Why the Metric System sucks by Phantom
One Metric Banana In Length
I’ve said, since Canada adopted the metric system in the 1970s, that it sucks. It is a stupid French utopian idea, and I hate it.
At a very basic level, metric doesn’t mean anything to me. How big is a centimeter? I have to check every single time. It has no meaning, it’s an arbitrary thing.
Imperial is based on real things. How big is an inch? My thumb, pretty much. My foot is about a foot. My stride is about six feet. Close enough to get me in the ballpark, anyway. Weights and measures are the same thing. An ounce, a quart, a pint, these are every-day amounts of things you use in food etc. A pound is roughly how much bacon you want for family breakfast. A kilogram is 2.2 times as much as you want, which is stupid.
How much is a milliliter? Um, who cares? I’m not a doctor, I don’t titrate drugs in exact amounts. I’m not a machinist, 1/64th” is about the finest measurement I ever need. If I need to do better I get out the micrometer and do things in thousandths. Which is decimal not fraction, just like metric right? The only difference is 1/1000 of something I know instead of 1/100 of something I don’t.
But I am constantly told I am a troglodyte and I must get with the Modern Age. Because… well no reason, really. Just because. Shut up, old man.
So now, to my vast enjoyment, here is a study showing that I am right and all the stupid French Revolution utopian bastards were wrong.
If you had to estimate the dimensions of a room without the benefit of a tape measure, you might walk its perimeter heel to toe, counting your steps. To estimate the height of a wall, you might count hand spans from floor to ceiling. In doing so, you’d join a long human tradition. Most human societies around the word—perhaps all—have employed similar body-based measurement strategies, according to a first-of-its-kind study published today in Science. And these informal body-based systems can persist for centuries after a culture has introduced standardized units of measure because, the authors argue, they often lead to more ergonomic designs of tools, clothing, and other personalized items.
“Nobody has ever done this kind of systematic, cross-cultural study of body-based measurement before,” says Stephen Chrisomalis, an anthropologist of mathematics at Wayne State University who penned an editorial accompanying the new paper. “It brings together a huge amount of data that [show] not just how common they are, but that they tend to fall along certain patterns. That is actually an extraordinarily important finding.”
Everybody, all over the world, throughout history, used the hand, the foot, the span, the yard, etc. Only the French were so ridiculous to invent a system that relates to nothing. The meter is the length that it is because some guy said so, and for no other reason (and he made it that way because it wasn’t a yard.) A yard at least started as the distance from the king’s nose to his outstretched index finger, which is something.
If you are making any object for use by human beings, be it a chair, a spoon, a car, the human body dictates the design. The proportions of the body also dictate artistic sensibility. If the proportions conform roughly to those of the human body the thing will be appealing. If they do not, it will be ugly. Which makes a yard or a foot useful information. A yard is how far your arm can reach. A shoe is a foot long.
That this is news to the academic world, an “extraordinarily important finding” quoth the authors, seems to me to represent an abject failure of the education system as a whole.
It seems as if none of these people studying these things has ever made anything with their hands. If they had, they’d know you don’t proceed to make a thing by manufacturing all the parts to a listed tolerance. You start with what the thing is for. From there you decide how big the parts are. Then you proceed in logical fashion from the most awkward part to the easiest.
Chair seat first, then the holes for the legs, trim the legs to fit the holes (because it is EASIER to trim the leg than to trim the hole), then the leg braces, then the back, then the arms, etc. Each piece is measured from the previous piece, or from the body of the person who is going to sit on it.
Tables, chairs, boats, all made the same way, each one unique. Because it doesn’t matter if no two are the same. It only matters if it fits the person it was made for.
Making a standardized object in a factory out of standardized, interchangeable parts is a profoundly unnatural process and only began in the 19th Century. Such a process requires all kinds of things that had never been required before. Two of those things were accuracy and precision of physical dimensions. The tapered pin that goes into the tapered hole must be accurate to within a few thousandths of an inch for diameter, roundness, taper and length. In the 18th century such things could not even be measured. In the 19th they were commonly being produced in lots of ten thousand. The Singer sewing machine, patented in 1851, is an example of a device that would have been impossible to make at all 100 years before.
But no one in Academia these days seems to appreciate what that means. Even the notion of measuring by rule of thumb does not occur to them, apparently. What did they do when they built those sailing ships to cross the Atlantic the first few times? Inch, foot, yard, fathom. That’s what. We’re humans. That’s how we do it. Except the French, whose one driving need throughout history is that they have to be different.
According To Hoyt 
I have, reluctantly, come to agree that the nautical mile is a superior distance measurement than the Imperial mile, however.
1 nm is equal to 1/60 of a degree in latitude. If you have to go a stupid long way, it is, by far, the easiest one to plot. Which is why all commercial air traffic does speed in knots.
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The Nautical Mile existed long before the Metric System. It makes good sense, which is a solid clue that it isn’t metric. They’ve adjusted the definition of a Nautical Mile to be 1,852 meters. Note the distinctly non-metric value. I learned it as 6,076.115 feet while working in the aerospace industry back in the 90s; that’s 1,852 meters, but nothing in the US aerospace world used metric back then. Much of it still doesn’t.
By the way, not only is the speed of commercial air traffic measured in knots (1 knot = 1 nautical mile per hour), the altitude of commercial aircraft is measured in feet, even in a made-in-Europe Airbus aircraft that will only fly between European destinations.
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“I am a German pilot in a German plane at a German airport, why must I use English?”
“Because you lost the bloody war.”
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I was involved in the Ares 5 development back in the 2000s, the heavy lift rocket in the Constellation program. I always found it rather amusing that the concept drawing of the beast gave length in feet and diameter in meters. Probably just as well that Constellation was cancelled before they got around to bending and cutting metal.
And a funny side note, at least to me, is how much the current SLS resembles in general that old Ares 5 design.
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I find that for endurance sports measuring minutes/(unit of distance) is more useful when (unit of distance) is 1km rather than 1 statute mile for the kinds of speeds I run/cycle at. I could be convinced to use nautical miles because 1nm ~= 2km
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It looks like the Roman League was about a nm, too. Supposedly it was about the distance Roman soldier could walk in an hour. So yeah, half a league was a thing, and about 1 km.
That does sound like that really was a thing.
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I’m a Physicist. Even in Physics we mostly simply pretend to use the metric system. In reality, we use units that are conveniently sized for what we are doing.
Light-years, Astronomical Units, Atomic Mass Units, Electron-volts. (the list goes on and on)
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Metric has its uses (I’m a physician and wouldn’t want to use imperial for measurements). But measurement of liquids works much better using a base-2 system than a base-10 system, Fahrenheit degrees convey much more information than do Centigrade degrees (and are thus more useful for everyday temperature if not for physics & engineering purposes). The notion that metric is “better” is absurd – it has its niche uses but for normal quotidian stuff, the American approach is just fine.
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I once had a proponent of the metric system smugly tell me that since water covers over 70% of the Earth’s surface, and the freezing point of water is zero degrees Celsius, that using the metric system was the only rational option.
When I pointed out that the freezing temperature of salt water at sea level is zero degrees Fahrenheit, his brain vapor locked so hard that he was completely physically immobile for several minutes.
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That would be some really salty water. Sea water, at about 3.5% salt, freezes at 28° F or -2° C. Saturated salt water, which has as much salt as can be dissolved in it, freezes at -6° F or -21° C. That’s as low as it gets.
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That’s fresh water, freezing out and increasing saturation. It isn’t FROZEN until the salt freezes in it.
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But but… The Metric System is Scientific!!!! [Sarcastic Grin]
Oh, originally the meter was defined based on the distance from the North Pole to the Equator, but that distance turned out to be wrong. :wink:
Oh, the Metric System wasn’t the worse thing to come out of the French Revolution.
They had a “scientific” Calendar with 10 “months” to a year and a week of 10 days. Of course, that idiocy died and is generally forgotten.
They also had a “Church of Reason” that died very quickly (other factions of the Revolutionaries killed it).
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My mistake, the Revolutionary Calendar used 12 months,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar
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You were probably thinking of their even-more-insane “revolutionizing” of daily timekeeping. Which ended up being about the shortest-lived thing about the whole frenzy, except of course for assorted people “shortened” by that Tall Shiny Murderish Thing.
1 day = 10 hours.
1 hour = 100 minutes.
1 minute = 100 seconds.
There are a few examples, so I hear, of clocks and watches built to the new standard. But not for long; even the Revolutionary French couldn’t put up with this editon of Measurements Rejected by Everyone.
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One system brought mankind to the moon. The other had to get saved by the first in a world war.
The French make marvelous food. But I still dislike the metric system, even though ( or because) I have had to use conversions for it many a time.
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It’s funny that, at a time where everyone has in his or her pocket a calculator and full access to all the data needed to convert between any measurement systems, people still push to convert to metric. Back before electricity, units of measure would vary from country to country and even from city to city, yet people still carried on international trade.
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Multi-linguistic people supposedly have an IQ boost due to having two different means of thought loaded into their brains. I would suspect that having two different means of measuring things would have a similar effect.
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this is heavily debated and might be… what’s the scientific term? Oh, yeah, bullshit. Trust me, I followed these studies pretty closely. (Screams in irreproducible research)
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Sounds like an opportunity for a post graduate study and paper.
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When’s/Where’s the IgNobel prize for this stuff?
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I. my experience, learning more than one language just means that instead of not being able to find the right word in one language, the word in the other language actively interferes in your efforts to find the right word in the first language.
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THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS!
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When my mother was 5 no-one but her mother could understand her – speaking 3 languages at one. And sometimes not even grandma.
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I’m honestly in awe of my husband, who endured all the years where I walked among languages within a sentence.
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Sarah, us IT guys are used to that. One of the early handheld computer makers invented their own programming language, described as “Pascal but with COBOL data declarations.
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One of the most fun, and hairpulling courses I took was how to implement object oriented programming in COBOL.
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Long, Long ago, before OOP-in-Cobol was a thing, we used to joke that the Object-Oriented update to Cobol would be named “Add One to Cobol”.
I expect only the C++ and/or Cobol literate to get that one.
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Which is why learning any new programming tools, once one has the first and second one, easy. All tools have to have the same foundations. There are no “new concepts”.
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Actions speak louder than words. Your moves must have had Dan in awe. ;-)
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Bilingual means you can be confused, and confusing, in more than one language. :-D
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As the editor of the book based on blogs can attest, being multilingual meant I kept weaving among languages and using constructions that don’t strictly speaking exist, until very recently.
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Huh. That must be why the French were so anxious to speak English after I tried showing my knowledge of their language.
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One advantage of being bilingual in Canada is that one can get federal government sinecure. Other than that is serves no practical purpose especially when half way through reading the ingredients list on a box of corn flakes you realize that you had already read them in French. In other words it’s a time waster.
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As I say when people ask how many languages I speak, I am “trylingual” in that I try to speak many languages
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I lived in Japan long enough and spoke Japanese well enough that even now, being back in the States for more than 8 years, I occasionally cannot think of the right word in English despite the Japanese word sitting right there at the front of my mind. Mocking me. Always mocking.
-MD Streeter
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It’s unfortunate that most of those who fulminate against the metric system understand so little about it, or the way it was constructed.
It is true that an inch is somewhat like the size of a typical thumb, and a foot is roughly the size of a typical foot. And yes, a (double) stride is roughly 6 feet. Why 6? I don’t see any reason. So? And weights are in pounds or in kilograms. I don’t see any real difference there, certainly the story about the bacon isn’t particularly convincing.
