Posts

Showing posts from May, 2009

The absurdity of the use of kph

Image
  First and foremost I apologise (yet again) for such a long gap in between blog posts. The return of freedom over the past year has kept me away from screens. They say it takes 66 days to develop a new habit. Running is a habit I developed over lockdown, but the return to the office (and I intend to never work from home again) and frequenting the pub has reduced frequency of this.  It is, however, not completely bleak for my physical well-being. Cramming a number of social events in after work has led to me doing a lot more walking around central London. I don’t have an Apple Watch, (other brands of smart watch exist), but my iPhone records my steps and a lot of really interesting data on my walking and running. As would be no surprise, I’ve configured everything in metric units. Thankfully, gone are the days where Apple would dictate to you , based on your location, the units of measurement you use. You have a chose whether to specify distances in miles or kilometres. You al

Fuel consumption/ fuel effinciency

Miles per gallon, it's the "standard measure" of fuel consumption in the UK although the kilometre is much more widely used than the gallon. (making a metric measure more sensible!) But I don't care about miles per gallon... So, in civilised terms, fuel consumption is measured in litres per 100 kilometres. (L/100km) is this really practical? Most British car adverts show fuel consumption in L/100km (unfortunately most times in brackets and in small print). but why not kilometres per litre? (km/L) personally, I think km/L is simpler to get to grips with, and more practical because you know that you'll drive y km using x L of petrol at a given fuel consumption. ( y / x km/L). eg. 6 km on 2 litres of petrol at 3km/L! using L/100km is not as practical! so why make life more difficult? sure many people would rather switch to km/L rather than L/100km! why not use km/L ? ...they do in Latin America and Japan!

Sorry for the lack of posting...

I had my heart set on going out and getting some shots of signs vandalised by the imperial-loving idiots, but unfortunately, my bike has been stolen. In light of this I bought a new one, and that was also stolen. So that has put a damper on me going around trying to get shots. In the mean time i'll just moan about the notation of km/h again.. I was reading through one of my textbooks today and there was a question stating: "suppose an advertisement for a new model of car states that it does an average of 12 kilometres per litre (kpl)at a speed of 80kph..." You'd think that a university text book author at least would have the intellect to get it right? Kilometres per litre, although not the most widely accepted metric form of measuring fuel consumptution (the more common one is L/100km) is a correct and accepted form, however why kpl? quite clearly km/l (or km/L) clearly! and again this kph rubbish... it's km/h for crying out loud! maybe getting rid of rubbish