However as an engineer I would like to add this.

If a car is running and not moving, it is still using fuel and regardless of what the little dial says.
The reason the instant reading goes up is not because the car is now doing 70MPG it is because if you are travelling no miles the instant formula used would be 0/x ,where x is the theoretical amount of fuel used to complete a mile (clearly you can't complete a mile if you are not moving).

However the average meter uses a different system and calculates as follows y/z where, y=total distance travelled and z=total fuel used.

So in the following situation a car travels 30 miles on a motorway and uses 1 gallon it then hits traffic and does 0 miles and uses 0.2 of a gallon this would work out as:

(30+0)/(1+0.2) = 30/1.2 = 25MPG

As you can see sitting in traffic going nowhere will reduce the MPG figure for the car.

Make Sense???

Dom

 

Your not doing 6 mile journeys in traffic though and have a good ratio of mixed driving so you cant compare your finding to the OP. My 530d LCI can easily be got down to 27mpg on my work journey if I take the 7 mile route giving it some stick and my journeys are never in traffic and all dual carriageway(with a few odd traffic lights). If I had to sit in alot of traffic stop starting then my mpg would be alot lower. The diesel engines really dont become efficient until they are warm and 6 miles crawling in traffic wont even get it nicely up to temp.

 

The 525d is a "old" engine already.

For the "old" E60 there is only one modern diesel, it's the 520d.
The E90 330d has a new 3.0 l diesel (245 hp and 520 Nm), that kicks ass.

Yeah, spell me - but so fast is the development for the diesels nowadays.



PS. The new C and E classe M-B's have a 2,1 l twin turbo diesel with 204 hp and 500 Nm.
CO2 emissions and consumption about the same as for the the 520d with 177 hp and 350 Nm.

 

Really, I quite recently compared 'like for like' between BMW, MB & Audi. BMW were consistenly higher BHP & Torque with lower emissions. When did this engine come out then?

 

Its now fitted to the E90 3 series with 245bhp. Its a whole new engine with an alloy block i believe. It was released sometime ago but will never be fitted to the E60 which will carry one with th older engine until its replaced by the new 5 next year.

 

that proves the point of MPG not being a measure of distance...its effeciancy of the engine.

 

Dr. Dave, quite a harsh statement?

Well, I clearly can't sleep and don't have a lot better to do than reply to this thread, and perhaps belittle myself.

Miles Per Gallon is, simply by definition, a measurement of distance moved divided by the energy used to move said distance.

It is also fair to say that Miles Per Gallon is no less a measure of distance than Miles Per Hour (I would agree that MPG cannot be linked to MPH).
That is to say that you may be travelling at 70MPH on the motorway, this doesn't mean that you will continue to travel at this speed (because of traffic etc), but if you maintain this speed you will cover 70 miles in one hour. So if you average 35MPG and have used 5 gallons of fuel, you will have covered 175 miles.

I would agree with comments on this board that 20MPG is not a bad value if you are constantly in stop start traffic.

Feel free to pull this apart, I?m enjoying the mental exercise.
Dom

 

hi dom, welcom aboard

to settle things just pull a list of all units of "measure of distance", i will bet with you that MPG will not appear.
surley that will satisfy?



here is the exausative list of measure of distance...and low and behold NO..MPG


Contents [hide]
1 Systems of measurement
1.1 MTS units
1.2 FFF units
1.3 SI-imperial hybrids
1.4 Derived units
2 Length
2.1 Smoot
2.2 Mickey
2.3 Light-nanosecond
2.4 Metric inch
2.5 Storeys (stories)
2.6 Double-decker bus
2.7 Football field
2.8 Tall buildings
2.9 Block
2.10 Siriometer
2.11 Circle of the earth
3 Area
3.1 Barn
3.2 Outhouse
3.3 Shed
3.4 Nanoacre
3.5 Football field
3.6 Various countries, regions, and cities
4 Volume
4.1 Board foot or super foot
4.2 Hoppus Foot
4.3 St?re
4.4 Olympic-sized swimming pool
4.5 Sydharb
5 Mass
5.1 Grave
5.2 Slug
5.3 Bag of Cement
6 Time
6.1 Shake
6.2 Jiffy
6.3 Microfortnight
6.4 Galactic year
7 Angular Measure
7.1 Furman
8 Other SI-compatible scales
8.1 Foe: Energy
8.2 Langley: Energy intensity
8.3 Stokes: Kinematic viscosity
8.4 Jansky: Electromagnetic flux
8.5 Metre of water equivalence
9 Units for unconventional measurements
9.1 Warhol: Fame
9.2 Encyclopedias, Bibles and The Library of Congress: Data storage capacities
9.3 Gillette: Laser power
9.4 Unit of alcohol: Quantity of alcohol
9.5 Sagan: Scalar
9.6 Big Mac Index: Purchasing power parity
9.7 Garn
9.8 KLOC: Computer program length
9.9 Nibble
9.10 Nines
9.11 Proof: Alcohol concentration
9.12 Savart: Audible frequency ratio
9.13 Scoville heat unit: Pepper hotness
9.14 ASTA Pungency unit: Pepper hotness
9.15 Strontium unit: Radiation dose
9.16 Dol: Pain
9.17 Erlang: Telecommunications traffic volume
10 References
11 See also



[edit] Systems of measurement
The SI units (metre-kilogram-second system) and the imperial system (foot-pound-second system) are the two major systems of measurement.


