https://markatwood.substack.com/p/the-metric-system-encodes-18th-century
Part one of this series argued that traditional units are good for daily life: human-scaled, body-derived, requiring no equipment. The metric system, I said, is for science.
I was being generous.
The metric system isn't a rational system derived from nature. It's a fossil record of what a late-18th-century laboratory could measure. Every "fundamental" SI unit encodes the instrumentation limits of the Enlightenment, wrapped in a story about universality and reason.
We covered this in part one [see below for link], but it bears repeating. The meter was defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator along a meridian passing through Paris. This required a years-long surveying expedition that produced a measurement nobody else could verify.
The competing proposal was the seconds pendulum: a pendulum whose half-period is exactly one second, whose length anyone with a clock and a string could reproduce. They rejected it. The meridian definition was grander, more French, and completely impractical.
The original survey was wrong. The meter we use today isn't one ten-millionth of anything. It's defined as the distance light travels in 1/299,792,458 of a second, a number chosen specifically to match the historical platinum bar as closely as possible. The "rational" definition is a retrofitted rationalization of a measurement error from 1799. [...]
Note, the "part 1" referenced above is here: In Defense of Traditional Units.
(Score: 5, Funny) by FunkyLich on Saturday August 01, @07:13PM (26 children)
Can't wait to go back to inches, feet, yards, miles, ounces, BTUs, horse-power and what else have you. Get rid of the metric system already, the abomination that's not human scaled and body derived.
(That was sarcasm, by the way)
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Saturday August 01, @08:44PM (21 children)
I realize you're kidding, but having lived for long periods with both systems, I struggled to identify any situation that isn't science or medicine where the SI/Metric system was more useful. In the best case was that it was no worse, and that was for things like calculating how long it would take me to go between cities where it was equally easy both ways. Any time where it wasn't equally easy the SI/Metric measures were demonstrably worse. It turns out that by choosing stupid things to define your system around and fetishizing the base 10 exponential scale that you make something that's annoying and unwieldy. The sorts of calculations that the metric measures use are just not ones that people normally do outside of science.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 01, @10:06PM (2 children)
Try calculations with temperature. Especially chemistry.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02, @12:13AM (1 child)
Fahrenheit [korman-science.com] is still the best
(Score: 1) by anubi on Sunday August 02, @10:10AM
For you, it's Degrees Rankine, not Kelvin .
The equations still work if you convert the units of measurement.
Seems I remember Rankine being used in some early refrigeration calculations. Imperial Units.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 5, Informative) by FunkyLich on Saturday August 01, @10:20PM (11 children)
That's only you. Many others - including me - find it a lot easier to have to calculate in simple multiples of tens. Converting millimeters to centimeters to meters to kilometers. When a liter of volume is a cube of 10cm side length. When a kilogram is the mass of that cube filled with water. When wondering how many litres of paint to buy when I need to paint a wall of 400 square meters of surface and one liter can paint 5 square meters. When one Watt of power is the strain to pull a mass of 1 kg for 1 second and have to move it 1 meter away from where it was at an acceleration of 1m/s^2.
Having the ability to do such quick calculations mentally and without a calculator, adding zeroes and multiplying by small numbers to get rough estimates, to have a 'visual' of what the unit means in the mind model, is very handy and powerful, at least for me. Knowing that a car engine is 75kW powerful makes me aware that it is the same power equivalent of 75 stove hot plates each of 1000W, or half of that number of 2000W vacuum cleaners. Knowing that a typical room air condition unit is about 1000W falls also very neatly to the scheme and making me aware of the power (aka also energy) used. It's definitely more telling than dealing with horsepower and BTUs. It gives a very clear notion of scale.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02, @10:14AM
Nitpick time...
Energy is a quantity...like so many Joules.
