On Thu, Aug 2, 2018 at 3:31 PM, <rcs@xmission.com> wrote:
[fifty year old memory below - details unreliable] I recall reading a WSJ article ~1970 (google can't find it -- have they digitized that far back?) about a counting fad that started in New York. Someone purchased a box of 100 paper clips. When they opened the box, it seemed short, so they counted and found ~70. Their story went viral, and sparked a fad of counting: sheets in a ream of paper, etc. A surprising number of "short count" cases turned up, enough to suggest that some manufacturers were deliberately cheating. The NY attorney general became involved. It was decided that (true) average counts were allowable if the deviation wasn't too big. Some makers routinely overfilled by 5-10%.
There's an anecdote about a town in the old west where a shopkeeper gets a fancy spring scale and adjusts it so it overestimates the weight. The shopkeeper later complains that the miller is shortchanging him on flour. The miller says, "I don't have a spring scale. I just put the five-pound bag of sugar I bought from you on one side of a balance and fill the other side with flour." Cereal boxes and potato chip bags say "sold by weight, not by volume" on the packaging to avoid accusations of underfilling. -- Mike Stay - metaweta@gmail.com http://www.math.ucr.edu/~mike http://reperiendi.wordpress.com