[edit] MTS units
During the twentieth century, the Soviets and French briefly used a variant of the metric system where the base unit of mass was the tonne. This meant that a kilogram was a millitonne (mt). Conversely, some companies use the megagram (Mg), to avoid confusion with long or short tons.

See also: Mesures usuelles

[edit] FFF units
Main article: FFF System
Unit Dimension Definition SI Value
furlong length 1/8 of a mile 201.168 m
firkin mass 9 Imperial gallons of water 40.91481 kg
fortnight time 14 days 1,209,600 s
Most countries use the International System of Units (SI). In contrast, the Furlong/Firkin/Fortnight system of units of measurement draws its attention by being conservative and off-beat at the same time.[1]

One furlong per fortnight is very nearly 1 centimetre per minute (to within 1 part in 400). Indeed, if the inch were defined as 2.54 cm rather than 2.54 cm exactly, it would be 1 cm/min. Besides having the meaning of "any obscure unit", furlongs per fortnight have also served frequently in the classroom as an example on how to reduce a unit's fraction. The speed of light may be expressed as being roughly 1.8 terafurlongs per fortnight.[2][3]


[edit] SI-imperial hybrids
In the U.S., new mongrel units are sometimes formed by a combination of traditional units, still widely used, and metric units. Thus, "grams per fluid ounce" and "grams per pound of bodyweight" are common units used in sports nutrition, for example to express the concentration of carbohydrate in a beverage.

A hybrid standard quantity used in mining is the assay ton (AT), which is as many milligrams as there are Troy ounces in a ton: 29.17 grams if the ton used is the short ton, and 32.67 g if the ton used is the long ton. So to find how many ounces of gold are in a ton of rock, one measures the number of milligrams of gold in an assay ton of rock.

There are also reports of engineers realizing the comfort of base-ten SI prefixes, combining them with Imperial or U.S. customary units instead of making the full switch, for example the kiloyard (914.4 m). The kip or kilopound is regularly used in structural engineering. Similarly, the kilofoot is quite common in U.S. telecommunication engineering, as significant distances in cable route planning are usually given in thousands of feet. Instruments like optical time-domain reflectometers usually have an option to display results in kilofeet. Perhaps most common is the use of the Mil, defined as one thousandth of an inch (25.4 ?m), frequently used to measure the thickness of very thin materials like film and plastic sheeting. A related unit is the circular mil, used for measuring the thickness of wire.

In the UK, it is still (2007) not uncommon to find the 'metric-foot' in use in the domestic refurbishment market. A metric foot is 30cm and usually it is used with lumber that is only available in metric-yards or 90cm multiples (See metric inch below).

A useful unit when working with optical pathway lengths in the lab is the one foot per nanosecond approximation for the speed of light. In electronic circuitry, where the speed of current flow is slightly slower, similar approximations can be used for 'signal races' in the circuitry. (See light nanosecond below.)


[edit] Derived units
There are some obscure metric units: with arbitrary units and prefixes, you can express a common unit with an unfamiliar term. Among physicists there is the in-joke replacing common units with uncommon units, as in velocity: metres per second is equivalent to hertz per dioptre (Hz/dpt). In this case, the reciprocal values of metre and second ? dioptre and hertz, respectively ? are used to contrive the same unit. The becquerel could also be used instead of hertz, as it is a measure of aperiodic events per time, instead of the periodic events per time measured by the hertz.


[edit] Length

[edit] Smoot
One smoot is defined to be equal to five feet and seven inches (1.70 m), the height of Oliver R. Smoot. Smoot was an MIT student whose fraternity pledge to Lambda Chi Alpha in October 1958 was to be used by his fraternity brothers to measure the length of the Harvard Bridge between Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts. The bridge's length was measured to be 364.4 smoots plus or minus one ear, with the "plus or minus" intended to express uncertainty of measurement. The marks are repainted each year on the Harvard Bridge by the incoming associate member class (similar to pledge class) of Lambda Chi Alpha and during the bridge renovations that occurred in the 1980s, the Cambridge Police department requested that the markings be maintained, since they had become useful for identifying the location of accidents on the bridge. [4]

Ironically, Oliver Smoot later became Chairman of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and President of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).


[edit] Mickey
One mickey, named after the cartoon character Mickey Mouse, is defined as the length of the "smallest detectable movement" of a computer mouse. Approximately equal to 0.1 mm, its precise size depends on the equipment used.[5]


[edit] Light-nanosecond
The light-nanosecond was popularized as a unit of distance by Grace Hopper as the distance which a photon could travel in one billionth of a second (roughly 30 cm or one foot): "The speed of light is one foot per nanosecond." In her speaking engagements, she was well-known for passing out light-nanoseconds of wire to the audience, and contrasting it with light-microseconds (a coil of wire 1,000 times as long) and light-picoseconds (the size of ground black pepper). Over the course of her life, she had many motivations for this visual aid: including demonstrating the waste of sub-optimal programming, illustrating advances in computer speed, and simply giving young scientists and policy makers the ability to conceptualize the magnitude of very large and small numbers.[6]


[edit] Metric inch
The international inch is defined to be exactly 25.4 mm. It is approximated to 25 mm as a "metric inch".

A metric inch was used in some Soviet computers when Soviet engineers built them based on blueprints drawn in the U.S.[citation needed]. The computers would look like machines made in the U.S., but components were not interchangeable.

The similarly derived metric foot (300 mm) was once used in the United Kingdom for some expensive materials. It was also briefly the unit used in the trade of timber when neither feet nor metres was used.[citation needed]


[edit] Storeys (stories)
All buildings are made up of storeys (stories in U.S. English), also referred to as floors or levels. In the United States, each storey is generally 8 to 10 feet (2.4 to 3 metres). The number of storeys is used to express the height of a building or nonbuilding structure.

