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From: Matt on 2 Feb 2010 23:08
On Tue, 02 Feb 2010 18:03:32 -0800, Uncle Al wrote:

>Andrew Usher wrote:
>>
>> On Feb 2, 7:06 pm, Uncle Al <Uncle...(a)hate.spam.net> wrote:
>>
>> > HEY STOOOPID - tell us how many fluid ounces and how many weight
>> > ounces there are in a cubic mile of water at 39.20 degrees Fahrenheit.
>>
>> Such a problem would never arise,
>[snip cap]
>
>idiot
>
>Lying coward. Ambulatory rectal bolus. YOU CAN'T DO IT. Go ahead
>STOOOIPD - show us your work.

http://www.google.com/search?q=1+cubic+mile+in+fluid+ounces
1 (cubic mile) = 1.40942995 � 10^14 US fluid ounces

We have machines for tasks like this.
From: Andrew Usher on 2 Feb 2010 23:53
On Feb 2, 8:19 pm, Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeo...(a)verizon.invalid> wrote:

> > The metric system for our purposes can be identified with the SI
> > [ Note that SI is a French abbreviation, reminding everyone of the
> > French nature of the idea ],
>
> Oh, so it's bad just because it's French? If you want to boycott French
> ideas, please reverse all of your chemistry knowledge back to
> discussions about "phlogiston" (possibly even earlier).

No I don't, certainly not in pure science. This is only a straw man.

> And having a French acronym does not necessarily mean it's a French
> invention, to boot.

But it is a French invention, indisputably.

> > The first of all the metric lies is that we must adopt metric because
> > it is the world standard. The costs of translation between languages,
> > though, certainly exceed those of translation between measuring
> > systems, should we then ask that everyone speak only English?
>
> One of the Mars rovers crashed into Mars. Why? Because one group of
> people were using SI units and the others Imperial units.

I did mention this in my post. Had NASA never started to convert
things like this, the problem could never have arisen.

> > And there is no more reason that we should
> > necessarily adopt metric than that they should adopt our measures,
> > when standardisation really is required, which is much less often than
> > they would have you believe.
>
> Except the fact that approximately 5.3% of the world population (U.S.,
> Liberia, and Burma) uses the Imperial units and 94.8% use SI. Even if
> you want to measure by GDP impact, you've still got a hefty 20-80% split.

Now this is oversimplified. All countries including the US use metric
for some purposes. Equally, there is some use of English in countries
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.

> > Finally, and related to my first point, the cost of converting to
> > metric is constantly minimised, and invariably said to pay for itself
> > within a short time even though there is little evidence for it. But
> > the reverse - that converting from the metric to the traditional units
> > - is never examined at all, and surely if it did ever come up they
> > would do the exact opposite. This shows that they are not truly
> > interested in saving money or time at all, but only in promoting
> > metric for its own sake.
>
> The cost is in conversion, period.

If that's so, then there's no reason to prefer metric.

> Mostly because most people of my
> generation would be used to thinking in Imperial units as opposed to SI;
> for Europeans, they would be used to thinking in SI. I have a pretty
> good intuition of what 50�F looks like, but not of 20�C. The inverse
> would be true for non-Americans.

I suppose so. But there's no reason one can't acquire both, whether
you're American or not. And yet, the metric people tell us how easy it
is for us to understand Celsius, but pretend that no one else in the
world can understand Fahrenheit.

> Here are all of the prefixes that I see commonly used for measurements:
> milli
> centi
> <none>
> kilo

Obviously you're not counting electricity, in which many prefixes
beyond those are used regularly. Anyway, the point was that the number
of independent words is not really any strike against traditional
units.

> Most people will know of "mega", "giga", and "tera" from computers, no
> matter where they live (even if there is confusion between 1024-based
> and 1000-based values for these units).

There wouldn't be any if not for (as usual) the meddling of standards
organisations. 1024-based units are to be used for computer data (and
there's a sound reason why) and 1000-based units for everything else.

> > However, now with SI, the metric bureaucrats
> > and their mindset are pushing the universal applicability of SI
> > prefixes, introducing absurdities like 'zepto' and 'yotta' and God
> > knows what will follow them. This is insane: how can we expect people
> > to keep straight so many prefixes? In contrast scientific notation is
> > always unambiguous.
>
> How often do you measure stuff in terms of 10^21?

