8 ms·

The hate comes from OP's description of MPGs as clearly inferior to L/100km when in reality he's just engaging in a Holy War between two things that are nearly

by ta12121 14y ago

The hate comes from OP's description of MPGs as clearly inferior to L/100km when in reality he's just engaging in a Holy War between two things that are nearly equivalent. The non-linearity argument is not as strong and you and OP think, because many people naturally think in ratios. In fact, in some anthropological studies hunter gatherers that don't know arithmetic mostly said that the value halfway between one and nine is three.

JumpCrisscross 14y ago
Fascinating on the anthropological perspective - would you happen to have a source?
- ta12121 14y ago
  http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/11/29/addition-is-useless-multiplication-is-king-channeling-our-inner-logarithm/ http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/11/29/addition-is-useless-m... http://www.unicog.org/biblio/Year/2008.complete.html#Dehaene2008 http://www.unicog.org/biblio/Year/2008.complete.html#Dehaene... Abstract from the original paper: The mapping of numbers onto space is fundamental to measurement and to mathematics. Is this mapping a cultural invention or a universal intuition shared by all humans regardless of culture and education? We probed number-space mappings in the Mundurucu, an Amazonian indigene group with a reduced numerical lexicon and little or no formal education. At all ages, the Mundurucu mapped symbolic and nonsymbolic numbers onto a logarithmic scale, whereas Western adults used linear mapping with small or symbolic numbers and logarithmic mapping when numbers were presented nonsymbolically under conditions that discouraged counting. This indicates that the mapping of numbers onto space is a universal intuition and that this initial intuition of number is logarithmic. The concept of a linear number line appears to be a cultural invention that fails to develop in the absence of formal education
orangecat 14y ago
In fact, in some anthropological studies hunter gatherers that don't know arithmetic mostly said that the value halfway between one and nine is three. Which still doesn't produce the right answer; you save three times as much gas going from 10MPG to 30 compared to going from 30 to 90. (More generally, going from k to kn MPG saves n times as much as going from kn to k*n^2).
- ta12121 14y ago
  I don't think the emphasis on saving is correct. You're picking an arbitrary origin which is not zero. If you go from 10 MPG to 30 MPG you are now using 1/3 as much gas. If you go from 30 MPG to 90 MPG you are once again using 1/3 as much gas.

by ta12121 14y ago

JumpCrisscross 14y ago

Fascinating on the anthropological perspective - would you happen to have a source?

ta12121 14y ago
http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/11/29/addition-is-useless-multiplication-is-king-channeling-our-inner-logarithm/ http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/11/29/addition-is-useless-m... http://www.unicog.org/biblio/Year/2008.complete.html#Dehaene2008 http://www.unicog.org/biblio/Year/2008.complete.html#Dehaene... Abstract from the original paper: The mapping of numbers onto space is fundamental to measurement and to mathematics. Is this mapping a cultural invention or a universal intuition shared by all humans regardless of culture and education? We probed number-space mappings in the Mundurucu, an Amazonian indigene group with a reduced numerical lexicon and little or no formal education. At all ages, the Mundurucu mapped symbolic and nonsymbolic numbers onto a logarithmic scale, whereas Western adults used linear mapping with small or symbolic numbers and logarithmic mapping when numbers were presented nonsymbolically under conditions that discouraged counting. This indicates that the mapping of numbers onto space is a universal intuition and that this initial intuition of number is logarithmic. The concept of a linear number line appears to be a cultural invention that fails to develop in the absence of formal education

orangecat 14y ago

In fact, in some anthropological studies hunter gatherers that don't know arithmetic mostly said that the value halfway between one and nine is three. Which still doesn't produce the right answer; you save three times as much gas going from 10MPG to 30 compared to going from 30 to 90. (More generally, going from k to kn MPG saves n times as much as going from kn to k*n^2).

ta12121 14y ago
I don't think the emphasis on saving is correct. You're picking an arbitrary origin which is not zero. If you go from 10 MPG to 30 MPG you are now using 1/3 as much gas. If you go from 30 MPG to 90 MPG you are once again using 1/3 as much gas.