In Brazil, storeys (andares in Portuguese) are used mainly by the media as a proxy for 3 metres. It's normally employed in situations to express heights of buildings or elevations.[citation needed]


[edit] Double-decker bus
In Britain, newspapers and other media will frequently refer to lengths in comparison to the length (8.4 m/27.6 ft) or height (4.4 m/14.4 ft) of a London Routemaster double-decker bus. Popular topics for such comparison include the blue whale, the IMAX screen, and the diplodocus.[7]


[edit] Football field
The length of an American football field is 100 yd (91 m) long. If the end zones are included, it is 120 yd (110 m), but 100 yards is used informally as a unit, to allow easier conversion from formal measurement in feet or yards. It describes the size of a large building or a park, a distance which is not too short, but which one can walk over. Media in the U.K. also uses the football pitch as a unit of length, although an area of a soccer pitch is not fixed, but varies within a limit of 90?120 m (98?130 yd) in length and 45?90 m (50?100 yd) in width. The usual size of a football pitch is 105?68 m (115?75 yd), the area used for matches in the UEFA Champions League.


[edit] Tall buildings
In the U.S., buildings such as the Empire State Building (449 m/1,470 ft), Sears Tower (519 m/1,700 ft), and Seattle Space Needle (184 m/600 ft) are used as comparative measurements of height, as are the Statue of Liberty and Washington Monument. The Empire State Building (but not the others mentioned) is also used in Britain for describing particularly large/tall objects.

In the U.K., the Eiffel Tower (324 m/1,060 ft), Nelson's Column (61.5 m/202 ft), Blackpool Tower (158 m/520 ft) and Big Ben (more correctly "The Clock Tower of the Palace of Westminster") (96.3 m/316 ft) are commonly used by British newspapers or reference books to give the comparative heights of buildings or, occasionally, mountains.

In Canada (and occasionally elsewhere), the Toronto CN Tower (553 m/1,810 ft), and in the western part of Canada, the Calgary Tower, is used as a unit of length.[8][9][10]

See also: World's tallest structures

[edit] Block
A city block (in most U.S. cities) is between 1/16 and 1/8 mi (0.1 and 0.2 km). In Manhattan, the measurement "block" usually refers to a north-south block, which is 1/20 mi (0.08 km). Within a typical large North American city, it is often only possible to travel along east-west and north-south streets, so travel distance between two points is often given in the number of blocks east-west plus the number north-south (known to mathematicians as the Manhattan Metric).


[edit] Siriometer
The siriometer is a rarely used astronomical measure equal to one million astronomical units, i.e., one million times the average distance between the Sun and Earth. This distance is equal to about 15.8 light-years, about twice the distance from Earth to the star Sirius.


[edit] Circle of the earth
The circumference of a great circle of the earth (about 40,000 km/25,000 mi/21,600 nmi) is often compared to large distances. For example, one might say that a large number of objects laid end-to-end at the equator "would circle the earth four and a half times"[11]. According to WGS-84, the circumference of a circle through the poles (twice the length of a meridian) is 40,007,862.917 metres and the length of the equator is 40,075,016.686 m. Despite the fact that the difference (0.17%) between the two is insignificant at the low precision that these quantities are typically given to, it is nevertheless often specified as being at the equator.


[edit] Area

[edit] Barn
A barn is a unit of area used by nuclear physicists to quantify the scattering cross-section of very small particles, such as atomic nuclei. One barn is equal to 1.0?10-28 m?.


[edit] Outhouse
An outhouse is a unit of area used by nuclear physicists. One outhouse is equal to 1.0?10-6 barns. The term was derived by analogy with the barn.[12]


[edit] Shed
A shed is a unit of area used by nuclear physicists. One shed is equal to 1.0?10-24 barns. The term was derived by analogy with the barn.


[edit] Nanoacre
A nanoacre is a unit (about 4 mm?; ≈ 2.01168 mm on a side) of real estate on a VLSI chip. "The term gets its humor from the fact that VLSI nanoacres have costs in the same range as real acres in Silicon Valley once one figures in design and fabrication-setup costs."[13]


[edit] Football field
In many countries, a football pitch (association football field) is used as a man-in-the-street unit of area.[14][15] It is necessarily restricted to order-of-magnitude comparisons by the fact that football pitches are officially allowed to vary by a factor of 2.67 in area (between 4,050 and 10,800 m?, i.e., roughly 0.5 to 1 hectare) although this factor drops to 2.01 in the case of pitches approved for international matches. In the UEFA Champions League a football field must be exactly 105x68m, which is an area of 7,140 m?. An American Football field, including both end zones, is 360 ft by 160 ft, or 57,600 square-feet (5,351.2 m?).


[edit] Various countries, regions, and cities

Wales (red) in the UK (pink)The area of a familiar country, state or city is often used as a unit of measure, especially in journalism.

In the United Kingdom, Wales, equal to 20,779 km?, is used in phrases such as "an area the size of Wales" or "twice the area of Wales".[16][17] England is 6.5 times the size of Wales, and Scotland is four times the size of Wales. The Isle of Wight (380 km?) is commonly used for smaller areas. The British comedy show The Eleven O'Clock Show parodied the use of this measurement, by introducing a news article about an earthquake in Wales, stating that an area the size of Wales was affected.

