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Well yes, if someone were to ask me, then I'd help (always assuming I knew enough to help), but my experience of forums suggests that many, perhaps most, people don't want to be corrected. I've never dared anyway, but I've seen such furious reactions that I'll continue to leave well alone (and learn).

Of course, people whose first language is not English are far more likely to be positive about offered corrections, but I would still wait to be asked. In any case I am neither a professional writer nor a teacher, so my opinions are not always reliable.

On the topic of the forum, I do wish I knew enough mathematics to be in a position to understand the Mainstream fully - a basic criterion for proposing something Against the Mainstream if I ever wanted to. (I don't.)

Let me mention "The Road to Reality" by Roger Penrose as a work that, whatever its merits or otherwise, has a level of mathematical content that I think is a fairly good guide to what would be required of a serious proposal contesting current theory.

I have??? I don't remember counting anything. I don't remember
performing any operation. What do you think I counted? What
operation or operations do you think I performed?

Also: Does counting count as mathematics?

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

__________________
http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"

"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves

I'd go so far as to say it's the very beginning of mathematics.

1. 0 is a natural number.
2. For every natural number x, S(x) is a natural number.

You need to tell them that 1 is not S(x) for any naturan number x. And that if you have a set A with the property that 1 belongs to A and if whenever x is in A then so is S(x) then A is all of the natural numbers.

With that you, basic logic, the usual notions of a set you can build all of the usual number systems -- integers, rationals, reals and complex numbers. (See for instance Foundations of Analysis by Landau).

Throw in the axiom of choice, and you can build virtually all of modern mathematics.

Yep, arithmetic is pretty fundamental.

I'm not either, but I was one once, and my opinions weren't always reliable then either.

I guess I should have preceded that with a /sarcasm

Verschuur made a claim based on a purely visual comparison. When someone else crunched the numbers the results where within statistical norms. Verschuur then basically said he doesn't care what the numbers say and, sadly, he's an astronomer.

Yes, 3 x* 2 is wrong and silly-looking, as it's never done in practice. The punctuation at the end of this sentance, however, is not, as it's commonly seen throughout modern literature!!!

What about beginning sentences with "And?" My teachers (all of them) taught me that was improper grammar.

I believe the this sentence of yours exemplifies what's going on, here. People speak informally. They do not speak formally, as they would write. Furthermore, the development of the Internet as an online social community has meant a change in the nature of online communication, a migration from formal writing reflecting the way people used to write, to information communication along the lines of the way people normally speak.

If I'm not mistaken, I believe I was one of those individuals, a while back. As a result, several critical errors which had crept into my writing have been removed; not all of them, mind you, just most. I'm a better writer for it, and I thank you for your efforts!

I would support an amendment to Rule 3 to include prohibiting language shortcuts as are commonly used in chat forums, and an encouragement to use proper spelling and grammar.

I would argue, however, that "proper spelling and grammar" should be inclusive of what is commonly experienced in information, face-to-face communication - in short, shop talk. Unless one is an exceptional grammarian, requiring formal grammar can prove to be as much of an impediment to good communication as allowing chat shortcuts.

In closing, if you allow yourself the occasional sentence fragment, I hope it wouldn't be too much to ask if you'd allow us the occasional missing fourth dot which completes an end of sentence ellipse and its subsequent period.

Thank you.

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If I set the budget, we'd have Ares and more. Unfortunately, I don't set the budget, and Ares is just too expensive and too far out for us to accomplish our goals within the budget we were given.

If we halt the ISS, all versions of Ares, and transport Orion and Altair aboard DIRECTv3's Jupiter family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles, we just might make it back to the Moon by 2020.