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Our Friend, The Meter
dbirchall writes "Upon hearing that SpaceShipOne reached 100km today, I did some hasty math based on the altitude in feet sttated by Scaled Composites in their press release, and was surprised to come up with a number under 100,000 meters. Fortunately, a friend pointed out that my inches-to-meters conversion was flawed. Some quick Googling determined that lots of people still have no idea how many inches are in a meter, even after some folks have had big problems because of conversion errors."
you mean it has nothing to do with iambic?
It's not like the press release was wrong, the poster was an idiot
Well, at least NASA knows what happened to it's probe, unlike some other space agencies. ;->
Why should I care how many inches are there in a metre (meter for some of you people). Everywhere I go today everything I see is in metric. Whoever uses inches anywa.... oh. *those* people. *sigh*
Maybe it's the time for the US to join the metric world. At least we wouldn't loose that Mars probe!
First, what the hell kind of post is this? "I can't convert, and my friend corrected me. Cool huh?" I don't get it.
Second, the imperial system is so ridiculous, I don't understand how it hasn't been replaced in the United States. I think the only good thing about it is the inevitable "my car gets 40 hogsheads to the slug" or whatever the hell it is. I laugh everytime.
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
1 inch = 2.54 centimeters
It's fairly easy to remember, and everything else regarding length conversions can be derived from it. It also happens to be the official definition of the inch, since NIST uses metric internally.
We just took our 2-year old son to the doctor, and they needed to weigh him, but he hates going, so my wife stood on the scales with him, then handed him off, and weighed, and they took the difference. The scale measured in Kg and I was able to say, "whoa! that's X pounds!"
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
I do not understand why the US won't change to metric, it would be so much simpler. I for one do not enjoy doing conversions and having to remember all the formulas that go with!
Dude, read the blurb again. It matters because the poster was Dan Birchall. Don't you know who that is? He's the head of NASA's mars probe program...
Which to me means nothing so much as is silly to point out you're right by simply being more right. The correct thing to do is to point out the above.
As a side note, this means I am doing the right thing. Go me!
It's so frustrating... there's gotta be someone in a public position with the balls to unify the measuring systems.
Either the world changes or the US changes. Personally I say go towards the metric system. Let's also use grams, liters, and all the other worldwide used measuring systems.
It might be tough in the beginning for those who are adjusted to the inch-system, but change has always proven to be hard in any society. Argg.. an anonymous post on slashdot won't make a difference anyways... or will it?
dude, your site SUUUUUUUUCKS! seriously, that make out thing is retarded.
The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it.
Meters! Pheh!
Umm an inch is exactly 2.54 cm. And I think you can convert from there.
as an american, i am ashamed that my country is not using the metric system
the political climate of this world paints an arrogant america, an america that happily drive hummer h2s and tank-sized suvs around while oil supplies become volatile, pollutes and consumes per capita more than any nation
it would be best if there wasn't an "us" versus "them" shadow cast across our country, but our stubbornness at not adapting the metric system can be chalked up to nothing other than an attitude exactly like that
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I only recently discovered the Google calculator, so in case it's new to you to:
100Km in feet
20 inches in cm
Instructions for the Google calculator
.: Max Romantschuk
1 meter in inches
--- P,L,G
Thanks for that announcement. Why anyone felt it was important to announce this to everyone on slashdot is beyond me.
How many inches are in one meter
1 m * (100 cm/m) * (1 in/2.54 cm) = 39.37007874 in
Look at me, I'm Informative!
How can people possibly get this wrong? The simplest conversion to remember is 25.4mm in an inch, and everything multiplies out from there.
Disclaimer: I'm an Australian who entered the school system after the metric system was adoped.
Meters always gives the real height of a man, providing they don't just convert 6 feet to mm ...
... 1.813meters is no quite 6 foot, is it Mr Doe?
Hmmmmm, yes
get a meter-o-meter and inch-o-meter, drive across the US, divide the numbers, BAM there is your answer, ok, move on to next story :)
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
What is the rational given in the USA for not using metric?