In the United States, the areas of Rhode Island (1,545 sq mi/4,002 km?, the smallest state and therefore a relatively easy threshold to reach), Texas (268,601 sq mi/742,293 km?, commonly used due to its historic "larger than life" reputation), and less commonly used Alaska (656,425 sq mi/1,700,133 km?) are used in a similar fashion. Antarctica's Larsen B ice shelf was approximately the size of Rhode Island until it broke up in 2002. Due to Rhode Island being a relatively small unit of measurement (and, perhaps, due to its area being 33% water), many comparisons to the size of Rhode Island are somewhat imprecise.[18] The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency uses Washington, D.C. as a comparison for city-sized objects.

In Finland, the region of Uusimaa (6,366 km?) is commonly used for area comparisons.[citation needed] In Canada, the standard unit of comparison is often Prince Edward Island[19], the smallest Canadian province.

In Russia, France is often used as a comparison for regions of Siberia.[20] This was so popular in Soviet time that the phrase "как две Франции" (twice the size of France) became a stock phrase to denote any large area.


[edit] Volume

[edit] Board foot or super foot
A board foot is an American unit of volume, used for wood. It is equivalent to 1 inch ? 1 foot ? 1 foot (144 cu in/2,360 cm?). However, in practice, it is defined differently for hardwood and softwood. It is also found in the unit of density pounds per board foot. In Australia and New Zealand the terms super foot or superficial foot were formerly used for this unit.


[edit] Hoppus Foot
A system of measure for timber in the round (standing or felled), now largely superseded by the metric system except in measuring hardwoods in certain countries. Following the so-called "quarter-girth formula" (the square of one quarter of the circumference in inches multiplied by one 144th of the length in feet), the notional log is four feet in circumference, one inch of which yields the hoppus board foot, 1 foot yields the hoppus foot, and 50 feet yields a hoppus ton. The hoppus board foot, when milled, yields a board foot. The volume yielded by the quarter-girth formula is 78.5% of cubic measure. [21]


[edit] St?re
The st?re (st) is equal to a cubic metre or kilolitre. The st?re is traditionally used to measure a quantity of wood.


[edit] Olympic-sized swimming pool
For larger volumes of liquid, one measure commonly used in the media in many countries is the Olympic-sized Swimming Pool. A large Olympic swimming pool with dimensions 50 m ? 25 m ? 2 m holds 2.5 million litres, about 2 acre-feet or 1/200,000 of a sydharb.


[edit] Sydharb
A unit of volume used in Australia for water. One sydharb (or sydarb), also called a Sydney Harbour, is the amount of water in Sydney Harbour: approximately 500 gigalitres (about 400,000 acre-feet).[22]


[edit] Mass

[edit] Grave
In 1793, the French term "grave" (from "gravity") was suggested as the base unit of mass for the metric system. In 1795, however, due in no small part to the French Revolution, the name "kilogram" was adopted instead.[23]


[edit] Slug
The slug is an English unit of mass. It is a mass that accelerates by 1 ft/s? when a force of one pound-force (lbf) is exerted on it.


[edit] Bag of Cement
The mass of an old bag of cement was one hundredweight ~ aproximately 50 kg. The amount of material that, say, an aircraft could carry into the air is often visualised as the number of bags of cement that it could lift, probably because a single bag of cement is close to the maximum that a person could safely carry. It should be noted that Health and Safety concerns have forced cement manfacturers to sell cement in 25 kg bags in more recent years, possibly negating the usefulness of this unit of measurement.[citation needed]


[edit] Time

[edit] Shake
In nuclear engineering and astrophysics contexts, the shake (as in "two shakes of a lamb's tail", an old colloquial expression) is used as a conveniently short period of time. 1 shake is defined as 10 nanoseconds.[24]


[edit] Jiffy
In computing, the jiffy is the duration of one tick of the system timer interrupt. Typically, this time is 0.01 seconds, though in some earlier systems (such as the Commodore 8-bit machines) the jiffy was defined as 1/60 of a second, roughly equal to the vertical blanking interval on NTSC video hardware (and the frequency of AC electric power in North America).


[edit] Microfortnight
One very convenient unit deduced from the FFF system is the millionth part of the fundamental timeunit of FFF, which equals 1.2096 seconds, and is a typical example of computer nerd humour[25]. As the story goes, "The VMS operating system has a lot of tuning parameters that you can set with the SYSGEN utility, and one of these is TIMEPROMPTWAIT, the time the system will wait for an operator to set the correct date and time at boot if it realizes that the current value is bogus. This time is specified in microfortnights".

The joke is in having a rather large unit (fortnight) combined with a fractional SI prefix (micro) to counteract that. The practical purpose is to discourage setting such parameters without some thought. The unit was selected because the time is only approximately one second, being established by some near-infinite loops rather than a real clock unit (which isn't active at the time), and rather than field complaints about this being "not exactly a second", the unit was invented.


[edit] Galactic year
Main article: galactic year
The most common large-scale time scale is millions of years (Megaannum or Ma). However, for long-term measurements, this still requires rather large numbers. Using as a measure the time it takes for the solar system to revolve once around the galactic core (GY), approximately 250 Ma, yields some easily memorizable numbers. In this scale, oceans appeared on Earth after 4 GY, life began at 5 GY, and multicellular organisms first appeared at 15 GY. Dinosaurs went extinct about 0.4 GY ago, and the true age of mammals began about 0.2 GY ago. The age of the Earth is estimated at about 20 GY.[26]


[edit] Angular Measure

[edit] Furman
The Furman is a unit of angular measure equal to 1⁄65536 (2-16) of a circle. It is named for Alan T. Furman, a mathematician who adapted the CORDIC algorithm for 16-bit fixed-point arithmetic sometime around 1980.[27] A related unit of angular measure equal to 1⁄256 of a circle has found some use in controllers for high-speed machinery where fine precision is not required, most notably crankshaft and camshaft position in internal combustion engine controllers, but there is no consensus as to its name.


