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posted by takyon on Saturday June 06 2015, @02:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the 2016-lbs-in-a-ton dept.

The most recent candidate under the DNC banner is Lincoln Chafee who interestingly, besides being the lone Republican (he switched parties) to vote against the Iraq war, is vehemently pro-metric system. I remember when I was a kid, the freeway signs for distance and speed were printed in both English and metric. Converting all those signs from miles to km (again) would cost money, but then, using the English measurement system costs money too, forever -- according to a random guy I googled up without putting any real effort into it because I'm not that interested in proving myself wrong (Paul Naughtin), somewhere between six billion and a trillion. There are without a doubt, critics who might call that somewhat of a wide margin but as one witty commenter noted: "It is probably impossible to give an upper bound on that, however I can give you a lower bound: 500 Million Dollars for the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter by NASA".

Now, I'm neither a firm GOP nor DNC voter... but I'm tempted.

takyon: Former Governor of Rhode Island Lincoln Chafee joins a number of other candidates seeking a 2016 U.S. presidential nomination.


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  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday June 07 2015, @01:12AM

    by frojack (1554) on Sunday June 07 2015, @01:12AM (#193070) Journal

    Actually, I believe those two are tied together somehow with navigation. Seconds, and degrees.

    A second may be a second but only in the same way that a yard is a yard.
    A second is a duration of time, and that period we choose to use is purely arbitrary, just as is the yard and the meter.

    In later times we started using atomic clocks to specify a second in terms of so many vibrations of an atom or something, but still
    the duration we chose to split time up into are purely arbitrary. Even days and years are relativistic and imprecise.

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