The metric system sucks
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From: Andrew Usher on 6 Feb 2010 16:48 On Feb 6, 7:05 am, jmfbahciv <jmfbahciv(a)aol> wrote: > If you have a business which wants to sell widgets to > people in countries who use metric, you should manufacture > your products using screws and bolts and things which > are metric. Not necessarily. The user of a machine usually doesn't care what units it's built to internally, only what it does. This point is made in that great book I referenced: "The metric fallacy". Andrew Usher
From: Andrew Usher on 6 Feb 2010 16:50 On Feb 6, 7:10 am, jmfbahciv <jmfbahciv(a)aol> wrote: > >> A mile is a thousand double paces. > > > One can still pace out long distances, like the Romans did, and 1,000 > > paces = 1 mile is pretty close. > > What do you do? Hop? A pace is properly the distance between two successive steps of the same foot, i.e. a double step. Andrew Usher
From: Andrew Usher on 6 Feb 2010 16:51 On Feb 6, 7:12 am, jmfbahciv <jmfbahciv(a)aol> wrote: > > Yes, but balances are almost obsolete. When measuring force as modern > > scales do, the full correction is needed. > > Where did you get the notion that balance scales are obsolete? > Do you really believe that computers replace them? I said almost obsolete. Computerised scales replace them in most uses today - yes, even in chemistry labs. Andrew Usher
From: Andrew Usher on 6 Feb 2010 16:52 On Feb 6, 7:01 am, "J. Clarke" <jclarke.use...(a)cox.net> wrote: > > Mixed units = feet and inches, pounds and ounces, etc. > > > Nothing to do with dimensional analysis. > > Then you've never done it. That's OK--I knew a PhD aeronautical engineer > who worked on the ME-262 who had never heard of it either. Of course I know what 'dimensional analysis' is. It's just not what I was talking about. Andrew Usher
From: Andrew Usher on 6 Feb 2010 17:02
On Feb 6, 9:46 am, nos...(a)nospam.com (Paul Ciszek) wrote: > Sure do. A resistance measured in ohms multiplied by a capacitance > measured in Farads gives you an RC time constant in seconds. For > the rail gun afficianados, the energy stored in a capacitor measured > in Joules is one half the capacitance in Farads times the square of > the voltage measured in Volts. Yes, the rail-gun fans I know do > talk about energy in Joules. I have even used spot-welders where > the intensity of the pulse was given in Joules. Well, I guess you can. But just because you can calculate with barbarous units doesn't make them superior - after all, you'd never allow that for English units, would you? > >They're only used by > >convention (Section VII), which actually discredits metric. > > Just because you personally think you have discredited metric > doesn't mean that metric is in fact discredited. How many legs > does a dog have if you call its tail a leg? Logic does not bend to your whims, sorry. > >> I don't even know the > >> names of any English/Imperial units for voltage, electrical charge, > >> magnetic field strength, capacitance, or inductance. > > >There aren't any separate ones. > > Bingo! The English system has no proper units for doing any modern > science. Neither does the CGS system, in this sense, and yet scientists used, and sometimes still use, CGS units. Andrew Usher |