I recall visiting a Manitoba conference some 30 years ago, and sharing a motel room with Selfridge. Both the taps were labelled `C' When I pointed this out to John he said: `don't you know you're in a bilingual country' R. On Wed, 3 Dec 2003, Gershon Bialer wrote:

There are other confusing things. In Spanish the word for hot is Caliente, and hence the hot water is labelled with a C. At least the colors kind of make sense. If you look at a lake, it looks blue. If you burn your skin it turns red.

Gershon Bialer ----- Original Message ----- From: "Henry Baker" <hbaker1@pipeline.com> To: <math-fun@mailman.xmission.com> Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2003 12:03 PM Subject: [math-fun] Hot & Cold

...

Does it bother anyone else that hot water is indicated by "red" and cold water is indicated by "blue" ?

I can forsee a time when an emissary from an advanced civilization comes to the UN and stays in a better hotel, and scalds himself to death in the shower -- thus causing an intergalactic war.

_______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun

_______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun

=Jon Perry A simple solution - use icons instead, e.g. a snowflake and a flame.

Good idea (except then we'll get sued for alien pornographic harassment...<;-) While we're at it we could score higher on the Martian intelligence test by universally adopting saner basis vectors for the control space in the first place--namely temperature and total water volume, rather than hot-volume and cold-volume. (But then again, as David Wilson notes, that's nowhere near as bad as turning on the windshield wipers by mistake when trying to parallel park a flying saucer)

--- Michael Kleber <kleber@brandeis.edu> wrote:

...

While we're at it we could score higher on the Martian intelligence test by universally adopting saner basis vectors for the control space in the first place--namely temperature and total water volume, rather than

...

hot-volume and cold-volume.

I recall my first trip to Israel, when I was confronted with a shower

that had *three* water control knobs. Being a cautious sort, I tried

turning each one on, one at a time. No water ever came out.

The knobs, of course, were rates for hot, cold, and total, all initially set to zero. This does offer all the advantages of both systems...

--Michael Kleber kleber@brandeis.edu

If you open Hot and Cold, but close Total, will water of one temperature be forced by pressure difference into the pipe for the other temperature water? Gene __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New Yahoo! Photos - easier uploading and sharing. http://photos.yahoo.com/