Quote:
Originally Posted by vnx205
I agree that people tend to work with the system that they have become accustomed to. However I don't think it hurts to have people aware of the fact that the sytem they are using can be misleading.
The fact that the majority of the world's population uses a particular system does not mean it is logical or sensible or efficient or anything else. It usually means it is the one that has become entrenched through years, decades or centuries of use.
I think it is generally accepted that Beta video was technically better than VHS, but VHS won out through sheer weight of numbers.
The qwerty keyboard is used almost universally even though more efficient keyboard layouts such as the Dvorak keyboard exist. The qwerty layout was designed to be inefficient. It helped stop mechanical problems with early manual typewriters. We are stuck with the inefficient qwerty because so many people are familiar with it.
I think we may have to put up with some people using mpg or km/l not because they are logical but because people are familiar with them.
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I have to agree that just because most people do something does not make it logical or sensible or efficient or anything else - look at wearing clothes for example.
I have seen recently (in discussions on Blu-ray vs HD-DVD) that the reason Beta lost out was that VHS was cheaper to duplicate tapes, but I suspect that the main reason may have been that Sony tried to keep Beta to themselves.
I agree entirely about Qwerty - but having learnt to type on this keyboard I am not about to change!
But I don't think you can say that distance/quantity is either more or less logical than quantity/distance - it is simply the inverse - although it may be more logical than quantity/distance*100, but even here it is only the same as comparing a fraction to a percentage.
Which way round you prefer your fraction, apart from habit, simply depends on whether (at the time) you are more interested in how far you can go for a given amount of fuel, or how much fuel you will need to go a fixed distance. If you are looking at how significant is a change in fuel consumption (or a comparison) in both cases you have to use a fraction or a percentage - e.g. 33mpg vs 30mpg is a 10% improvement, 9l/100km vs 10l/100km is a 10% improvement.
(of course, going the other way is a trap for the unwary - going from 33mpg down to 30mpg is only 9% worse, and you have to bear in mind that in the other cases one is a 10% increase in the distance you can go, where the other is a 10%
decrease in the fuel used for a fixed distance).
John