Oh…that’s coming soon.
I cut my teeth on the 360: real woven ferrite core.
In about 2003 I was helping one of my very young bucks (~age 20) debug a Wintel dump. He called it a “core dump”, but when I said something like “following this pointer to the address in core we see …” he got puzzled. He thought the word “core” in “core dump” was sorta like “kernel”: a ref to OS innards vice application program space.
When I told him “core” meant “RAM” he was mystified. For years I’d kept in my desk a small core plane module I’d bought at an electronics junk sale. It was about 2" square, 1/2" thick, and held 12 x 12 bits. I think it was a part from a high tech 1960s photocopier. I wished I still had it to show him. But it had gotten lost a couple job changes previously.
My favorite messed up metric/Imperial thing is that I think of horizontal distances in metric but vertical dimensions in feet. Mass and temp I can use pretty much interchangeably thanks to being in grade school when the dreaded conversion occurred in '77.
These days, “core” can mean “processor core”, of which your CPU has multiple, just as easily as it means RAM. Meaning is disambiguated by context, as usual.
Despite being pretty thoroughly metric, TV screens and computer screens in Australia are still sold in inches (or have the inches equivalent displayed), and people still like to know they can get a pint of beer at anywhere pretending to be an English or Irish-themed pub.
The closest I can think of a term for what the OP is asking would be “Fuel economy”
Yes. That’s true. Vertical dimensions (in Canada) are indeed typically Imperial, for my age group anyway. Actually, anything other than driving distances are also Imperial, aren’t they? No one says “that car was 5 meters away.” More likely “that car was 15 feet away.”
And maybe it’s just me, but anything up to 600 yards is immediately obvious to me due to being a golfer. I can look at a distance, and estimate it as a 5 iron, for example, and convert that to yards or feet.
Funny story, a border town near Ottawa changed all their signs decades ago to put both meters and yards on the sign. I have never, ever seen meters on a golf course in Canada: yards all the way.
I wonder if Australian golf courses are metric; I bet not.
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You lose your bet; metres all the way. Conversions to yards sometimes offered in material produced by courses that are marketing themselves to visiting Americans.
Here, for example, is the course map for Royal Sydney. Hereare the course marking recommendations from Golf Australia (warning: pdf). Not a yard to be seen.
Interesting! Thanks.
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Metrification happened in 1971. Some years later, as things developed, it became illegal to import imperial scales.
It was a long time ago, so I don’t remember if the restriction also applied to something manufactured in Aus, but since such stuff isn’t generally manufactured in Aus, whatever.
So there is a period from which rulers, tape measure, balances spring scales etc only showed metric scales.
So for school rulers, the sequence went:
Imperial.
Mixed. (metric one side, imperial on the other side)
Metric Only.
Mixed.
and (now) Metric Only – since school children don’t know or care about Imperial measurement.
And I can (now) buy tape measures in Metric or Mixed. Bathroom scales mixed or switchable. Kitchen scales mostly metric only.
There was a seperate ‘weights and measures’ thing going on at the same time, which meant that it was illegal to sell the service of measuring the weight of things in imperial units.
I guess all of this nominally to protect the consumer from having invalid unregulated non-standard weights and measures, but it was a long time ago.
Yeah. I actually have always wondered why it’s inverted. It’s such an unwieldy unit, too, with a constant built in.
I didn’t find anything on a very minimal Google search. Does anyone know why metric (or, at least, Canada) uses fuel volume per distance instead of distance per fuel volume?
And what advantages are there?
I dunno, but runners take the same approach. The standard measure of pace is how many minutes it takes to cover 1km, not how many metres are covered in one minute.
Obviously both bases for measurement yield the same information, since they are just inverses of one another. It may be an intuitive thing; if you’re measuring fuel consumption, you expect a “good” answer to be a low number and a “bad” answer to be a high number, so you adopt a measurement basis which will conform to that expectation.
Yeah, no. It’s only unwieldy if you’re not used to it. The built in “constant” merely shifts the decimal point.
My guess would be that it’s just the result of somewhat arbitrary choices back in the youth of motoring. Unless someone happens to have expert knowledge of how fuel economy was first advertised and discussed some time in the early 20th century that’s as good as we’re likely to get.
None, but there are no drawbacks either.
That’s true, but it’s only a minor part of the reasoning. But yes, the EnergyGuide label for appliances also addresses economy/efficiency, displaying estimated annual operating cost and electricity usage, both of which are numbers where lower is better.