[edit] Other SI-compatible scales

[edit] Foe: Energy
A foe is a unit of energy equal to 1044 joules that was coined by physicist Gerry Brown of SUNY-Stony Brook. To measure the staggeringly immense amount of energy produced by a supernova, specialists occasionally use the "foe", an acronym derived from the phrase [ten to the power of] fifty-one ergs, or 1051 ergs. This unit of measure is convenient because a supernova typically releases about one foe of observable energy in a very short period of time (which can be measured in seconds).


[edit] Langley: Energy intensity
The langley (symbol Ly) is used to measure solar radiation or insolation. It is equal to one thermochemical calorie per square centimetre (4.184?104 J/m?) and was named after Samuel Pierpont Langley.


[edit] Stokes: Kinematic viscosity
One of the few CGS units to see wider use, one stokes (symbol S or St) is a unit of kinematic viscosity, defined as 1 cm?/s, i.e., 10-4 m?/s.


[edit] Jansky: Electromagnetic flux
In radio astronomy, the unit of electromagnetic flux is the jansky (symbol Jy), equivalent to 10-26 watts per square metre per hertz (in base units 1 kg/s4). It is named after the pioneering radio astronomer Karl Jansky. The brightest natural radio sources have flux densities of the order of one to one hundred jansky.


[edit] Metre of water equivalence
A material-dependent unit used in nuclear and particle physics and engineering to measure the thickness of shielding, for example around a nuclear reactor, particle accelerator, or radiation or particle detector. 1 mwe of a material is the thickness of that material that provides the equivalent shielding of one metre of water.

This unit is commonly used in underground science to express the extent to which the overburden (usually rock) shields an underground space or laboratory from cosmic rays. The actual thickness of overburden through which cosmic rays must traverse to reach the underground space varies as a function of direction due to the shape of the overburden, which may be a mountain, or a flat plain, or something more complex like a cliff side. To express the depth of an underground space in mwe (or kmwe for deep sites) as a single number, the convention is to use the depth beneath a flat overburden at sea level that gives the same overall cosmic ray muon flux in the underground location.


[edit] Units for unconventional measurements
See also: List of humorous units of measurement

[edit] Warhol: Fame
This is a unit of fame or hype, derived from Andy Warhol's dictum "everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes" ? it represents, naturally, fifteen minutes of fame. Some multiples are:

1 kilowarhol ? famous for 15,000 minutes, or 10.42 days. A sort of metric "nine day wonder".
1 megawarhol ? famous for 15 million minutes, or 28.5 years.
First used by Cullen Murphy in 1997.[28]

Also used simply as meaning 15 minutes; as the Warhol worm, that could infect all vulnerable machines on the entire Internet in 15 minutes or less.


[edit] Encyclopedias, Bibles and The Library of Congress: Data storage capacities
When the compact disc began to be used as a data storage device, the CD-ROM, journalists had to compare the disc capacity (650 M to something everyone could imagine. Since many Western households have at least one Christian Bible, and the Bible is a comparatively long book, it was often chosen for this purpose. The King James Version of the Bible in uncompressed plain 8-bit text contains about 4.5 million characters,[29] so a CD-ROM can store about 130 Bibles.

The Encyclop?dia Britannica is another common data size metric ? it contains approximately 300 million characters, so two copies would fit comfortably onto a CD-ROM.[citation needed]

The term Library of Congress is sometimes used as a unit of measurement when discussing large amounts of data. It refers to the U.S. Library of Congress. One Library of Congress is used as approximately 20 tebibytes of uncompressed textual data,[30][31] or 10 terabytes according to other uses.[32][33]

In most cases, diagrams and photographs are not included in the total ? since these take considerably more space than text, this would be an important consideration for practical storage of large book collections. In practice, diagrams can often be expressed more compactly using vector graphics, and data compression software can pack more text into the available space. It is possible to compress English text to about 11% of its original size. Thus one might claim that the entire Library of Congress could be packed onto a single 2.2 terabyte storage unit ? excluding the pictures.

See also: Wikipedia:Size comparisons
A similar unit of measure for early computers was phone numbers and phone books.


[edit] Gillette: Laser power
A unit described by Theodore Maiman as an early measure of laser output power. The measure was simply the number of razor blades through which the laser could burn a hole. This measurement was especially convenient as the first lasers were pulsed ruby lasers, making it otherwise difficult to measure the output power. Also, due to the relative uniformity of razor blades manufactured by The Gillette Company, it had some usefulness as a rough comparison.[citation needed]

Thus, scientists would brag about having a "4 Gillette" laser versus their competitor's puny "2 Gillette" laser. (For the record, Ted Maiman claims that the first laser was a "2 Gillette" laser.[citation needed])


[edit] Unit of alcohol: Quantity of alcohol
In the UK, units of alcohol are used in the health industry and some government campaigns to measure the amount of alcohol consumed. One unit is approximately 10 cm? of ethanol, or about 8 g. The recommended weekly intake is no more than 14 units for women, and 21 units for men.[34][35]

See also: standard drink

[edit] Sagan: Scalar
Main article: Sagan (unit of measurement)
A whimsical unit of measure equalling at least 4,000,000,000. Based on the quote "billions of stars" used by Carl Sagan and popularized with the derivation "billions and billions of stars" by Johnny Carson.


