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Uncle Sam's Funhouse
carlie writes: "Ever wonder who's taking care of the 'National Kilogram'? Have a 40 foot structure you need tested to 12 million pounds of pressure? How about a 6 foot aluminum sphere with microwave plasma lamps called the 'Black Ball of Sunlight' to check that new polymer for photodegradation? The online version of the Washington Post has an article about the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, where all this and more occur daily."
"The metric system is the tool of the Devil! My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it!" - Abe Simpson
In fact I recall I think it was 20/20 or 60 minutes which had an article where researchers were being paid high salaries to test the flow of ketchup (catsup/ketsup) and if it was thick enough for the American market.
What is it with luddites on Slashdot? NIST is a vitally important hi-tech facility that does far more than simply measure the viscosity of ketchup. I live 5 minutes away from it and have been there many times and I never knew this. Taking one *minor* area of research and blanketly saying they aren't necesary is a disservice to NIST and the country (USA). BTW the reason I *don't* work there now is because I can make more money in the private sector. My dad worked at NIST (not on this alleged ketchup project) and I have surpassed his salary.
Surely someone can regulate what constitutes a neccessity, but why not branch some of these things to academia, where things are always revolutionary changing constantly to keep up to date, as opposed to following standards set eons ago.
You don't understand what they mean by standards. They can very accurately measure flow rates (like at your gas pump), weights (for commerce), lengths (for better manufacturing), etc. They aren't about establishing standards (though they do sometimes) so much as QA of current standards like the meter, the US pound, etc.
Government can cut budgets by passing some of these tasks to colleges, then pay the universities to keep track of this at the fraction of a cost, keep students excited about helping government, and saving us all some money.
Um how? You mean by giving them more money? The government already gives state Universities money. What proof do you have that a bunch of students often more concerned about getting drunk can do what phDs at NIST do better and for less money? They serve different purposes and handle things that University research can't do.
NIST is one of the reasons that America is at the leading edge of technology. NIST and research labs like it employ *many* phDs from all over the world. Believe me, there are far more intelligent people at NIST than any of the Fortune 500 companies I've worked for. If we cut funding to NIST then many people will not have a reason to get a phD because there will be no jobs for them (outside of Universities). Guess what? Many smart people will leave the country and go to other places with hi-tech research and we will become an insigificant country.
Here is a *small* list of the many important things that NIST does:
- Better fire detectors
- Bomb sniffing
- Nanotechnology
- 1997 Nobel prize winner in physics for using lasers to cool atoms. This was a Slashdot topic BTW
- Advanced Robotics
- Advanced Manufacturing - This is really cool stuff.
- Semiconductor Fab - i.e. making faster computer chips
- ...
Just because you don't know or understand what they do doesn't mean it isn't important.Metric could've been built on English units and used kilofeet, millislugs, etc.
Buzzzz. Wrong. Thanks for playing !
The metric system is linked : a liter of pure water weights exactly 1 kilogram... woud you care to remind us of how many ounces weight a gallon of water exactly ?
A mile may be 5280 feet but that quantity divides EVENLY... A km is 1000m and divides evenly
Yep, but I'd rather use units that have less multiples but have 100 as one of them that a unit that have more multiples but only ones like "176 or 165" like your miles. How often do you count in base 176 exactly ?
Water is just another liquid.
No - it's the raw liquid most commonly available on earth, and almost the only one. Liquid hydrogen or nitrogen is not easy to find, neither is raw mercury. Only a fucked up mind would base it's unit system on another liquid than water. Or someone who lives on Jupiter (hint : you don't).
If you wanted a universal constant for temperature, why did Centigrade scale not at least use absolute zero as one anchor point?
There's some sense to this but :
- absolute 0 temp has only been known quite recently, and by the time it was found temp. units were firmly established worlwide. There was not time to wait for the (possible) discovery of absolute 0
- centigrades are based on freezing and boiling point of pure water at sea level. That's a unit fairly easy to understand for anyone on earth, as long as you know how to make a fire and have an idea of what ice looks like.
Sure English units are fucked. At least we admit it. But it learns just as easy as anything else.
No it doesn't. Really.
It evenly divides better by everyday numbers.
If you consider (I quote you) 33, 40, 44, 48, 55, 60, 66, 80, 88, 96, 110, 120, 132, 160, 165, 176, 220, 240, 264, 330, 352, 440, 480, 528, 660, 880, 1056, 1320, 1760, 2640, 5280 as everyday numbers, then maybe. But my everyday number is 10. Mastering multiplication/division by 10 is all you need to manipulate ALL metric units. You can use your fingers for all of them. Can't be easier than that.
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Still rely on the French to define your unit of mass, eh? (Rusting, other chemical readtions with the block. Bye bye perfect reference!) And the meter being
the distance from the North pole to the equator thru Paris divided into 10,000,000 parts? Yah, that's real accurate
The kilogram is the only unit that is still defined after a physical reference: a 2001-like monolith of platinium covered with iridium, located at the Conservatoire national des arts et metiers There are other equivalent "reference kilograms" worldwide that are similarly amagnetic and insensitive to rust or corrosion. The metre is the distance covered by a photon in 1/299 792 458 second. The second itself is based on transitions between two states of the cesium 133 atom. More information at the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (Yes, there is an English version-
And why do people state "weight" or "thrust" in kilograms? Why not
Newtons?
