So, if a car 25 years old or older is an antique...

[SlowwHand]

Actuallly, they've changed the definition or I was simply misinformed.

Classic Car Club of America

The Classic Car Club of America defines a CCCA Classic or is as a fine or distinctive automobile, either American or foreign built, produced between 1925 and 1959. Generally, a Classic was high-priced when new and was built in limited quantities. Other factors, including engine displacement, custom coachwork and luxury accessories, such as power brakes, power clutch, and "one-shot" or automatic lubrication systems, help determine whether a car is considered to be a Classic.[1]

Any member may petition for a vehicle to join the list. Such applications are carefully scrutinized and rarely is a new vehicle type admitted.[2]

This rather exclusive definition of a classic car is not universally followed, however, and this is acknowledged by the CCCA: while it still maintains the true definition of "classic car" is its, it generally uses terms such as CCCA Classic or the trademarked Full Classic to avoid confusion.

[edit]
United States legal definition

Legally, most states have time-based rules for the definition of "classic" for purposes such as antique vehicle registration; for example, Pennsylvania defines it as "A motor vehicle, but not a reproduction thereof, manufactured at least 15 years prior to the current year which has been maintained in or restored to a condition which is substantially in conformity with manufacturer specifications and appearance."

[edit]
Antique Automobile Club of America

The Antique Automobile Club of America defines an antique car as 25 years old or older.[3]

[KrazyHorse]

http://automotive-insurance.suite101.com/article.cfm/classic_vs_antique_car

An antique car as defined by the Antique Automobile Club of America must be at least 25 years of age or older

the Classic Car Club of America defines a classic car as: "...fine or unusual motor cars which were built between and including the years 1925 to 1948

[chequita guevara]

I have a memory card for a Vic 20 on my desk.

[Kuciwalker]

You kids learn computer stuff early these days. I never had to do any numerical work in undergrad which couldn't be achieved with Excel (even this was only for lab classes; specifically, error analysis).

Seriously? They had you use Excel? In the physics department? Could they not afford Matlab licenses or something?

[KrazyHorse]

We didn't have to use anything. It was just easiest to use Excel.

The most complicated thing we did was to take a bunch of measurements (~100) with a bunch of different sources of error (~5), enter these into a spreadsheet, use the maximum likelihood method (actually, most stuff was linear, so regular linear regression) to determine a parameter and determine the standard error on this estimate.

[KrazyHorse]

I went straight from Excel to C, Fortran and C++

**** that intermediate ****. I hate Matlab and Mathematica. My wife uses those, and she's in bimbo physics.

[Aeson]

"Bimbo physics"... what's that? Is it like "boob physics" they use in beach volleyball videogames?

[KrazyHorse]

Medical physics

[Jon Miller]

We had some mathematica/maple stuff to do in applied analysis/advanced lab. Occasionally for integrals.

I also learned fortran.

Then I didn't use anything, really, until I became an experimentalist. Now I spend most of my time with C++.

I have always hated excell though. We used psigma plot/etc because excell didn't do error properly in undergrad.

I do use mathematica to check my algebra/etc sometimes.

JM

[Kuciwalker]

I went straight from Excel to C, Fortran and C++

**** that intermediate ****. I hate Matlab and Mathematica. My wife uses those, and she's in bimbo physics.

The stuff Mathematica does isn't anything a sane person would do in C.

(No sane person writes Fortran.)

[KrazyHorse]

Mathematica doesn't do numerical integration?

[Kuciwalker]

yeah, yeah. * the stuff Mathematica is does and you're supposed to use it for blah blah

You know what I mean. Symbolic integration, symbolic whatever, you'd much rather do it in Mathematica than in C. If you do it in C you're just going to be feeding strings to a Mathematica-like symbolic package anyway...

[KrazyHorse]

BTW, I consider anybody who uses a program to do analytic manipulation of any kind to be barely human.

[KrazyHorse]

Most of the physicists I know who actually use the three Ms regularly are using them to do numerical stuff, and are doing so simply because they aren't any good at doing real numerical work.

[KrazyHorse]

I once watched a high energy theorist run a numerical integration in 5 dimensions in Mathematica. It ran for 4 days and didn't converge. I wanted to throttle the guy.