Gunter’s Laws of Air Travel
1. When you are served a meal aboard an aircraft, the aircraft will encounter turbulence.
2. The strength of the turbulence is directly proportional to the temperature of your coffee.
The Gunter here most likely derives from Edmund Gunter (1581-1626), an English mathematician, whose name has been perpetuated through association with several practical inventions. (Ironically his contributions to mathematics - he introduced the words cosine and cotangent - have been pretty much forgotten.) The inventions included ‘Gunter’s Chain’ - a 100-link chain used by surveyors, and ‘Gunter’s Scale’ - a sliderule used in solving problems in navigation trigonometry and so on. Meanwhile a gunter is a sail that operates somewhat like a sliderule, being attached to a spar that slides up and down a short mast.
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