[edit] Big Mac Index: Purchasing power parity
Main article: Big Mac Index
The Economist's Big Mac Index compares the purchasing power parity of countries in terms of the cost of a Big Mac hamburger.[36] This was felt to be[citation needed] a good measure of the prices of a basket of commodities in the local economy including labour, rent, meat, bread, cardboard, advertising, tomatoes, etc.

A similar system used in the UK is the 'Mars Bar'. Tables of prices in Mars Bars have intermittently appeared in newspapers over the last 20 years, usually to illustrate changes in wages or prices over time without the confusion caused by inflation.[37]


[edit] Garn
The Garn is NASA's unit of measure for symptoms resulting from space adaptation syndrome, the response of the human body to weightlessness in space, named after U.S. Senator Jake Garn, who became exceptionally spacesick during an orbital flight in 1985. If an astronaut is completely incapacitated by space adaptation syndrome, he is under the effect of one Garn of symptoms.[38]


[edit] KLOC: Computer program length
A computer programming expression, the KLOC, pronounced kay-lok, standing for "kilo-Lines of Code", i.e., thousand lines of code. The unit is used, especially by IBM managers[citation needed], to express the amount of work required to develop a piece of software. Given that estimates of 20 lines of functional bug-free code per day per programmer were often used, it is apparent that 1 KLOC could take one programmer as long as 50 working days, or 10 working weeks.


[edit] Nibble
A measure of quantity of data or information, the "nibble" (sometimes spelled "nybble" or "nybl") is equal to 4 bits, or one half of the common 8-bit byte. The nibble is used to describe the amount of memory used to store a digit of a number stored in packed decimal format, or to represent a single hexadecimal digit.


[edit] Nines
Numbers very close to, but below one are often expressed in nines (N - not to be confused with the unit newton), that is in the number of nines following the decimal separator in writing the number in question. For example, "three nines" or "3N" indicates 0.999 or 99.9%, "four nines five" or "4N5" is the expression for the number 0.99995 or 99.995%.[citation needed]

Typical areas of usage are:

the reliability of computer systems, that is the ratio of uptime to the sum of uptime and downtime. "Five nines" reliability in a continuously operated system means an average downtime of no more than approximately five minutes per year.
the purity of materials, such as gases and metals.

[edit] Proof: Alcohol concentration
Up to the 20th century, alcoholic spirits were assessed in the UK by mixing with gunpowder and testing the mixture to see if it would still burn; spirit that just passed the test was said to be at 100? proof. The UK now uses percentage alcohol by volume at 20 ?C, where spirit at 100? proof is approximately 57.15% ABV; the U.S. uses a proof number of twice the ABV at 60 ?F (15.5 ?C).[citation needed]


[edit] Savart: Audible frequency ratio
An 18th century unit for measuring the frequency ratio of two sounds, it is equal to 1/300 of an octave, or 1/25 of a semitone. Still used in some programs, but considered too rough for most purposes. Cent is preferred.


[edit] Scoville heat unit: Pepper hotness
The Scoville scale is a measure of the hotness of a chili pepper. It is the degree of dilution in sugar water of a specific chili pepper extract when a panel of 5 tasters can no longer detect its 'heat'.[39] Pure capsaicin (the chemical responsible for the 'heat') has 1.6?107 Scoville heat units.[40]


[edit] ASTA Pungency unit: Pepper hotness
ASTA (American Spice Trade Association) Pungency unit is based on a scientific method of measuring chili pepper 'heat'. The technique utilizes high performance liquid chromatography to identify and measure the concentrations of the various compounds that produce a heat sensation. Scoville units are roughly 15 times higher than Pungency units while measuring capsaicin, so a rough conversion is to multiply Pungency by 15 to obtain Scoville heat units.[41]


[edit] Strontium unit: Radiation dose
The strontium unit, formerly known as the Sunshine Unit (symbol S.U.), is a unit of biological contamination by radioactive substances (specifically strontium-90). It is equal to one picocurie of Sr-90 per gram of body calcium. Since about 2% of the human body mass is calcium, and Sr-90 has a half-life of 28.78 years, releasing 6.697+2.282 MeV per disintegration, this works out to about 1.065?10-12 grays per second. The permissible body burden was established at 1,000 S.U.


[edit] Dol: Pain
The dol (from the Latin word for pain, dolor) is a unit of measurement for pain.

James D. Hardy, Herbert G. Wolff, and Helen Goodell of Cornell University proposed the unit based on their studies of pain during the 1940s-1950s. They defined one dol to equal to "just noticeable differences" (jnd's) in pain. The unit never came into widespread use and other methods are now used to assess the level of pain experienced by patients.

See also: Pain scale, Dolorimeter, Pain, and Nociception

[edit] Erlang: Telecommunications traffic volume
Main article: Erlang unit
The Erlang, named after A. K. Erlang, as a dimensionless unit is used in telephony as a statistical measure of the offered intensity of telecommunications traffic on a group of resources. Traffic of one Erlang refers to a single resource being in continuous use, or two channels being at fifty percent use, and so on, pro rata.


