OT: Mathematical Conundrum II

[Tim Streater]

I think Adrian also wants to change all the expressions in the language too. "A miss is as good as a kilometre", anyone? I expect also he'll name his child "Kilometres" instead of "Miles".

[News]

In message , NY writes

I'm sure the free milk at my primary school was ordinary milk, in 1/3rd pint glass bottles. Probably silver top, then. That would have been

57-63.

Wonderful story, but *into class*? Our milk was delivered in crates and dumped beside the playground, where we helped ourselves at morning playtime. Hence frozen or curdled, depending on the season :-)

[NY]

I imagine that individual teachers and/or schools set their own policy as to when/where the milk was given out. I've heard of some people at other schools being given the milk during the morning break and maybe in the playground, but at my school it was always handed out in class at the start of the afternoon break. Consequently our milk was always lukewarm, having sat somewhere inside the school building for most of the day. And warm milk "would make a brontosaurus puke" - now I wonder if anyone knows which cult ITV series from the 1980s featured that brilliant line.

[John Rumm]

Yup my memory of it was ordinary milk - but often warm and not looked after too well!

Talk about clue resistant...!

My first junior school, it was delivered to class, and a milk monitor would hand them out (and another privileged individual chosen on the day) would go round with the little punch to make holes in the foil top so you could get your straw through!)

Second school, we had to wander off to the dining area to collect it.

[John Rumm]

While humming the tune to 2.54cm worm ;-)

[NY]

Yes, this was at infant school (not even junior school). Maybe for younger children the policy was to deliver the crates of milk to class as opposed to letting the older children collect it themselves from the dining room or playground. I remember the ritual of the "milk monitor", though I don't remember a punch. I think each person simply had to stick their thumb into the foil top, with loads of opportunities for pressing too hard and squirting milk over everyone else. And I remember the waxed-paper (not plastic!) straws which the milk monitor handed out from a large square brown cardboard box.

Nowadays if they offered milk at school (whether free or paid-for from dinner money) they'd have to keep the bottles in a fridge and they'd have to have a selection of blue (full-fat, wi' nowt tekken out), green (semi-skimmed) and red (skimmed-and-watery), as well as goats' milk and milk made from rice, soya and various other vegetable substitutes. Imagine the logistical problems of getting the right milk to the right person!

[Tim Streater]

And there were some people who never got the technique, so theirs always squirted hem hem. The technique was to press with thumb, but with iron control over the muscles so you could stop pressing the instant it started to move.

[Jim_S]

It's always struck me as typically British that we change everything, but keep pints for beer and miles for roads.

[Tim+]

Let's not forget MPG. I mean who in their right mind would ever want to change over to litres per 100km? It's a system that only makes a bit of sense if you've never had a "man sized" measure of fuel. Of course now we're stuck with converting litres to gallons before we can work our our MPG but that's still preferable to changing over to L/100km. ;-)

Tim

[NY]

I set up a spreadsheet which does all this for me: given start mileage, end mileage, amount of fuel, total cost and date, it gives me mpg (which is miles/litre * litres/gallon), cost per litre, and plots consumption and fuel prices on graphs as a function of date so I can look for trends. I also record the average mpg that my car's trip computer reports and plot this against my calculated mpg - sadly although there is *some* correlation between the two, there is also a great deal of scatter and the best fit line is laughable (you'd expect it to have a gradient of 1 and to go through zero if there was good correlation, but it's nowhere near, so the car's mpg figures are largely fictitious! A gradient of a little under or a little over would be fair enough if it consistently under- or over-read, but I'd still expect the intercept to be close to zero.

The only thing that I've not managed to automate is the plotting of the graphs: every time I add a new row for a new tank filling, I have to adjust each graph's formula to increment the row number that defines the end of the data series.

On the subject of miles versus km, I was told when I went over to the Republic of Ireland that when they changed from miles to km, they changed the distance signs to km, and all modern cars were made to a strange spec: right hand drive, but with speedo calibrated primarily in km/hr. However they deliberately left the speed limit signs in mph because they did not want anyone to see a speed limit in km/hr (which is a *larger* figure than the equivalent mph) and try to claim that they thought that it was an mph limit :-) So you see a limit and have to read it off the smaller, less conspicuous figures on the car's speedo, which takes a bit of getting used to!

[The Natural Philosopher]

Give an ethnic minority 25.4 mm and he will take about 457 mm, that's what I say...

[The Natural Philosopher]

Now what was it we were discussing again?¿

[Adrian]

It makes _at least_ as much sense to say "How much fuel does it take to go a certain distance?" as to say "How far can I go on a certain amount of fuel?".

[Adrian]

Why is that the "strange" spec, rather than RHD/miles?

As well as Eire, are another two European countries (Cyprus and Malta) that use that combo, and only us that use "our" way. Then there's the various other global RHD markets - Australia, Japan, India, Malaysia, most of Southern Africa, Caribbean - who all use km.

Globally, there is only one country that is RHD and uses miles. The UK. All the other countries who use miles (the US, Liberia and Myanmar, plus a handful of tiddlers) are LHD.

[NY]

What's the significance of 457 mm (about 18")? According to the standard phrase, I'd expect him to take 1,609,344 mm.

[The Natural Philosopher]

except smaller numbers are better in the latter case, worse in the first.

[Tim+]

Foolish boy. This isn't about "sense". This is about what is right and proper, and not giving in to Johnny Foreigner nonsense. ;-)

Tim

[Adrian]

Well, quite.

If the convention here was "How much fuel does it take to go a certain distance?" and somebody suggested "How far can I go on a certain amount of fuel?", there would be a huge outcry about how wrong it all was, and how OUR WAY was so much better.

Of course, the ridiculousness is merely compounded by the only other major country in the world who use "miles per gallon" using a different sized gallon...

[soup]

Maybe more people would get it if you jazzed the question up a bit.

[soup]

...and phrases like 'two metres of four b' two'