Is it some badge of honour to continue to use an outdated, more complicated system of measurement?
I also could have carried out the whole conversion, because I know that 1 in = 2.54 cm.
There are a lot of math illiterates. The poster is obviously one of them. I don't think the poster should take any comfort in the fact that other people got the wrong answer as well. I think that (s)he should realize that it's time to become educated.
This is just basic common knowledge that everyone should have.
You know what? It's too early in the morning to care what you think about that site. So screw you, Mr. Anonymous Coward. ThatWeasel.com rocks. And this post is crap. Convert Inches to Meters properly by using the back of a Marble Notebook.
TW
Television is dead. Long live That Weasel Television
No roundoff!
The sooner the USofA joins the rest of the world in adopting the logical, easy to use and calculate metric system, the sooner we will all be better off.
how the parent can be modded anythign but troll is beyond me.
Napoleon, whose judgement was exceptionally keen on all non-Russian-winter related fronts, saw the problem right at the beginning, when he said of the "metric system":
"Nothing is more contrary to the organisation of the mind, of the memory, and of the imagination."
He was right. Our mind, unaided by an exterior calculating device, works best with 3's and 4's. Which is why the 3- and 4-based Imperial system is vastly more serviceable for everyday use.
Google confirms: Ruby is the world's most beloved programm
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
Maybe some are confused between the nautical inch and the statute inch ... oh wait ...
... for ... ummm ... "discrete" measurement verification ...
... my rocket *does* go 100 km up.
Maybe another reason is that some people are believing the doctored rulers they have laying around
Ya baby
"With your centilliters and you milliliters." /Eddie Izzard
You cant fight in here, its a war room!
[Anti-US rant]
And fuck the kids
No. That's done in France.
Conversion from the system you grew up in to a new system is not easy. We [nl] have the Euro for some years now and I still can't figure out how much I'm ripped off.
:-)
Also, engine power is officially measured in kW, but everybody still speaks in terms of horsepower. You'll agree with me, 192 hp sounds much better than 131kW.
It's not 25.4 mm per inch, it's 2.54 cm per inch. You freakin' moron.
You can't just read your mails at google now, you can also convert units there... and they got it right.
Meter/Inch
Inch/Meter
We tried to convert the nation to the metric several times. In the 70's the metric system was touted as the wave of the future and soon everything would be metric. That never happened. It probably won't for a long long time, if ever. We simply have no use for a simple system. A complex one is somehow perceived as better solely on the basis that it is most common.
Can someone tell me why using the metric system is superior to the American forms of measurement? Not opinion mind you, but the science of it, please.
:-p
As far as opinion goes - Personally, I think doing exactly the opposite of France and Germany isn't such a terrible strategy!
Mod me troll, if you must, I can't help it.
It's "40 rods to the hogshead", actually. A "rod" is 16.5 feet; a "hogshead" is 63 gallons. Consequently, the elder Mr. Simpson's car putatively ran at 0.002 mpg.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
When, or if, you americans actually do adopt the metric system, it's spelled Metre.. =) Hope that helps... Meter is more commonly known as the measuring device.. heck, from Dictionary.com:
meter
n.
1. The measured arrangement of words in poetry, as by accentual rhythm, syllabic quantity, or the number of syllables in a line.
2. A particular arrangement of words in poetry, such as iambic pentameter, determined by the kind and number of metrical units in a line.
3. The rhythmic pattern of a stanza, determined by the kind and number of lines.
As it pertains to Music:
1. Division into measures or bars.
2. A specific rhythm determined by the number of beats and the time value assigned to each note in a measure.
Of course, this is just me being a nit-picky bastard.
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
1 inch == 2.54 cm, by definition. end of story. according to 'bc -l', 1 meter is 39.37007874015748031496 inches, rounded at the 20th decimal place.
in keeping with my last grumpy post, what the fuck is this all about? "hey, I'm stupid. Here read about how stupid I am and how some people approximate a metre by 38 or 40 inches!!" A meter is a little more than three feet (easily approximated by 40 inches).. how hard is that to remember? I'm from Texas, and I can remember that. Also, a meter stick is a little longer than a yard stick.. guess how many feet in a yard.