Not often, I suppose. But how do you specify, say, the mass of the
Earth?

> You've magically missed the argument that most people use when
> advocating metric: units are a lot more intuitive. How many feet are in
> a rod? How many square feet per acre? Acres per square mile--are you
> talking about statute or nautical miles? Please convert knots to miles
> per hour. And then there are fluid ounces (distinct from avoirdupois
> ounces and troy ounces!), gills, cups, pints, quarts, gallons... and
> barrels and hogsheads.

I know all these conversions in my head. Most people don't, but they
will quickly pick up any that they need to use frequently. And how
much calculation do people do without a machine anymore?

> So, if the United States imports 13.1 million barrels of oil per day,
> and the average car gets 27 mpg, how many miles would the average car be
> able to drive on the imported oil, assuming perfect conversion of oil to
> gasoline?

About 20 million vehicle-miles. More precision is unnecessary because
of the conditions.

That took me about 15 seconds to do mentally.

> [ Snip hoopla about base units ]
>
> Base units really don't make that much of a difference. Consider it a
> historical aberration.

No, the fact that the kilogram (base unit) has a prefix is a
historical aberration but I don't mention that. The fact that the
'seven base units', adopted in the 1960s, are promoted as illustrating
the logical nature of the SI, is not.

> > In angle, the smaller divisions are less used (or known), yet degrees
> > are universal and seem to be understood by almost everybody.
>
> I seem to use radians a lot more when doing calculations. And I'm sure
> many surveyors may prefer gradients to degrees.

Radians are of course preferred for math but in practical engineering
they have an obvious problem in not being rationally related to the
circle. And grads (not 'gradients', that's something different!) may
be used by some surveyors, but the great majority of people only know
degrees.

