The metric system sucks
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From: Paul Ciszek on 4 Feb 2010 04:21 In article <438ecb1e-34a8-42bb-9cea-5be88d3bd51a(a)v25g2000yqk.googlegroups.com>, Frogwatch <dbohara(a)mindspring.com> wrote: > >I even had one professor who worked in a system where all independent >constants (c, q, permativitty of free space, etc) were all equal to >1. I had an E&M textbook like that once...everything was fine until one of the homework problems ended with having to find the dimensions of a solenoid needed to satisfy some condition. I just couldn't turn the ESU's or whatever back into meters and amps. -- Please reply to: | "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is pciszek at panix dot com | indistinguishable from malice." Autoreply is disabled |
From: Paul Ciszek on 4 Feb 2010 04:29 In article <7e4ca67f-208b-48e5-827f-b7380357befd(a)s12g2000yqj.googlegroups.com>, Andrew Usher <k_over_hbarc(a)yahoo.com> wrote: > >that are officially metric. But so what of the numbers? The US clearly >has a heck of a lot of power to impose its will on the rest of the >world. But not as much as it thinks it has. Sometimes I think it would do the US a world of good if the rest of the world would stage an "intervention" and stop loaning us money or selling us oil until we admitted our addiction to both. -- Please reply to: | "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is pciszek at panix dot com | indistinguishable from malice." Autoreply is disabled |
From: Mike Dworetsky on 4 Feb 2010 05:26 Andrew Usher wrote: > On Feb 3, 5:13 pm, Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeo...(a)verizon.invalid> wrote: > >> The Internet was developed by researchers in the U.S. working under >> the ARPA program to link up the various research universities. Why >> do you think IANA was originally controlled by the U.S. Department >> of Defense (and is now run by a company who does it on a contract >> with the U.S. Department of Commerce). > > Yes. And what does it have to do with units? > > The Internet, by its nature, doesn't care what units are used. > Going to the moon was done very largely with English units. > > So how is this supposed to be an argument for metric? > > Andrew Usher I don't know, but all the other space countries and consortia such as ESA are using metric, and they are highly successful at launching commercial and scientific satellites. Even India is getting in on the space industry. The difference is that none of them are having to prove themselves better than the Russians. I don't see any signs lately that the US is going back to the moon, regardless of units, so at best your comment is an irrelevance. If it ever does, the astronauts may have to bring passports with valid Chinese visas. -- Mike Dworetsky (Remove pants sp*mbl*ck to reply)
From: Aatu Koskensilta on 4 Feb 2010 05:30 "Mike Dworetsky" <platinum198(a)pants.btinternet.com> writes: > Marshall wrote: > >> And mad props to Lord Rutherford for it! Of course the USA was the >> first country to make it go BOOM, plus we still have that whole >> "moon" and "internet" thing going. > > Using refugee European physicists who all worked in metric units. > Most American physics (certainly nuclear physics) was also done in > metric, even then, and all of it is done in metric now everywhere, as > is nearly all science. Some American engineering is for obscure > reasons done in Imperial, hence the Mars probe disaster. I doubt Marshall was trying to argue against the metric system, or for the Imperial system. He was, I take it, simply valiantly defending the good name of American and British engineering. > American engineers invented Darpanet, a communications network for > defense purposes that leaked out as Arpanet to civilian applications > such as email and ftp; a British scientist at CERN came up with the > hypertext protocols that led directly to the internet, a way to use > the interconnected network for passing, storing and creating > information content quickly and easily. Well, no. -- Aatu Koskensilta (aatu.koskensilta(a)uta.fi) "Wovon man nicht sprechan kann, dar�ber muss man schweigen" - Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
From: Mike Dworetsky on 4 Feb 2010 05:47
Heidi Graw wrote: [snip] >> Common units work extremely well, but if you want your house >> built in MeTric I'll add 25% to the cost, and you've got it. > > No need. I wouldn't be hiring you anyway. My husband > built the house I designed. Custom? Very...and rather > quite unique. > > Take care, > Heidi <...whose house is a mishmash of German metric and British > standard. About 35 years ago I moved to a new (to me) older house in London and needed to replace some damaged floorboards. When all the houses in my area were built they were done in Imperial measurement with boards, as I recall, 5-5/8 inches wide (finished size), or 143 mm. But when it came to buying some new replacement boards, I couldn't find any because timber had been decreed to be in metric cuts a few years earlier. They literally would not fit. So I had to have the merchant trim about 5 mm off the edges of all the 150-mm boards I bought so I could fit them in. (Floorboards have a small gap between them in most houses; normally you would lay your interior flooring on top of them.) My point is that it should have been perfectly possible to measure in metric, but retain the same historic physical size as a stock option, because the vast majority of housing stock used the old size, however you measure it. None of this made any sense to me but some government official had decreed it because he liked round numbers, or because 150mm was some sort of standard continental timber size. -- Mike Dworetsky (Remove pants sp*mbl*ck to reply) |