I was just thinking about gas milage for some reason.  The common metrics
like miles per gallon or liters per kilometer all specify a volume of fuel
for a distance traveled.  If you take that volume and spread it equally
along the distance, you end up with a specific cross section area.  This
area is directly proportional to the fuel used per distance.  That means
fuel consumption can be expressed as a single area value.

Going further, I wanted to visualize that area better.  Small areas
themselves have little direct meaning to me, but I can visualize a cylinder
with some diameter.  If you specify the area will always be in the shape of
a circle, you can now specify fuel usage as a single distance value, being
the diameter of the circle.  That's now something I can visualize.

So what is a example diameter?  Unless I messed up the calculations
(possible), at 50 miles/gallon the diameter is 9.6 mil.  I can now picture
my car running on a thin thread of gasoline about 10 mils in diameter.  The
gasoline is magically suspended along the road in this thin thread until my
car comes along and gobbles it up and uses it to propel itself forward.  Or
you can think of the reverse.  This is the size of the thread of gasoline
that gets pulled out of the tank and left on the road as the car moves
along.

Anyway, this isn't meant to be useful, just a different way of looking at
something.


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