I'm very sorry, my dear friend (how are ya? Long time no talk... :-) ), but I must strongly rebuff your allegation below of the "superiority" (SIC) of the weighing system using oz components.
Not in your lifetime! The way to settle this would be for one to look at the range of values, say from one to 1 000 and verify how many combinations would be required to perform that measurement. As I clearly proved here in the past (with the example of the coin denominations - an increase in over 30% efficiency!!!) IF one is using *decimal base* to "show results", it will ALWAYS be more efficient to use primes of 10 to accomplish that task!!! Sorry, pal... No go! Marcus On Sun, 29 Feb 2004 10:34:52 elwell wrote: >Two pictures attached: "jars.jpg" are some kitchen canisters my wife >bought this weekend in Salt Lake City. Pure metric -- no colloquial units >anywhere on them (and "in your face" metric at that -- the text is very >large). >Some uber-pessimists who inhabit this list will complain at the fractions, >ignoring the bigger point that a hard-metric, dry-goods storage container >is being sold to American consumers. I contend that Americans are getting >quite used to liters, thanks originally to the 2 liter pop bottle, and now >the many, many beverages that are in liters. >"scale.jpg" was a Christmas gift from my wife. The left weights (excuse me >... "mass pieces") came with it (1 lb, 8 oz, 4 oz, 2 oz, 1 oz, 1/2 oz, 1/4 >oz). She had to special order the metric weights from Salter in England >(500 g, 2 x 200 g, 100 g, 50 g, 2 x 20g, 10 g, 5 g). >For all you "metric is infinitely superior to colloquial" types, here is a >case where colloquial is better: the factors-of-2 progression, with the >wonderful 2^4 ratio of ounces to pounds, makes using the colloquial >weights easier and faster to use, plus only 7 weights to 9 weights for >approximately the same mass range. >No, I am not promoting colloquial units, just pointing out that metric >would be even better if it was base-8 or base-16 (I personally would like >to have five fingers and three thumbs per hand, giving 16 fingers total). >I'm going to keep the colloquial weights -- I have no doubt that they will >become valuable antiques within my lifetime. >Jim Elwell > > > > ____________________________________________________________ Get 25MB of email storage with Lycos Mail Plus! Sign up today -- http://www.mail.lycos.com/brandPage.shtml?pageId=plus