P.S. I seriously doubt Dan Birchall submitted this story.
328419 feet in meters
or
62 miles in meters
Google is your friend!
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
The USA may not admit it, but it yearns
for royalty, just like what we gave up
with our Revolution. How else to explain:
(1) fastination with Hollywood celebrities
(2) continued re-election of undeserved
politicians (like the House of Lords)
(3) elevation of GW Bush to near-sainthood?
What you mention is an excellent point. When I was living in Canada everything was labelled in metric. So instead of buying a 1/2 liter bottle you bought 13 fluid ounces and 534 ml bottle. Ok the numbers are not totally right, but you get the idea.
NOW, most of the measurements in the US and Canada are 12.345 fluid ounces or 500 ml. It seems that even though the US does not want to change all things like you mention are in metric. I also know that the entire car industry is in metric.
So what I wonder is why people are still using imperial units....
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
It's just that everyone knows the standard/imperial/whateveritscalled units already. They're familiar and they work and we understand what it means when someone says it's 85 degrees in New York today. Switching over means everybody has to learn what everything means, intuitively, all over again. That's a long process that nobody wants to go through.
For you metric-using folks, think of it this way: you still use weird old fashioned seconds/minutes/hours. You know that 4:45 is almost 5 o'clock and your commute will take 20 minutes. Without thinking about it you know that you'll be home eating your microwaved dinner in 50 minutes, a little less than an hour, and you can leave that candy bar in your desk drawer for tomorrow.
Now suppose some aliens came down and gave us metric time units. 100 centihors in an hor, 10 hors in a day. Oh, and keep in mind that's a galactic standard day, which is actually 1.3 earth days. Now you have to start using these units. What time is your appointment? Oh, it's at 4:87. How long does it take to get to there from here? About 25 centihors. What?
It's practically meaningless, because you haven't developed a frame of reference. You'd have to convert it mentally until you got familiar enough with the new units to just 'know' what 4:87 means, and nobody voluntarily wants to bother.
or what you manage. You can still be an idiot. Just take a look at the president...
% units
510 units, 54 prefixes
You have: inch
You want: meter
* 0.0254
/ 39.370079
Sheesh.
Do you really think that our mind is naturally suited to 3s and 4s? Are you closed to the idea that it could be a much more complex source of interactions in your life that trained your mind to work that way?
.. etc. It's all socially constructed. Those numbers aren't inherently evil or more useful for one purpose or another, it's totally social pressure. Ditto for your ability to work with 3s and 4s in your head. Good on you, but it's hardly a firm basis for such a wide-ranging generalization.
Did you ever think that if you grew up in a metric environment, you'd have as much of a troubled time thinking in imperial? The website you linked to didn't think that. After all, naturally you'd be more adept at doing 3 and 3 times stuff in your head if you'd been doing it for all your unit conversion in your life! I've been doing metric in my head, as Canada is not silly like the brits (a brit whose site you link to) who don't sell things by the litre, or measure by the kilometre, or use kilograms as their unit of mass. British people are metric in name only: underneath, the sickening heart of ugly imperial units beats away.
Converting non-metric units in my head is hard, and I usually end up likening it to the ratio out of 10 because that's how I grew up. 5/16ths? Thas' really close to 4/16ths, which is 1/4th which is a weensy bit more than 0.25, so this must be smaller than the 1/2th one which is really 0.50. I don't convert the 16ths and 2ths to a base denominator, I convert them in terms of a 0 to 1.
The kooky site you link to is all about how counting in base-12 is the way to go. I mean, you can take a step back to the way Germanic tribes did it, but I think base-10 is the way to go. Metric's just an outgrowth of it. Imperial units were an outgrowth of kooky base-12 that was used by Germanic tribes -- it's why English uses eleven and twelve instead of oneteen and twoteen. Japanese people don't have this problem -- the go ju-ich, ju-ni, ju-san. Their problem is about 4s and 7s and 9s. Yon or shi? Shi means death! Shichi or nana? Nana is usually used for numbers only. Ku or kyu?