Power is a rate... Joules/second, watts, HP.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02, @01:27PM (2 children)
Whilst I get your point, and being of a certain age having been exposed to both systems (and even CGS for my sins) I'm fairly 'agnostic' when it comes to SI and Imperial units and will happily use either¹ measurement system, sometimes both at the same time in the same job, your example is one where horsepower makes more sense.
There's nothing wrong with using kW to record the power output for technical purposes, but the mental picture alone of your car, static, hitched to a team of 75 'toasty' stove hotplates vs that of it being pulled along by a team of 101 horses should be enough to prove which is the most apposite and 'human relatable' metric for a car engine power output rating.
Horse(power)s for courses, if you will...
--
¹ Exception being temperature, then it's Centigrade or Kelvin only.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FunkyLich on Sunday August 02, @02:54PM
I don't need to visualize the how many stove hotplates need to be chained together to become a car engine. While surely it might be useful in some scenarios, it's a lot more useful and quick to evaluate the equivalency of power against a unified unit (the Watt in this case) because it is immediately equivalent to the energy consumption (multiply that by the time applied) of all these otherwise unrelated to each other objects. There is where we get the Watt hour energy unit. I don't find the "100 hundred horses" powerful any more meaningful than "75kW powerful" as in the end it is a number. But the later can be very easily converted to monetary cost by multiplying it with the time and then with price (to get WattHours and then cost with money per WattHour). And this mental formula is only one and involves the same exact conversion constants for a locomotive, a car engine, an AC unit, a stove, a refrigerator, or a mobile phone. You can see how easy it becomes to now not only picture a hundred horses pull a cart being equal to 75 hot plates, but also 187 of 400W type fridges, or 7500 mobile phones. Fitting the horses in this scheme is admittedly one multiplication away (by 1.3) but to be fully honest, in my modern life I have to deal daily with the other quantities discussed here than with needing to know of horses pulling heavy objects (which definitely were a more common thing 3+ centuries ago).
So again, remembering arbitrary numbers, is in both cases the same. I already know that the full length covered by my own open palm is 24-25cm, the height of my ceiling is almost 3m from the ground, the height of my door seems to be some standard 2.2m high, and so on. If you're willing to average the power of a young race steed to that of one in its last days of old age, I don't see why I can't average a meter being 4 times the length of my palm. So these numbers I can grant you are as arbitrary as memorizing how many inches are in a foot, how many feet are in a yard and/or in a mile (nautical or terrestrial?), how many BTUs per second are in a horsepower.... but while these cancel each other out on the scale of convenience to memorize, converting between them and deriving useful results with the least mental effort in whatever situation that might arise, is definitely, undeniably, on the metric units advantage.
(Score: 3, Informative) by pe1rxq on Sunday August 02, @10:47PM
Human relatable? Do you actually know what a horsepower is supposed to relate to?
Here are just a few lines from the wikipedia entry:
The rest of the article is just a long list of different types of horsepower going all over the scale.
If you think it 'relates' to actual horses in any usefull way you are WRONG.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by aafcac on Sunday August 02, @05:05PM (5 children)
No, it's more or less everybody, there's a ton of rationalization built into your answer. You're not going to convert from millimeters to kilometers like ever. The equipment that can handle both ends of the scale is extremely expensive and rarely needed. At most you might go from millimeters to centimeters or centimeters to meters, but you're highly unlikely to ever legitimately have a reason to go from meters to kilometers. You'd know ahead of time which one was likely to be appropriate to the task. Just select the right unit and the thing that you think is an advantage goes away. To make matters worse, that fetishization of the base 10 units means that you almost never have a unit that's the correct size for what you're doing, you're just so used to having to kludge it out that you don't notice. Neither 180cm nor 1.8m are particularly good numbers for a height. 5'10" isn't bad nor is 5.84'. They're perfectly sensible units for the job of measuring people's heights and give you plenty to work with.