The more important reason is that miles per gallon bears a non-linear relationship to efficiency so it’s misleading when comparing across a broad performance range. Consider the example of a car “A” that gets 10 mpg, equal to a consumption of 23.5 l/100 km. Car “B” that gets 5 mpg better consumes 15.7 l/100 km. Meanwhile car “C” that gets 30 mpg consumes 7.8 l/100 km, while another car “D” that gets 5 mpg better consumes 6.7 l/100 km. If a consumer is comparing cars “A” and “B”, he sees a 5 mpg difference. If he’s comparing “C” and “D” he also sees a 5 mpg difference. But in the first case the 5 mpg difference gives you 7.8 liters lower consumption over 100 km, and in the second case the same 5 mpg difference gives you just 1.1 liters lower consumption over 100 km.
Take those two things together and fuel consumed per fixed distance makes a lot more sense. It scales linearly with the thing that we’re really interested in, fuel efficiency. Miles per gallon in a sense prioritizes the wrong metric. The US EPA seems to be getting on board with the idea – new car stickers now show “gallons per 100 miles” as well as the usual MPG.
Absolutely. In fact the list of words whose meaning has changed over time is probably far longer than the list of mundane simple words that have kept their meaning! Some might retain a recognizable linkage to their origin, but often not even that.
“Mileage” of course has other meanings than just fuel economy as well as figurative meanings, which have all been well noted by UDS in #32. If I have a big argument with my spouse and eventually prove that I was right and she was wrong, I’ll be damned if I have to say “I’m going to get a lot of kilometrage out of that!” 
Is there a metric equivalent for ‘acreage’ for land areas? It’s probably obvious, but I’m at work, so temporarily lobotomized.
The advantage is that the difference between vehicles and the benefit of one over another scales linearly. mpg creates a greater perceived benefit for high-mileage vehicles that isn’t there.
Compare two vehicles, one 16 mpg, one 20 mpg. That’s 6.25 and 5 gal/100mile, respectively, with a difference of 1.25 gal/100mile.
Now take a 32 mpg car. That uses 3.13 gal/100mile. For a vehicles that uses 1.25 gal/100mile less, we’d need 1.88 gal/100mile, or 53 mpg.
53 seems way better than 32. 20 vs 16? Doesn’t seem like a huge difference. But you’ll save the same amount of gas.
Exactly.
MPG (distance per volume generally) is a fine measure if your approach to driving is to buy a fixed X gallons of gasoline per year and drive however far that allows you.
Gallons per 100 miles (volume per distance generally) is the more directly relevant and hence smarter measure if your approach to driving is to drive however far per year you need to and purchase however much fuel that happens to need.
If there are two ways to do something, one of which is factually useful and the other leads to marketers being better able to fool the rubes, guess which one will win out in the USA?
Obligatory XKCD link.We’ve all been doing it wrong, we should be measuring fuel efficiency in square meters.
I’d forgotten that one. Good find. Thanks.
For fun I figured out our cruise fuel burn cross-section in customary US units. It’s about 0.01 in[sup]2[/sup] or a square roughly 1/10th of an inch on a side. Or a circle about 0.11 inches in diameter. Which is real close to #9 AWG wire and just a smidgen bigger than the much more common #10 AWG wire.
Pretty impressive for moving 200+ people in a big hurry (roughly 9 inches per millisecond).
Now I’m going to have to get a 9" piece of #9 from Home Depot to carry with me for demonstration purposes. There’s a winning bar bet somewhere in there for sure!
Yes. mpg “scales linearly” with the number of miles you can drive on a full tank (or on your remaining fuel)…
So on modern AUS cars, the instrument panel always shows /how many kilometers you have left in the tank/ (the most critical information you get from mpg and fuel guage), and seperately shows the (almost useless) km/100 litre number.
Since you have the critical range information that you need, giving the km/100L information doesn’t cost much, and arguably gives some person information they would have to laboriously work out.
The explanation in Aus was the km/100L number is “what is used in racing” (and hence must somehow be better?). Amongst the people I know, the standard belief seems to be “metric is better”, and of course km/100L is better as part of that.
I haven’t seen “km/100L” but I have seen “L/100km” - ie, how much fuel will the car use to drive 100km?
Given how much driving Aussies do, that’s actually useful info - as has been noted. 