On Sat, 15 Aug 2020 11:28:29 -0400, Frank Krygowski
wrote:

On 8/15/2020 1:55 AM, John B. wrote:
On Fri, 14 Aug 2020 23:40:06 -0400, Joy Beeson
wrote:


Whenever you read that a double-blind study has proven, beyond any
shadow of a doubt, that X is more efficient than Y, your very first
question should be "What do they mean by 'efficient'?".

Sometime during the second half of the twentieth century, there was a
tremendous flap because someone had proven that slogging was more
efficent than spinning.

Since everyone had personal experience that flatly contradicted this
result, there was a *lot* of discussion!

Eventually someone noticed that the researchers had defined
"efficient" as "I don't burn much fuel."

The riders defined "efficient" as "I can go a long way before I get
too tired to continue, I don't hurt myself doing it, and it doesn't
take a long time to rest up for another round." If you have to pig
out on sweets, that's a feature.

So the study had practical meaning only among people too poor to have
access to the results.

But according to another study, they've already figured it out by
themselves.

Well, mechanical efficiency is simply power in versus power out. But
there are other functions termed efficiency although I think that they
probably require a qualifier, as in above "fuel efficiency"

One problem of a public discussion group is imprecise or colloquial use
of technical terms. And some of the people who use those terms
imprecisely seem to take offense at the notion that the terms have
actual technical definitions. They seem to find that idea elitist.

Well, perhaps anyone that actually does know what he/she/it is talking
about is elitist.

As a demonstration of this "fact" simply read the daily news :-)
--
Cheers,

John B.