3 ms·

To be needlessly pedantic: the wheel is the place where the non-rotating axle connects to the rotating body. So for most automobiles, the tire (tyre) can be de

• nayuki 2y ago
  Thank you so much for taking the time to explain things! By analogy from studying bicycle mechanical maintenance, I can understand that the wheel of a car has many components like you mentioned (tire, rim, bearing, hub, axle, etc.). Clearly I'm not well-versed in car terminology. I know many people find pedantry to be viscerally repulsive, and feel that the pedant is acting self-important. I disagree with this because if you look deeper down, I think there is a reason for it: To be able to name and distinguish things. Let me give a few examples: Some people think it's okay to abbreviate kilometres as "kms", whereas the standard is "km". By analogy, that would mean it's okay to abbreviate watts (a unit of power) as "Ws" and newtons (a unit of force) as "Ns". But now you can't distinguish them from actually useful units, like the watt-second for photographic flash output energy or newton-second for rocket impulse. I've encountered people who call a laptop computer as a "laptop" (okay) but a desktop computer as just "computer". That makes no sense, as a laptop is a computer, and can easily be a desktop replacement especially if you attach an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse. These days, it's common to ask "Do you want to buy the game disc or get the digital version?". But that's a misnomer because the data on the disc is digital! Ask anyone from the cassette vs. CD days about whether CD is digital music or not. Common speech ascribes qualities to digital that are not inherent in the definition. Digital does not imply electronic, high-tech, new, or immaterial; there are counterexamples to all of these. There can be digital logic made of plastic mechanical LEGO; digital signaling is as low-tech as a man writing numbers on a tablet; digital is as old as DNA (a 4-symbol code); digital information can be transmitted by physical objects like CDs or by energy like Wi-Fi radio waves. I argue that the core qualities of "digital" are finite information and perfect copies. For example, you cannot measure the real-valued positions of every single atom in a painting, nor can you copy it perfectly. Technically, you can't copy every atom on a "digital" CD either, but by convention we all agree that the exact atoms are irrelevant and only the high-level interpretation is important. For example, no one argues that a file on a server's hard disk is any "better" than the same file transmitted over the Internet to some rando's flash drive; both files are equally good. Pedantry means "pay attention to what these words are supposed to mean, not what you want them to mean".
  • Dylan16807 2y ago
    > These days, it's common to ask "Do you want to buy the game disc or get the digital version?". But that's a misnomer because the data on the disc is digital! I don't think that's really a misnomer. You're ordering some food, do you want the combo or the sandwich? The combo has the sandwich of course, nobody is implying otherwise. But if you say "the sandwich" then you get just the sandwich wrapped up in a delivery medium.
• fuzztester 2y ago
  >Muphry be praised. Don't know whether your spelling was intentional or not, but anyway: Muphry's law: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry's_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry's_law Murphy's law: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_law Edit: I just saw this one for the first time, after re-reading the one above: Yhprum's law: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yhprum%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yhprum%27s_law