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

[Bob Martin]

  There is a reason dictionaries supply multiple definitions to words
and it's not surprising that some engineer or scientist chose the 
most common meaning of decimate in coining the name decimation 
filter. I must admit it bugs me as well when the decimate is
equated with slaughter.

  The meaning of words can evolve over time.
Washington DC had (has?) a radio station called WGAY back in the
seventies.  The the meaning of the word gay evolved since those call 
letters were first assigned. Interestingly the station formats 
evolved with the word.

http://beautifulmusicradio.blogspot.com/2013/01/wgay-and-wqmr-washingtons-quality-music.html

Back in those same seventies, I was working for an army lab (Harry
Diamond Labs) as a summer student. I saw a picture in a lab supply 
catalog of a (ein) stein of beer. I tore it out and taped it over a 
picture off Albert Einstein that a German physicist, Howard Brandt, 
had on the wall over his desk.  This was a bad idea.  Howard was so 
incensed that he called the whole department together, hauled out 
the Websters Unabridged Dictionary, and forced me to read the 
definition of the word philistine in front of the group. 
Fortunately, there were many entries under the word and I chose "a 
native of Philistia" to read out loud. The moral is words can have 
many meanings and, more importantly, don't make fun of Einstein
around German Physicists.

Bob Martin

On 1/10/2019 6:58 AM, Tim Shoppa wrote:
> 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. 
>> _______________________________________________ time-nuts
>> mailing list -- time-nuts at lists.febo.com To unsubscribe, go to 
>> http://lists.febo.com/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts_lists.febo.com
>>
>> 
and follow the instructions there.
>> 
> _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing
> list -- time-nuts at lists.febo.com To unsubscribe, go to
> http://lists.febo.com/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts_lists.febo.com 
> and follow the instructions there.
>