Data Gathering Side Effects [Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος]

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Y'know what LJ polls are good for? I mean, aside from finding out what people think?

Okay, I mean aside from finding out what people think and finding out who reads your journal but doesn't list you as a friend?

Finding out which of your friends read LJ late at night or in the wee hours, that's what.

Feeling amused. And also informed regarding the question I really wanted answered, thanks. It's kind of interesting to note that "I knew that" was running around 2/3 overnight and jumped closer to 3/4 once the morning respondents logged in. I wonder whether there'll be another shift with the folks who start checking LJ in the afternoon. Anyhow, I was wondering how safe it was to use that abbreviation and expect my readers to understand, and I'm getting useful information on that score. (Of course one side effect of the way I asked is education...)

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There are 7 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

Actually, I saw the poll last night, but didn't answer it then because I didn't feel like deciding what to pick for the second and third questions. I considered answering just the first question, but I thought that would be unsociable, so I decided to wait until the morning, when I figured I'd be less tired and in more of a decision-making mood.

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oh, i meant to comment earlier, but "iff" will often read as a typo to me -- when i've seen it used that way i've usually seen it capitalized: IFF.

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I'm used to handwriting it, and I usually print in all-caps -- and seeing it printed was usually on a blackboard where, again, everything but variable names and funsction names often got written all-caps, so my instinct was to type it "IFF" ... Until I looked it up a week or so ago and saw (as someone else pointed out in a comment to the poll) that in uppercase it usually means "identification friend or foe" and the dictionary used lowercase for the math usage.

But I'm not sure how much that convention matters, since it'll almost always be obvious from context which meaning is intended. I haven't decided whether to go back to uppercase for "if and only if" yet ... if I do so, the only reason will be what you just described: it makes it a little clearer that it's not merely a typo of "if" (which I agree with you about).

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it'll almost always be obvious from context which meaning is intended

Yes.

My first reaction on seeing iff in the middle of a sentence is not to go "typo!". IFF would throw me.

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Heh. Would have been in bed much earlier last night, except for having to rebuild the W2K install on the laptop. I think the poll happened sometime around the Service Packs installation.

And I, too, am more used to seeing IFF (capitalized) than iff, though I have seen and recognized both.

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