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Old December 8th 03, 10:19 PM
Russell Kent
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OK, I know it's bad form to follow-up one's own posting. So sue me. :-)

Gene,
I see from your signature that this "weight vs. mass" thing is a personal windmill
for you. Fine. And I see that slug isn't used anymore (pound-force is the term
now). And for non-technical conversations, pound is a unit of mass.

Here's a question though: is this forum a technical or non-technical conversation?

And look at the sequence of postings: EUTNET wrote that the baggage area dimension
was 100 lbs, obviously meaning *weight*, and Dave S. complained that EUTNET
"cannot tell the difference between MASS and VOLUME." [emphasis Dave's] So I
believe Dave should have instead written "WEIGHT and VOLUME."

Now I suspect that Dave S. was merely careless and really does understand the
difference between mass and weight, and I was trying to gently pass along the
advice that newsgroup corrections are invariably inspected for even the slightest
error (see this thread!). I welcome you (Gene) jumping in at that point to
correct the whole weight vs. mass, slugs, pound-force hullabalu, but I wish you'd
do it with a bit less hostility. Someone may well have ****ed in your cornflakes,
but I assure you it wasn't me. :-)

Russell Kent

Russell Kent wrote:

Russell Kent wrote:

Those that point out the mistakes of others would do well to mind their own.


Gene Nygaard responded:

Heed your own advice, fool.


On entirely too many occasions I am indeed a fool, but I don't see where
devolving to name calling improves the conversation. Besides gently (IMHO)
chastising the intervening poster's rant, I still provided a useful answer to
the original poster's question (12+ cu. ft.) and a reference to the source.

Russell Kent continued:

Pounds (lbs.) are a measure of weight, not mass (which in the English system
would be slugs).


Gene Nygaard responded:

Where'd you get that idea?


Uh, 2 years of high school physics (a jillion years ago). Perhaps a few web
references will help clear the cobwebs:

http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/Slug.html

http://www.physics.ucla.edu/k-6connection/Mass,w,d.htm

Russell Kent