[edit] References
^ Furlongs per Fortnight
^ "c in furlongs per fortnight - Google Search". Retrieved on 2006-03-10.
^ "FAQ for newsgroup UK.rec.sheds, version 2&3/7th" (TXT) (2000). Retrieved on 2006-03-10.
^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot
^ Rowlett's Dictionary of Units
^ "Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper". U.S. Navy (4 May 2006). Retrieved on 2006-12-26.
^ NZ fishermen land colossal squid
^ Electronic Recycling Association of Alberta
^ Shores of Lake Agassiz
^ Computer Recycling and Donating, Electronic Recycling Association Expands its Operations
^ Enough Burnt Sienna to Circle the Globe
^ "An Exceptional nuclear Glossary". Retrieved on 2008-05-11.
^ "The Jargon File - nanoacre". Retrieved on 2006-03-10.
^ Nigerian crash airline grounded
^ Grass fire strikes the Malverns
^ Expat joins Falklands council
^ Diary: The Amazon rainforest
^ "Rhode Island as a Unit of Measure". Retrieved on 2006-03-10.
^ "The Atlas of Canada". Retrieved on 2009-01-22.
^ ЖИЗНЬ ЗА ПОЛЯРНЫМ КРУГОМ(Russian)
^ Husch, Bertram; Thomas W. Beers, John A. Kershaw (2003). Forest Mensuration. John Wiley and Sons. ISBN 0-471-01850-3. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=p0v3m8P...esult#PPA202,M1.
^ "Australian Conventional Units of Measurement in Water" (PDF). Australian Water Association. Retrieved on 2006-03-10.
^ "The name "kilogram": a historical quirk". Bureau International des Poids et Mesures. Retrieved on 2006-03-10.
^ "The Pathogenesis and Therapy of Combined Radiation Injury". Defense Threat Reduction Agency. Retrieved on 2006-11-12.
^ Microfortnight
^ ""Geologic Time Galactic"". "vendian.org". Retrieved on 2006-12-19.
^ Furman, Alan T., ""The Cordic Algorithm for Fixed-Point Polar Geometry"", FORTH Dimensions (FORTH Interest Group) 4: 14-15, http://www.forth.org/fd/FD-V04N1.pdf, retrieved on 16 January 2009
^ Murphy, Cullen (2 October 1997). "Too Much of a Good Thing ? How much hype is overhype?". Slate.com. Retrieved on 2006-03-10.
^ The Bible, Old and New Testaments, King James Version - Project Gutenberg
^ "Terabyte defitition". Retrieved on 2008-09-03.
^ "How the Wayback Machine works". Retrieved on 2008-09-03.
^ "Data Powers of Ten" (1995). Retrieved on 2008-09-03.
^ "How much that is that, James S. Huggins' Refrigerator Door". Retrieved on 2008-09-03.
^ "Healthy Living". Retrieved on 2006-12-19.
^ "Units (of Alcohol) Calculator". Retrieved on 2006-12-19.
^ "Big MacCurrencies". The Economist (1998-04-09). Retrieved on 2007-07-24.
^ Mars Bar, Nico Colchester Fellowship, FT.com (Financial Times website). Article dated 2001-01-26, retrieved 2007-01-13.
^ http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/oral_histo...RES_5-13-99.pdf, pg 35, Johnson Space Center Oral History Project, interview with Dr. Robert Stevenson
^ What Is The Scoville Scale. Retrieved 2008-12-22.
^ Scoville Scale. Retrieved 2008-12-22.
^ Tainter, Donna R.; Anthony T. Grenis (2001). Spices and Seasonings. Wiley-IEEE. pp. 30. ISBN 0-471-35575-5. http://books.google.com/books?ie=UTF-8&amp...rVKTgFT71bk-DHE. ? "Interlab variation [for the original Scoville scale] could be as high as + / - 50%. However, labs that run these procedures could generate reasonably repeatable results."

[edit] See also
Conversion of units
History of measurement
List of humorous units of measurement
Systems of measurement
Units (Unix), a unit conversion program, which supports many uncommon units.

 

and here we go again.

to argue is rearly not valid, as its a recognised fact not an oppinion.

but if you think we landed on the moon, then go ahead

Nudge blog
From Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein?s ?Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The author of the MPG illusion on why we misunderstand the meaning of miles per gallon (and why we shouldn?t completely hate the hybrid Cadillac Escalade)
By Richard Larrick

Jack Soll and I recently looked at people?s intuitions about car fuel efficiency when expressed as miles per gallon (mpg), which is the common measure used in the United States. We realized that the mpg scale was not intuitive. If you are buying or trading in a car, what mpg increases are worthwhile in terms of reduced gas consumption and carbon emissions? Certainly a car that gets 50 mpg looks great compared to one that gets 33 mpg. But many other trade-ins for small improvements didn?t seem worthwhile. Why bother trading in a 16 mpg car for a 20 mpg one? Why bother putting hybrids on huge SUVs (like the Chevy Tahoe or the Cadillac Escalade), increasing their mpg from 12 to 14? What?s the environmental payoff?

Surprisingly, however, for the same distance driven, each of the improvements listed above is equally beneficial in reducing gas use. They all save about 1 gallon over 100 miles and 100 gallons over 10,000 miles (with a little rounding). Without question, 50 mpg is the most efficient level and ideally everyone would strive for it. But, if we are simply considering changes to existing vehicles, 16 to 20 mpg can help save as much gas as 33 to 50 mpg.

In short, although mpg always tells you which car is most efficient it obscures the value of improvements as fuel efficiency improves, leading people to undervalue small mpg improvements on inefficient cars, and overvalue large jumps between efficient cars. We call this effect the ?MPG Illusion,? and published a paper about it in the journal Science last week. So don?t dismiss that hulking Escalade. Gallon-per-gallon, it?s a big improvement.