“Nobody has ever done this kind of systematic, cross-cultural study of body-based measurement before”, quoting the author of some study with delusions of novelty. In fact, that study was done at least once, half a century or so ago. I remember some of it, an entire book owned by my father (an ME professor specializing in metrology, i.e., precision measurement which necessarily means understanding units). It described the hundreds of systems in use in Europe prior to the metric system. Yes, they all had feet and inches, but none matched. For example, I have a book about early Dutch shipbuilding which mentions their sizes, in “Amsterdam inches” of which there are eleven, not twelve, to the foot. Another example: in many places the “foot” was the foot of whoever was king at the time. But there is a description of some place, in Germany I think, where a different procedure was used: one sunday some officials went to a church in some town and stopped the first 12 adult males leaving the service, had them line up their feet end to end, measured that, divided by 12, and called that the official foot for that region and time.
As for “the meter is not based on anything”, false. It is 1/10,000,000 of the distance from pole to equator, as near as it could be measured in the late 1700s.
Something else: the metric system (or SI, to be specific) is not just weight and length; it is a complete system of units and a way of combining them for every aspect of engineering and physics. You might prefer feet over meters, but when you work in electricity you are, unavoidably, using the metric units for electricity — there are no others.
On the notion that estimating sizes is easier in feet and inches, that is undoubtedly true if you grew up here and learned that, just as arguing in English is easier for most of you than in Portuguese or Dutch. But as a former Dutchman who grew up there I can just as easily eyeball a tree or a field and give you a guesstimate in meters. Or, for small objects, in millimeters.
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Something else: the US units are in fact all defined in terms of metric units. The inch is now 25.4 mm exactly — though until around 1945 there supposedly were three different inches: the slightly larger US one, the slightly smaller British one, and the Canadian one at 25.4 exactly. I suspect in reality they all were the same, because the most precise measurement available was with Johansson blocks and old Johansson certainly wasn’t about to make up three different “inch” sets. Surprisingly, the belief in those different inches still persists in the world of surveyors.
On the meter being wrong: the definitions of units have changed over time. Not to change their value but to pin them down more precisely. The original one was a metal bar whose overall length was a meter; later it became a metal bar with lines engraved on it, then a wavelength of light, and today it is defined via the speed of light. In each case, the definition at the time was the best one available, and it was replaced when a new one became possible that can be produced with smaller error margins.
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Any human measuring system was created by humans and thus isn’t perfect.
I’ve heard all the “arguments” for the Metric System and IMO none of them convince me (and plenty of Americans) to want to change.
Too many pro-metric system folks seem to believe that The God Science handed it down and EVERYBODY MUST LOVE IT.
You like it? Fine, don’t try to force me to change what I prefer to use.
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The sad thing is, metric has decent utility for digital and automated uses, since base ten is easy to program and if it doesn’t need to be used by a human, it avoids the weakness of a system specifically designed to avoid being human-shaped.
However, that’s apparently not good enough for some folks.
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Metric is fabulous until you try to build something with it. Then you will be getting out your digital calipers and micrometer. If all you’ve got is a ruler and a compass, metric loses most of its appeal very quickly.
When people build things one of the things they automatically do, by eye, is divide distances in half. You can take 1″ and divide into 1/2″, 1/4″, 1/8″ by eye and be close enough for pine. Give or take a 1/32nd most of the time.
People do -not- divide distances into ten even spaces. We can’t do that.
What’s the difference between 3/4 of a centimeter and 3/4 of an inch in terms of ease of use? 7.5mm or 0.75 inches, is there much to choose from? >:D
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Yep.
It fails to work for people.
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The human eye can bisect very well. It’s the reason that the English system worked so well. MUCH harder to divide a centimeter into 10 equal parts.
A yard still is the standard for measuring cloth. Without a handy yardstick, a competent clerk can quickly measure and cut 4 and 1/2 yards of fabric.
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Most of the arguments for metric — and against — end up completely missing what measurement systems are for, and what makes them easy to work with in different contexts.
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The US system is defined in metric because the US government tried to get the country onto metric during the 70’s, and largely failed.
But because it does have a constitutional charter to define official weights and measures, they had to be defined by something, and have direct conversions to metric simplifies international trade.
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Something else: the US units are in fact all defined in terms of metric units.
Which can, with at least equal justice, state that “the metric is defined in US units.” It’s a conversion.
There’s been a conversion in place in federal law since 1866, although rather recently it was amended to
“The metric system of measurement shall be defined as the
International System of Units as established in 1960, and subsequently
maintained, by the General Conference of Weights and Measures, and as
interpreted or modified for the United States by the Secretary of
Commerce.”
The 1866 act defined a Myriameter as 6.2137 miles, a kilometer as .62137 miles or 3280 feet, ten inches, go on down, centimeter is .3937 inches.
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Wayback to the original act:
Click to access STATUTE-14-Pg339.pdf
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No, the picture is not symmetric. Metric units are defined by reference to physical processes or (for the kilogram) to a physical object. Imperial units are defined in terms of metric units.
In centuries past Imperial units had their own primary definition, such as King Henry’s Yard. But that stopped being true a while ago. The 1970s metrification push isn’t when and why it happened, but rather earlier in the century the realization that the English speaking world could not cope with having three slightly different (theoretically anyway) inches. So they picked one, namely the Canadian one. Perhaps because it was a round number of millimeters. Were Jo blocks built to that inch? I would like to find out, I haven’t yet.
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As I already linked evidence for, your claimed storyline is inaccurate.
The metric units for use in American legal documents were given conversion definitions back in 1866.
That you continue to confuse a conversion factor with defined in terms of, with a heavy mix of folk-history, makes it clear why you wanted a “reason” for a naturally occuring ratio earlier.
A conversion factor lets you take a standard and translate it between measurements– previously, it was special metal bars, now it’s the speed of light in a vacuum, presumably in a solar gravitational field and almost certainly also in earth gravity, plus whatever factors are either not known or not important enough to measure right now.
You appear to be attempting a from memory rendition of the 1959 conversion factors conference.
https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/si-units-length
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I didn’t know the actual date, thanks for the pointer.
The old US law “definitions” are irrelevant. The metric system isn’t and never was defined by that law but rather by the definitions of the SI, and those are as I said. And of course, that 1959 document confirms this and indeed then expresses US units in terms of metric ones.
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The old US law “definitions” are irrelevant.
That they show your timeline is absolute horsepucky, and in fact demonstrate that there were English-to-metric conversions offered before BIPM was founded, however, is quite relevant.
The metric system isn’t and never was defined by that law but rather by the definitions of the SI, and those are as I said.
https://www.britannica.com/science/International-System-of-Units
International System of Units (SI), French Système International d’Unités, international decimal system of weights and measures derived from and extending the metric system of units. Adopted by the 11th General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) in 1960, it is abbreviated SI in all languages.
And of course, that 1959 document confirms this and indeed then expresses US units in terms of metric ones.
That is how translation works.
If I grab a Spanish dictionary, it will, hopefully, give me an accurate-enough statement of meaning for the word in English.
That does not, however, map to your original claim of the Spanish words being defined in terms of the English translation; or the English units defined in terms of the Metric translation.
It tells you how each would describe a unit of a specific size in each language.
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When I spoke of SI I wasn’t thinking about the history of that term, I was only using it as a shorthand for the international metric system. The thing is that, at no time in its history, has the metric system (whatever its formal name was at the time) ever been defined in terms of any other system’s units. It always had its own units each with its own definition (by object or physics).
So I interpret the 1866 law as either a way to define the US customary units in terms of the metric ones (by stating the reciprocals of the conversion factors in the reverse order) or as a sign of confusion. Which it is depends on whether there was, at the time, a definition of the customary units.
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….You know, you could have opened your attempted lecture with “I do not understand measurement standards, nor converting between measurements, and I am at best very shaky on the history involved, and I am positively allergic to things like evidence and precision, now please read my Humpty Dumpty post.”
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I could say that, but in fact I know the metric system, its method of construction, and its history quite well.
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Ah, so you chose to get basically every detail wrong, up to and including order of occurrence.
Well, then. If you say so.
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What is “order of occurrence”? What exactly do you say I got wrong in the post I replied to? The fact that the metric system has always had its own definitions of its units, without reference to other systems?
Or are you objecting to my interpretation of what the 1866 law says? That’s more a matter of opinion, I suppose. The way I look at it is that the words of that law don’t make a whole lot of sense (which of course is not unusual in the works of politicians). My comments were two possible interpretations of what happened. Another one could be that the equivalences listed are just given for information, and that both the customary units and the metric ones already each had their own independent definitions that take precedence. I’d like to see the then-existing definitions of the customary units; it would be interesting to see how they are stated.
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:looks up the long thread of Pkoning failing to engage with arguments made, being corrected on the arguments he does make, making claims that are met with evidence that it’s exactly wrong, and then trying to bluster further and stamp his feet because NO NO NO, and generally have expectations of others that he consistently fails to even attempt:
Audience sport, and you definitely did your part to make it so I don’t have to waste any more time on you.
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(Golf Clap for Foxfier)
I worked in an industry (semiconductor manufacturing) that used a rich mix of SI and ANSI units. If I’m measuring things considerably smaller than 1/1000″, I’ll use metric. If I’m building a table or drilling a hole, I’m using ANSI.
And yes, dividing things into halves is considerably easier than tenths if you don’t have precision(ish) instruments. One of my calipers can switch between Metric and ANSI. 99+% of the time, it’s telling me inch/thousanths units.
I also have a tape measure that has both inch and cm scales on it. It’s my least-used measure, and I’ve lost count as to how many tapes I have.
RCPete I see your nanometer and raise you an Angstrom
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My job in the Navy was built on understanding “what is this measurement actually good for?” (Calibration. Which is why we got the history of agree-on-close-enough and why it’s important, even when it’s inaccurate, because everything is inaccurate, but many things are accurate enough.)
They’re different tools for different jobs. As I commented yesterday.
But “it’s got a use” isn’t good enough for some folks, and having to flat make up a mythology to support it– while attacking other people as ignorant, and failing to engage the arguments made– is simply obnoxious.
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Do we get to count the ruler with inches on one side, centimeters on the other, for use statistics?
That’s the one that gets the most use here…because the kids use it on their math lessons. 55howevermanyweeksofmath > maybe a few times a month for when we need better accuracy than “will this fit?” or “if we make it square to the nearest tenth of anything small, it won’t work because old houses are far from square to the nearest INCH.”
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Yeah, it is a lousy tape measure by an random manufacturer. Stanley or Lufkin for the win.
I’m starting to a flooring project for the master bedroom. The fancy vinyl planks which are really nice, but the measurements are weird. My first clue was the fact that the label on the end panel is “approximate square feet per carton”. OK, how about a plank size? 9″. OK. Then they were cadgy about the length: “about 60″ long”.
Got fed up and opened a carton. At least according to a non-beaten up tape measure, they’re exactly 60″ long (that’s effective length, disregarding tabs), but the width isn’t the 9 they claimed, but between 8-3/4″ and 8-7/8″. Wasn’t going to get out the 12″ caliper, so I left it there.
So, went back to the square footage per package and back calculated to width. OK, it comes out to 8.7800″, which isn’t close to a round number in any common system. 223 mm width. Okay… Plan A was to lay the planks out and eyeball the rip width for the first one. At 9 pounds per plank, that’s too much weight to play with, so CAD program to the rescue. I swear I’ve used CAD more for carpentry and finish trim applications than for metalworking. 8.78″ spacing, OK.
