Spreadsheets: an appreciation — what changed since — setting out what I have, and where I think it stops being reliable.
What changes if the standard account of Spreadsheets is wrong? I ask because I have been treating it as settled and I noticed this week that I could not say why.
Working through the consequences rather than the evidence, since others here are better placed on the evidence.
Appreciated. The plain phrasing does more work here than a longer post would.
A note on how Spreadsheets gets discussed rather than on Spreadsheets itself: the confident posts get the replies and the careful ones get ignored, and the careful ones have been right more often.
Spreadsheets came up in a thread eighteen months ago and was answered well. I cannot find it, which is itself the problem, so here is the reconstruction.
Lounge-level thought to close on: the measure of this place is that being wrong in public here is cheap. That is a design decision and it took work.
Not the answer, but possibly the question that gets there.
Something I have wondered without ever asking: is there a good reason the vocabulary in this field is so inconsistent between suppliers? Half the disagreements here start as terminology.
On Spreadsheets I would separate what is worth knowing from what is worth acting on. The first list is long and the second is short, and conflating them is how threads get heated.
On Spreadsheets, the part that usually goes wrong is that the question is asked as though it has one answer. It has a range, and the width of the range is the interesting bit.
If you can post the two or three numbers you are working from, several people here will check the arithmetic rather than argue about the conclusion.
Good question, well framed, and I would like to see it answered properly.
A note on scope: what I am saying about Spreadsheets applies to the case in the first post and I would not extend it further without checking.
Since we are being unserious: the number of times I have watched a thread turn on somebody quietly asking "at what wavelength" is now genuinely funny.
I would want the raw data before agreeing with my own summary of it.
Where the Spreadsheets reasoning breaks down for me is the step from the group result to the individual case. That step is almost never argued for.
Helpful, and easy to find again, which is half of what a good reply is.
That is a fair summary of where the discussion has got to.
Agreed on Spreadsheets, with one qualification that I think matters. The reasoning holds for the case as described. Change the starting assumption and it does not, and the starting assumption is the part nobody states.
Personal stories: if you want to talk about what led you to this compound, your journey, or how the change has affected your life, the Lounge is the place for that.
Two sources, same conclusion, and I could not rule out that one copied the other.
Practical answer on Spreadsheets, since the theoretical one is upthread: do the simplest check first, write down the result, and only then decide whether the complicated explanation is needed. It usually is not.
Since the Lounge tolerates a digression: the thing I find most interesting about this community is how much of the useful material is negative. Half the value is knowing what a document does not establish.
Reading back through the Spreadsheets threads from last year, the same three questions come up every time and only one of them has ever been answered properly. That seems like a documentation gap rather than a knowledge gap.
Lounge question, no agenda: does anyone else keep a physical notebook for this rather than a file? Mine is more use than anything I have typed, and I cannot entirely explain why.
If the premise is wrong, everything after it is decoration.