And no, the metric system is not better for doing quick calculations without a calculator unless all you're doing is converting between the units, try dividing things into pieces, it's far, far easier with US Customary units and far more likely to come up in real life.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by FunkyLich on Sunday August 02, @06:46PM
Everybody? On planet Earth, if we want to speak of "everybody", that is more true for those who use the metric system than those who don't... who basically are 350 million (350 * 10^6, or correct to say even though unusual, 350 mega) people in US, while the total population of planet Earth is around 8.4 giga people. So be more respectful to the word "everybody".
You seem not aware that millimeters and kilometers and meters are the same number with a 10 power in there. It's in the very name of it. I don't *need* to convert anything as it all is already there in the name: 5 m. Then 5 mm = 5 * 10^-3 m (the word milli already has done the conversion). Then 5 km = 5 * 10^3 (again the word kilo- has done the conversion already). 5 km are 5 * 10^6 mm (twice the ^3). Your notion for needing to convert these is not existent for me, as for you it might not make sense to measure the distance from Paris to London in inches, but for me it is the same number (345) and if I want it in meters it is a multiplier of 10^3, if I want it in km it is that number itself, if I want it in mm it is 10^6. If I want it in Gm (gigameters, the same giga- as in gigabytes) it is with a multiplier of 10^-6. There is no conversion, it is the same thing, just the common sense really of which unit to apply to a number, provided there is common sense enough in a person to realize that when when one says 345 for that distance Paris-London it is kilometers rather than millimeters.
Why you consider 5'10" or 5.84' a better number (what does that even mean?) than 1.8m or 180cm is purely subjective. As I said, instead of remembering two numbers I only have to remember one, because again, there is no conversion. The unit is that and the same, the conversion is already there in the name itself. All I remember is the number "18" and then common sense fills in automatically the unit based on context and the desired unit by simply adding a zero or placing a decimal symbol where it belongs. I am sure that a person's height of 180mm makes little sense, even to you.
If you're afraid of numbers based on 10 or 100, that's a different story. But in my everyday real life I am perfectly fine to deal with volumes that descibe a litre or half a litre, or a water jug of 1.5 litres, or a speed limit of 40km/h in the city or 110km/h on the highways, or road signs that warn "roundabout 300m ahead".
Bottom line to remember: there is no need to convert much within the same property (mass to mass, or length to length) in the metric system. The conversion is inherently there in the very name of the property itself. All you need to do is simply move decimal points to and fro, and that's it.
(Score: 1) by Arthur T Knackerbracket on Sunday August 02, @07:27PM (3 children)
A height of 5'10" is 1778mm. What is difficult about that? It has the same accuracy as your imperial measurement. My identity card has 179.6cm, which of course is 1796mm. We use such measurements all the time. Metal is often specified in mm, as is wood for carpentry. Tubing for plumbing comes in 2000mm x 50mm (length x diameter). Notice it is 2 metres long. Easy to work with and to calculate how much you need for a job. Over 5000mm is usually specified in cm, or even metres. The conversion is trivial.
Apologies for the username - I am doing 2 jobs at once at the moment.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Monday August 03, @01:12AM (2 children)
It's less that it's difficult and more that all the available measures are just stupid. Either they're too large and require decimals or they're too small and require a ton of them. There's really no legitimate reason why there isn't a decent measure in the middle because decimeters aren't any better. Going from roughly 4 inches up to roughly 36 is an unnecessarily large jump when the previous one was roughly 2/5 of an inch up to about 4.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03, @12:56PM
OK, I can understand that.
It reminds me of the joke about there being too many standards, so let's invent a new one to replace them all. Then there are too many standards + 1.
Here in Europe we have no problem with the system that is currently in use. Much of the world, but not all, agrees with us.
Stick with whatever you have and suits you best.
(Score: 3, Touché) by pe1rxq on Monday August 03, @01:12PM
Don't you mean from 4 inches up to roughly 3 feet?
Can you at least be consistent when trying to promote your crappy imperial system to the rest of the world?