RCPete where metalworking tools get used for carpentry. I can do a mean bowl with a 12″ lathe and carbide tool bits.
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With respect to rulers, it’s which scale gets used. I don’t use my dad’s old drafting rulers because the markings don’t correspond to what I need. One of the reasons I dislike the dual-scale tape is because the figures get crowded. My eyesight isn’t great to begin with (nothing that a new cornea in one eye wouldn’t fix, but hell to the no for a transplant*), and I don’t need extraneous information.
(*) The retina doc says there’s a scar-removal technique that can deal with scars affecting the inside of the cornea. Had cornea work before (removal of dystrophy) so wouldn’t be my first rodeo.
RCPete Pets can do a number on corneas. Also grit from a shingle. Forgot the safety glasses that day.
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“The metric system isn’t and never was defined by that law but rather by the definitions of the SI, and those are as I said.”
It’s literally defined by a platinum bar sitting in a French museum. All else is approximations of or copies of that one, singular bar. And so is the kilogram. It’s a chunk of platinum in a box on a shelf.
As arbitrary goes, that’s a great example. “This is The Meter, because we said.”
I must say, the distance from the king’s nose to his index finger is looking pretty good next to that.
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Actually…. no.
Both are arbitrary. One changes considerably faster than a human lifetime.
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Regarding the yard, you would think the French would be in favor a measurement system that involved looking down one’s nose.
Maybe it’s the king thing that’s the hang up?
“Hold on, Pierre, his head’s rolled off, let me go fetch it again.”
“There has to be a better way.”
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But they missed a really good opportunity to fudge / make things make even more sense. They defined a meter as being 1/299,792,458th of a light second (i.e. the distance travelled by light in a vacuum during a second). All because they wanted to get more precise but match what had already been created as a reference. But if they had been sane they would have rounded up the size by 0.000691807% and made the definition of a meter as 1/300,000,000th of a light second….
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Sure, but that would have been a change, while what was actually done, in every case, was to change the definition but leave the value untouched. What you describe would have been a quite noticeable change in the nominal value of the meter. It’s actually 0.069 percent, not enough to bother carpenters but relevant to many machinists, never mind metrologists like my father.
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So what?
You folks expect us (American unit users) to change?
So why not change the unit values of the Metric system?
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It’s not like we haven’t had slightly different definitions of a measurement over time, and that level of precision was only recently achieved, so they should have said, oh our original reference was wrong, lets tweak this slightly….
If you want to be pedantic, call it a new meter rather than a meter in the scientific materials.
Anyway the time to do so easily has passed, but it just demonstrates to me it isn’t as scientifically pure or good for calculations as it is said to be.
I’ll also note, a lot of engineers just round up to 300 and divide with good results, so I bet it wouldn’t hurt as much as you claim, but would be cleaner long term.
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And it’s not like they haven’t changed definitions and/or standards before now.
Revamping the entire thing to be based off of tenths of the distance light travels in a vacuum would have been even better, and then making conversions from there for whatever someone used.
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I found for a lot of my uses, the speed of light is well approximated as being one foot per nanosecond. (That’s in free space; mileage varies when it’s running down a cable.)
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And if you ever attended a lecture by the late Admiral Grace Hopper, you have a handy measuring wire for it.
snelson134
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All bets are off when it’s not in a pure vacuum in unstressed space. Unfortunately, neither exists anywhere local, and quite possibly nowhere at all. (Halfway between the Milky Way and Andromeda might come fairly close…) :-)
And fiber is Right Out.
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The Reader notes that electrical engineers everywhere would support this. It would make the speed of light in a vacuum exactly 3exp10 cm/sec as opposed to 2.997925exp10 cm/sec.
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Just do what everyone I know in science does, write ‘c’ as 3×10^8 m/s and unless you’re doing the rare calculation where you know all your data to more precision than that, get on with life :)
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Alternatively you can do your calculations with the value of relevant constants stored in memory, to the full precision that your machine can natively represent.
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My mother’s Handbook of Chemistry and Physics had 1 inch equal to 2.54006? (I can’t remember the last digit anymore, I should still have it somewhere…)
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The U.S. unit for distance is the “survey foot” which has been around for a long time. It is slightly different than the foot defined as 12×2.54 mm. And the survey foot is a decimal system, measured in 10ths and 100th (and 1000th) of a foot. A 10th of a foot is about 1/8th of an inch and easy to estimate by eyeball. Surveying instruments also use decimal degrees for angles.
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There are 12 inches to the foot because there are. Seriously. The two units were defined separately. An inch is the length of 3 barleycorns laid end to end. A foot . . . well, you know. A yard is 3 feet because it is. It was not defined as 3 feet; as the article says, it was the distance from the nose to the tip of the outstretched hand. The reason two paces is 6 feet (one fathom) long is because it just is. The reason a fathom is 6 feet is because that’s the distance from outstretched hand to outstretched hand. Being quite tall, for me a fathom is the distance from the crooks of my thumbs, and I have measured out rope and wire at hardware stores and been right on even measuring out as much as 50 feet.
The metric system is purely arbitrary. Interestingly, in my work writing software for the aerospace industry, I have seen far more errors converting values between metric units (meters and kilometers) than I have between US Standard Units (feet and miles). I’m convinced that’s because the numerals in the number do not change when you convert in metric, so when typing a constant, it’s easy to slip the decimal and it will look right to everyone examining it. When you’re multiplying or dividing by 5,280, the numerals change and it’s instantly obvious that you have or have not converted the values.
They say the ESA’s Schiaparelli lander slammed into Mars and was destroyed because the descent module was spinning unexpectedly fast, causing saturation of the Inertial Measurement Unit, which resulted in the braking rockets to burn for 3 seconds instead of 30 seconds. Does anyone else notice that burn time is off by that typical metric factor of 10? From the beginning, I’ve strongly suspected a slipped decimal actually caused it, but that no one will ever admit it because they’re too vested in the politics of metrification.
Just so you’ll know, there will ALWAYS be rounding errors when a digital computer stores the value 0.1. But a digital computer can store the typical US measurement fractions (1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32, 1/64 and any combinations and multiples thereof) with absolute precision, no rounding errors whatsoever. It’s almost as if the digital computer was designed for US customary units and not for metric.
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Plus, if your software development team knows the program is going to deal with fractions, they can choose to store the fractions as actual fractions rather than as floating-point decimals. (Meaning that fractions are stored as pairs of integers, numerator-denominator). Then even fractions like 1/3 and 2/3 can be represented with perfect accuracy. The customary fractions used in the US are all powers of two, which just so happens to have perfect accuracy in floating-point representation, but you can store any fraction with perfect accuracy if you know ahead of time that that’s a requirement and you plan ahead for it.
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Nothing like a good rocket propelled goalpost.
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Demonstrating the falsity of your argument is not moving the goalposts.
Fractions are intrinsically more precise than decimals.
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You realize that a decimal is a fraction, right?
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Yes, a fraction with a denominator of 10 (or a power of 10). Which, sticking to the particular topic being discussed, is impossible to represent accurately in the standard floating-point representation that computers use natively, which is basically a binary version of decimal numbers (e.g., the binary number 0.1 represents one-half, binary 0.01 represents one-fouth, binary 0.11 represents three-fourths). Put the decimal number 0.1 into a computer, and what will actually be stored is 0.0999755859375, which then gets rounded to 0.1 when displayed. (Most of the time; to keep this short, I won’t discuss the exceptions here).
Precisely because of the binary nature of computers, fractions with denominators that are an exact power of 2 can be represented precisely in floating-point format. It just so happens that the traditional way the U.S. measurement system represents partial inches is in power-of-two fractions, which ends up being rather convenient for computer representation.
I’ll grant that this has little to do with the usefulness of imperial for human-related measurements such as the height of tables or the width of chairs. But I wasn’t trying to make any kind of argument with my comment, I was just bringing up an interesting fact. Which is why your accusing me of moving goalposts seems strange: are you sure you posted that reply to the correct comment?
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Ah, I mixed up people, what with the current wordpress hilarity.
I thought you were the same person as my first response.
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I figured that might have been the case.
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That is one of the worst arguments for imperial I’ve ever seen.
You had to cherrypick fractions which are powers of two to make it seen reasonable. Have fun representing 1/3rd of anything.
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Actually the bullshit goes deeper… the computer represents those power of two fractions well BECAUSE IT IS BINARY.
YOU IDIOT.
If it were actually designed for imperial it would be some sort of base 6 / 12 / 60. But that isn’t how binary logic works.
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Before calling someone an idiot, it’s generally advised that you double check and make certain that you understand the argument you’re addressing, and your understanding of the argument you’re attempting to make.
I’m not a big math-brain, but I’m pretty sure division is division, whether you’re using base 2, base 10, or base 12.
And fractions are simply division problems that you don’t have to solve.
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Your own words:
If you are storing numbers using the machine’s native types you are using binary. Some numbers can be exactly represented in base-2 floating points, some cannot. Just as some numbers can be represented in base-10 floats and some cannot.
Your assertion was that the computer is designed around imperial because some common imperial fractions can be precisely represented. This isn’t just wrong. It is fractally wrong on every possible level from the user level representations to the conceptual logic of the system to the actual gates etched into the silicon.
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Anything*1/3=Anything/3
QED
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Your argument was that imperial better because it works with computers better because fractions.
Ignoring that decimals are fractions.
Ignoring that there are a lot more fractions used than just powers of two or multiples thereof.
Ignoring that binary computers are base two, and imperial is several different bases none of which are two or directly comparable with it.
You can’t even get basic mathematical concepts straight, and you expect anyone to listen to you?
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(Holds up mirror)
Decimals are not fractions.
A fraction is an unsolved division problem.
A decimal is a solved division problem, with the possibility of introduced error from rounding.
The claim that base 2 has trouble dividing by 3 is false.
(Neither does base 2 have trouble dividing by 5, even though the same logic would apply, and make your argument self-defeating, instead of merely wrong.)
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A fraction is just a way of representing a number. 0.2 and 1/5 are the exact same thing written down in two different ways.
And I did not say it has trouble dividing, fool. I said it cannot precisely represent.
It should be easy enough for you to prove me wrong, oh great wise one: simply post the complete binary representation of 1/3.
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As memory serves, the official excuse for the failure of that craft was “an error in translating imperial to metric”.
Slipping the decimal point sure looks like a better answer…
RCPete (Hello WordPress, Usenet is calling. Where’s my .sig file?)
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Why 6? I don’t see any reason.
…?
Really? You aren’t familiar with the reason that Imperial is base 12? Nor are you able to quickly understand why a man’s stride would be roughly six feet?
You may want to choose a different angle of argument than the one you opened with.
And you pull out old stories of how the foot was, in theory, established in some place?
All without, notably, actually engaging the arguments made, other than where you proved them– in response to an entire post laying out that imperial is human-shaped measurement, you offer in refutation: (i)t is 1/10,000,000 of the distance from pole to equator, as near as it could be measured in the late 1700s.
…which is to say, it absolutely proves the point that it’s an arbitrary thing.
“Gosh, why would species use a measurement based on their bodies and the functions they use the measurements for, rather than a fraction of the estimated size of the third planet from some random star in an off-brach of a galaxy, which would be TOTALLY less random.”
A 12 inch foot can be divided in half (6), in thirds (4) and in quarters (3) very easily; those are all useful when building things, especially if you are working with natural materials and don’t have a lot of measurement equipment.