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Josh
1 inch is formally defined as 2.54 cm = 0.0254 m EXACTLY.
The imperial usints of measurement are defined in terms of the metric ones these days, so the ratios in that direction are a finite number of decimal places, while in the other, they're messy.
1 foot = 30.48 cm = 0.3048 m EXACTLY.
It's in the other direction it gets messy, as 1 in = 1/0.0254 m = 10000/254 m = 5000/127 m, which is a non-terminating decimal.
So you want to be absolutely exact, it's 39.(370078740157480314960629921259842519685039) inches, where the 42 parenthesized digits repeat forever.
Is that the metric spelling?
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
Who cares?
1 yard = 0.91 metres
[(328,491/3)*0.91]/1000 = 99.64227km
No matter how you cut it, the listed height is below 100km
why not do the conversion based on millimetres. Sure the values you play with seem much larger, but the end result is the same.
Anyone with half a brain can realise the the problem with making this change, especially in an environment where you're working with existing materials. The following is a genuine conversation I had while out buying some 4 inch guttering:
Me: Hi, I need some 4 inch guttering.
Plumbing shop: Oh sorry, we don't have any 4 inch guttering.
Me: How can you not have any? This sucks!
Plumbing shop: As luck would have it, we do have some 101.6mm guttering that is exactly the same size.
Me: I'll take it!
1 inch = 2.54 cm, exactly. There is no need to remember any other number than 2.54. Base all calculations on it and you'll be fine and accurate.
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
Hi, err, well,d /mm/pagina_mm.h tm
despite it is in Spanish, this freeware can convert 500 measure units very accurately...
http://webs.sinectis.com.ar/alejan
I'm not sure how americans avoid confusion between their meters (which are used to measure things, like a volt-meter or speedometer) and their meters (which are used as a unit of length).
I'm sure someone can come up with some equally odd spelling that the rest of the world uses, but sometimes american spelling makes me smile.
(and I'm fully expecting any typos in this comment to be suitably flamed)
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World" 1 John 4:14
READ - Click on posters link
This evening, I learned that one meter equals 39.3700787 inches. While this may come as no surprise to some people, it was one to me - for years, I had mistakenly believed a meter was 39.77 inches, and now I know it's basically 39.37.
Of course, I'm not alone in my confusion. A bit of research on Google revealed quite a few different conversions from meters to inches. Here are some of them:
* 38 inches according to a page at Arkansas State University and another at Microflex Technologies.
* 38.16 inches according to a rounding-happy math teacher at Norfolk Collegiate School in Virginia.
* 38.37 inches according to Honeywell's Sensotec folks.
* 38.8 inches according to some numerological babble
* 39 inches according to Fife Products and some folks who sell quilting products.
* 39.14 inches according to the specifications on a measuring wheel for engineers. (uh-oh!)
* 39.15 inches according to an October 30 2002 entry in a blog.
* 39.21 inches according to Richard Bowles.
* 39.27 inches according to pages at University of Wisconsin Stevens Point and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory.
* 39.28 inches according to Jonathan Brooks at Penn State University.
* 39.3 inches according to some laser folks.
* 39.34 inches according to a page about photography, and another about a role-playing game. Hey, it's only a game, their meters can be whatever length they want.
* 39.36 inches according to some ham radio sorts and some NASA folks among others. Pretty close... but... shouldn't NASA know better by now?
* 39.38 inches according to people who race 1-meter model yachts, talk about prehistory in California, and, um, other NASA folks. Again, pretty close!
* 39.39 inches according to someone ranting against metric (how ironic), as well as a page about UFOs.
* 39.4 inches according to a list of conversions from a company that makes electric motors and such things, and the Secretary of the Navy.
* 39.45 inches according to a set of math problems from a university in the Philippines.
* 39.5 inches according to a space.com article on liquid lenses.
* 39.54 inches according to Mark Moburg in this mailing list archive.
* 39.6 inches according to a page about magnetic therapy.
