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El Reg reports
20,000 [...] bees were found in the exhaust nozzle of an F-22 Raptor engine following flight operations at Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia, on June 11, 2016.
Rather than kill the bees--America is badly affected by hive collapse, the base decided to call on a beekeeper to take them away.
Andy Westrich, US Navy retiree, was the apiarist known to the on-base entomologist (the Air Force keeps insect experts on its bases, apparently). Westrich used vacuum hoses to trap the bees, and he calculated the swarm size from the weight of the captured bees--eight pounds, or in modern numbers, 3.6 kilos.
From the USAF release: "Westrich suspected that the swarm of bees were on their way to a new location to build a hive for their queen. [...] Westrich believes she landed on the F-22 to rest. Honey bees do not leave the queen, so they swarmed around the F-22 and eventually landed there."
wordlessTech has a good photo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 16 2016, @03:19PM
This time XKCD proves useful. [xkcd.com] With some alterations:
-30°C = Cold day (Minnesota) = -22°F
-20°C = Cold day (Michigan) = -4°F
-10°C = Cold day (Moscow???? never been myself) = 14°F
0°C = Snow! = 32°F
10°C = Jacket weather = 50°F
20°C = Room temperature = 68°F
25°C = Warm room = 77°F
30°C = Beach weather = 86°F
etc
I really see no compelling reason for either scale for temperature. "But 0-100 are 'normal' temperatures!" Not good enough. I kind of prefer metric for temperature for the exact reason that there are fewer numbers between freezing my ass off and in danger of frostbite vs. sweating like a pig and in danger of dehydration. I don't really care to know whether I'm sweating like a pig because it's 91°F or 92°F. I'm still equally uncomfortable.
Now, inches/feet/yards is where imperial really shines. Not because "those are 'natural' lengths!" A foot being 12 inches and a yard being 3 feet makes for a lot of easy mental math.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Tuesday August 16 2016, @04:05PM
And you don't see why some of us think it's useful to use a degree that marks the smallest difference we notice?
Your list isn't too bad but you need to add the outliers so you really get the feel for where they are calibrated.
-40 -40 artic cold - human life impossible without material aid/technology
-17.7778 0 water freezes - dang cold
37.7778 100 very hot, getting close to the point where again life would cease without material aid
100 212 water boils. human life has long since become impossible again.
so ok, '40' does actually get used but it's quite rare to go past that. Why do we need to reserve nearly 60 perfectly good degrees for temperatures that are rarely if ever encountered?
Again, centigrade makes perfect sense in other contexts, it just makes less sense in the case which most people use most often.
"Now, inches/feet/yards is where imperial really shines. Not because "those are 'natural' lengths!" A foot being 12 inches and a yard being 3 feet makes for a lot of easy mental math."
Oh, it's *partly* because they are somewhat natural lengths, but as I already pointed out in the end they are all arbitrary. Still, you'll notice that a yard and a meter are quite close to each other - it's a length that seems naturally useful in many contexts.
But yes, the true brilliance of the older system (I refuse to call it 'Imperial' as that falsely implies that the French Imperial system is not) is in the divisors. Unfortunately at some point last century they decided fractions were somehow too hard for people to learn anymore, which in turn seems to have resulted in many people being truly incapable of understanding it.
Anyone that understands basic fractional arithmetic, the kind that we used to master in the first years of school, doesn't need much explanation to understand that there are very good reasons to choose base 12 over base 10.
And of course all of our clocks still use a sexigesimal system, decimal time would be a huge PITA.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday August 16 2016, @04:34PM
There's something wrong with your table: Water freezes at zero degrees Celsius, not at zero degrees Fahrenheit.
Also: normal body temperature: 37 °C, 98.6 °F. Clearly the Celsius temperature wins here.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Tuesday August 16 2016, @06:24PM
As someone that's lived most of his life in temperate climates, 32 isn't really all that cold. You still have plenty of liquid water at that temperature, it's just brisk, nice weather for a run.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 1) by Arik on Tuesday August 16 2016, @06:26PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Absolutely.Geek on Wednesday August 17 2016, @01:42AM
The true beauty of metric is that there really are no fractions required; just change your scale. Is the meter too big for what you want, don't bother trying to get 1/32 meters; just change to mm and suddenly you have plenty of granularity; still too big; try um or nm. 1/32m = 31.25 mm; 31,250 um.
I realise that there are imperial units that are thousandths of an inch which has the same effect; but mostly I come across fractional inches, mostly when having to use imperial wrenches/nuts/bolts.
Don't trust the police or the government - Shihad: My mind's sedate.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Wednesday August 17 2016, @02:00AM
And the beauty of our traditional metric system is that fractions are actually a lot easier than changing your scale ;)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Absolutely.Geek on Wednesday August 17 2016, @02:37AM
I grew up using the metric system; changing scale is so simple that it requires almost no thought. So "easier" is a big stretch; I am good at maths, really good my grasp of fractions etc is easily good enough; I really can't see how the positive and negative powers of 10 can be considered more difficult then using the negative powers of 2 and parts thereof.