A stride is roughly the same as the height of the person taking the stride, as is the finger tip to finger tip span when they spread their arms.
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My point is that there is no obvious reason why a man’s stride should measure 6 times the length of his foot. It so happens that it’s roughly that, given an average man’s anatomy. And yes, the Imperial system (some of the time at least) is built around the number 12, mostly because the Babylonians liked that number. But not everywhere, consider for example the number of feet in rod. (16.5? I never remember.) And as I mentioned, that usage of 12 is not universal in the old systems, witness the Amsterdam example.
For that matter, why is the mile not 6000 feet as the etymology says it should be (1000 strides)?
Why did the French pick the particular units they chose? I don’t know. Perhaps they felt that the alternative would be to pick some random existing unit, but if they had picked the Paris foot the people of Marseille might have complained.
Anyway, “human sized” units are fine for the most casual work. The moment you’re doing carpentry, never mind machine building, you’re not dealing with the sizes of parts of your body but rather with numbers on measuring instrument scales, and the fact that one of them is approximately equal to the size of King Henry VIII’s foot is not at all interesting.
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There’s plenty of good reasons to push for Standardized Measurements, but IMO Standardized English units work as well as the Metric Standardized units.
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Other than the reason that it’s an observable fact? Then yes, there is no “reason.”
As opposed to the utterly rational way of saying that a man’s stride is roughly six times the length of his foot, but putting it all in units of estimated distance from equator to pole.
Which is obviously a totally rational way to describe an existing relationship between measurements.
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“.. it is a complete system of units and a way of combining them for every aspect of engineering and physics.”
BOOM.
You’ve just defined the purpose and niche for where the metric system should reside. For human specified purposes, the metric system need not apply.
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“It’s unfortunate that most of those who fulminate against the metric system understand so little about it, or the way it was constructed.”
Canadian here. I know -all- that crap. I remember where I was when they switched all the road signs to metric. Algonquin Park.
” And yes, a (double) stride is roughly 6 feet. Why 6? I don’t see any reason.”
The reason, as it happens, is Phi. Also known as the Golden Ratio. 1.61803. It turns out that that the proportion that mammals and also reptiles are built on is Phi. There are many deep reasons in the physics of animal movement making it so.
The distance covered in one stride is six feet. Because that’s relationship between between the size of the foot and the length of the leg. Inches/hands/feet/yards/paces is based on the geometry of Humanity, which is Phi.
As noted in the article (which it seems you didn’t read except to scoff at) there is a REASON why kayaks are two and a half fathoms long, with a cockpit opening the diameter of the builder’s forearm and closed fist. A fathom, in primitive society, is the span of both outstretched arms. Thanks to the geometry of the human body, a fathom is the same length as a stride. Six feet. (See Leonardo’s etching Vitruvian Man. He hits all the high points.)
Your Alaskan sea kayak wants to be about 15 feet long, give or take depending on the size and weight of the kayaker, because of buoyancy and the usual size of waves the boat is meant to handle. That’s the right size because that’s the right size. It is determined by the conditions and the guy using it in those conditions. 12 of his feet is too short. 18 of his feet is too long.
If I’m considerably bigger or smaller than that guy, his boat will not fit me. My life will suck if I try to hunt seals in his boat. For the same reason his shoes won’t fit me.
I’m a bigger guy than an 1850s era Eskimo dude, I need a bigger boat. But mine will still be two and a half fathoms long. My fathoms, not his. My boat, my fathom. See how that works? It solves a ridiculously complex buoyancy/wave size/turning effort/roll radius/center of gravity and etcetera problem with a piece of string and a bit of charcoal for marking.
What’s a fathom in metric? My fathom is 6 feet, 1.8288 meters. My kayak is going to be 4.572 meters. How the f- am I going to measure that out with a piece of string and a bit of charcoal, sitting on a beach in Alaska? Seriously.
The Metric System is proudly decimalized. Base ten. Nice easy arithmetic. But the choice of the length of the meter, even taking the founders at their word that it is 1/10,000,000 of the distance from pole to equator, is -sciency-. (Not to mention they got it wrong, but let us leave that aside.)
There is no intelligent reason for making the meter 1/10,000,000 of an arbitrarily chosen geographical dimension. Why not one minute of arc from the sun to the Earth? (They actually knew what that was.) Why not the Earth’s radius? No -scientific- reason, really. All equally stupid. (The joke of it all is that the actual Meter, from which all others are determined, is a platinum bar sitting in a French museum. Leaving aside all the speed-of-light hogwash, if you want to know what a meter REALLY is, you must go to Paris and measure that bar. -That- is a meter. It is The Meter. All else is approximation and a sales job.)
It was a POLITICAL decision. Mr. Pole-To-Equator guy was in favor with the committee dudes, his choice was politically acceptable because it was roughly yard-sized without being an actual Yard, it sounded suitably Enlightened, Rational and Revolutionary, so they ran with it.
Not to put too fine a point on it, they were part of the same bunch that made Mr. Guillotine’s invention famous. Metric is the bastard child of murderous French Revolution politics and world-wide tyranny. It is anti-human in conception and function, which is why Communists love it.
Can you design an Alaskan sea-kayak in Metric? Yes. 4.572 meters, baby. Can you easily pass the tradition down from illiterate father to illiterate son for a thousand years or more like the Eskimos did? No. Not a f-ing chance.
Can metric be useful in a factory? Yes, and it is very popular with communists who can’t do fractions. Is LIFE a factory? I’m sure those a-holes would like it to be one, but it’s not.
Leonardo “Man is the measure of all things” Da Vinci was smarter than all of those French wankers wrapped up in a sack. Here endeth the lesson.
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Don’t hold back! Tell him what you really think!
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Anybody who says they can’t see any reason why a pace is six feet… [muted swearing]
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Metric is the measurement system for mass production and all it entails. It is not a human centered system, but if you are reducing everything to standardized widgets…including people…why, it’s just the thing.
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A Standardized Measurement System is necessary for mass production.
The Standardized “Imperial System” worked just fine before US industry was pushed into using the Metric System.
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I may have been clumsy in my statement; that is certainly true. I was trying to note it came from the same line of thought that gave us mass education, mass media, and Marxism. It’s something only a soulless collectivist intellectual would bother coming up with.
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Absolutely right. Most of US Industry still uses US Customary Units (my brother’s a machinist who frequently works in the automobile industry). Aircraft altitudes around the world (except perhaps in certain extremely authoritarian nations) are measured in feet. The vast majority of maritime commerce (and the ships which carry them) are designed based on US feet. Why? Because the Intermodal Shipping Container was invented in 1955 by Malcom McLean, an American businessman.
Take a glance at the official measurements of the playing field of the sport of the metric world, soccer. You’ll see that the center circle is 9.15 meters, the penalty box is 16.5 x 40.3 meters, and so on. Why the strange values? Because the center circle is 10 YARDS, the penalty box is 18 yards by 44 yards, the 11 meter spot is actually at 12 yards, and the goalie’s box is actually 6 yards deep and extends 6 yards beyond the goal posts on either side. The goal itself is 8 feet tall and 8 yards wide, not 2.44 meters tall and 7.32 meters wide.
Several years ago, Maker’s Mark accidentally neglected to water down (to 90 proof) one lot of whiskey – all of the bottles in question were the 1,137 ml bottles. It took me a few minutes to realize that was on Imperial quart. Canada may LABEL the bottles in metric, but they’re still sized in Imperial fluid ounces.
No country has gone fully metric, and there’s no reason for the United States to go any further than it has already.
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I live in a certain country in Asia (I won’t be more specific on a public blog), where nobody thinks they use the metric system. When we buy milk at the store, it’s in 2 liter bottles, or in 5 liter bottles (about 10% more than a gallon). BUT… when we buy butter, it comes in 227 g packs. Since I have the gram-to-pount conversion memorized at this point, I know without looking it up that 1 lb is 454 g, so 227 g is half a point, or 8 oz. (The brand of butter we prefer to buy is imported from New Zealand). Imperial units, hidden behind a conversion.
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We have the same thing here in Canaduh. Bacon comes in 454g packages, etc.
Because A) it is cheaper to change the writing on the package than to change the machine that makes the packages and B) nobody wants to open a kilogram of bacon for breakfast.
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EVERYTHING in Portugal is 250g packages. this is know as “quarto” which is the same word for room.
When we were small and our parents were very poor, my brother slept in the hallway, where there was a recess large enough for his single bed (and a curtain to give him some privacy.)
He referred to that space as his 125g
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I meant to write “nobody thinks they use the imperial system” or “everybody thinks they use the metric system”. Hopefully my meaning was clear despite the fumble-fingers that typed the opposite of what I meant.
Robin Munn
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The Soviet Union was a metric country. But the Mikhail Tomofeyevich Kalashnikov’s iconic rifle was designed in inches. The drawings are metric, but the sizes are all weird. If you take the pieces in one hand and the calipers in the other, most dimensions come out in nice even inch fractions.
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I still say the metric system is an evil plot by the French.
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…wait, do they have other sorts!?!?
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They sometimes have strange or depressing plots, and some overly romanticized ones, but those are all mostly in their literature. As are the occasional just out there ‘are you even human?’ plots.
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French plots only belong in French stories, or graveyards.
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This springs to mind, regarding standard plots:
American – “I will die for freedom.”
English – “I will die for honor.”
French – “I will die for love.”
Russian – “I will die.”
Always reminded me of the line in The Assassination Bureau, said by the Russian assassin in a thick accent:
“In Russia, death is a serious business. [thoughtful pause] Life is no joke, either.”
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Now, one thing that was hilarious was how the US being on Imperial completely jacksawed the Socket B-29 copying project. Apparently did not have tooling to make sheet metal of the same thickness, due to the metric/imperial differences, so they had to either use thicker (heavier) , or thinner (under strength) material for the skin.
Because any project where you want the raw materials guy to make custom sheet metal, you might as well make out of solid gold; it will cost less.
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Boeing aircraft are still built in inches.
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Metric is great for science, because science works great in base 10.
Imperial is great for cooking, because there’s nothing like it when you’re camping and half of your measuring implements have gone missing. Also that most people can’t divide by five by eye, but can divide two by eye or even three.
I know someone who claims that it’s perfectly easy to cook in metric without a scale if you grew up with it. Uh, sure. I somehow doubt that would transfer to most of the scouts I work with.
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Most? I would go as far as any scouts I’ve worked with and that includes all the adults, including me.
One thing we were tickled with when we were in Canada and we switched the car dash from MPH to KPH. The KPH dash had a location to also show the MPH. FWIW the opposite does not happen.
Other measurements I had to work with was a “chain” (66 feet) a measurement used in land survey. A “log” (32′ – 40′ depending on context). I’m sure others can come up with similar. Note, neither show metric equivalents.
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Sure, they use a handful of this, a pinch of that….
That they have to buy their flour in 2-1/5 lbs batches hinders them not at all.
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The system for cooking arguments are cringeworthy. Because both sides can’t seem to figure out whether they are talking about different measurement systems or measuring by mass vs volume.
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$SPOUSE notes she agrees with Rachel Ray. Cooking generally doesn’t need careful measurements. OTOH, she measures out Cayenne and Paprika peppers with an eagle eye because she has major problems with overly spicy foods. Me, I shake or pinch, but I lived near the San Jose barrio for a good number of years…
OTOH, baking needs precise measurements. Whatever system is in use, there’s a tiny amount of wiggle room (depends on the ingredients–baking without gluten needs fairly precise measurements) with some spectacular failures for violations.
