cubic gallons

[Mullins, Bill]

>
> In the continuing absence of a reply from someone with actual
> knowledge,

Here's some actual knowledge.  "Cubic gallons" is ignorance on the part
of the user.  "Cubic" is used when describing volume to modify a linear
measure -- cubic meters, cubic yards, cubic inches, etc.  "Gallon" is a
measure of volume already, so adding "cubic" to it only confuses the
matter.

This usage on the part of Fox News and Cislunar Aerospace is just
ignorant.  I'm not surprised that Fox got it wrong (most everything I've
ever seen in the mass media requiring knowledge of engineering, science,
etc. is confused at some level or another . . .), but you'd think
Cislunar Aerospace would have an engineer on staff, who, when in school,
got points taken off exams for errors in notation, units, etc. (like I
did) such that he'd be sensitive to this sort of error.  But maybe they
got an education major to write it . . .  (I'M KIDDING!)


> MY speculation would be that when you're dealing
> with the kind of volume that pumping stations handle, a
> gallon is like a thimbleful and using it as a measure results
> in numbers so large as to be unwieldy and virtually
> meaningless.  So a "cubic gallon," defined as n-superscript 3
> gallons, might be used as a more manageable unit.

If this reasoning was the source of "cubic gallons", it would go as
follows:  Rather than say 1,000,000 gallons, we'll say 100^3 gallons.
But the pronounciation of that term would be "one hundred cubed
gallons", not "100 cubic gallons".

There's no way to rationalize this into something that makes sense.  The
usage is wrong.