Hey @histodons, I have a puzzle for you. I'm looking at a payroll register from a cotton mill in 1867 and can't figure out what the columns signify. They're unlabeled. The center column makes sense as amount of money earned, and you'd expect the two to the left to be # of hours worked and rate of pay. But there's no way to combine cols. 1 and 2 in such a way that you get the values in col. 3. Also, the writer uses both superscripts (e.g., 26²) and dashes. I'm stumped.
@LizzieEhrenhalt
https://www.1900s.org.uk/1900s-coins-writing.htm seems to help. column 2 looks like the pay rate, and column 1 looks like the amount of work (in whatever unit), the "exponent" seems to be quarters, i.e. 12²=12.5. so 6/- is 6 shillings and 6/6 is 6 shillings 6 pence, equal to 6.5 shillings.
The sum column seems to be a decimal number.
However, there seems to be a factor 6 involved: either the sum is in a unit of 6 shillings, or the rate is given as the sixfold.
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@histodons @Mela
@KarlE @LizzieEhrenhalt @histodons @Mela This works.
Performing a regression over A*B = C gets us a R2 of 0.99998
The coefficient is 16.65 which is a bit strange thus I imagine there's something more to the calculation.
I excluded two rows: the ones with 50 and 1.58 in column B
@rastinza @LizzieEhrenhalt @histodons @Mela
as I said, there is a factor 6 i can't explain, so your ~16.66 is 100/6
anecdote: when I studied in UK 1990-93, there were still coins "1 shilling"=5p and "2 shillings"=10p in circulation, matching the geometry of the "5 new pence" and "10 new pence" coins - they got much smaller later in that decade. There were also - rarely - "new heypnies" and some postage stamps had a x+1/2 p value.