Built like a Mercedes (?)

OMG, powers of two are SO hard.

Don't lose your measuring cup. If you lose your tools, metric won't help you.

It is the same thing, Bill, they are sold in nominal sizes. When you buy rough lumber at a mill, a 2x4 measures 2" x 4". When you joint and plane it, the finished size is slightly smaller. If you go to a really good mill, you can get 1" oak that actually measures as much as

1-1/4". So you are able to plane it down to a full inch for really great shelving, or whatever you are doing. ************************* Dave

Someone else already pointed out this is incorrect, so I won't bother.

************************* Dave

And your point?

Sounds like you have trouble with math.

Guess you do.

If you can't add 2 + 2 and get 4, the difference between our measurements and your simplistic ones don't matter.

Nope. I make bread all the time, and pizza dough, and all kinds of other baked products. I NEVER worry about getting things precise. They all come out fine.

************************* Dave

I disagree. As you pointed out, fuel economy is worsened when more fuel is being consumed per amount travelled. But the worse possible economy you can have with distance per fuel quantity is 0 [e.g. fuel being consumed but no motion], with higher numbers indicating improving economy. What is the worse economy you can have with fuel quantity per distance on a number scale? In addition, to measure ever improving economy you need more and more fractions between 1 and 0 rather than merely using higher and higher numbers.

No - backing up, it goes negative. : (actually it doesn't, because unsophisitcated speed sensor signal interpretation gives absolute values).

Decimals work nicely. How many places do you want to take it to? Both systems rely on averaging over some number of sampling periods for meaningful accuracy and all but eliminating the effects of round-off errors in calculations. Both fall apart as useful for consumption calculations at 0 speed. Averaging falls apart for both systems if a significant portion of total fuel consumed is consumed during periods of

0 speed - but that would be very unusual.

Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x')

You still don't get it. How long does it take to reach a town 120 miles away at 60 mph?

2 hours!

How long does it take to reach a town 120 kilometers away at 60 kph?

2 hours!

DUH!

Unless you happen to be going to a town exactly a multiple of 10 kilometers away, your "advantage" is not an advantage at all. It might be a slightly bigger advantage if there were 100 seconds in a minute,

100 minutes in an hour and 10 hours in a day, but there aren't. So it isn't.

And miles-per-hour has another advantage. 60 mph is 1 mile/minute, and also happens to be a good rule-of-thumb average speed for a cross-country trip. So the number of miles you're going is (to a first order approximation) how many minutes it'll take. OTOH, 60 kph (1 km/minute) is far to slow to use as a rule of thumb, and 120 kph (2 km/minute) is far too fast.

Of course freezing water as a reference point is NOT folklore!!! Its one of the most accurately reproducible physical constants that can be created any time any where that a supply of ice is available. Boiling water is less accurate since atmospheric pressure skews it significantly more than the freezing point. That's grade-school science stuff, no great mystery.

I think he was poking fun at the fact that a "2x4" has not been 2-inches by 4-inches since before WWII.

Plywood numbers (thicknesses in particlar) ARE reasonably accurate. But go measure a "2x4" and tell me what you find... :-)

Guess you must have dropped out after grade school. Freezing point is also variable depending on colligative properties and impurities in water.

True, but for concentrations that pull the freezing point significantly far away from the freezing point of pure water, you can TASTE the difference. And distilled water or rainwater is plenty good. Tap water in many areas is good enough to get you very close.

You can nit-pick and be a know-it-all all you want, but its still one of the easiest-to-reproduce physical constants that exists.

DTJ wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Hell, if you're going to be precise in baking, you'd better measure your flour by weight and not volume. Of cource the vagarities in heat and humidity of the weather also wreak haovic to the precise baker.

The complaint about the two bu fours belies a lack of carpentry experience. Hell, just get it framed, the sheet rock and mud will cover it anyway. And if you're making furniture, you wouldn't trust someone else to do your measuring for you.

By show of hands, how many take a tape with you to Lowes/Home Depot?

How many get their lumber for furniture projects from lowes/Home Depot/ (insert whatever big box home improvement store here).

Doug

-snip- irrelevant stuff

I can just see it, imagine the supervisor and student exchange:

supervisor: did you check the purity of the water in the flask beside the beaker of HCl student: crap, I thought the water was in the beaker

cheers

ps, little excercise for Steve: town is 590 miles away with a speed limit of 75 mph ..... how long does it take? well, 590/75 hr ... probably a instant answer is not forthcoming. Now imagine same town is quoted as 945 km away with a speed limit of 100 kph ..... how long does it take? well, 945/100 ... instant answer of 9,45 hr. n'est ce pas? ... re duhh: pot, kettle black Lesson learned? there you go!

If it were the 100 kph road, it's probably be 60 MPH, not 75. 600 minutes, 10 hours.

OTOH, if it were the 75 mph road, it would probably be 120 kph, not

100. 945/120... probably not so instant, though after blinking once you'd realize it's almost 960/120 = 8 hours.

sure, to a lot of people...... on the other hand, are you aware of the general level of arithmetic ability (I'm not talking math) out in the general population?

cheers, guenter

So you use distilled water - takes out 90+% of the already small variance.

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Steve, Bingo, that was what the original discussion was about.... "the easy answer" ... of course there is no practical difference. I guess the point of the original discussion can get easily lost in the to and fro

best regards, guenter

Good point..

If you lose your measuring cup, just remember that four Tablespoons is 1/4 cup and, of course, two would be 1/8 cup.

Damn, what a long thread.....