RCPete
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Worse, you have to be accurate about stuff like ‘how much water’… and that includes how dry or damp the flour is in the first place.
And what’s in your water.
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…and, according the baker in my family, altitude (barometric pressure) and RH. And maybe phase of the moon and current orbital position; everything seems to affect baking. She had a lot of fun when we moved from sea level in MD to 1200′ in AZ; I wasn’t aware she even knew some of those words. :-)
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Ooof, a real baker.
I’m just able to do things like “look at bread dough in machien, realize it looks too dry, add a little oil” or “look in, realize it’s too sticky, remember humidity exists, add a little flour.”
But “it doesn’t look right” is a learned, not a measured, which is why I say real baker in the tone of real painter vs a by-numbers-kit type. [raises hand]
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She does the same; the issue was that she’d used the same learned techniques and processes for almost 60 years (almost “muscle memory” by then), and had to modify them. Not a Happy Camper (TM).
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Heh. $SPOUSE bakes gluten free at 4300′. The Bette Hagman recipes are a close approximation to what we need, but Adjustments Get Made. (Frequently depending on humidity, both ingredients and ambient, plus variations for ambient temps. Yeast does funny things at altitude.)
Kat considers breadmaking to be a spectator sport. Slices off the heel and overflow are a treat, and the crumbs go into her doggie bowl. OTOH, we get the Border Collie Stare of Doom when my bread is being made. Ingredients she can’t eat, but it smells really good.
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My wife loves to make meringue… and she can’t. No matter how hard she beats the egg whites, they never settle into stiff peaks. That is, until she tried making meringue while visiting her family for Christmas, in the northern U.S. not far from the Canadian border. Suddenly she could get stiff peaks easily, in the cold dry air of a northern winter. But with the humidity and temperature where we normally live? Fugeddaboudit.
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1200′ in Arizona? That’s the low lands. Try 7,000′ (Flagstaff). It’s been over 60 years, but I still remember when Mom opened one of those tubes of ready-to-bake biscuits and biscuit dough exploded all over the kitchen. Anything boiled took significantly longer, because the boiling point was lower at the lower pressure.
But what I remember most of all was when we first arrived, in a mid-1950’s Oldsmobile pulling a trailer. We started in Council Bluffs, Iowa, but IIRC, first we visited Dad’s folks in northern Minnesota, then south to pick up US 66 (not yet replaced by the interstates), and across on that. I can’t remember how many days that took, but it seemed like my baby sister and I had been cooped up in the back seat forever. Then finally pulled up to our new house, and in back of it was a large play park! Yeah!!! As soon as I could, I took off running across that – until I suddenly collapsed, out of breath and felt like I was dying.
A few weeks later, I was acclimated and could run all over that playpark, and in a few more weeks I was tanned as dark as the Navajo kids.
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It is indeed the “lowlands” (about 16 miles south of Phoenix), but 1200′ is still significantly different in effect from 0′ (actually, about 35′); apparently the 10% pressure difference is enough to cause problems.
And FWIW, a Sherpa would call Flagstaff “the lowlands”. :-)
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No Bake Cookies. Some wiggle room for everything except sugar. But always changes the consistency. What can’t be done is to double or triple the recipe. Results in a soupy mess that never sets up.
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This! I’ve mostly switched to grams just because they’re smaller than (weight) ounces. This has mostly swapped 1/4 cup-and-bigger volume for gram weight.
I don’t like grams for small amounts because a gram is so small that I don’t trust scale calibration to be – and remain – accurate, so I switch back to volume for teaspoons or less.
Cooking units are just annoying. It took me a while to realize that my 3/4 teaspoon spoon was also 1/4 tablespoon. How many tablespoons in a cup? I always need to look at a (wrapped) stick of butter to get 8 Tbl is 1/2 cup. 113 grams (the weight of a stick of butter) is just useless.
The fact that one can switch back and forth between weight and volume so easily means that cooking – particularly baking – is not as precise as people like to pretend it is. Milk and water don’t have the same density, so a milliliter of milk does not weigh one gram, but nothing bad will happen if you make that assumption. 240 grams of milk for a cup is as close as eye-balling the line in the measuring cup.
And eggs! They’ve gotten bigger. None of my grandmother’s cake recipes work; they’re all far too runny because “3 medium eggs” is much more liquid now than it used to be. And who buys three cartons of eggs just to have small, medium, and large eggs lying around?
markedup
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“Freedom ends where the Metric System begins.”
I can’t think of a much truer statement.
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The Reader has never understood the angst the topic of measurement systems generates. The ‘English’ – dare I say ‘American’ – system works fine if that is what you are used to. The Great Big Defense Contractor built planes and chasses for sensor systems using the American system. Precision at suppliers was not a problem. The Metric system works fine if that is what you are used to. The Reader notes that electrical engineering units are all metric. A bastardized system works fine if that is what you are used to. Just make sure everyone is on the same page.
An example – his senior year in college the Reader had to take a class in thermodynamics (required for all engineering disciplines). Back then thermodynamics was taught using the American system of units (horsepower, BTUs, psi, etc.) He found the problems easiest to work when he converted all of the givens to their metric equivalents and then converted the answer back. Why – because he had spent 4 years in the EE department and metric units were all he saw. The Reader got a note from the professor on his first test – ‘you’re an EE, aren’t you?’.
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It sometimes seems like the “Lovers Of The Metric System” believe that only Stupid Americans want to use the American units. :wink:
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My guess is that one of the bigger reasons for the failure of USA Metrification was the switch in gas pumps from gallons to liters. That seemed to generate all kinds of confusion, from mileage (is kilometerage a thing? Makes cross with fingers) to “what is a fillup going to cost me?”. As memory serves, stations that switched to liters backtracked fairly quickly.
RCPete
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100% What does $1.98/liter = $/gallon?
“Easy”. Just take cost/liter * 3.785411784 Thus $1.98/liter ~ $7.495/gallon
When we were in Canada, we paid $1.98/liter CA, regularly. Which is ~ $4.49 to $4.87 per gallon US depending on conversion rate. Plus whether whatever payment system using charges a fee to do so. Ours didn’t. Given, when we got home, not too bad, as we are now at $4.55/gallon locally, after a month. OTOH gateway towns, and pumps inside Yellowstone were at $3.40/gallon, which historically is unheard of; fuel in national parks is historically high. Sister and BIL reported they paid over $5/gallon when they were driving in Washington State.
Bit of a perception that the stations were trying to pull one over on customers. The gas stations weren’t. The problem was they had no way to display > $.999/gallon costs back then. Like what will happen NOW if the price per gallon goes over $9.999/gallon. Seriously look at most of the gas station reader boards. Thinking it will never go to $9/gallon let alone $9.999/gallon? Dream on. Back in the early ’70s it was emphatically stated that gas would never go over $.999/gallon. Not ever! Who here would love to see fuel down to < $2/gallon?
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Yes, I recall when the price reflected a half-gallon because the then-mechanical price settings maxed out. Lots of fun.
Fred Meyer is running at $4.35 in Flyover Falls, but I just got (and spent) a $500 Home Depot card and got $2.00 worth of gas discounts. I’m limited to a dollar/gallon discount per session, but planning for that’s fairly easy.
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All they’d have to do is move the decimal point and shitcan that idiotic .9¢ which they should have done 60 years ago.
That might — might — have sort of made sense when gas was 15¢ a gallon, but these days it’s just f*king stupid. I’d pay a little bit more just to see an honest price.
———————————
Not everybody should go to college. Some folks, you send ’em to college and you just wind up with an educated idiot.
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Not now with the digital boards, but way back when, the decimal was fixed on the sign, agree.
Hubby says he remembers paying $.259/gallon. I never did. Got my driver’s license in the middle of cost sky rocketing to over $1.009/gallon. When he was 16, I was 11. Who pays attention to the cost of gas if you aren’t paying for it?
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When I was young, there was a price war going on in the big city near where we lived. We were going to a dinner at Grampa Pete’s club, and I recalled seeing gas going for $0.229 a gallon. That would have been the early 1960s.
I bought a car in 1972 (seriously clapped out MGB–had to make new floorboards), and the cheapest gas I got was 29.9 cents. I interned between semesters in January 1974 and courtesy the OPEC shutdown, gas lines were bad. As I recall, gas went up to $0.60 a gallon.
I graduated and moved to Silly Valley in June ’74. Took the scenic route and I recall being a bit shocked to have to pay $1.00 a gallon in Fort Bragg. Rather more expensive than previous fillups, but I hadn’t thought about the joys and costs of delivering stuff to the coast. (Our neighbors used to live near Florence, OR and told us they shied away from propane because it was so expensive there. Not that it’s cheap right now. Thanks, Brandon!)
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Got my first car in ’76. Driver’s license in early ’73. Just in time to be the one taking parents and neighbors cars down on appropriate plate days to sit in the gas line to get cars filled up (hey, got to drive). Got paid to take neighbors cars down. Hubby got his driver’s license, and a car, in 1968. He talks about gas station fuel wars too, < $.20/gallon.
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I graduated in ’74, too. High School :-)
Based on context, presume you graduated from college in ’74. ;-)
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BSEE in ’74. MSEE was in ’91, though the work was completed Dec ’90. I wasn’t in a hurry for that advanced degree. :)
Unspecified U didn’t do graduation ceremonies in December. Mom really wanted to see me graduate, so she flew out to Silly Valley for my 15 seconds on the stage.
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Never walked the stage for the college degrees. First one (BSFM ’79), we’d moved to go to work that spring. Career change (AACS ’85), were in the middle of a forced move. Last one (BSCS ’89), we welcomed our son at 8 PM that night.
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> Who here would love to see fuel down to < $2/gallon?
On November 4 , 2019, I filled up at $1.69/gal.
Two days later it went to $1.99, and two weeks later $2.35. It went over $4 for a while, then dropped back to about $2.90 a few months ago, but it’s been creeping back up. I paid $3.29 a few hours ago.
The New Imperious Leader blames it on gas company profiteering. But being a suspicious and contrarian sort, I wondered if it has something to do with the New Imperious Leader.
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Fuel locally is $4.30 – $4.60/gallon for regular. Premium is pushing $5/gallon.
Not the gas companies. Not the US oil industry. OTOH Iran/Iraq/Russia, and other anti-US actors, laughing all the way to the bank. You’d think there is a conspiracy there somewhere.
Not the only one.
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(Some) lovers of the metric system are like (some) lovers of dogs. Absolutely determined that their way is best and no rational person would even consider otherwise.
Americans go “Meh. Whatever. Just don’t try to force it on me.”
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I once got a rise out of a physics prof by reporting on a radioactivity measurement assignment with particle energies given in femtojoules (rather than mega-electronvolts — which of course are neither metric nor imperial but rather the bastard offspring of metric confusion).
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Megatons per second is my favorite Imperial measurement. >:D
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Just don’t mix up the metric units with the English units when computing distance to grown, approach speeds, interplanetary/stellar travel, or focal lengths for space telescopes.
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This amuses me some, as I picked up amateur astronomy and telescope optics during that time when the objectives (lens, mirror) were still stated by inches of diameter, but the eyepiece focal lengths were in millimeters, so there was always one conversion somewhere to get magnification as it wasn’t simply applying f/ratio. (And ‘astronomer’ f/ratio and ‘photographer’ f/ratio might TECHNICALLY be the same the thing, but the usage is different and makes going from one to the other Seriously Weird.)
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Aye, thermodynamics problems might never be easy but the computations of them get seriously less annoying when done in SI units, even if the front and back end is conversion from/to Imperial units.