* 39.7 inches according to pages from Des Moines Area Community College and some rounding-happy laser people.
* 39.77 inches according to a page about carpet-weaving in Turkey and another site that sells S-Video Cables and lots of other cables. (See, I wasn't alone!)
* 39.79 inches according to InterlinkBT (now Turck)'s information on DeviceNet Pre-molded Fieldbus cables (below table).
* 39.87 inches, according to a textfile compiling handy (if wrong) conversions for common weights and measures, from O'Reilly.
* 39.97 inches, according to the Science Glossary developed by teachers in the Poughkeepsie (New York) City School District for the 2001-2002 school year, and according to the zoning laws on satellite dishes in Springfield Township, Ohio.
* 40 inches, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Once again, the correct answer is right around 39.37 inches. Remember that - it'll be on the quiz!
:wq ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
To convert between different units, WWW Unit Conveerter is your friend.
It was funny, but Dan Birchall isn't the head of NASA's mars probe program
my world has just shattered around me.
but at least 2.54 is exact...
We need to just forego metric altogether in the US and skip straight to Modern Physics units!
My car tops out at about 0.000000231 c
It can travel about 5000000000000 nanometers per tank of gas
and it's engine produces around 937500000000000000000000 electron volts per second at the crank.
It's the wave of the future!
`which fortune`
You mean it's not 42 ? Oh wait..
The metric system (SI now) is the only official unit of measurement the US government has ever adopted. It did so way back in 1893. (1866 it became a legal unit of measure). What they didn't do though, was require it's use. So since the older imperial system was still widely in use it lived on. (Some of it anyway.. nobody knows what a stone is for example) Congress went back and required the metric system's use for all goverment purposes in 1988 (unless the infomation is for public use where it can be either).
So really we use a mix of both here. In school they teach almost entirely in metric... makes the math easier to deal with when to have to convert to smaller/larger units. Common stuff like speed limits, weight, tempature, and long distances are measured in mph/pounds/fahrenheit/miles. If you go to the store, or use any tools though it's 50/50.. so smaller units like liters/grams/centimeters I think most people know pretty well.
Just think of all the work those spam senders have to convert all their inches to centimeters.
Has anyone else noticed that Google calculator uses meter, rather than metre as a unit of length?
Next....
One person can't convert English to metric units. Why is this worthy of a slashdot article?
Why do people keep harping on this anyway? The metric system isn't a panacea anyway. It's better for some thins, worse for others.
Why do people get so hung up on a system that is every bit as arbitrary as another?
On the other hand, is a different story. It is much easier to cook in imperial, and recipies won't convert easily. Nobody wants to measure out 525 mL. This could come to a problem, however, with food packaging. If we don't want a lot of unusable leftovers, we need to stay in inmperial for imperial recipies, right? Then what about the container ships to hold it....Oh.....OH NO!
I could only imagine the field day manufacturers would have with confused Americans. I would bet that every product they could get away with short-changing us a bit on, they would (same price for "roughly" the same size package...)
And don't tell me the price of a liter of gas would cost 26% of what a gallon does now... We'd be lucky if they didn't charge half, Americans would just be happy to see prices in the one dollar range on the gas station signs again...
The other easy way is the conversion ratio of 0.3937 (1/2.54). To go from inches to centimetres you simply divide by 0.3937, or to convert from centimetres to inches simply multiply by the same.
So metro-sexual was not about size?
What's in a sig?
There is a navigational reason to use knots on water (for us who navigate and not just stare on chart on GPS). And it is trivial to convert knots to m/s with 3% accuracy just by dividing by 2.
BTW. There are advantages in navigating around 60th latitude.
The only good thing about the Imperial measurement system is the pint of beer. I love it. It beats the 25 centilitres of the standard beer glass in my country.
It depends what kind of meter it is of course.
On the other hand, a METRE pretty much fixed a bit bigger than a yard. Darned yanks.
Gallons are worse - there are two kinds.
Pounds worse still, as some items require a pound to be volumetric, and not necessarily weigh the same as a pound of anything else. Or it could be money.
