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[lojban] Re: the 17 tallest men



One needs to either specify upsort or downsort or alternatively to describe the tail in some fashion.

"The set of 17 tallest men comprises the first 17 men in the list obtained by downsorting all the men by height."

co'omi'elaStivn

On Apr 14, 2004, at 4:27 PM, Jim Carter wrote:

On Wed, 14 Apr 2004, Pierre Abbat wrote:
But Lojban has grammatical setness and massness, so we can say "The subset
which, considered as a mass, is tallest among the 17-element subsets".

Aaaa, this again!  A mass doesn't have properties coherent with its
members. For example, a sports team (mass) wins even though its members individually don't win. Particularly, a purely subset type of mass doesn't
have height, no matter what properties its members have.

I would approach this problem along these lines:

<pedantic excess=maximal>
The 17 tallest men =
the members of the tail, of length 17, of the list gotten by sorting
"the" men by height
<comment>when you sort a quantitative measure, the natural order puts
the larger values at the end.</comment>
</pedantic>

Your most efficient approach to extremal subsets is through sorting.
And you have to remember to deliver the result as members in extension, or
as a set, or when applicable, as a list or a mass, according to how the
result will be used in the containing sentence.