As for electrical… lead and lag seem an issue… then one tries to compute a steam cycle or two with variable ‘quality’ of steam… and suddenly the very worst of AC looks pretty tame.
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The French were trying to be rational, scientific, and revolutionary about everything. But any system of measurement is going to be arbitrary about something, and is going to be awkward when applied to a different realm than the one it was originally devised for. The problems of getting used to yet another new system, and getting international agreement to using it are formidable enough that dislike of the French revolution and all its fruits doesn’t seem enough cause to scrap the metric system and start over.
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The French were trying to be rational, scientific, and revolutionary about everything.
But being French, they got things wrong. :twisted:
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No, the French were trying to convince everything that THEIR flavor of rational scientific thinking was the best one and reclaim their place as the Height of Culture. It did not go the way they expected.
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The French had such a lock on truth that when they announced that stones did not fall from the sky and anyone saying different was ignorant or a fraud museums all over the world threw their meteorite collections in the trash. People have not improved at all in their worship of authority. For any well know ‘fact’ to change we must wait on the death of a generation of ‘scientists’ whose status and pay depend on their current version of truth.
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“…dislike of the French revolution and all its fruits doesn’t seem enough cause to scrap the metric system and start over.”
I must sincerely disagree! Despising the French is more than enough reason to justify almost anything! ~:D
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I had a BLT sandwich at deGaulle airport. Any nationality that doesn’t cook the bacon in a BLT deserves all the despite one can muster. [VBEG]
RCPete
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“…doesn’t cook the bacon in a BLT…”
Well, that killed my appetite. And, even aside from the “yuck!” factor, is trichinosis an issue there?
And let me guess; they fry the lettuce and tomato?
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I didn’t notice the produce after considering the bacon. That looked like the stuff fresh off the grocer’s shelf, so it had probably been cured* and not cooked, but the Gaah factor was strong.
(*) Of which disease is left as an exercise for the student. This was when shoe inspections and “search the 90 pound 80 year old women**” was introduced for worldwide airport security theater. Come to think of it, that was the last time I flew anywhere…
(**) Somehow the weak and harmless got selected for extra searches.
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I’m sure cured, yes. It’s a linguistic thing. Cured bacon is actually quite tasty a friend and I used to buy it and consume it as a forbidden treat. (Expense, not religious dietary abstention. Our mothers didn’t buy it because it was very expensive, and if they knew we bought it, they’d insist we share it with the family.)
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After a certain age air travelers don’t have to remove shoes to go through scanners. Mom keeps her driver’s license handy. They ask her to take off her shoes before proceeding. She says I’m 88. They give her a bad time. She pulls out her driver’s license. She does have the quick check security number so she also uses that line, domestic flights. What she doesn’t have is the international version.
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Might be cured bacon. Portugal has such. Halfway between bacon and prosciutto. In fact it’s the only bacon they recognize by such name.
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Could be; apparently it’s a valid way to make pork products safe, if it’s done correctly, with process and results testing. This article…
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405676616300208
…details how it’s (supposed to be, and probably is) done in the US; as for France, who knows?
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Yeah, it was probably safe, but when one is expecting a crunch and getting a goo, it just isn’t fun.
I’m recalling an episode of the PBS All Creatures Great and Small where James Herriot* is offered “bacon” after treating a cow and getting a huge slab of pork fat. He “took the leftovers home” and tried to give it to the farmer’s Border Collie, who ran away from it.
(*) James Wight’s son did a nice biography. The Real James Herriot. Apparently much of the All Creatures stories were pretty close to truth with the names and serial numbers filed off to protect the guilty.
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Not quite true. There is one measurement system which isn’t arbitrary, but derived purely from the constants of the universe.
Unfortunately planck units are far too small to use in everyday life.
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I thought I was so smart when I thought to myself, “what if we had a measuring system in which all those weird constants were 1?”
I was very sad to discover Planck units already existed and no one used it because it was even more confusing.
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I’m with both sides on this. But as a former cabinet maker I have to state that working in millimeters was a godsend. If you ever had to rapidly and repeatedly add, subtract, multiply or divide measures such as 17/64th from 3/8th or 11/16th then you would likely agree.
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Funny, but when I make cabinets or wooden boxes, I usually have to trim off a smidge, not 1/16th of an inch and not 2 millimeters.
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Cabinet maker here, profoundly disagree. EVERYTHING in woodworking is Imperial. From the raw logs to sheet goods. Everything.
Going from Imperial 4×8 sheets to metric measurements and then back to Imperial again because the -cutters- are Imperial? Nightmare.
Every woodworking machine from England or North America made before 1980 is in Imperial. Not to mention every piece of furniture that didn’t come from Ikea is in Imperial.
Even if you are using CNC machines there’s no point to metric in North America. Decimal inch gets you everything you want. 48x96x0.75 is 4’x8’x 3/4″ What’s that in metric? A stupid long decimal. If you don’t do everything to four digits the rounding-off will kill your project.
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Being human, they got things wrong. IMO, their work in science was less disastrously bad than their philosophy.
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That’s an incredibly low bar.
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EVERYTHING is more rational than their philosophy, including my cats.
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Foucault. Cats beat that dude all day long.
I rest my case. (And a good thing too, it was getting heavy…)
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Foucault, the name, presents a problem. See, there are two Big Name Foucaults. One was a genuine genius. The other was a ratfink “philosopher.”
See: “Foucault Test” – how, after some math that the end user can ignore, you can use well-nigh primitive gear to measure (or at least compare) a surface to fractions of a wavelength of light.
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The Foucalt I remember is the physicist, and that because there was a copy of his pendulum in the lobby of the science building at BYU.
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I’m fairly sure the meter’s length was chosen because it’s almost the same as a yard, so you can estimate by strides as you do with yards. Similarly, the gram seems to be named for a unit of weight in Late Antiquity, which was approximately equal to the metric definition. The formal specifications in terms of the Earth’s polar circumference (the meter) and the mass of a cubic centimeter of water (the gram) were contrived to match the old units.
The metric system’s novelty was to insist on defining all its units as powers of 10 times a base unit, thus abandoning inches and miles, pounds and tons. It isn’t obvious that this decimalization gives any real advantage over human-scale units.
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As I recall my history lessons, a meter was chosen to be the length that it is SPECIFICALLY because it is -not- a yard and also -not- whatever insane shite the French monarchy were using before the Revolution. Probably also chosen because it wasn’t a yard.
The only -rational- and irreducible value in metric is the milliliter, because one cubic centimeter of water is what defines the milliliter. So a liter is 1000 of those. But it is only “rational” by virtue of being consistent with the meter, which is arbitrary.
That it is consistently sold on the basis of “rationality” and “sciencyness” is a source of great hilarity to me.
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…whatever insane shite the French monarchy were using before the Revolution…
The French people, at least, were using something very much like our Imperial system, only with a national (and some regional) re-scalings overall.
~1 fathom = 1 toise (~76 3/4 in. of ours now, at least in Paris)
1 toise = 6 pieds (yes, that’s ‘feet’)
1 pied = 12 pouces (inches)
1 pouce = 12 lignes (‘lines’)
Like much/most of Europe was — it’s only the “French feet vs. British feet’ (etc., but factorial) thing that led to all the madness.
Note how this only supports the Science article’s point of ‘natural measurments are usual’ even in the very nursery of the lordly International System of Units (sniff!).
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Metric is for people who are bad at Fractions.
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The Reader’s sister, who couldn’t master fractions no matter how hard the Reader and his parents tried, wasn’t very good at powers of 10 either. We were exposed to the metric system as kids in Spain in the 60’s and she never got it.
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Eli Whitney, 1797, came up with building US military muskets of all interchangeable parts. Which really got things rolling.
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One size fits all equally badly is a Marxist principle. Which is why they probably love the metric system.
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I’ve always understood that a double stride is about 5 feet (not six), with a single stride being 30 inches (2.5 feet). Thus the Roman Mile (thousand paces) of 5000 (Roman) feet. (The Romans were a bit shorter, and so their feet and miles were a bit shorter.)
The modern mile of 5280 feet, as I understand it, is due to stretching the length to be exactly eight of the then-more-important furlongs.
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Sounds about right re: stride. I’m taller than most, and my normal, comfortable stride, which I can use to pace out distances in yards quite accurately, is almost exactly 3 feet. Just looked up furlongs, and it seems they’re a bit more than 200 yards. A handy length for measuring fields and farms and the distance one could reliably shoot an arrow, I’d bet.
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A furlong was the length of one furrow. The acre was the (approximate/average) amount a man could be expected to plow with a single ox in one day and is derived from the word for ‘field’.
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Exactly correct for me: 4 steps/2 paces = 10′ but then I’m short.
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IIRC, the Air Force marching step was 2.5 feet, but this was used only on the parade ground. (To help hold us to that, the shortest guy in my Basic Training flight carried the flag.) When a group of men marched to get somewhere on base, they stepped longer, somewhere between 2.5 and 3 feet, and at a considerably faster rate, making about 4 mph. That tiny little guy that carried the flag on the parade ground somehow matched steps with the 6-footers without straining…
2.5 Imperial feet probably was the average young man’s step back when the US Army established it’s standards (WWI or 19th Century?), but men were shorter then. The Romans were even shorter, so their foot – defined by the military march, 5 feet to the pace – was shorter.
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Respectfully disagree. I’m not a metric snob any more; when you get in to making things, metal stock and many parts come by the inch, not the millmeter. But for calculation, metric is Just Better; if you find yourself computing things that aren’t just dimensions of a room, but velocities, electromagnetics, heat flow, and the like, the metric system is better and much less error prone. Could a similar system be created based on English units? Sure, and it was, but it never caught on much (mass in Slugs?).
And the meter isn’t based on nothing; it’s (very nearly) 40,000 meters around the equator of the Earth.
But I don’t look down on the use of inches or miles or pounds-mass for comparing or communicating — just for calculating.
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When I’m rule of thumbing something I use inches.
When I’m calculating spacecraft delta-V I use meters per second.
When I’m loading ammo I use grains.
When I’m designing an object to print I use milimeters.
The metric and imperial snobs are identical in one thing: they think their’s is the One True System, rather than accepting that you should have multiple systems for different uses.
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So, .45 or 9mm?
Don’t cross the streams! they shriek.
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.223 or 5.56 mm. Streams are crossed everywhere in guns.
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Ah, but that leads to such amusing things as journalists writing about a 357mm handgun! Fun on a bun!
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Yeah and don’t get started on the Navy “six inch gun” or the 20MM cannon in the Army. You just have to do what works! Now how about 7.62 and .30?? ;-)
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It comes down to who made the original guns that the newer ones are based off of. If it was a British design, it’s in inches or pounds. If it was based on a continental (usually French) design, it was in millimeters.
Thus the reason why the US Army has seen no contradiction in having both 155mm and 8 inch artillery guns at the same time.
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Ahem. That’s a warning topic, per the FAQ and BBQ. Like arguing DOS vs. Mac vs. Linux et al. The caliber wars were … ugly.
We now return you to your regular but unscheduled digression.
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All i have to say is i sure would like a chair custom-made to my measurements … at my size, comfortable chairs are few and far between.
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No kidding. I was trying on replacement chairs at a national-brand shop. The result was I don’t have a new chair. Short legs were NOT welcome. “Just add a lot of pillows,” is not the answer, either.
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You too? Not helped because hubby is almost a foot taller. Finding new furniture is not easy.
