[time-nuts] Misuse of word "decimate" (was Re: Short term 10MHz source)

[Tim Shoppa]

This is not misuse. Everyone in signal processing knows what decimation
means in this context.

I pulled out one of my older signal processing books - Gold and Rader,
"Digital Processing Of Signals", 1969 - and Decimation is used in several
places exactly as we use it today.

I looked in some of my non-digital signal processing and older books, like
MIT Rad Lab series, and don't see the term used, but I know that I heard
old-timers using decimation used in automatic analog signal processing
especially with regard to "zooming out" on a spectrum analyzer or
pinball-style pulse-height analyzer (often the knobs gave you only factors
of ten).

Tim N3QE

On Thu, Jan 10, 2019 at 7:02 AM Peter Vince <petervince1952 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> In his comment below, Mark has used the word "decimate".  There is much
> debate about what this word means (presently, and/or in the past), but
> common explanations refer back to Roman times when they apparently killed
> one person in ten as a punishment, and similarly "tithes" - or taxes, where
> one in ten was taken.  Now OK, you can argue this until the cows come home,
> but the result is that the meaning isn't crystal clear, and particularly on
> a technical forum where precision is paramount, and the entire reason we
> are here, I believe accuracy and clarity of expression is also important.
> In this instance, I believe "truncate" would be a better word.
>
> </rant>  :-)
>
>      Regards,
>
>           Peter Vince
>
> On Wed, 9 Jan 2019 at 23:56, Mark Sims <holrum at hotmail.com> wrote:
> > ...
> > And as far as decimating the TICC output values in firmware... please
> don't.   Let the user decimate the values if they want to.
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