The Math Behind the MPG Illusion

Of course, none of our conclusions are too surprising once you apply a little math. Miles per gallon is a ratio. Gas consumed is an inverse of that ratio. A ratio and its inverse do not have a linear relationship. They have a curvilinear one, as shown in the graph below, plotting gallons used per 10,000 miles driven (10,000 divided by mpg) by mpg.



We suspected that most people would not spontaneously think in terms of this curvilinearity and would, in fact, think that fuel consumption decreases as a linear function of MPG. In our paper, two studies confirmed that people reason in a linear fashion; a third study showed that their misperception could be corrected by using gallons per 100 miles as the measure of fuel efficiency. (For a full description of all three studies, click here.)

A Nudge for Car Shoppers


The mpg illusion suggests an obvious nudge: Start expressing fuel efficiency as gallons per mile (gpm) for some standard (meaningful) distance. We prefer gallons per 10,000 miles because it makes clear that seemingly small mpg improvements are valuable. Here?s an abbreviated table of what gpm numbers would look like:

10 mpg = 1,000 gallons per 10,000 miles
15 mpg = 667 gallons per 10,000 miles
20 mpg = 500 gallons per 10,000 miles
25 mpg = 400 gallons per 10,000 miles
30 mpg = 333 gallons per 10,000 miles
35 mpg = 286 gallons per 10,000 miles
40 mpg = 250 gallons per 10,000 miles
45 mpg = 222 gallons per 10,000 miles
50 mpg = 200 gallons per 10,000 miles

Gallons per mile should help consumers recognize the value of replacing inefficient cars in the 10 to 20 mpg range. Ten thousand miles not only makes the difference look large, it is close to the national average for yearly driving. It?s a realistic estimate of fuel consumption for many drivers. And, because the number is round, it is pretty easy to adjust up or down for actual driving. The perfect gpm expression, however, would be to a personal distance. We?ve created an excel worksheet like this that is available on the MPG Illusion web site.

We prefer putting gas consumed in the numerator, rather than cost, because gas prices can change substantially in a short period of time. Also, a direct measure of gas consumption is just one step away from calculating greenhouse gas emissions from burning gas (one gallon equal a little over 20 pounds of carbon dioxide).

The gpm measures listed above also point to a clear policy implication: Replacing the most inefficient vehicles, and improving their mpg by a seemingly small amount, can make a big difference in total gas consumption. In fact, it can make a larger difference than replacing a Honda Civic with a Toyota Prius.

Clearing Up Public Misconceptions

A few misconceptions have come up when people have reacted to this proposal:

1) We are not proposing to replace mpg, just to supplement it. Miles per gallon is very useful once you own a car and need to know the range of the gas tank. However, gpm is more useful when deciding about replacing a car or choosing between two cars. Both measures are useful at different times.

2) The metric system does not solve the mpg illusion. India uses kilometer and liters but expresses efficiency as kilometers per liter. Because the ratio is distance over volume, it creates a parallel illusion to mpg. See this blog for a nice translation to the Indian context.

Many countries currently use liters per 100 kilometers, which has the right numerator and denominator. However, some people living in those countries have questioned how helpful it has been. We think that the base distance should be larger so that differences between efficiency levels are clearer and involve fewer decimals.

3) Displaying the percentage increase in mpg does not solve the MPG Illusion either. Many people look at a 50 percent mpg improvement, such as 33 to 50 mpg, and assume that it will save more gas than a 30 percent mpg improvement from 10 to 13 mpg over the same distance. A quick check of the math will show that 10 to 13 saves 230 gallons over 10,000 miles; 33 to 50 mpg saves only 100 gallons over the same distance. Percentage increase in mpg, like linear increases, is a fallible indicator of improvements in efficiency. The problem with percentage reasoning is that the percentage change has to be applied to an initial level of gas that is being consumed.

One of the beauties of gpm is that private organizations can take the lead in promoting awareness about the mpg illusion. If Consumer Reports, Edmunds, and car manufacturers started using gpm to express fuel efficiency, the actual value of replacing inefficient cars with more efficient cars would be clear. Car buyers could make better decisions to their own benefit, as well as ours.

Addendum by Richard Larrick: I will add that the Cadillac Escalade is acceptable only if it is replacing identical miles from a worst car! Otherwise, forget it.

Addendum by Nudge blog: Mahesh Sethuraman thinks cars should come with a cost meter that calculates the cost of each mile travelled based on the cost of gas and the vehicle?s current mileage.

Imagine a ?cost meter? (which takes the cost of petrol/diesel and the mileage of the vehicle as inputs) connected to all the motor vehicles which displays the cost of every meter of travel just like a ?speedometer? and as an add on it could have a sensitivity meter which shows what would be the cost of every meter of travel if the petrol/diesel price rises by another 10%.A similar device for cooking gas and for that matter for usage of any non-renewals sources of energy. Maybe just maybe this might instill a greater discipline and judiciousness in consumption of scarce, non-renewable sources of energy. If it does, then this would be a very effective way for disciplining consumption to a level which would have otherwise taken another 5rs hike in prices. And even if it doesn?t, this experiment isn?t very expensive!

 

You must have copy/pasted too much - you had measurements of time and kinetic energy and viscosity and all sorts in there.

You might want to edit this wiki page which in it's first sentence (usually the sentence that sums things up best) says the following:

"Miles per gallon (MPG) is a standard unit of measure (a metric) that measures how many miles a vehicle can travel on one gallon of fuel."

They're under the delusion that MPG is measuring distance (miles). As you know, I agree with them , but if they're really wrong (and me too) then it'll need changing. The term miles-per-gallon is also misleading as miles is a distance.