Sentences like 'roughly 2/5 of an inch up to about 4' are really funny though.... I just hope you were not having a stroke when writing it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04, @01:17AM
Its not only them. I like feet (kek), mm but not CM. C for certain temps, F for outside. G/MG but not KG. Liters/mm for mixing but gallons for gasoline.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday August 02, @04:46PM (5 children)
Metric's only advantage is that it's all base ten, making conversion from millimeters to megagigometers easy. It is indeed superior for science and engineering, and additionally almost universal. How big is a cubit? A Furlong?
When it comes to human comfort, Fahrenheit is far superior to celsius. Centigrade degrees are three times the size.
When it comes to cooking, metric is also inferior, as recipes have been based on fractions rather than decimals for centuries. Changing a recipe for ten to a recipe for three is far harder in metric.
A late friend told me his grandmother used eggshells for measurement when she cooked, which seems to me the most accurate measure for cooking.
But the whole argument is silly, as rough conversion is a piece of cake. A centimeter is about half an inch, a meter is a few inches longer than a yard. A kilometer is a little over half mile (exactly .6 mile). A liter is a little more than a quart. And you're going to use a measuring device, anyway.
The Stupid-Ass Voter Evisceration act: SAVE Trump and his family from prison
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Sunday August 02, @05:23PM (3 children)
TBH, the thing that gets on my nerves about this more than anything is that there's really no good reason why we need one measuring system to rule them all. The whole SI system does seem to be legitimately better for science than really any other system of measure that I'm aware of. But, it isn't convenient for the things that normal people do because of the exponential nature of the scale and that the things that it uses as bases don't really make any sense. It's not even like you can't use decimals with US Customary measures. People do that all the time when they don't care if it lines up with the measures perfectly. It's not like I'll be thrown in jail for saying that I'm 5.83' tall.
I think that if people really realized just how the system came to be defined, they'd probably stop complaining about Imperial and US Customary measures being arbitrary, because if anything, the SI ones are worse.
(Score: 2) by pe1rxq on Tuesday August 04, @07:45AM (2 children)
If you guys actually did say 5.83' you might have a point. But for some reason you like divisions so much you don't even notice how weird your measurements sound to the rest of the world. The only reason imperial makes more sense to you is because you were indoctrinated with it from birth.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday August 07, @10:32PM (1 child)
That's the point. You NEVER have 1.5 inches, you have 1 1/2 inch. Not .5 quart, it's a pint.
Metric is based on decimals, imperial is based on fractions.
The Stupid-Ass Voter Evisceration act: SAVE Trump and his family from prison
(Score: 2) by owl on Wednesday August 12, @05:17PM
Well, no... In the machinist trades, where one is creating things with lathes (or in more modern machines, a CNC machine) the measurements are often based on 1/1000th of an inch. So a machinist would say 1.500 inch (1 and 500 thou) rather than 1 1/2 inch. Yes, they almost always add the extra zeros just so it is clear that it is 500 thou that is meant.
So decimals are used for Imperial measurements, it is just used in fields that the vast majority of folks are not familiar with and so they don't realize decimals are used there for Imperial measurements.
Now, granted, with modern CNC machines (and CNC lathes) the controlling computer system likely accepts both units and produces the expected size part to the expected tolerance whether it is told 1.000 inch or 2.54cm or 25.4mm.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 03, @01:03PM
How big is a 'cup' of something? When it says 'add a clove of garlic', how big a clove did the recipe mean? When I have to add 2 x tbsp of something, which of my tablespoons should I use?
:)
(Score: 4, Touché) by Thexalon on Saturday August 01, @09:42PM (2 children)
Imperial units make just as much sense as metric units ... if you have 12 fingers.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 3, Funny) by FunkyLich on Saturday August 01, @11:10PM
Use the toes, Luke.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aafcac on Sunday August 02, @05:10PM
I've got 12 bones in my fingers. Which is where all this base 12 stuff for math came from in the first place. Each hand's fingers have 3 bones and you've got 4 of those. The thumbs can then be used to help increase that by even more or point at the joint you're currently on. If the SI system had been based around the more sensible base 12 system I'd probably not being saying most of the bad things about it that I say.
