Subject: Re: General formula, was Re: Attribute certificate lifetimes:way too much math, but getting closer to correct

From: "Bob Blakley" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 26 May 1999 16:37:19 -0500

Ed,

Here's the other source of apparent disagreement: you're using the word
"lifetime" in a way
I consider unnatural, and it may strike others oddly also:

>> >I disagree. And, there are billions of counter-examples. For example,
>> >if men's biological lifetime is 70 years this does not mean that all men
>> >were born at the same time -- and yet they all have the same lifetime.

The word normally used in English to capture this concept is lifeSPAN, not
lifeTIME.
"The span of a man's years is threescore and ten", etc....

If I'm lucky, I will have the same lifespan (102 years) as my
great-grandmother, but
it's already too late for us to have the same lifetime.  In the course of her
lifetime,
Soviet communism rose and fell, there were two world wars, the United States
was
electrified, private automobiles came into use, refrigeration and then
air-conditioning
became common, homes got telephones, radio and then television became popular,
and so on.

These usages are completely natural, but using lifetime to designate the
length of
the interval but NOT (also) its origin is not common.

--bob

Bob Blakley ([email-masked])
Chief Scientist, Dascom