Friday, January 23, 2009
The importance of choosing the right word
From Taubman and Marcellin, JPEG2000: Image Compression Fundamentals, Standards and Practice: "Such a compression system is said to be 'idempotent' because the operations of compression and decompression may be repeated indefinitely without effecting the result produced by their first application."
Of course, an idempotent operation should "effect" the same result every time it is applied. But I guess it's tough finding proofreaders to whom that sentence is anything but technobabble.