But, if you need really high numbers, you can do binary on your fingers, but quite honestly, the math on that can get rather complicated if you're not used to it.
Honestly, do they teach people nothing in Metric-land?
And BTW, either way, they still make more sense than metric measures for the things normal people use measuring for.
(Score: 2) by jb on Sunday August 02, @07:17AM
Absolutely. Just so long as they're proper imperial units, not the silly short-changed US units which leave you still thirsty when you order a pint and end up with 4oz less than you expected, or leave you stranded when you think you've bought 44gal of fuel but those last 9gal just aren't there...
Oh, and don't forget stones, chains, rods, furlongs, fathoms, hands, etc. etc. Each and every one of them corresponds to something the average person can call to mind with little to no effort.
Metric units tend to work better for very large or very small quantities, simply because at those extremes the everyday comparisons break down (e.g. it makes little sense to measure the power of a rocket in horsepower, since no matter how many horses you have, they'll never be able to pull your cart to the Moon), so if you have no near-scale real-world units to benefit from, you may has well have the simplicity of just shuffling the decimal point around. But for everyday things, everyday units have always made much more sense.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Saturday August 01, @07:20PM (10 children)
You can play retro games with the metric system to make it fit human body parts.
My pinkie fingernail is about one cm across. About as accurate as 1 foot is as long as my foot.
Your average fingernail is about a third of a mm. If clean-ish. You can go pretty far in life making a spark gap two fingernail thicknesses in a small engine if you have the misfortune of a spec in mm instead of inches. Unsurprisingly two fingernail thicknesses also works in most engines if the spark gap is spec'd in inches LOL.
If you're a dude you can wrap a piece of wire around your wrist and for most dudes its about six cm around. This is low precision "men's wrists are a bit more than half of ten centimeters around" So if the instructions read something like cut off roughly 15 cm of magnet wire to wrap around a ferrite core exactly X times you can get away pretty well with wrapping it about three times around your wrist as a first approximation. You'll waste some but not that much. You can also do this estimation with vacuum hose, fuel hose, etc. Probably depends on body hair LOL.
Another human measure is a 11mm socket is a tight fit on my pinkie finger so it doesn't really fit but almost fits must be a 10mm socket and its a hotdog thrown down a hallway (slight exaggeration) must be a 12mm or larger socket. Your individual situation may vary.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday August 01, @07:23PM
This is of the genre of you can cut it twice if its too long but you can't do the "I cut it twice and its STILL too short". So yeah you need 30 cm of vacuum hose according to the book well wrap it around your wrist about 6 times and trim to fit, that'll be plenty.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Saturday August 01, @08:37PM (6 children)
The thing is that you can do that with basically any unit of measure you can come up with. The issue is that Imperial and US Customary measures are more intended as approximations for human body parts and things humans do on a daily basis. Whereas the SI and metric units are allegedly intended for science, but they predate a lot of the more modern understanding of things and the ability to accurately measure them as well. Plus, they're based on an exponential system to make the conversion between units easier, even though there's rarely a reason to actually do so in daily living. If I'm measuring something in miles, there's rarely a level of precision that would allow me to worry about inches. But, by having 12 inches to the foot, 3 feet to the yard and 1760 yards in a mile, you get a pretty decent array of measurements that likely include something convenient for what you're doing.
SI and metric get even worse if we ever manage to get off the Earth and onto another planet where the physical properties change how those things are actually measured and have to have a second kilogram to use as a standard that might not change the same way that the one here does.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FunkyLich on Saturday August 01, @10:35PM
One kilogram is exactly one kilogram everywhere in the universe. If you think that on the Moon one kilogram of mass is different from one kilogram of mass on Earth, you're wrong. A kilogram is a measure of mass, not weight. Weight is a force, not mass.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Bentonite on Sunday August 02, @10:27AM (4 children)
Not true - it's some braindead arbitrary retarded rollercoaster, kept around solely because of tradition and for some reason there is an incredible level of delusion that somehow units that do not scale and that aren't initiative, are useful.
