More Procrastination

Stimulus

A news bulletin about a prototype device surprised me today, describing the device as a "handheld cell counter the size of a Rubik’s Cube," then as "a simple, solid-white cube measuring 2x2x3 inches". (my emphasis).
It is dismaying to observe that cube may be following literally in the path to uselessness, if a cube no longer has to be cubic. That is, as every schooled person ought to know, a "regular polyhedron having six identical square faces."

Response

What should have been said is a block, or a cuboid, or--my preference--a square cylinder.

• A block, I think most would agree, is rectangular but not necessarily square on any side. It may be a bit oblong, like a brick. It may be, as Wiktionary notes, "approximately cuboid." But what is cuboid? 
• A cuboid is a rectangular parallelepiped, of which the cube is the special case where the rectangular faces are congruent squares.  The cuboid generalizes the cube by allowing the edges to lengthen or shorten as long as the opposing faces remain parallel to each other. The cube might be flattened and stretched to become brick-like: a little longer than twice the width, and wider than it is high (240 × 115 × 71 mm, e.g.). Or, it might extend a two inch cube to a 2x2x3 inch cuboid.
• Whereas a cylinder may usually be circular (and right) in non-mathematical usage, it may be any "surface created by projecting a closed two-dimensional curve along an axis intersecting the plane of the curve." (source: Wiktionary). A dowel is a cylinder and, yes, one can buy square dowels (ask your search engine).

Conclusion

If the three-dimensional rectangle has edges of more than one length, i.e. one cannot say it is a some length cube but must say it is a width by depth by height something, it is not a cube.

References

A 'game-changer' for HIV/AIDS -- UC Berkeley College of Engineering

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Labels: ambiguity, devolution, endarkenment, journalism, language

A recent list of news headlines might not seem ambiguous at first glance.  We probably all read it according to what we wish to find.
Coroners, I do believe, must investigate hundred of hospital deaths in the course of their careers.  In fiction, whistle-blowers and other heroes take--or have thrust upon them--investigative initiatives.  Surely the Brazilian nurse, or doctor, or both were such heroic investigators.  Or were they?

Would "suspected of 300 hospital deaths" have been too hard to think of? Or must we suppose that it would have been "investigated more than" in the opposite case. 

Explanation

The meaning of "over" in this case could be in association with either

1. "investigated": was or would be investigated over something, meaning (to be) investigated because of something.
2. "300": over 300 something is investigated (did investigate) more than 300 something.

The ambiguity arises because the rationale for investigating is stated using a number, and "investigated" could be either a past active form (as "did investigate") or a present participle (as "is being investigated"). There are many ways to avoid this ambiguity. For one, a simple change from "300" to "hundreds of" (or "scads of") would suffice, since "over hundreds of" does not make sense, making it clear what was meant is "investigated over." Another possibility is to remove "over" by writing "suspected of" instead of "investigated over," as suggested above.

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Labels: ambiguity, journalism, semantics