There is a reason dictionaries supply multiple definitions to words
and it's not surprising that some engineer or scientist chose the
most common meaning of decimate in coining the name decimation
filter. I must admit it bugs me as well when the decimate is
equated with slaughter.
The meaning of words can evolve over time.
Washington DC had (has?) a radio station called WGAY back in the
seventies. The the meaning of the word gay evolved since those call
letters were first assigned. Interestingly the station formats
evolved with the word.
http://beautifulmusicradio.blogspot.com/2013/01/wgay-and-wqmr-washingtons-quality-music.html
Back in those same seventies, I was working for an army lab (Harry
Diamond Labs) as a summer student. I saw a picture in a lab supply
catalog of a (ein) stein of beer. I tore it out and taped it over a
picture off Albert Einstein that a German physicist, Howard Brandt,
had on the wall over his desk. This was a bad idea. Howard was so
incensed that he called the whole department together, hauled out
the Websters Unabridged Dictionary, and forced me to read the
definition of the word philistine in front of the group.
Fortunately, there were many entries under the word and I chose "a
native of Philistia" to read out loud. The moral is words can have
many meanings and, more importantly, don't make fun of Einstein
around German Physicists.
Bob Martin
On 1/10/2019 6:58 AM, Tim Shoppa wrote:
This is not misuse. Everyone in signal processing knows what
decimation means in this context.
I pulled out one of my older signal processing books - Gold and
Rader, "Digital Processing Of Signals", 1969 - and Decimation is
used in several places exactly as we use it today.
I looked in some of my non-digital signal processing and older
books, like MIT Rad Lab series, and don't see the term used, but
I know that I heard old-timers using decimation used in automatic
analog signal processing especially with regard to "zooming out"
on a spectrum analyzer or pinball-style pulse-height analyzer
(often the knobs gave you only factors of ten).
Tim N3QE
On Thu, Jan 10, 2019 at 7:02 AM Peter Vince
<[email protected]> wrote:
In his comment below, Mark has used the word "decimate". There
is much debate about what this word means (presently, and/or in
the past), but common explanations refer back to Roman times
when they apparently killed one person in ten as a punishment,
and similarly "tithes" - or taxes, where one in ten was taken.
Now OK, you can argue this until the cows come home, but the
result is that the meaning isn't crystal clear, and
particularly on a technical forum where precision is paramount,
and the entire reason we are here, I believe accuracy and
clarity of expression is also important. In this instance, I
believe "truncate" would be a better word.
</rant> :-)
Regards,
Peter Vince
On Wed, 9 Jan 2019 at 23:56, Mark Sims <[email protected]>
wrote:
... And as far as decimating the TICC output values in
firmware... please
don't. Let the user decimate the values if they want to.
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