Andrew Usher
From: Frogwatch on 2 Feb 2010 23:59
On Feb 2, 9:19 pm, Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeo...(a)verizon.invalid> wrote:
> On 02/02/2010 05:54 PM, Andrew Usher wrote:
>
> > I. Introduction
>
> I know better than to succumb, but oh well.
>
> > LEFTIST POLITICS is one of the great errors of our age. [ By leftism I
> > mean specifically the quasi-religious crusading ideology identified by
> > Ted Kaczyncki (I always have trouble spelling that name!),
>
> That is obviously evidence of a homogeneous ethnic environment where you
> grew up. Eastern European names aren't really that bad to spell. Or
> pronounce, for that matter.
>
> > One such place is the imposition of the metric system. All conversion
> > to the metric system today, and not only that compelled by government,
> > can safely be put under this head, as anyone that had good reasons to
> > convert unrelated to ideology would have done so already.
>
> You overestimate the propensity of people to change when there are many
> clear good reasons to do so. Inertia counts for a lot in politics and
> general management. Indeed, it probably counts even more so in politics:
> it's extraordinarily hard to undo something. Just ask the U.S. Congress,
> European Commission, or the Japanese Diet [1].
>
> > The metric system for our purposes can be identified with the SI
> > [ Note that SI is a French abbreviation, reminding everyone of the
> > French nature of the idea ],
>
> Oh, so it's bad just because it's French? If you want to boycott French
> ideas, please reverse all of your chemistry knowledge back to
> discussions about "phlogiston" (possibly even earlier). Which probably
> means you should give up all synthetic fibers or drugs. And you'll
> probably need to start learning to sew by hand, for I believe the French
> were instrumental in the development of sewing machines. And the French
> also made significant forays into mechanical looms (including, most
> notably, the Jacquard loom, the first use of programming a century
> before the Babbage engines and two centuries before the first electronic
> computers).
>
> And having a French acronym does not necessarily mean it's a French
> invention, to boot. French was, and still remains, an important business
> language. Until the middle of the 20th century, it was more likely to be
> the international language one learned instead of, say, English.
>
> > The first of all the metric lies is that we must adopt metric because
> > it is the world standard. The costs of translation between languages,
> > though, certainly exceed those of translation between measuring
> > systems, should we then ask that everyone speak only English?
>
> One of the Mars rovers crashed into Mars. Why? Because one group of
> people were using SI units and the others Imperial units. I'm sure that
> the potential damage due to mixing up unit systems is much worse than
> mixing up languages. This would mostly be due to the fact that you often
> calculate using units and not with languages. Unfortunately, trying to
> statically cart around units is a lot harder in practice than you would
> think.
>
> > And there is no more reason that we should
> > necessarily adopt metric than that they should adopt our measures,
> > when standardisation really is required, which is much less often than
> > they would have you believe.
>
> Except the fact that approximately 5.3% of the world population (U.S.,
> Liberia, and Burma) uses the Imperial units and 94.8% use SI. Even if
> you want to measure by GDP impact, you've still got a hefty 20-80% split.
>
> > Finally, and related to my first point, the cost of converting to
> > metric is constantly minimised, and invariably said to pay for itself
> > within a short time even though there is little evidence for it. But
> > the reverse - that converting from the metric to the traditional units
> > - is never examined at all, and surely if it did ever come up they
> > would do the exact opposite. This shows that they are not truly
> > interested in saving money or time at all, but only in promoting
> > metric for its own sake.
>
> The cost is in conversion, period. Mostly because most people of my
> generation would be used to thinking in Imperial units as opposed to SI;
> for Europeans, they would be used to thinking in SI. I have a pretty
> good intuition of what 50�F looks like, but not of 20�C. The inverse
> would be true for non-Americans.
>
> > Above I compared the difficulty of learning measures with that of
> > learning a language, and that is appropriate here also; for learning
> > the differing words for the units in the traditional system - as inch,
> > foot, mile or ounce, pound, ton - as not much more difficult than
> > learning a similar number of new words in a language, or not very hard
> > at all. In addition, the traditional names are shorter and can't be
> > confused.
>
> Here are all of the prefixes that I see commonly used for measurements:
> milli
> centi
> <none>
> kilo
>
> Most people will know of "mega", "giga", and "tera" from computers, no
> matter where they live (even if there is confusion between 1024-based
> and 1000-based values for these units).
>
> > However, now with SI, the metric bureaucrats
> > and their mindset are pushing the universal applicability of SI
> > prefixes, introducing absurdities like 'zepto' and 'yotta' and God
> > knows what will follow them. This is insane: how can we expect people
> > to keep straight so many prefixes? In contrast scientific notation is
> > always unambiguous.
>
> How often do you measure stuff in terms of 10^21? Indeed, the media
> seems to think that most people already can't handle numbers larger than
> a trillion (million billion and billion billion starts becoming popular).
>
> You've magically missed the argument that most people use when
> advocating metric: units are a lot more intuitive. How many feet are in
> a rod? How many square feet per acre? Acres per square mile--are you
> talking about statute or nautical miles? Please convert knots to miles
> per hour. And then there are fluid ounces (distinct from avoirdupois
> ounces and troy ounces!), gills, cups, pints, quarts, gallons... and
> barrels and hogsheads.
>
> So, if the United States imports 13.1 million barrels of oil per day,
> and the average car gets 27 mpg, how many miles would the average car be
> able to drive on the imported oil, assuming perfect conversion of oil to
> gasoline?
>
> [ Snip hoopla about base units ]
>
> Base units really don't make that much of a difference. Consider it a
> historical aberration.
>
> > In angle, the smaller divisions are less used (or known), yet degrees
> > are universal and seem to be understood by almost everybody.
>
> I seem to use radians a lot more when doing calculations. And I'm sure
> many surveyors may prefer gradients to degrees.
>
> > The English units of measure are part of the English language, and
> > indeed, of every European language once, even French. Most
> > particularly, it is true of Latin, the language of our common
> > heritage, and where we got our traditional units from.
>
> You are so insensitive, you know that? What about the Japanese and their
> koku of rice? Or their ri? The Chinese li? The ancient cubit? You're
> being so Amerocentric. And what about the Anglo-Saxons' units, before
> the Romans imposed their unit system onto them?
>
> [1] I know, I know, I shouldn't be so biased towards the
> economically-advantaged nations, but unfortunately my media sources
> provide me with too little information on third world countries.
>
> --
> Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not
> tried it. -- Donald E. Knuth

