On 5/30/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net>
wrote:
You extrapolated the frequency of the name
"Ng" in the Melbourne
directory as an argument to prove the much broader hypothesis that phone
books are not valid sources. That name was the straw man. Choosing a
much rarer name may have resulted in the quite different conclusion that
a phone book is _sometimes_ a valid source. If among all those Ngs
there is only one Egg Foo Ng it might still be useful there. And we
haven't even mentioned the usefulness of the yellow pages in
establishing the existence of a business over a time frame.
I did what?
I was asked for an example of a phone book being a reliable source for a claim.
I gave one.
Now you're just being nasty.
Huh???? What's nasty about it? Why should it seem nasty to point out
an apparent error in logic? There was absolutely nothing personal in that.
It did strike me that your example was designed to show exactly the
opposite of what you now claim. This would certainly seem the effect of
citing that there are so many Ngs in the Melbourne phone book.
Ec