cubic gallons

[Jonathan Lighter]

Very ingenious, yet the roughly 500 Googlits I got seem far too few to support the existence of a "cubic gallon" as a genuine measure, no matter how defined.

Without examining these in detail (for fear of being proved wrong), I'd expect the Internet to provide many thousands of examples of what, if genuine, should be a basic engineering term.

JL

"Peter A. McGraw" <pmcgraw at LINFIELD.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Peter A. McGraw"

Subject: Re: cubic gallons
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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

Peter

On Thursday, September 22, 2005 7:01 AM -0700 Jonathan Lighter
wrote:

> Fox News reports this morning that the municipal pumping stations in N.O.
> are pumping out "miliions of cubic gallons" of water per hour.
>
> Here's a site from 1997-99 that says the cubic gallon is real
> [http://wings.avkids.com/Book/Flight/intermediate/measure-01.html] :
> "Other cubic measures are: Cubic meters, cubic gallons, cubic liters."
>
> It's copyrighted by Cislunar Aerospace, Inc., so it must be accurate !
> About 500 Googlits for "cubic gallons" too ! (Fewer for "metric
> gallons.")
>
> Can anyone provide a scientific explanation ? Or is science baffled
> once again ?
>
> JL
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> Yahoo! for Good
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***************************************************************************
Peter A. McGraw Linfield College McMinnville, Oregon
******************* pmcgraw at linfield.edu ****************************


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