Brian J White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I think km per liter would > have been a much better choice than liters per 100km.
There seems to be a tradition in the US marketing world, to use reciprocal units in order to ensure that a higher number means better. I would be curious if you have any reference for where/when this practice originated historically. Fuel consumption, that is volume or mass per distance would be the most natural quantity to describe efficiency of a car, but a lower figure means better, so its reciprocal value "mileage" was used instead in the US. Similar, for printer resolution, pixel size in micrometers would be the technically most natural specification of length, but smaller means better, so we ended up with reciprocal length (dots per inch) in the US marketing literature. German phototypesetters used to have a resolution of 10 �m, these days they are advertised to have 2540 dpi ... :-( In very recent products this trend is sometimes broken. Examples are the gate width quoted to characterize a semiconductor process (The Pentium4 is produced in 0.13 �m technology) and mask pitch of color CRT monitors (mine here has 0.22 mm). It seems that in the computer industry people are more comfortable with the idea that smaller is better, even in advertised quantities. Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