Don't trust the police or the government - Shihad: My mind's sedate.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday August 17 2016, @12:35PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Absolutely.Geek on Wednesday August 17 2016, @11:22PM
I'm not really sure what you are getting at here; the number systems developed by humans are based on the number of digits on your hands (10). But how is that relevant to the comparison between metric and imperial?
My dad and brother are both builders and guess what they have tape measures; these are graduated in mm this is the level of accuracy required to build a house +- 2mm is what builders in NZ work to. I don't know any reputable builders that 'eyeball' things when a measurement is required.
Where would having the accuracy of 1/3 of an inch (8.466666mm) be preferable to 8.5mm? Also with the advent of relatively cheap digital callipers I can measure to +- 10um accuracy when required at home.
If we are taking 1/3 of a foot or 4 inches that is 101.6mm; that is close enough to 102mm that in daily life you are not going to notice the difference; and if you need the kind of accuracy where 0.4mm is important you are probably going to have equipment that will give you the required granularity of measurement.
Arguing that the imperial system is inherently better is kind of silly since all the countries in the world are either using or transitioning to metric except the USA and Myanmar / Burma. Usually I disagree with the saying "x number of people can't be wrong" they can and often are; but in this case 7 billion people are on the right side of the argument here.
Due to a recent vote the moon is now considered metric. Basing the argument only on length is also completely ignoring all of the other useful properties of the metric system. i.e. 1Joule is 1 Watt for 1 second; 1 Pascal is 1 Newton applied over 1 square meter; 1NM is 1 Newton applied at 1 meter. Plus many more; these simple units lead to very useful unit conversions when doing more advanced things; especially in a lab.
Don't trust the police or the government - Shihad: My mind's sedate.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday August 18 2016, @12:44AM
No. Just no. :bashes head into desk repeatedly:
Sorry, I am sure you are just a victim of the education system, but WOW.
No the decimal system is base 10, which is often taught by analogy to the digits of two hands. However that is far from the only number system around, and you can fingercount in many different bases, not just decimal. For instance you can fingercount in binary from 0 to 1023 using the same 10 digits. And people that have feet as well as hands might argue that base 20 just makes more sense for them.
Where this is relevant to the distinction between the different metric systems is that one very rigidly relates all measures to each other using factors of 10 exclusively, while the traditional ones tended to use a lot of 2s and 3s and numbers built from them, you can make all the other numbers from 2 and 3 using fractional math. You make a fractional stick based on a french measure, perhaps marking centimetres off in 8ths or 12ths instead of 10ths, but that would be awkward, it would only work at a frozen scale, etc. You can make a decimal stick based on traditional measures as well, for instance a ruler with the inches marked off in 10ths rather than 12ths, but what would you do with that?
"My dad and brother are both builders and guess what they have tape measures; these are graduated in mm this is the level of accuracy required to build a house +- 2mm is what builders in NZ work to. I don't know any reputable builders that 'eyeball' things when a measurement is required."
Definitely not, you're completely misunderstanding what I am talking about though. You are talking about accuracy of measurement. Of course that's entirely a factor of the accuracy of the instruments used, assuming it's done correctly. And if you're building from metric plans you better be measuring with metric tools! I'm talking about the accuracy of the *calculations*. If I have a room 12 $measures (whatever measures, whichever units, doesn't matter) square which I want to divide into 9 equally sized rooms I can calculate where to put the internal walls precisely, in my head, at a glance. If it's a 10 I cannot, and in fact I'll wind up having to approximate it. I could do it close enough it wouldn't matter, of course, but you can see how the calculation phase is much much easier if you can pick the right numbers to work with.
"Arguing that the imperial system is inherently better is kind of silly since all the countries in the world are either using or transitioning to metric except the USA and Myanmar / Burma. "
Have you ever heard the word 'fallacy?'
I'm not arguing that it's "inherently better" I've been arguing that each has strong and weak points and it's wrong to say either one is inferior across the board. So that's a straw man. And the rest of the sentence constitutes a misguided ad populum that fails even if you ignore the fallacy of the argument itself, on its own terms, since the vast majority of the people using your french imperial system did not freely choose it but had it imposed by force!
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Absolutely.Geek on Thursday August 18 2016, @01:44AM
So you are trying to argue that the world settled on base 10 out of chance?
I can also come up with an example that doesn't fit easily into your nice 12 into 9 problem set; how about 12 in 7; that is no easier then 10 into 7; or 12 into 5 which is much easier in base 10. Yay dividing some numbers by some other numbers will often result in decimal places.
Yes I have head the word fallacy; I wonder if you have heard of the word irony. Since you are arguing that the imperial system is inherently better for "day to day" measurements; which it just isn't.
Don't trust the police or the government - Shihad: My mind's sedate.