Cubits per fortnight



  • It's bad enough that vendors provide specs that I can't use. I don't know if a label printer that prints 7.5 inches/minute is fast enough for me. Is that fast? Slow? I dunno. Can't say I've given it much thought. I searched staples.com and got the following search results.

    Units per time

    Here's one that prints 7.5 inches / minute, and another from the same manufacturer that prints 10mm / second. Now I've got to do a bunch of conversions and stuff, and I still don't know if it's fast enough or relevant. Now, if they would tell me how many cubits per fortnight it printed, I'd be better off.



  • Not difficult to compute! No need to use a calculator to see that the second is 3x faster...

    Then ask yourself the average length of a label, and compute how much time it will take to print it.

    But it's true that one should be consistent with the units they use, and that metric should be used instead of imperial ;-) 



  • This is easy.

    The first outputs 14 718.7155 smoots per quarter

    The second outputs 46 358.159 smoots per quarter

    Clearly the second is smooter.



  • 7.5 in / min.

    That's less than a keyboard's width in a minute. It had better be a photographic CMYK label printer.

     



  • Just use Google Calculator. Type in the search box "7.5 inches per minute to mm per second", you get the answer 3.17500.

    Now if you prefer that "cubits per fortnight" unit, type "7.5 inches per minute to cubits per fortnight", and you get 8 400.

    Simple, isn't it?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @tray said:

    Just use Google Calculator. Type in the search box "7.5 inches per minute to mm per second", you get the answer 3.17500.

    Now if you prefer that "cubits per fortnight" unit, type "7.5 inches per minute to cubits per fortnight", and you get 8 400.

    Simple, isn't it?
    Have we run out of orange again?



  • This is like that whole how big is a gigabyte topic... They use numbers that would make it seem larger...

    Top is 3.175 mm / second

    Bottom is 10 mm / second...

    Whats better to say 3 mm / second or 7.5 inches per minute? Obviously the larger number sounds better NO? Well if you THINK about it it is not, but to the untrained *cough (dumbass)* eye the larger number is better.

     

    Its like wallmart shoppers thinking that the bigger the computer case, the faster the computer... Which is why the $200 can fit in a tiny case and a cool apple-mini rival for 1/4 the price, yet its as big as a regular desktop so its really a really useful computer/foot stool.



  • I was buying frozen peas once. The local grocer had two different packages of Birds Eye frozen peas, presumably the same product inside. One was an eight ounce box for $0.99, the other was one box containing two four ounce "stay fresh pouches" for $1.99 (the latter did, remarkably, look almost twice the size though despite being the same weight). I deduced that a bit of extra plastic bagging and frozen air  wasn't worth the extra dollar.



  • @dhromed said:

    7.5 in / min.

    That's less than a keyboard's width in a minute. It had better be a photographic CMYK label printer.

     

    Or, unlike the other printer, it might print at 230dpi, not 180dpi.  Slower, yes, but the print will be 27% denser.  I think that means a better quality label.

    Don't go blaming the vendor.  They're just copying what the manufacturer puts on the box.



  • @mrprogguy said:

    @dhromed said:

    7.5 in / min.

    That's less than a keyboard's width in a minute. It had better be a photographic CMYK label printer.

     

    Or, unlike the other printer, it might print at 230dpi, not 180dpi.  Slower, yes, but the print will be 27% denser.  I think that means a better quality label.

    Depends on the ink and paper involved. I've seen inkjet printers marked as having huge dpi capabilities, but if you actually try to use them you just get a gooey blob, because neither the ink nor paper involved can handle that kind of density.

    They mark them that way because it sounds impressive compared to the laser printers which are actually capable of putting out those dpi levels with decent quality (since laser toner doesn't soak the paper and then run).

    Never trust a number quoted by a marketdroid. It doesn't mean what you think it means. 



  • @mrprogguy said:

    Or, unlike the other printer, it might print at 230dpi, not 180dpi.  Slower, yes, but the print will be 27% denser.  I think that means a better quality label.

    Boh. If it is merely black on white, it's right bloody slow. In fact, it's slow if it's full-colour. My inkjet does far better at 300+ dpi. And I printed Ian Albert's GTA:SA maps. Which are large.

    Actually, my inkjet probably won't be printing anything since it's been standing on a shelf for the past year. It's basically a large container for little CMYK blocks.