-- All your bass are below two Hz
I have absolutely no idea how you came up with those numbers, but they are wrong.
328,491 feet = 3,941,892 inches
3,941,892 inches = 10,012,405.68 cm
10,012,405.68 cm = 100124.0568 m
100124.0568 = 100.1240568 km
Seems a bit more than 100km to me.
Got it?
Some people are like slinkies--basically useless but they bring a smile to your face when pushed down the stairs.
After all, they did have the worlds first Decimal Currency, introduced in 1792. (100 cents equals 1 dollar) Thomas Jefferson proposed that America go to a Decimal system in 1790. Why is it that America refuses to change to a simpler system when they've had the opportunity to do it and participate in it for over a Century? You're all just super proud of your English heritage traditions! And as we all know it, tradition is a method of doing something stupid for no real reason, for a long time.. Have a look at some of the dates involved with the metric system. If you're American, do you feel like you live in a country which adopts technology now? http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/dates.htm
1 yard = 0.91 metres
[(328,491/3)*0.91]/1000 = 99.64227km
1 yard = 3 ft = 36 in
36 x 2.54 = 91.44 mm
So 1 yard = 0.9144 mm != 0.91 mm
And [(328,491/3)*0.9144]/1000 = 100.1240568 km
Apart from a few of the CIS countries (former Soviet Union), altitude on aircraft is measured in feet. International flight levels are always expressed in feet which has lead to one or two problems in the past on CIS airliners but they now carry imperial altimeters as well to prevent confusion. Even the French, the inventors of the metric system use imperial altimetres.
See my journal, I write things there
3's and 4's?? are you kidding?? How many tsp to a tbsp? How many tbsp's to a cup? How many cups to a pint? How many pints to a gallon?
... and if you DO know the answers to these questions...
I don't know. When I do need to know, I'm glad I have google.
I'd rather just deal with nice 10's all the way around.
Front page material? I think not!
metre and litre, not meter and liter. The US corrupts everything, imperial pint are not the same as US pints etc, bah!
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Heres how I keep everything straight....
1 meter = 39.37 inches
1 centimeter = 2.54 inches
1 liter = 33.8 ounces (from the 16.9 ounce half liter pops I used to drink long ago)
28 grams ~= 1 ounce (actually 28.40875 grams)
454.54 grams = 1 pound
5 milliliters = 1 teaspoon
15 milliliters = 1 tablespoon
1 metric ton ~= 1 'long' ton (2200 pounds)
1 kilometer ~= 0.6 miles
37 degrees Celcius = 98.6 degrees Farenheight (human body temperature)
That is about all the conversion 'tricks' I know concerning metric-to-english-to-metric conversion
Caluclate 1 meter in inches
- To understand recursion, we must first understand recursion -
I am from Oz and i am a fitter and turner. I must say that the metric system is far better than Imperial as the metric Micrometers are more acurate .01mm is about 2 thousands of an inch.
Also working things out for a CNC makes things so much more faster when you dont have worry about things like 11/32, 54/64 and just see 23.44 ect.
The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Uh, well, that's was a waste of 5 minutes of my life... no wait, i can't add, thats 10 minutes, sorry about that ^-^
Stick your foot up your ass. Go metric plz.
but if you lived in a metric world, your window would be ever so slightly LARGER, at 138 cm...
your saw blade would be slightly different width too...in the metric world, all "standard" pieces are just ever so slightly off from the american world, so that they are very easy to mess with. of course 1/8th an inch is easy to add to 3/16's, but so is 2cm to 5 cm...
Female Robot: It fits, then you must know that I'm...
Calculon: Metric? I've always known, but for you my darling, I'm willing to convert.
Google, How many centimetres are there in an inch?
Maybe because it's not inherently easier. If you are brought up in the Imperial/US systems they are not in fact hard - my parents can do percentage changes in Imperial measurements in their heads - and their frequent use of fractions is in fact less prone to rounding errors in many cases and is therefore more accurate.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
For my argument re: NASA, any Dan Birchall is the "right" Dan Birchall. ;)
The "right" I actually referred to was in reference to the SpamCon Foundation. I found a reference to that separate from danbirchall.com, so I wasn't sure that you and the SpamCon Dan Birchall were one. Clearly you are.
