RG <rnospa...@flownet.com> writes: > In article <8hl2ucfdv...@mid.individual.net>, > Gregory Ewing <greg.ew...@canterbury.ac.nz> wrote: >> Tim Bradshaw wrote: >> > In general any function >> > which raises its argument to more than one power ... doesn't make >> > much sense if its argument has units. >> >> That's not true. Consider the distance travelled by a >> falling object: y(t) = y0 + v0*t + 0.5*a*t**2. Here t has >> dimensions of time, and it's being raised to different >> powers in different terms. It works because the >> coefficents have dimensions too, and all the terms end up >> having the same dimensions. > > This reminds me of back when I was a kid and my dad was trying to teach > me basic physics. He kept saying that the acceleration of gravity was > 9.8 meters per second squared and I just couldn't wrap my brain around > what it meant to square a second. > > Now that I think about it, I still can't. :-)
Fuel economy can be measured in reciprocal acres (or reciprocal hectares if you prefer). miles/gallon or km/liter is distance / distance**3 --> distance**-2. -- Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) ks...@mib.org <http://www.ghoti.net/~kst> Nokia "We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this." -- Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, "Yes Minister" -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
