Loren,

I think the problem is that the things we're used to measuring--water
boiling on a stove, miles per gallon from a vehicle, the time it will
take to get to grandma's house--are based on easily understood,
observable principals into which the few variables figure little.

For instance, no matter how hard or easy I drive my Vanagon, I'm
going to get pretty much the same result mileage and time wise,
within a predicatable margin or error.

Measuring the capacity of a battery is dealing with unobservable
dynamics that are beyond the simple reasoning we can apply to other
things in life. We don't understand the way electrons become
available for use in a battery the way we understand how water
becomes available for use in a bucket.

For those of us like Dennis who do, it's simple

For the rest of us, we have to buy the battery, buy the fan and plug
it in and see if it does what we want. Not that there's anything
wrong with that.

Jim

On Jun 22, 2006, at 9:20 AM, Loren Busch wrote:

> Posting a question to this list is sometimes like asking for the
> time of day
> and getting the history of time keeping and a course in horology.
> Don't get me wrong.  There was not an answer that was not valuable
> and the
> links provided were exactly to the point.  But only one answer
> actually
> answered the question posed, the answer from Dennis Haynes.
> But the other answers did a very good job of making it clear that,
> at least
> in this case, there is no simple answer to the question and a broader
> understanding of the topic is needed.
> Thanks to all those that responded.
>