Whenever I need to do any calculations involving physical quantities,
I first convert to metric, do the calculation and then convert back to
english. This avoids bizarro conversions such as feet in a mile or
psi to something else.
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. Using SI, you could then simply insert the correct units at the
end knowing it was correct with no conversions.
One of the few truly arbitrary things in metric system is temp using
Celsius but true SI uses Kelvin whose units of temp happens to be the
same size as Celsius degrees.
In SI units, I can readily calculate things as varied as time to fall
to earth for an object, period of a pendulum, amount of fuel needed to
change an orbit, ALL IN MY HEAD. In english units, no way.
Let me see, 12 inches in a foot, 5280 feet/mile, a cubic foot of water
weighs ...........I dunno. However, a cubic meter of water is
obviously 1000 Kg. One does need to remember a few basic constants
such as c, q, mass of electron and proton, Avagodros number, etc.
However, in english units you would not only have to remember such
constants but also conversions between various units. Ummmmmm, how do
you go from BTU/sec to hp? How is hp related to watts?
Calculating pressure, you say nobody does this, WRONG. I used to be
an oilfield engineer, the only way to deal with english units was to
memorize bizzaro conversions such as:
downhole pressure =.052*mudweight(pounds/gallon)*depth in feet.
Somewhere in that .052 number is the constant g (what is g in english
units, something like 32 ft/sec/sec) but this formula gives no
physical sense of what is happening. In SI, one simply uses the
formula Pressure =rho*g*h where rho(density) is in kg/m3 and g is
about 10 m/sec2 and h is in meters. This formula in SI would be
useful on the moon where g is 1/6 of that on earth whereas I have no
immediate idea how to modify the english one (probably divide .052 by
6 I think just to keep units correct).
Quite frankly, the cumbersome english units cause so much confusion
that we would have far better of understanding of physical concepts if
we simply used SI in everything (except temp where we would use
Celsius).
From: Heidi Graw on 3 Feb 2010 00:04


>"Bart Goddard" <goddardbe(a)netscape.net> wrote in message
>news:Xns9D13CCB0DF19Egoddardbenetscapenet(a)74.209.136.81...
> "Heidi Graw" <hgraw(a)telus.net> wrote in
> news:tC4an.64378$PH1.2203(a)edtnps82:
>
>
>> He prefers the metric. It's easier to learn and easier to use.
>> I also prefer metric for those same reasons.
>
> Which is also a reason for choosing Cosmetology school
> over Engineering.
>
> B.

<chuckle> ...and lots of folks do just that. A good question
to ask is, "How do you get the most using the least amount of
energy?" If cosmetology earns one an adequate living, and it
requires less energy and effort, then why not?

Haven't you noticed that those who earn the most conserve
the most energy? Being an energy efficient person can be
rather quite profitable. ;-)

Heidi


From: Frogwatch on 3 Feb 2010 00:13
On Feb 3, 12:04 am, "Heidi Graw" <hg...(a)telus.net> wrote:
> >"Bart Goddard" <goddar...(a)netscape.net> wrote in message
> >news:Xns9D13CCB0DF19Egoddardbenetscapenet(a)74.209.136.81...
> > "Heidi Graw" <hg...(a)telus.net> wrote in
> >news:tC4an.64378$PH1.2203(a)edtnps82:
>
> >> He prefers the metric.  It's easier to learn and easier to use.
> >> I also prefer metric for those same reasons.
>
> > Which is also a reason for choosing Cosmetology school
> > over Engineering.
>
> > B.
>
> <chuckle> ...and lots of folks do just that.  A good question
> to ask is,  "How do you get the most using the least amount of
> energy?"  If cosmetology earns one an adequate living, and it
> requires less energy and effort, then why not?
>
> Haven't you noticed that those who earn the most conserve
> the most energy?  Being an energy efficient person can be
> rather quite profitable.  ;-)
>
> Heidi

The observation that various fields use variations on units is one of
the great "Duh" lines in the original rant. I work in x-ray
spectroscopy and routinely use eV for photon energy instead of the
usual Joule simply because it is easy to relate this to how the x-rays
are produced. Of course, I then convert to wavelength.
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