Yes. talideon wrote two unrelated sentences next to each other, Turing_Machine thought they were related, and the two of them started talking about different things. (This is my impression, at least. I can't seem to bring myself to properly read the whole thread, it's too frustrating.)
talideon, you do not come across well from that exchange. You may or may not have been talking to a brick wall, but you weren't listening to one. I more-or-less agree with raldi: instead of fixating loudly on what Turing_Machine did wrong in that thread, think about how you could do better next time.
Look, I repeated told him that the units didn't matter, and that it was the ratio that mattered. Other than disengaging sooner (which I would've done if I'd any cop-on myself), what could I have said differently? I'm truly at a loss. I straight-up wrote this:
> _The units are irrelevant._ That's what you're not getting. What is relevant is that the same page width/height ratio is maintained between the different page sizes.
When I was younger, I would've had more patience with this kind of thing; but as I get older, it becomes less and less worth my time and energy.
You say that "same page width/height ratio is maintained between the different page sizes" is the important thing, but it's the result of using that particular ratio that is important, when you take a page of 1/2 the area by cutting across the long dimension, the aspect ratio is maintained.
If you aren't worried about maintaining the aspect ratio for 1/2 pages, you can maintain any arbitrary aspect ratio as you scale up and down (but you don't get the 'easy' scaling to half or double areas).
That's where the imperial fluid analogy comes in, there is convenience derived from having it be base 2.
The fluid measurements analogy doesn't work though because volumes don't behave the same way as areas with fixed aspect ratios. Moreover, the reason why √2 is such a useful ratio is because it maintains the same aspect ratio when the sheet is doubled or halved. That's why his argument was nonsensical.
You shouldn't have said "You appear not to understand the actual utility behind the page width/height ratio used in ISO/DIN page sizes." Turing_Machine wasn't talking about utility at that point. Ve had misunderstood something confusing that you had said, and you basically straight up said "you're dumb".
That was only after he came up with the fluid measurement analogy, which made _no_ sense at all. I'd written this:
> The 1:sqrt(2) ratio used is extremely convenient as it scales up and down nicely
Then he wrote this:
> How are factors of 2 and sqrt(2) "based on metric"? At some level you could say that the U.S. measurements are "based on metric" since almost all of them are defined in terms of metric units. You just have to apply the proper factor (which is a decimal, but a terminating one --- unlike the sqrt(2) business).
(Emphasis mine.)
That is where the "You appear not to understand the actual utility behind the page width/height ratio used in ISO/DIN page sizes." comment came from. I wasn't calling him dumb. I hadn't flipped the bozo bit on him at that point, though I had by the time I wrote "Ok. I'll be super explicit about this." later on.
> They're not part of the metric system, simply based on it. The 1:sqrt(2) ratio used is extremely convenient as it scales up and down nicely
TM thought those two sentences were related. Ve thought you were saying that the factor of sqrt(2) was what made it metric. Ve was correcting something that you hadn't actually said, but which would have been wrong if you had said it.
And then your reply to ver made the same mistake, and you do not get to feel superior about this.
("You appear to not understand" isn't literally calling someone dumb, but that's pretty much what it boils down to.)
I'm not going to make another of the same mistakes you did: I'm tapping out here.
(I agree that they miss the point that you aren't promoting metric)