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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: 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.