  • It's kind of like how in supermarkets, the same type of product will be a) split over a great distance, and b) priced in different units.  For example, the pre-sliced deli meat in one corner of the store may be priced per ounce, whereas the actual deli counter has it priced per pound.  It requires a pad of paper, a good deal of walking, and either great mental math skills or a calculator to compare the two.



  • @djork said:

    It's kind of like how in supermarkets, the same type of product will be a) split over a great distance, and b) priced in different units.  For example, the pre-sliced deli meat in one corner of the store may be priced per ounce, whereas the actual deli counter has it priced per pound.  It requires a pad of paper, a good deal of walking, and either great mental math skills or a calculator to compare the two.

    They're very careful with the floorplan. The most expensive (and hence most profitable) item that doesn't normally sell so well will be positioned in a location that you are probably going to have to walk past anyway, while the cheaper items will be tucked out of the way. They usually record sales boosts of 5%-10% this way, presumably from people who can't be bothered to keep walking.



  • @asuffield said:

    They're very careful with the floorplan. The most expensive (and hence most profitable) item that doesn't normally sell so well will be positioned in a location that you are probably going to have to walk past anyway, while the cheaper items will be tucked out of the way. They usually record sales boosts of 5%-10% this way, presumably from people who can't be bothered to keep walking.

    And we all know how they put the milk and eggs in the back so you have to walk past everything else to get to it.  They'll also open up the registers that are on the opposite corner of the milk and eggs before they open the ones closest to them, for extra walking. 



  • Many years ago I worked on a unit conversion component. Given a user defined unit of measure it needed to convert a value into any other arbitrary unit of measure of the same dimension.

    The canonical test case we used was to be able to convert between hogsheads per square cubit into and out of liters per hectare or gallons per acre. And yes a hogshead is a defined unit of volume equal to 238.47 liters.



  • @pacohope said:

    Here's one that prints 7.5 inches / minute, and another from the same manufacturer that prints 10mm / second. Now I've got to do a bunch of conversions and stuff, and I still don't know if it's fast enough or relevant. Now, if they would tell me how many cubits per fortnight it printed, I'd be better off.

    At least you've got convertible units there. When I was looking for a backpacking flashlight, I wanted the brightest one I could get. Only problem is, different manufacturers used different measures of brightness, and you couldn't always convert between them without knowing the solid angle subtended by the light beam (not listed). I finally picked the flashlight with the shortest battery life: all else being equal, I figured that brightness and battery life were inversely proportional.



  • @Carnildo said:

    At least you've got convertible units there. When I was looking for a backpacking flashlight, I wanted the brightest one I could get. Only problem is, different manufacturers used different measures of brightness, and you couldn't always convert between them without knowing the solid angle subtended by the light beam (not listed). I finally picked the flashlight with the shortest battery life: all else being equal, I figured that brightness and battery life were inversely proportional.

     

    Not necessarily so. I've got an LED lantern that's pretty bright, used it for a whole month road trip and never needed to replace the batteries. And often it was on for 8 hours or more at night and I was camping about every other day. A couple nights I even left it on all night because I knew there were animals about. Got a lot of life out of four D's for sure. 



  • @medialint said:

    @Carnildo said:

    At least you've got convertible units there. When I was looking for a backpacking flashlight, I wanted the brightest one I could get. Only problem is, different manufacturers used different measures of brightness, and you couldn't always convert between them without knowing the solid angle subtended by the light beam (not listed). I finally picked the flashlight with the shortest battery life: all else being equal, I figured that brightness and battery life were inversely proportional.

     

    Not necessarily so. I've got an LED lantern that's pretty bright, used it for a whole month road trip and never needed to replace the batteries. And often it was on for 8 hours or more at night and I was camping about every other day. A couple nights I even left it on all night because I knew there were animals about. Got a lot of life out of four D's for sure. 

    LEDs have the best battery life, and are brighter than anything with an incandescent bulb at the same size and power level. However, for the best brightness, you want an arc lamp (usually xenon in a hand-portable lamp). Battery life on those kinda sucks.

    Measurement of brightness is further complicated by the fact that a lamp with a blue colour at the same level of total light power output will usually be effectively dimmer than a green one, because your eyes can pick up green much better than blue - the exception being if the things you are trying to illuminate are mostly blue (unusual), in which case the absorption pattern skews things back the other way.