Every country but the US's countries, uses SI units, but every other country is wrong and the US is right huh?
They were designed to be usable units, that use logic and reasonable scales, specifically designed to be good for practical use and as a consequence are directly usable for science and won't crash your spacecraft (most scientists use Celsius for example).
For fancy science stuff, derived units like Kelvin are used instead.
If I'm measuring something in km, I demand the freedom to also measure down to the metre, cm and mm, just by moving a few 0's.
Every inaccuracy you add, the worse your measurement gets.
That is confusing as hell and makes no logical sense - needing to remember 1760 is stupid - also, dividing by 1760, 3 and/or 12 compounds into severe accuracy issues, even when using a calculator.
1000 m to the km, 100cm to the m and 10mm to the cm is meanwhile logical smooth sailing.
You can even go and just measure everything in mm when building things, to eliminate most mistakes.
What? US customary units are defined to be SI units with extra steps - any issues with SI would be made exponentially worse in SI units.
Until the recklessness of measuring wrong with US customary units is ended, there is no chance in hell of humanity reaching another planet (besides, the planet would have been fine for the next several billion years, if it wasn't for certain USAians and also others in other countries (but mostly USAians it seems), who carefully ensured the reduction in the habitability of the planet).
Besides, SI can be used to measure mass instead of weight, which could be nicely scaled to weight on other planet, unlike trying to use US units on another planet.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Sunday August 02, @05:17PM (3 children)
I'm not really sure how you can be so confidently wrong about things like this. Most countries use the metric system because they didn't have much of a choice in the matter. They had some combination of a lack of enforcement of standard measures where they were or a lack of ability to produce the things they needed in those measures without having to import them.
And BTW, it's hardly just the US that still uses a bunch of other measures, Canada, the UK and China to name a few still do use other measures for things in daily living, they just use metric a bit more than the US does. If the metric measures were as beneficial as you're trying to gaslight me into thinking, the US would have switched over ages ago, we were one of the first countries with metric currency and we did sign up to convert to metric measures. In fact all of our measures are defined based on the same standards, we just don't use the same multiples as the metric system does.
As far as the KG being a KG anywhere, that's questionable at best, the actual standard kilo keeps changing in mass which has led to issues over time, in addition to the fact that it was only after they redefined it a few times that other countries could independently verify it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FunkyLich on Sunday August 02, @07:26PM (1 child)
Fascinating. So while you question the exact amount of mass expressed by the unit of 1kg with the passing of time in terms of accuracy, you also bring that as the supporting argument that 1kg on Earth is not the same as 1kg on Earth or 1kg on Venus or 1kg in zero gravity or 1kg in a black hole? Which means that you think that one unit of mass of whatever unit of choice (pound included), changes and depends where in the 3 dimensional grid of space it is located? Your physics teacher must have cheated in his/her graduation exams to get that degree and has taught you fairy tales, if that's the case.
(Score: 2) by FunkyLich on Sunday August 02, @07:28PM
Correction: Second occurrence of "on Earth" in the post here above should be replaced with any choice of name for one of the Jovian moons.
(Score: 2) by Bentonite on Monday August 03, @05:47AM
If reproducible measurements are wanted, all countries don't have a choice but to use SI units.
Yes, as you pointed out, the US has already changed to SI - all customary units are defined based off SI units (otherwise the measurements won't be the slightest bit reproducible).
The US just need to stop being braindead and use SI directly, rather than via extra steps that cause error.
Yes, Canada, UK and China do the same braindead thing to a lesser extent - but that isn't really relevant.
A kg of mass is now the same anywhere, although a kg of weight depends on the current gravity.
