OT Guardian Science Funnies

[stuart noble]

Does The Observer have any scientist readers? :-)

[jgh]

Missing Until statement.

jgh

[Tony Bryer]

Not like now, because ISTR they changed the law about 30? years ago so that the average loaf must weigh x, rather than every loaf. So before every single loaf had to weigh (say) 800gm, now it's fine if a batch of 100 weighs 80kg.

[polygonum]

I suspect that the ability to incorporate ever increasing amounts of water into foods means that old-fashioned short measures are not nearly as profitable as once they were. :-(

[Dave Liquorice]

Like most things not just bread and maybe the same legislation. The slightly stylised lower case e that you find next to weights and volumes is the indicator that you may not for that particular item have *exactly* that weight but over a number of the items the average will be pretty close to the quoted weight/volume.

[Dave Liquorice]

Putting in an "until" introduces the possibilty of breaking out of the loop. No until and you're stuck in the loop.

[jgh]

The program will just run off the end of the code and terminate/won't compile/crash. Without an until clause there's no instruction to branch the execution back. Or, depending on the syntax, without a loop statement, there's no destination to loop back to.

loop .... repeat repeat .... until

jgh

[Bob Eager]

In some languages, perhaps. But don't assume that's always so, just because you've never encountered it. For example:

{ command1; command2; command3; } repeat

is an unambiguous loop with no terminating condition. The loop is back to the start of the bracketed block.

I leave it to the reader to discover which language this is...

[MattyF]

40 years ago I invented a language mainly for processing sequential files. You could say READ process WRITE

If it fell off the end it went back to the first instruction. If it hit end of file it stopped!

[chris French]

Ah, thankyou . whilst I knew about the weight of bread loaves etc. being an average I didn't know what the e meant

[bert]

Breakfast cereals amongst other things. It was introduced at the behest of the larger processors/manufacturers to the detriment of smaller suppliers who couldn't afford to re-equip to measure average weights and hence were left with a more expensive product

[Huge]

Not strictly true. The EU packaging regs also divide products into "easy to pack" and "hard to pack" categories, then define standard deviations for each category.

(Or they did when I was writing software to control crisp bagging machines.)

[Tim Watts]

On Monday 30 December 2013 12:16 bert wrote in uk.d-i-y:

Hang on - presumably the smaller manufacturers were selling with every packet meeting a minimum weight? Or were they somehow exempt from weights&measures?

If the frmer, then if every packet meets the minimum weight, then of course so will the average - so why the need to re-equip?

Cheers

Tim

[newshound]

My favourite was Spiegelhalter's about the statistician who had twins. She had one baptised and kept the other as a control.

[tim.....]

to avoid "over-averaging" and wasting product

tim

[Huge]

There is none. "bert" is an idiot.

[Weatherlawyer]

I never heard of anyone suing a baker for a roll of bread.

The fact is that if you have room you put what you can in the oven. What comes out has to be sold so you gear the consumer accordingly. Or find other succkermores.

[John Williamson]

This was in the days when the local Lord of the Manor had the right and duty to enforce the King's weights and measures. His dungeon always had room for one more.

Modern TSO's are wimps by comparison.

[The Natural Philosopher]

----------------------------------------------------------------------- A baker's dozen, devil's dozen, long dozen, or long measure is 13, one more than a standard dozen. The oldest known source for the expression "baker's dozen" dates to the 13th century in one of the earliest English statutes, instituted during the reign of Henry III (1216?72), called the Assize of Bread and Ale. Bakers who were found to have shortchanged customers (some variations say that they would sell hollow bread) could be subject to severe punishment including judicial amputation of a hand. To guard against losing a hand to an axe, a baker would give 13 for the price of 12 in order to be certain of not being known as a cheat. Specifically, the practice of baking 13 items for an intended dozen was insurance against "short measure", on the basis that one of the 13 could be lost, eaten, burnt, or ruined in some way, leaving the baker with the original legal dozen. The practice can be seen in the guild codes of the Worshipful Company of Bakers in London.

---------------------------------------------------------------------- So not suing so much as bringing a criminal charge...

[The Natural Philosopher]

wouldn't it be nice if you could amputate the hand of any wind farm protagonists when their windmills failed to 'power up to a thousand homes'....sigh