    The only correct answer to "how bright is this particular lamp?" is a graph. You just can't fit it into a single number. It's the same problem as trying to measure the power output of a speaker.



  • @asuffield said:

    Measurement of brightness is further complicated by the fact that a lamp with a blue colour at the same level of total light power output will usually be effectively dimmer than a green one, because your eyes can pick up green much better than blue - the exception being if the things you are trying to illuminate are mostly blue (unusual), in which case the absorption pattern skews things back the other way.

    It gets even more exciting: both blue and red will preserve your night vision. A blue lamp will look dimmer than a red one, but at the same time, your eyes are better at distinguishing dim shades of blue than they are at distinguishing dim shades of red. Your eyes are more sensitive to green light than to either red or blue, but green will wreck your night vision before it gets bright enough to provide the same information that either red or blue will.



  • @Carnildo said:

    It gets even more exciting: both blue and red will preserve your night vision. A blue lamp will look dimmer than a red one, but at the same time, your eyes are better at distinguishing dim shades of blue than they are at distinguishing dim shades of red. Your eyes are more sensitive to green light than to either red or blue, but green will wreck your night vision before it gets bright enough to provide the same information that either red or blue will.

    This leads me to the question of how the heck the greyscale map is determined in Photoshop. A long time ago, I found that greyscaling produces  slightly different results in Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro, and wondered how any single hue->grey conversion could be "correct". (and greyscale mapping via Gradient Map is further complicated by the smooth slider in PS's gradients). I imagine other applications produce different results as well.

    It's not really an issue because I don't use PSP anymore, but I still wonder who or what's the authority on this.



  • @dhromed said:

    @Carnildo said:
    It gets even more exciting: both blue and red will preserve your night vision. A blue lamp will look dimmer than a red one, but at the same time, your eyes are better at distinguishing dim shades of blue than they are at distinguishing dim shades of red. Your eyes are more sensitive to green light than to either red or blue, but green will wreck your night vision before it gets bright enough to provide the same information that either red or blue will.

    This leads me to the question of how the heck the greyscale map is determined in Photoshop. A long time ago, I found that greyscaling produces  slightly different results in Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro, and wondered how any single hue->grey conversion could be "correct". (and greyscale mapping via Gradient Map is further complicated by the smooth slider in PS's gradients). I imagine other applications produce different results as well.

    It's not really an issue because I don't use PSP anymore, but I still wonder who or what's the authority on this.

    It's an arbitrary choice, much like the choice of the primary colours and their intensity scales. Some choices are obviously wrong (for example, a mapping that transforms every image into a white square), but none of them are obviously correct. The process is fundamentally discarding information from the image, and there is a psychological element involved in deciding which information is important enough to keep.



  • @dhromed said:

    This leads me to the question of how the heck the greyscale map is determined in Photoshop. A long time ago, I found that greyscaling produces  slightly different results in Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro, and wondered how any single hue->grey conversion could be "correct". (and greyscale mapping via Gradient Map is further complicated by the smooth slider in PS's gradients). I imagine other applications produce different results as well.

    It's not really an issue because I don't use PSP anymore, but I still wonder who or what's the authority on this.

    I know of three different conversions from color to greyscale:

    1. Simple conversion: 1/3 red + 1/3 green + 1/3 blue.
    2. Perceptual weighting, the most common of which is 0.39 red + 0.5 green + 0.11 blue.
    3. Desaturation: convert to HSV colorspace, then discard the "hue" and "saturation" terms. Depending on your conversion, this may be the same as either (1) or (2).



      As for an authority, you could always see what CIE has to say about it.


  • @Carnildo said:

    I know of three different conversions from color to greyscale:
    1) Simple conversion: 1/3 red + 1/3 green + 1/3 blue.
    2) Perceptual weighting, the most common of which is 0.39 red + 0.5 green + 0.11 blue.
    3) Desaturation: convert to HSV colorspace, then discard the "hue" and "saturation" terms. Depending on your conversion, this may be the same as either (1) or (2).

    As for an authority, you could always see what CIE has to say about it.

    CIE isn't directly involved in this sort of thing. Their role is rather more fundamental: in the above descriptions, you have referenced the terms 'red', 'green', 'blue', and 'HSV'. CIE's primary role is to put actual numbers on these terms so that when people talk about colours, they're all using terms that mean the same thing, however they eventually decide to do their conversions.

