Re: Improving the WHOIS format

Dwayne Henderson wrote on Sat, Jan 14, 2012 at 05:12:24PM MST:
> 
>    Again, your New York State Journal quote is a proper use of "join to".
>    It'd be wrong saying "the toxine molecules join the receptors", because
>    they're objects attaching themselves to each other.
Fair enough.

>    You can't describe the relationship between yourself and a group (which
>    is what a channel is) as a joined-to one. By saying to "join to a
>    table", you're saying you're attaching yourself to a table (physically,
>    not emotionally), as in "I joined myself to the table with superglue".
The quotation I cited shows that you can describe the relationship between a
person and a person as a joined-to one. Are you saying that the noun in the
prepositional phrase isn't permitted to refer to a group (e.g, us), and that
the joined-to relationship in the quotation is only acceptable when the
subject and the prepositional phrase both denote a single person? I.e., are
you saying "X is joined to too many channels" is a person related to a group
of people, and since a group of people isn't singular, my quotation doesn't
apply? I didn't consider that distinction as relevant, but was focusing on the
'join to' part of the question itself. I regard an IRC channel as an object
denoting a group of people, not the group of people per se. So our
disagreement is on semantics. We are disagreeing of if the channel *is* the
group of people or *is a represention for* the group of people. So until we
agree on what a channel is, I think we'll be arguing past each other.

>    The Google count shows that the only particularly common phrases are
>    "join us", "join a group" and "join me". The others are far too low to
>    say anything about. As for the accuracy of Google itself, let's save
>    that for another discussion.
As for this discussion, I'll summarize my argument: You can't justify your
position using Google counts and ignore Google's method of composing those
counts. That's like saying you don't care how unemployment by the U.S. Bureau
of Labor Statistics is measured, you are just concerned about the number they
state as unemployed. Understanding the methodology that produces a result is
Research 101 (or at the very least Statistics 101). You don't know the
methodology but you're making conclusions about the results. That's just not
good.

-- 
David Romano .:. [email protected]
----
"All theory depends on assumptions which are not quite true.  That is
what makes theory.  The art of successful theorizing is to make the
inevitable simplifying assumptions in such a way that the final results
are not very sensitive.  A 'crucial' assumption is one on which the
conclusions do depend sensitively, and it is important that crucial
assumptions be reasonably realistic.  When the results of a theory seem
to flow specifically from a special crucial assumption, then if the
assumption is dubious, the results are suspect."
    -- Robert Solow, A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth,
           Quarterly Journal of Economics, Feb 1956.