Because people (including me and you) are morons, so they use a MASS unit to describe WEIGHTS and FORCES, or use WEIGHTS and FORCES to determine MASSES. This is totally stupid if you're an angst-ridden physicist living in an ivory tower somewhere in the Kalahari desert. For the rest of us, since G is a constant in any given place (there may be slight differences between two different places), the confusion is acceptable, because measuring something's WEIGHT is still the easiest way to determine its MASS. Could you tell me of any practical mass measurement method (for solids) that does not rely on weight comparison ?-
Why do we still ask for a "pint of ale" in the UK?
First, because Brits are drunkyards. Personally I always drink beer by the glass (half-pint)Second, because you (or at least your ancestors) blatantly screwed the French. In 1875, France accepted to leave the international zero-meridian to the English (Greenwich instead of Paris), because the English promised to adopt the metric system in return. Yet another shameless lie from the Perfide Albion
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And if base 10 is so l33t, where is metric time? Base 60? Why
stick with millenia old numbering from Babylonian times yet praise base 10 everywhere else
There is no such thing as "metric time". The second was invented by astronomists long before the metric system. The idea to "pack" the second with the metric system (metre, kilogram, litre) in order to have a coherent measurement system is (c) Gauss (1832). And this is how the International System was born.And, by the way, there is no base-60 stuff in the International System itself. The only time unit in it is the second, period. If you were to speak in pure IS units, you would talk about kiloseconds and hectoseconds (just in the same way as you talk about milliseconds or microseconds). Hours and minutes are pure legacy stuff, and are not part of the IS - they're just here because it's easier to divide the day in 24 hours than in 86,4 kiloseconds.
Thomas Miconi
The Londonerry Occupational Health and Testing Centre, Richond NSW, Australia. It's a seriously cool place. The best place is what is called the Explosion gallery, where they simulate mine explosions. It is a 50 meter tunnel, which on it's forst test firing in 1979, was filled with a mix of air / methane to a ratio of 320% methane. This was before they knew exactly the power of mine explosions. They worked out they would need a ventilation fan for clearing the noxious gasses after the test firing, so they placed a 3 ton fan at the gallery entrance.
The video of the event went a bit like this.... show the bushland at the tunnekl entrance, a rumble and then a flash and then... BANG!.... and pieces of fan ripped the trees to shreds for 50 meters. Decorated other trees with metal bits for 100's of meters. Oh man, it's an awesome video. Also is a real eye opener to see the sheer power of an uncontrolled explosion.
Other interesting items are a full sized mine gallery to test fire fighting inside a mine, a cable destruction tester (up to 50 million newtons - a 5 inch steel cable breaking can punch holes thro 3 inch steel), an electrical destruction test lab, an engine dyno rated to 5000 hp and some serious computing grunt.
Great place... especially when you know the guy who runs the place.
"Old Rallydrivers never die - they just fail to book in on time"
Do they have a standard BlueTooth spec there? It seems some folks are just estimating. ;)
--NEWS BULLETIN--
National Kilo stolen, replaced with precise kilo of China White in daring Indiana-Jones style robbery.
The Mgt.
- 'tis an ill wind that blows no minds -
complete referendum
In fact I recall I think it was 20/20 or 60 minutes which had an article where researchers were being paid high salaries to test the flow of ketchup (catsup/ketsup) and if it was thick enough for the American market.
The episode went on to document millions of dollars gone to waste over some "trivial" (*cough* stupid *cough*) programs with NIST being on of the top sectors in gov. Shouldn't this money be used for useful purposes such as creating new jobs, housing, drug rehabilitation versus incarceration, etc., or am I being a troll because I find a problem with millions being spent to make sure my ketchup is thick enough?
Now not to troll even longer, but I always thought the NSA handled this... or at least they would have the most input into any of the things related to security.... But what about the next one, shouldn't this be left to companies on their own to develop their own programs to meet their own needs, or is this something that just sounds good enough to push for more funding... (above taken from NIST)
How is government affected by someone's product that may not be compatible with anothers? Or let me rethink this, what defines an industry standard format, and according to whom, last I checked, I've never read anywhere that Microsoft had to make its *.doc files compatible with anything because of regulation.
Surely someone can regulate what constitutes a neccessity, but why not branch some of these things to academia, where things are always revolutionary changing constantly to keep up to date, as opposed to following standards set eons ago. Government can cut budgets by passing some of these tasks to colleges, then pay the universities to keep track of this at the fraction of a cost, keep students excited about helping government, and saving us all some money.
I know for a fact many students would love to delve into this, especially if it'd help their tuition go down slightly, while improving standards in the U.S.
Ghost in the shell (hiding your data)
360 degrees of Karma