    They also act as a clearing house for third-party guidance and analysis relating to colour and light, but that's not relevant here.



  • @djork said:

    ... For example, the pre-sliced deli meat in one corner of the store may be priced per ounce, whereas the actual deli counter has it priced per pound.  It requires a pad of paper, ...

    And people defend the US system of measurement? I have never in my life seen anything in the fruiterer/butcher/deli areas measured in something other than per kilogram. (Ignoring the "each" items, of course.) If the prepackaged meats are listed in grams it is very easy to compare with the sliced meats in the deli counter.




  • @Zemm said:

    @djork said:

    ... For example, the pre-sliced deli meat in one corner of the store may be priced per ounce, whereas the actual deli counter has it priced per pound.  It requires a pad of paper, ...

    And people defend the US system of measurement? I have never in my life seen anything in the fruiterer/butcher/deli areas measured in something other than per kilogram. (Ignoring the "each" items, of course.) If the prepackaged meats are listed in grams it is very easy to compare with the sliced meats in the deli counter.

    See, now there's the problem with your commie metric system--it's way easier for grocers  to fleece their customers in the good ol' US of A, as opposed to you pinkos in Canada or wherever.  That's how Capitalism works.  I bet metric units are half the problem with your health care system, too.



  • @phaedrus said:

    I bet metric units are half the problem with your health care system, too.

    The "problem" being that we have one and you don't? 



  • @PJH said:

    @tray said:
    Just use Google Calculator. Type in the search box "7.5 inches per minute to mm per second", you get the answer 3.17500.

    Now if you prefer that "cubits per fortnight" unit, type "7.5 inches per minute to cubits per fortnight", and you get 8 400.

    Simple, isn't it?
    Have we run out of orange again?


    Sorry, I didn't want to hype Google. Just thought it was a kind of WTF that their unit calculator actually realizes "cubits per fortnight" as a unit for speed.



  • @tray said:

    @PJH said:
    @tray said:
    Just use Google Calculator. Type in the search box "7.5 inches per minute to mm per second", you get the answer 3.17500.

    Now if you prefer that "cubits per fortnight" unit, type "7.5 inches per minute to cubits per fortnight", and you get 8 400.

    Simple, isn't it?
    Have we run out of orange again?


    Sorry, I didn't want to hype Google. Just thought it was a kind of WTF that their unit calculator actually realizes "cubits per fortnight" as a unit for speed.
    It doesn't. It recognises the cubit as a unit of length, the fortnight as a unit of time, and per as a synonym for divide. It also knows the most painful speed to walk at: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=1.3636363636+mph+in+feet+hertz



  • At least you can convert between the units.

    The unit prices the Shaw's supermarket lists here for liquid laundry detergents are utterly useless. Some of them are dollars per gallon, others dollars per pound. The only way to use these numbers is to know the density of the detergent, which one can guess is pretty close to that of water. Then you have to take into account how much of each detergent you'd be using for a load. The only meaningful unit here would be dollars per load.



  • @joemck said:

    The only meaningful unit here would be dollars per load.

    Which actually changes depending on the size of the load as different washing machines have different capacities.



  • @Lingerance said:

    @joemck said:
    The only meaningful unit here would be dollars per load.
    Which actually changes depending on the size of the load as different washing machines have different capacities.

    Most detergents tell you how much for one load, though...

    (Also, 141000 GET) 



  • @acne said:

    Then ask yourself the average length of a label, and compute how much time it will take to print it.



    Then multiply that time by two, as I've never seen a printer reach more than half of it's rated speed.



    But it's true that one should be consistent with the units they use, and that metric should be used instead of imperial ;-) 



    I've seen worse on grocery store shelves where the "unit price" for some packages is listed as dollars/liter while other
    packages of the same product are dollars/ounce.



  • @Zemm said:

    @djork said:

    ... For example, the pre-sliced deli meat in one corner of the store may be priced per ounce, whereas the actual deli counter has it priced per pound.  It requires a pad of paper, ...

    And people defend the US system of measurement? I have never in my life seen anything in the fruiterer/butcher/deli areas measured in something other than per kilogram. (Ignoring the "each" items, of course.) If the prepackaged meats are listed in grams it is very easy to compare with the sliced meats in the deli counter.


    16 oz = 1 lb

    I think in hexadecimal, so this is very easy for me. 


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