Yes, there has been minuscule adjustments to the kg, that is below measurement error for 99.995% of practical use - but scientists wanted the 0.005% to be perfect.
Making a final adjustment of a few micrograms, to allow for perfect reproduction between laboratories, hasn't caused practical problems for normal use cases;
- You slap an old or new kg on a normal scale and you get 1kg.
- You slap an old or new g on a normal scale and you get 1g.
This is not comparable to the several major adjustments made to US customary units, that made previous measurement equipment useless.
(Score: 3, Informative) by dwilson on Saturday August 01, @11:06PM (1 child)
... how does that phrase go, 'Tell me you don't use metric, without telling me you don't use metric'?
I'm not a big guy by any means, but the circumference of my wrist is just about exactly seven inches. I know - I just measured it.
That's nearly eighteen centimeters, for the record.
Did you mean diameter? Radius? Still not six centimeters, though diameter comes closest at just over 7.
- D
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday August 02, @02:05PM
I think you're correct its a diameter, I'm not really sure where I came up with that. I don't do much metric stuff, true.
(Score: 4, Informative) by bloodnok on Saturday August 01, @08:31PM
I was once told by a french sailing friend that the metre was actually part of a system intended to reduce the influence of Britain in maritime navigation.
The British had standardised the nautical mile as the unit for marine navigation. One nautical mile is equivalent to one minute of arc along any line of longitude. This is why most mariners and flyers still use nautical miles today: the calculation of distance/speed is easier when the units of position (lat/long in degrees and minutes) and distance (nautical miles) are closely related.
Napoleon, according to the story I was told, wanted to replace this system. He proposed replacing the 360 degree compass with a 400 grad one. And the nautical mile of one minute of arc, would be replaced with the kilometre being 100th of a grad. Alas Britain was not to be denied.
__
The Major
(Score: 4, Funny) by istartedi on Saturday August 01, @09:23PM
I've run this independently before, but used DDG's AI assist to get this rundown. c is a universal constant. Binary is likely universal insofar as any civilization developing computing is likely to be drawn towards bistable circuits just as we were. The speed of light divided by 2^26 is approx 10 mph. 9.96 but who's quibbling? We don't even need to change our road signs. They're already universal, based on light speed and binary arithmetic. The exponent is even the same as the letters in our alphabet. How cool is that?
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 01, @11:38PM
...the guy had an axe to grind.
(responding to https://markatwood.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-traditional-units [substack.com] , to be fair)
And it's hogwash, through and through.
That's a fair point, but I think he's missing the bigger point. Precision matters, or we wouldn't have bothered with it.
Yep, he's right. About a foot. About an inch. Nearly a yard. Close enough is good enough, eh? Remind me again, what's the tolerance for the piston diameter in my ICE? Is it 3.0 inches or 3.000 inches? Or was it about 3 inches? I forget. Doesn't matter, it's measured in imperial and it runs, I'm sure it's fine.
Uh huh. I can't personally think of the last time I had a board and, wondering if it would fit through the doorway, stopped to measure it in meters. I mean, I also didn't stop to measure it in feet; I had the board, the door was there. I TRIED IT and found out real quick. The pertinent unit was, one door-width. A bit non-standard but you work with what you have. I'm six feet tall and weigh 77 kilograms, btw. It just makes sense that way. Well, about six feet, give or take a few millimeters. And roughly 77 kilos - I mean, I go up and down a pound or two through the week.
Sort of depends on what I need the rope for and what units I did the math in, doesn't it? If I'm buying it in meters and did my figuring in chains, furloughs, or yards, I'm going to have a problem. Or feet, for that matter. How many feet to a chain? I don't know, and don't need to. I'll look it up if it ever comes up. Same way this guy could have, really. It's absurd to have to look up a unit conversion? So is his entire premise behind the situational set-up. Why are we looking for rope at a lumberyard, anyway?
One of these is not like the other, read on.
