NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Geeks [slide] rule!
From: Lu Abel
Date: 2013 Mar 28, 11:53 -0700
From: Lu Abel
Date: 2013 Mar 28, 11:53 -0700
We engineers call it "back of the envelope" calculations.
I've heard that potential Microsoft employees are given a test to assess their abilities to estimate situations. One of the questions is "what is the power output of a corner gasoline station." With a few simple assumptions about traffic through the station, it turns out that it's close to the output of a full-blown commercial electric generating station...
I caught one on the news last night -- a claim that theft from retail stores is a $30 billion per year problem in the US. Hmmm, there are about 360 million people in the US. Round that down to 300 million. That say that theft from retail stores is a $100 per person problem -- and those "people" include children. Or, another way, $400 for the average family of four people. If only one person in 100 families is a shoplifter that means each shoplifter is netting $40,000 per year. I don't believe it. But reporters are not very good at math...
I've heard that potential Microsoft employees are given a test to assess their abilities to estimate situations. One of the questions is "what is the power output of a corner gasoline station." With a few simple assumptions about traffic through the station, it turns out that it's close to the output of a full-blown commercial electric generating station...
I caught one on the news last night -- a claim that theft from retail stores is a $30 billion per year problem in the US. Hmmm, there are about 360 million people in the US. Round that down to 300 million. That say that theft from retail stores is a $100 per person problem -- and those "people" include children. Or, another way, $400 for the average family of four people. If only one person in 100 families is a shoplifter that means each shoplifter is netting $40,000 per year. I don't believe it. But reporters are not very good at math...
From: Alan S <alan202@verizon.net>
To: luabel@ymail.com
Sent: Wednesday, March 27, 2013 8:42 PM
Subject: [NavList] Re: Geeks [slide] rule!
Brad:Re The Brooklyn Bridge, once upon a time, many years ago, when I lived in NYC (Brooklyn) and worked in New Jersey, I used to drive across the old bridge regularly.As to placing of decimal points, it took me a while to catch on, but "powers of 10"(exponents) were a handy mental device to use for that purpose. I still play with them now and then, having become interested in the things, after seeing some posts here on solving some navigation problems. I usually use my old HP 11C, which is handy too, especially for trig.
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