I read the instructions on my microwav(abl)e lunch: “800W for 4 minutes”. I wondered if that was input or output power. If microwaves got more efficient, would there be an increase in burned food? I needn’t have worried. Our microwave is 1200W in, 800W out but is that Root Mean Square, like a guitar amp? That’s how to blow up 100W speakers with 50W valve amps. They’re Peaky Bosters, like that Cillian Murphy’s accent in Series 1. Should I worry whether my risotto rice will assplode at 3:2 efficiency.
“Why would They label things relative to an obsolete technical standard?”, you might ask, if you’d never seen a modern 11W, 50W-equivalent(ish) light-bulb. You’d think ‘They’d at least have introduced a light-output based standard. There is a standard: ‘Lumens’ (total) and/or ‘Lux’ (intensity.) That’s an adventure for another day.
How many Horse-Power is your car; what size of horse; and how frisky is it feeling? I took a photo of a horse once, using an Digital Single Lens Reflex with a zoom lens that was specified by a foal length in Millimeters equivalent to a 50mm lens on a 35mm diameter camera with a slightly different frame width:height ratio. There are no sprocket holes on the digital either.
I’m trying out dropping ‘title-case’ in blog post titles. I didn’t even know what it was until a week ago. Unnecessary upper-case letters in titles appear to upset the design sensitivity of the font-folk. They have other ways of emphasising and I prefer not to offend people’s aesthetic until I mean to. I was persuaded to conform because the convention scrambles structure, content and style, while over-loading capital letters.
On The Outside 