I don't know exactly where to draw the line on "the vast majority," but surely it must be higher than the bar for a simple majority, which is "more than half." If you want to describe something in the lead but under the 50% mark, the word you're looking for is "plurality."
Yes indeed, both meanings are possible in most contexts.
In US English, when speaking with the mathematical precision, majority means absolute majority (more than half) and plurality means relative majority (more than anyone else). British English does also have the term relative majority like in French, though I don’t know if this is used in mathematics.
But like most other dictionaries in both English and French (with some exceptions like l’Académie Française’s dictionary), Merriam-Webster tries to describe how language is actually used in the real world and not some theoretical idea of how it should be used.
Therefore, since “majority” is often used to mean either absolute or relative majority when speaking in a less precise context than mathematics, a general-purpose dictionary like this one lists both meanings. A mathematical dictionary from the US (again I don’t know about the British equivalent) would list just the absolute meaning.
As an Australian English and Indian English speaker and a mathematician, I have never heard the word plurality outside of discussions of the US political system.
I have seen nitpicking on whether the word majority is the right word for a relative majority, but only seen plurality offered as an alternative by American English speakers who are also students of the American political system.
I would almost never expect anyone to say "the plurality of cars sold are Toyotas", for example.
In the end, identifying where you can usefully take action to reduce the chances of something similar happen in the future is far more useful than assigning blame.
Yes! It's basically better to take all screw-up(s) and make their recurrence the assumption. 'Given people will forget to replace bolts how can we best make it so the plane cannot exit the factory without the bolts in place?'
The Moon's gravity isn't just pulling on the water, it's pulling on the Earth as a whole. It's pulling more on the Earth as a whole than on the water on the far side. In the Earth's frame of reference, that looks like it is pushing the water on the far side away a little bit.
By this standard, the US has not been at war since WWII. This is an absurd result, so I conclude that the standard is wrong. Official declarations of war have become decoupled from actually being at war.
I do it for the purpose of preserving the battery for myself down the line. I'll go for a full charge if I expect to need it, but 80% is usually more than enough so why put unnecessary wear on the battery?
isn't that intentionally creating a lot of mental anguish every day (trying to make 80% last the full day) in exchange for just one day of simplicity at some theoretical point in the future?
Feels a bit like worrying about tomorrow stealing joy from today
> isn't that intentionally creating a lot of mental anguish every day (trying to make 80% last the full day)
Not at all, I only use around 40% per day.
> in exchange for just one day of simplicity
More like avoiding months of that mental anguish in the future because my phone can still easily handle the 40% I use instead of having degraded down to where that is the limit.
Homo sapiens is a genus full of anxiety, as our ancestors who didn't "worry about tomorrow" either died from hunger, or got killed by those who did. Anxiety is an evolutionary feature.
I used to think this way. Spent decades justifying it as a motivator. It's a trap.
It made sense if you were risking your life whenever you went to get food. If you're trying to recreate those feelings by undercharging the battery of your smartphone, you're just bored
It doesn’t matter. You’re not trying to recreate anything. Your brain is just wired that way already. You’ve got it from your parents, who got it from their parents, all the way to our predecessors in Africa.
I'd rephrase the sell as "now people who are used to doing the wrong thing and risking vulnerabilities can do the right thing without any extra effort," with a footnote about the difference in types allowing libraries to force the change.
My favorite math professor said "your homework is as many of the odd-numbered problems as you feel like you need to do to understand the material" and set a five minute quiz at the start of each lecture which counted as the homework grade. I can't speak for the other students, but I did more homework in his classes than any of the other math classes I took.
Even in that case I'd be hesitant to open a CSV file in excel. The problem is that it will automatically apply whatever transformation it thinks is appropriate the moment you open the file. Have a digit string that isn't semantically a number? Too bad, it's a number now, and we're gonna go ahead and round it. You didn't really need _all_ of the digits of that insurance policy number, did you?
They did finally add options to turn off the common offenders, but I have a deeply ingrained distrust at this point.
If something was caused by pilot error, there's nothing you can really do except shrug and hope it doesn't happen again. It's an intuitively appealing explanation, and usually wrong. The aviation community has spent decades rejecting that instinct and looking for contributing factors that can be addressed. Those other factors are almost always present, and improvements can then be made. The net result of this process is that aviation has become incredibly safe, which would not have happened if people were content to say "eh, it was probably pilot error."
All else being equal, two access methods are strictly less secure than a single access method. But is all else equal? I suspect that there are quite a few people who are willing to use a long, complicated password occasionally but who won't put up with that for passwords that are used frequently. If those people use better passwords when they can use a PIN to make routine access easy, that's a win.
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