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I’ll just repeat the comment I made on Phantom’s blog:
Where the metric system does shine is in science, because of how easy it is to convert between units. Put one volt of potential across a circuit that will draw one amp, and you have one watt of power. Put one kilovolt of potential across that circuit, and you have one kilowatt. Redesign the circuit so that it draws half an amp, and you have half a kilowatt. And so on. The fact that nearly every unit is defined in terms of other units means you can do multi-unit calculations trivially.
In any kind of crafting work, however, you don’t need multi-unit calculations. There, you often want units that make sense to the human body. And furthermore, you often want to be dividing your units by some kind of fraction, which is why having 12 inches in the foot is brilliant. Base 12 is far superior to base 10 if you’re going to be dividing by 3 or 6, which comes up quite often in crafting.
Metric for science, imperial for daily life including practical crafting work. That’s the right way to use those two unit systems.
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Robin, this is far too sensible. How are you going to stick it to the French by being reasonable like that? ~:D
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See, we can get double
ourtheir money. Should Germany once again invade France, we let both of them have it: Germany has to keep France.LikeLiked by 1 person
The single most common operation is dividing something by 2. (finding the center, for example). SI units are ideal for that. You can have rulers that continue to divide in half down to the 64’ths and they can be dead-on accurate. Do that with Centimeters and you’ll need a ruler with divisions down to .001 mm, and that’s not even readable.
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I mention this above somewhere. The human eye/brain combo divides things in half automatically, and lines things up automatically too.
There is a hexagonal modified ghost ring gunsight that works on this principle called the Hexsite, a guy I know designed it. Amazing technology.
What this means for US, the humans out here doing things, is that we instinctively do half, quarter, eight, sixteenth. Our whole brain is wired for that.
We are -not- wired for Metric. For that you are stuck using a ruler, or more likely calipers. I do love my calipers, but they shouldn’t be a necessity.
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And this divide-in-two instinct connects to why it’s easier to find the socket that fits your unknown-sized bolt or nut in binary-fractions Imperial than decimal-millimeters metric.
“Try 3/4. No, too big.”
“Try 1/2, no, too small.”
“Try 5/8, no, still too small.”
“Try 11/16, ah, just right.”
In computer-world terms this is a “binary search algorithm” and it’s really efficient. What makes it work here is that the average size just halfway between two binary fractions is also always a binary fraction… though you’ll not likely have a 115/128 socket, it’s also quite unlikely you’ll ever need one. It is clearly one of the search values, though.
But the point is, many of us never needed to be told to do this… it’s so instinctive it’s just obvious. Especially in a system that openly and brazenly runs entirely on binary fractions.
The typical metric grab-bag of whole and half millimeter sizes? Not obvious, at best. At worst you’ll never hit on this trick at all, and you’ll spend several times as long on your search — for every last mystery nut and bolt you meet. For ever and aye.
“But metric is efficient! (It says here right on the ad copy.)”
Yeah, right.
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Incidentally, I’m seriously bummed that Hexsite went out of business. I wanted to buy (at least) one and try it out. Any chance he’s got any left?
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This is how I taught my daughter to use them.
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Except we really don’t use metric for science. We only pretend to.
If I am doing particle physics, I measure energy in electron-volts, not Joules. If I am doing P-chem, I’m also probably using electron-volts not Joules.
The normal unit of mass in chemistry is the Atomic Mass unit, or 1/12th the mass of a Carbon-12 atom. How much is that in Kilograms? Nobody cares. Unless the guy doing chemistry is a physicist, in which case he is probably using mass in Electron-Volts again, because yeah, I’d do that just to be a jerk.
In Astronomy we use light-years, not meters. How many meters is that? Nobody knows or cares. I’m going to go with LOTS of them. If you are doing planetary science you are measuring orbits in AU, not meters. Oh yeah, we measure stellar masses in Solar Mass Units, again, I have no clue how many Kilograms that is.
We use Kelvin for temperature, not Centigrade, or Celsius, or whatever they are calling it this week, because you actually need zero to be zero for math to work, but the units could be any arbitrary size since you are always multiplying against Boltzman’s constant, in which case the constant would just be a different number. So we could use Rankine (same scale as Fahrenheit) and call room temp 530 R instead of 300K. Although of course room temp as 25 mili-electron-volts is just as easy to remember.
E&M is metric simply because there are no traditional units. So they are all metric, and based on the Coulomb. This is simply dumb because a Coulomb is 6.24 E+18 electrons. Which is a perfectly reasonable number? Nope, completely arbitrary.
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Fundamentally, it doesn’t matter what a measuring system is based on. What matters is that everyone agrees that the standards are just that: standard. The meter was supposed to be 1/40,000,000 of the equatorial circumference of the Earth; the fact that the Earth is slightly larger than 40,000,000 meters in circumference doesn’t matter, so long as everyone agrees on the length of the meter. Standards come from all sorts of different sources, such as the diameter of a Blu-Ray disk having come about because of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony (though, sadly, the diameter of some of the Saturn 5’s components having been determined by the spacing of Roman chariot wheels, though seemingly logical, wasn’t really true, historically); the only thing they need to have is that everyone agrees to them.
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It does matter though. That’s the point of the research article. Human society, all over the world, all through history, have used inches, feet, yards, cubits, spans, hands, paces, handfulls, scoops (both hands), grains, what have you.
Rail gauge, the distance between the rails on a railway, was determined roughly by the horses that pulled the rail cars. Wide enough for the horse but not much more, due to expense. Four feet, give or take. Why not eight feet wide? Because the horse can’t pull it. Why not two feet wide? The horse trips on the rails.
Roughly 4 feet four inches began as the standard in the 1500s and stayed that way. Different gauges exist, but they’re all close to 4 feet. A foot either way. Horses decided rail gauge in the 1500s and chariot wheel spacing in Roman times. (There is a metric gauge, which of course falls in that range. It still fits the horse. Chosen not because a meter is a good size, but because bureaucrats like nice round numbers.)
That’s the real reason why a meter is fat yard. Humans need something about that size for railways, doors, wheels, boats, rafters etc. That’s how long our arms are. The Frenchies just made up all that crap about the Earth’s meridian for a sales job. Amazing the number of people who still fall for it.
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US Standard Gauge is 4′ 8.5′. That is quite a bit larger than 4′, or even 4′ 4″.
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Standard gauge was British before it was American. Most of the world uses it, although they call it 1435mm.
It’s the distance between the ruts worn into the stone in the old Roman roads in England, which was the typical width between wheels on their carts. My first guess was that the Romans set this to 5 Roman feet, but it’s a little less than this even by the shortest measurement we have of the Roman foot. They probably picked this width to approximately match the width of a pair of horses, so if your horses fit through, your wheels wouldn’t catch.
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the diameter of some of the Saturn 5’s components having been determined by the spacing of Roman chariot wheels, though seemingly logical, wasn’t really true
I’m going to pretend I didn’t read that or that I don’t believe you. I LOVE that story and I’m going to keep telling it!
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As the little girl said in the taco commercial, “Why not both?”.
For science metric, for human needs Imperial or as I like to say American Standard.
Each one works where it fits most. That’s why Americans do what we do, we can use what is best for both and just move on with our lives and not go crazy. The french were correct when they said Europe needed a common unit of measure. About the only thing they got right. But it really doesn’t work well with people. Science sure. Personally a vice grip doesn’t care if you’re supposed to be ten millimeter, you are moving.
Silliest thing I ever saw advertised at a tool store, a metric crescent wrench.
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Why are we all suddenly named [1]?
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Word Press Must Die!
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For convenience. :-D
“And now, meet the faculty. This is Bruce, Bruce, Bruce, Bruce, Bruce and Bruce. Er, what’s your name?”
“Nigel.”
“Well, we’ll just call you Bruce to avoid confusion.”
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Because WordPress shat itself. All blogs hosted by wordpress have done this. I’m not amused.
I’m a number, not a name. And I’m the same number as all of you!
I still see your names in the back panel, though.
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Names showing up in emailed comments too. Just here is where we are all [1].
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1 for all and all for 1, d!
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I swear this is the most broken thing I use anywhere. Every week a new -amazing- malfunction.
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Oh, so it’s not just me. I was starting to wonder if it was my browser.
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“I’m [1]!”
“I’m [1]!”
“I’m [1]!”
“We are all [1].”
“You are the [1].”
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1? Oh, let’s be Frank. (Old SF story; they all were Frank)
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By Brian W Aldiss.
I had to look it up, because I thought it was by Fredick Brown.
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That’s the one. It does sound sort of Brown-ish… :-)
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“they all were Frank”
Dr. Seuss: Too Many Daves
Did I ever tell you that Mrs. McCave
Had twenty-three sons and she named them all Dave?
Well, she did. And that wasn’t a smart thing to do.
You see, when she wants one and calls out, “Yoo-Hoo!
Come into the house, Dave!” she doesn’t get one.
All twenty-three Daves of hers come on the run!
This makes things quite difficult at the McCaves’
As you can imagine, with so many Daves.
And often she wishes that, when they were born,
She had named one of them Bodkin Van Horn
And one of them Hoos-Foos. And one of them Snimm.
And one of them Hot-Shot. And one Sunny Jim.
And one of them Shadrack. And one of them Blinkey.
And one of them Stuffy. And one of them Stinkey.
Another one Putt-Putt. Another one Moon Face.
Another one Marvin O’Gravel Balloon Face.
And one of them Ziggy. And one Soggy Muff.
One Buffalo Bill. And one Biffalo Buff.
And one of them Sneepy. And one Weepy Weed.
And one Paris Garters. And one Harris Tweed.
And one of them Sir Michael Carmichael Zutt
And one of them Oliver Boliver Butt
And one of them Zanzibar Buck-Buck McFate …
But she didn’t do it. And now it’s too late.
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“Did I ever tell you that Mrs. McCave
Had twenty-three sons and she named them all Dave?”
The version I remember:
“Mrs Sylvester McMonkey McBrave
Had 23 sons and she named them all Dave.”
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We might as well all be John. (Big-boo-TAY!)
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Say it with me “I am NUMBER ONE”
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Number Two had very bad luck dealing with Number Six (ie The Prisoner).
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And don’t let 7 near 9. that’ll get… messy.
~WyrdBard
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We’re number 1! We’re number 1!
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I am still after all these years trying to convert Metric into Pounds. I found an app for that so I can check what the item is costing me, mostly for veggies and fruit. The government keeps saying that is is better than Imperial, HA! Most grocery stores still put both measures on the price tags, and no one seems to care. My big hullabaloo is gas and how much it is in Canada versus U.S. That is why I need the app.
Ladyhawkmb
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It’s okay. I can’t actually function in either system, now. I can’t estimate length or height or anything at all. Has made for some funny Amazon orders.
The temperature, though? That’s Farenheit all the way now.
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Fahrenheit works for temperatures you’re likely to experience, but for cryogenic temperatures, the melting points of metals, or high-pressure steam equipment, I prefer to use °C.
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Comparisons are best done with absolute, whether Kelvin or Rankine. But I’m generally with you on this; even for lead casting (or actually, for anything under around 2000F) I use Fahrenheit.
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If you’re boiling food, or doing aqueous chemistry in the lab, 0 Celsius = the freezing point of water, and 100 = boiling. It’s perfect for the scientist or cook that never goes outdoors.
