On Jan 8, 9:54*am, John H. wrote:
On Tue, 8 Jan 2008 06:13:17 -0800 (PST), wrote:

snipped

Loogy, you said it all right below:

An average is an average.

We all agree with that statement. The question revolves about the title you
give your average. Apparently that's a point you're not grasping well.

If I take the average of the noon temperature in Seattle (50F)and the 3:00
PM temperature in Washington, DC (64F}, I can then say the average of the
two temperatures at the same time was 57F. If I wanted to be bold, I could
say that the average temperature across the continental US was 57F.

Hopefully, we can both see the stupidity of that 'boldness'.
--
John H

"All decisions are the result of binary thinking."

It is what it is. An average. Given enough data sets it gets quite
accurate. There are a lot of things in engineering that were derived
by nothing more than averaging. Case in point. We know that a given
shape of steel, let's say a wide flange shape, with a certain value
for Bf, and a certain value for d and a certain value for k and a
certain value for Tw will fail with a point load of X. How do we know
this? By making them fail. Does every piece of a certain size wide
flange shape break at exactly the same load? Not by a long shot. Want
to guess how we came up with X? Yep, averaging.