If he can halve a poured pile of flour three times, by eye and straight edge, and have it precise to three decimal places in his measurement system of choice, I'll eat my hat. Measured with the precision scale he dismissed one paragraph previously, of course.
Because of course, that's the whole point, and it isn't the flex he thinks it is. Imperial units are great for everyday use, they're easily measured by our bodies and our built-in equipment, and that's only useful as long as close enough is good enough. As soon as you need precision, it goes out the window anyway, so why not metric at that point? I can do powers-of-ten conversions in my head all day long, and as long as that initial measurement was precise, so will my conversion be. Can he tell me to six decimal places how many feet 2.345 miles is, exactly? Of course not. That's not something we'll ever need to know in daily life, you say? I agree! But it seems awfully important to him, that we do it in feet, not meters.
I will bet him whatever he cares to wager that if I poured out his pile of flour, then poured out exactly one litre of flour, and let him halve and halve again with his straight edge, he'd hit 250 mL on the second go at least as accurately as he hits one quarter of the other pile. Or inaccurately, as the case may be. Choosing 100 mL as a target is a bit disingenuous there.
He's right! And thanks to the magic of precision measurement that he's ignoring here, my 'cup' is within a decimal place or two of my mothers, and hers with her mother's. Prior to the very late 1800's, that was not at all the case!
Even accounting for the unprecedented precision of my kitchen measurement devices, if I bake a loaf of bread, flour measured by the cup and leveled by the finger, I end up with ... bread! And if I bake a second loaf, same recipe, same methodology, I get.. also bread! But it's not exactly the same loaf. Might be a bit underdone. Might have risen a bit more than the last one. Or be flatter. Maybe it's drier? It's almost like, even in cooking and baking, precision is important, and 100 grams of flour today is going to be 100 grams of flour tomorrow, and one cup, finger leveled, is going to vary a bit. Always has, always will.
I could go on, paragraph for paragraph, but I won't because it's making me riled. This guy needs to pull his head out of his ass.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02, @12:48AM
Dear Submitter,
Substack is by Nazis and for Nazis. Explicitly.
Nothing there of interest to me without a signed order in triplicate from my superior officer directing me to go in undercover. Notarized.
Sincerely,
Everyone not a Nazi.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 02, @02:24PM (2 children)
"can we ... can we all get along?" -- Rodney King
Seconds are common to both ISO and the current varieties of "customary" units. Why all this angst about differences, when we all agree on the second...which (afaik) was originally based on our nominal resting heart beat (as used by Galileo to time pendulums, etc?)
(Score: 3, Informative) by istartedi on Sunday August 02, @05:50PM
You sent me off to look up the history of the second, and there wasn't any mention of Galileo or heart beats. It seems to drop out naturally because of the year being close to 360 days, which has a lot of convenient prime factors and naturally leads you to 60*60 and divisions of 60. Early time keeping divided the *day* in to 1/60th units!
That said, there might be some natural draw in all this and I'm sure Galileo worked with pendulums at some point. Normal resting heart beats being close to a second apart probably isn't entirely a coincidence.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by jb on Monday August 03, @05:37AM
That might explain why King George decreed that "God save the King" must be played/sung at exactly 60bpm...
...except that "our nominal resting heart beat" is not a constant quantity: what it's stated to be by the reigning experts has changed multiple times, even within my lifetime to date (I was taught 72bpm which was the official line at the time; then later it became "60 to 80"; then later still "60 to 100"; no idea if that's changed again since then, but if not then it undoubtedly will at some point).
(Score: 2) by datapharmer on Monday August 03, @05:50PM
Well it’s a darn good thing we didn’t go with pendulum swings or our measurements would be all off once the sea levels rise and throw off our gravity.
(Score: 2) by bart on Thursday August 06, @11:34AM
Even the title "Defense of Traditional Units" is bullshit for 90% of the global population; the meters, Celsius etc are our traditional units.