Would you believe that I must have asked that dozens of times over the years --- and as far as I can recall, that's the first time it's ever received a correct answer, from people with a technical background included? It's an excellent example of how a badly-formulated linguistic trope may confuse its users so badly that they become incapable of disentangling its distinct meanings, even after those are explicitly pointed out. WFL On 11/25/07, Eugene Salamin <gene_salamin@yahoo.com> wrote:
----- Original Message ---- From: Fred lunnon <fred.lunnon@gmail.com> To: math-fun <math-fun@mailman.xmission.com> Sent: Saturday, November 24, 2007 12:30:23 PM Subject: Re: [math-fun] The Axiom of Choice for roots of z^2 + 1
Which reminds me --- quite irrelevantly --- of a claim I fear I may have made previously in these august pages: that a most effective means of causing a polite gathering to descend into an incoherent brawl is to remark that "a mirror exchanges left with right" and then to enquire innocently "so, why doesn't it also exchange up with down?"
A mirror neither exchanges left with right nor up with down. It exchanges front with back. This is precisely the definition of "reflection in a plane".
Gene
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