But Fahrenheit designed his scale for measuring temperate zone weather: 0 F and 100 F were near the lowest and highest temperatures he marked on his first thermometer over a year in Paris. For thermometer calibration, he needed reference points that were easily, accurately, and consistently reproducible in the lab: mixed snow and salt for 0, and a mix of chemicals for 100. Mark those points on the thermometer, use a dividing engine to put 99 marks in between and extend the markings out both ends by 30 steps, and you have a thermometer that will cover the weather nearly everywhere.
If you need to heat-treat steel or to work with liquid nitrogen, there’s nothing natural about the temperature ranges involved, so use whichever scale you please. Kelvin or Rankine have a true zero point determined by physics, so they work better for thermodynamics.
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I remember reading that about Fahrenheit’s work, and the reason he selected 0 and 100. I thought he did his work in Germany, but from a Wiki article…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit
“According to a German story, Fahrenheit actually chose the lowest air temperature measured in his hometown Danzig (Gdańsk, Poland) in winter 1708–09 as 0 °F…”
According to a Britannica article he was living in The Hague when he developed the thermometer scale, so ??? Probably somewhere in Europe, at any rate… :-)
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You know how you freeze ice cream for old style makers? The salt on chipped ice?
That’s the version I was taught in school– and the teacher demonstrated it, too.
Given the time involved, pretty accurate.
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Bob: I misremembered Fahrenheit as working in Paris, but he was a German from Danzig, and lived mainly in the Netherlands from when he was 15. (Danzig was a mostly German city on the Polish sea coast. It remained a German enclave in Poland after WWI. After WWII, many Germans fled and were replaced by Poles. The Poles pronounce the name differently and spell it Gdansk.)
He traveled a lot, so he may have been back in Gdansk when he marked the coldest night in 1708-9 on his thermometer. I’m a bit surprised that a seacoast city got that cold, but if the Baltic froze over completely, it would have no longer done much to warm the air.
Foxfier: I learned about freezing ice cream with ice and salt when I was pretty young. We visited some extreme Mennonite cousins, who had no electricity in the house, and they made homemade ice cream. I’m not sure where they got the ice – did they still harvest it from a pond in winter and keep it in a pit insulated by sawdust?
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My sister, middle school science teacher (retired), used to have a school year-end project, where the ice cream ingredients went into two separate freezer bags and sealed. those went into as second freezer bag with ice and salt, and sealed. Then pairs/groups would go out and toss the ice cream to be bags back and forth, until ice cream was made. The year she retired she retired well before end of the year (they offered) the students were not happy. She left the lesson behind (if not ingredients) the year-end sub/new-teacher did not follow through.
We got a manual ice cream maker as a wedding present in ’78. It used ice and salt around the ice cream ingredient container, and a crank that turned the container against the ice with salt. There are now electric ones. Same principle, but no manual labor. Either way what one does not want to do when done is dump the resulting melted ice out onto grass (water and salt will kill the grass where dumped, and takes a long time before concoction is washed out of the dirt so grass will grow there again. Note this is in western Oregon which gets a lot of rain. Dead grass ring there for a few years.
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Our Samsung 5 built in calculator app has a ruler that allows you to do the conversions. Used a lot on our Canadian trip.
d –
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If you’re going with ball park figures, then a meter Is the distance from the queens nose to hand, basically a tiny bit smaller then a yard.
But we converted to metric when I was a child and 50 years later I am still not quite 6ft tall not 1.78 meters and shrinking:), if I am going to estimate I think in feet for small distances and kilo’s for weight and driving.
But for all practical purposes that America was not successful in converting to metric matters at all.
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“The Metric System is the tool of the Devil!” -Grandpa Simpson
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I’m late to the party as usual, and everybody has covered almost everything I want to say, but I still have a few items to add.
It’s true that the meter was first supposed to be 1/10,000 of the distance of the meridian that goes through Paris from the north pole to the equator. They resorted to the actual platinum-iridium bars because they couldn’t consistently measure the intended definitional unit accurately. Science has since abandoned even that to define the length of a meter in terms of a certain multiple of the orange-red wavelength of krypton in a vacuum IIRC.
Part of the metric system’s value was to define all the units in terms of each other—a gram was supposed to be the weight of a cubic centimeter of water (source and density of the water not specified of course).
The other big plus of the metric system was that it corresponded to the accepted number system base (that would be base 10). Of course that correspondence would have been better achieved by changing the accepted number system to be base 12 instead of 10. You see, people tend to measure things in simple fractions rather than tenths. It’s very inconvenient that a third is .3333 (repeating forever). A base 12 system would only require 2 more number characters and would have the virtue that a fourth would be .3, a third would be .4 and a half would be .6 since 12 is evenly divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6 rather than just 2 and 5 for base 10. That change could have been implemented fairly easily in the time of the French Revolution.
BTW do you know why there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 360 degrees in a circle? It’s because the Babylonians used a number system of base 60 (actually 15 digits with a modifier of 1-4, but that’s being pedantic), and they were the first to try to accurately measure time and space. That brings us to Fahrenheit vs. Centigrade (or Celsius for those who want to deemphasize the systems metric roots). It seems logical to set the freezing point of water at 0 and the boiling point of water at 100 (leaving aside air pressure), right? But it seems more human to consider 100 degrees to be really hot and 32 degrees to be really cold, rather than 40 being really hot and 0 being really cold. Of course Fahrenheit keeps the significance of freezing and boiling points of water by making them 180 degrees apart.
It may be just that I’ve grown up with the imperial system that I find it much easier to picture the difference in height of 6 foot tall to 6 foot 4 inches tall rather than 1.83 meters to 1.93 meters. The fat end of the bell curve for human height seems to fall comfortably between 5 feet and 6 feet tall. To use whole numbers for the metric system, you would go from 1 meter (3 feet 4 inches tall) to 2 meters (6 feet 6 inches tall).
I’ll shut up now.
Frank (Hood)
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Random thoughts:
My favorite measurement is the speed of light at 1.8 terafurlongs/fortnight.
I got into an argument about the usefulness of 9-digits of precision, in which case my height is 1.2 picolightseconds. “pls” or “pels” would make an excellent measuring system for docking space craft; I loathe the switches from km to ls in science fiction.
I have always thought the Babylonian priests were six-fingered mutants (which is why they were priests looking at the sky, not working the fields like everyone else) who came up with the base-12 system of dozens, grosses, and myriads.
Radians make logical sense, but I’ve never been able to internalize them. Maybe because they’re too big? A full circle is just two of them. Are milliradians a thing?
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If you shoot distance, they are. Most of my scope reticles are in mils (short for milliradian). Though some are in MOA (minutes of angle). Becoming comfortable with mils took me practice, and more practice. MOA was easier, but I’m used to degrees, minutes, seconds of arc. OTOH, it’s easy to mistakenly think of MOA as something linear (on a target), when it’s really something angular.
RFMan
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I’m pretty sure millionaires are a thing.
I thought there were around six radians in a circle?
If the radius is r, than the diameter is 2pir. I thought the angle corresponding to a radius in distance being swept out was a radian?
That sort of feels right with my memories, but I’m not sure I ever really got radians down.
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1 radian is the angle subtended by a 1 inch long arc on a 1 inch radius circle. The full circle (360 degrees) is 2 pi radians, which makes it painful to calculate a fraction of a circle in radians. I can visualize an angle of, say, 143 degrees fairly easily – it’s more than 135 = 90+35 = 3/8 of a circle, and less than 150 = 120 + 30 = 1/3 +1/12 of a circle. But 2.49 radians – what’s that?
On the other hand, trigonometry functions work out very nicely in radians. The sine of a small angle is approximately equal to the angle in radians. I’m an electrical engineer. We represent alternating current circuits in complex numbers all the time, using a mathematical trick connecting the exponential function of imaginary numbers and the trig functions – but the angle needs to be in radians. That means a whole lot of formula where the “angular rate” is in radians per second instead of using the frequency in Hz (cycles per second), so we’re continually dividing and multiplying by 2 pi.
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This really isn’t at all difficult:
Q: What is the single largest, longest-duration, most urgent R&D and manufacturing/distribution event in world history?
A: WW2
100% of the victors used English (yes, all the stuff we sent to Russia was English)
100% of the vanquished used metric
Oh – and a kg is a unit of mass, not of weight; a pound is a measure of acceleration, not of mass.
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I use both systems as needed. Imperial is my “mother” measurement system. Metric is for science.
And I use TEU’s for work. That stands for “twenty-foot equivalent unit”, AKA one unit of a version 1.0 container. This is a neat unit that combines volume, mass, time, and money – our rates being posted publicly every day (hell, updated every minute sometimes).
I will give metric one outstanding thing: 1 cubic meter of fresh water = 1 metric ton (or tonne) which is great for calculations about big ships. But the Imperial system always did have the “a pint’s a pound the world around”, thus keeping the distinction between US Pounds and UK Pounds.
Hell, even the UK Pound once equated weight to money. 1 Pound of pure silver was one pound (£) of money, split into 12*20 = 240d (denarius, AKA silver pennies, AKA those damn Romans again). Allow the mint to add some copper to turn fine silver into bullion silver (92.5% silver [thank you King Edward I of England]) and keep the difference to cover the minting costs and have better coins – fine silver (99+%) wear out to quickly.
I’m full of useless facts, some even true.
–Matthew Iskra
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UK pounds (weight, not currency) are the same as US pounds. The ounces are almost the same, with one liquid ounce of water (specified purity and temperature) being about 1 ounce weight. But they have 20 ounce pints instead of 16, and I think bigger quarts and gallons. So beware: if you’re measuring weight or length, US units are Imperial units, but if you’re measuring liquid volume, they’re different.
In one chapter of the book 1984, Winston Smith is hanging out in a prole (lower class) pubs, and an old prole is ranting about metrication. He wants a pint of beer, not a half-litre. That’s too small and the full litre is too big. That puzzled me because in the pantry there were 1/2 liter bottles of soda, and they were 16.7 ounces, a tiny sip more than a pint. But eventually I learned about the British pint. A half liter is about 3 ounces less than the British pint, and that’s a difference you’ll notice.
I suppose British pubs still sell 20 ounce (1.25 litre?) pints of beer, because their government hasn’t yet gone totalitarian in all aspects. Or is simply smart enough to know that if they don’t eff with the beer, “football”, and rugby, they don’t have to worry about any revolution gaining massive popular support.
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I confine my metric-ism to medications, ammunition, and skis, with the occasional nod to imported foodstuffs (Mexican chocolate, anyone?). Otherwise, give ’em an inch, they’ll take a mile. And leave the meter running.
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We must thank God that the French scientists did not reform Music.
Image a “musical” system defined not by the conductor’s choice of tempo via the composer’s rhetorical instruction (legato, allegro, etc.) but defined as a metric standard. The metric whole note is 1 second, and instead of half or quarter or hemidemisemiquaver notes the beats would be decimalized by tenths of one second…
Worse! Define the standard metric tone as 1000 Hz, and all the scale are tenths of that tone, so the lowest note is set at the barely audible 100 Hz (1 decitone) and the scale rises to 200, 300, 400, etc Hz up to 1000, (one Tone) then on to 1100, 1200 etc… Hz. (Up to 10 kHz, or one dekaTone) again barely audible dog whistle territory. )
One might program a computer to score such “music” but I doubt an audience would sit still to listen to it.
(I note, so to speak, that those without a music theory background who don’t understand how beats and tones are now based on multiples of powers of 2 won’t understand why decimal “music” is so awful.)
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Just started reading a book that seems to be exactly on this theme. “Beyond Measure”, by James Vincent. It is about “The hidden history of measurement from cubits to quantum Constants.” Will let you know if it is any good.
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