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Another English/Metric "Spacecraft" Problem
SuperDry writes "There's been another spacecraft failure that's been attributed to an English/Metric units problem, this time at Tokyo Disneyland's Space Mountain. An axle broke on a "spacecraft" (a.k.a. roller coaster train) mid-ride, causing it to derail (nobody was hurt). The final investigation report has been released, and the root cause has been determined to be a part being the wrong size due to a conversion of the master plans in 1995 from English units to Metric units. In 2002, new axles were mistakenly ordered using the pre-1995 English specifications instead of the current Metric specifications. Apparently size does matter, even if it's only a 0.86mm difference."
Average A-M-R-I-C-A-N..cough...cough. but just for the record: 1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9.10
US technology is a safety hazard until ALL of it uses the International Units System. I believe most of it does comply.
Just another chance for Europeans to whine and snivel about how Americans won't do things their way. When you clowns learn to bathe regularly and stop acting like a bunch of women, maybe you'll gain some respect and we'll listen to you. Otherwise, kiss my cowboy boots.
All you need to know, it's the universal prefixes (vocabulary, not math skills): Mega-, kilo-, deca-, centi-, milli-, etc (and really for everyday life you only really ever use 3 of them: kilo-, centi-, milli-).
Your post hits the nail on the head - the Metric system (SI for the pedantic) is anything but consistent!
You cite "deca" - there's NO SUCH PREFIX. In fact, the entire deci/deka mess turned into such a morass of ISO incompetency that the official prefixes are now wildly inconsistent even within the SI system. (I discovered this recently when I looked it up and realized they'd "changed" the metric system since I learned it in the late 1970s):
The prefix for "deka" or "deca" (even the spelling is inconsistent!) is deplorable - it's listed as either da or dk, depending on where you look, and I'd argue *both* of these are wrong, since they break the otherwise inviolable rule of SI prefixes being a single character.
Thus the poor Metric-loving product of European public school education who sees 3.24 dkm may (quite reasonably) wonder what other metric-loving fool would specify a distance in "decikilometers"! (Oddly, some metric preferences would make this an acceptable if quite confusing usage, since they discourage the use of less-commonly used prefixes like "hecto" in favor of more common ones like "deci" and "kilo". Only if the user understands that magnitude prefixes should never be compounded can he avoid this mistake.)
When I learned the Metric system, "deka" was recommended to be represented with an upper-case "D" to distinguish it from the lower-case "d" representing "deci". Apparently, European outcomes-based educators thought this was too confusing to teach, and so lobbied to have it changed, although apparently they failed to expunge the far-too-commonly-used prefix overloading of using the letter "M" to represent both "mega" and "milli" based on case-sensitivity. (The formerly upper case "K" for "kilo, apparently also fell at this time, replaced by the now-standard lower-case "k", breaking the at-least-sort-of-sensible former property of SI prefix symmetry, which at that time held that upper case prefixes represented a positive exponent of the 10, while lower-case ones represented a negative exponent.
So instead, they decided that "deka" would stand alone in all of SI nomenclature, and use a two-character prefix, but apparently, in true ISO fashion, they couldn't agree on even what those two characters should be, "da" or "dk"? (Look around, and you'll find both, even in "official" publications from a number of countries that have adopted the SI as "standard".
(And then of course, there's the pathologically broken use of the lower-case Greek mu as the prefix for "micro". This results in a unit that cannot be typed directly on the vast majority of the world's keyboards, and which is at the mercy of extended character maps that often do not successfully carry the character across different applications, operating systems, or displays, thus rendering yet another prefix at least halfway useless.)
Now Metric-bigots will respond, "But no one uses deci much or deka at all, so who cares?" Those same metric-bigots should, because the bureaucratic bungling that has surrounded SI politics since the beginning is what has has rendered them unusable. If you can't actually use all those decimal prefixes, because doing so creates more confusion than it resolves, then how can you possibly claim that the Metric system is easier, more logical, or more consistent than the English system. You can't - the Metric system is every bit as arbitrary and capricious as the English system, but much harder to use in the real world, because 10 is such a difficult number.
Why do you think hours are 60 minutes, or circles 360 degrees? Because 60 is evenly divisible by 2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15,20, and 30! Try plotting your ship's course in radians sometime and see how long you can sail before running aground - talk about a stupid measurement!
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last