Obviously you would find it difficult to use metric if all the products you are using are made with imperial measurements that are "nice" numbers. Just bear in mind that other peoples products come with "nice" metric measurements.
Also, I prefer metric becasue I was born after it was adopted and it's all I know, certainly. But it does seem that if everything is ten more than the previous level it's a lot more consistent than imperial where the number of x's in y differs depending on what type of measurement you're talking about.
Daar is nie 'n lepel nie
I'm an import to the US, from the UK.
... what base is that ?
:-D
I grew up with the imperial system sort of being "phased out", which in reality, as other posters pointed out, never really happend. I was just about old enough to notice the decimalization of the currency, and people still refer to 10 pence as "two bob".
Pints of beer, liters of milk.
Centrigrade for temperature (by the weather folks on TV),
Miles per hour, but buy litres of gasoline (petrol).
It's a mess, but even fully metric countries still have one problem. Time is still expressed in a non metric way, mosly. I mean, when we get down to subsecond expression, it's base 10 all the way, but after 1 second
Maybe a decimal time system for all would level the field, everyone would be confused.
OK, let's keep it simple. your window is 54 5/16" only because you use imperials. if USA wuold use metric your window would have been 1,20 meter, and you would easily add up an extra 20 centimeters space ending with 1,40 meter. As you can see metric is way more easy, you meke sums with decimals, NOT with fractions!!!!!
I like Gradians better
Circle = 360 degrees, 2PI radians, or 100 Gradians.
Just seems simpler.. 100
One of the interesting side-effects of Imperial units being defined in terms of SI units is that it gives them credibility. The classical problem with Imperial units was that they were poorly defined, while SI units were more rigidly defined. Now that the Inch and the Gallon have rock-solid definitions, they're really no better or worse than their SI counterparts. Convenience is the only reason to choose one or the other. The SI system is more convenient for most of us since our governments use it. Imperial is still more convenient for Americans. International trade may eventually change that, but why get in a fuss? As long as we all know the conversion factors, who cares which system Americans choose to use?
every time somebody makes an argument against the metric system, they are essentially also making that same argument agaisnt the arabic (our) number system. to use a number system with a base of 10 and not use units with a base of 10 is illogical, and impractical where units with a base of 10 are much easier to manipulate using a number system with a base of 10.
I don't see any mention of NASA in his resume.
Still, I'd take an anti-spam Dan Birchall over a NASA administrator anyday... much more useful in my everyday life.
Your an idiot.
Sure 54 5/16inches = 137.95375cm, but tell me how the fractions of mm is going to be of any use to you building your windows.
1379mm is easily accurate enough, and can be measured on any metric tape-measure or ruler.
just type "1 inch to meter" in google or vice versa ;)
We do use the metric system, you're just very naive:
- In 1866, Congress authorized the use of the metric system in the USA and supplied each state with a set of standard metric weights and measures.
- The US is one of the original 17 signatory nations of the 1875 Treaty of the Meter.
- In 1893, the metric system was adopted as the fundamental standard for length and mass in the United States.
- Congress passed the Metric Conversion Act of 1975, "to coordinate and plan the increasing use of the metric system in the United States", and a process of voluntary conversion was initiated.
- Congress passed the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988 which amended the Metric Conversion Act of 1975 and designates the metric system as the preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce.
- Federal agencies were to use the metric system in their procurement, grants and other business-related activities by the end of 1992
Point your browser here.Personally, I don't see how my use of kilograms to purchase olive loaf at the corner deli is going to benefit you any.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
*No, really, honest.
Here in Argentina we have a mathematic formula which can be used for any kind of unit conversion and its pretty simple. We like to call it the "Rule of the three simples" (yes yes..i know, its nonsense in english...)
Let me show you how it works..
Lets say i want to know how many kilometers an hour there are in 60 m/h.
if 1.6 Km/h its 1 m/h, then 60 m/h = X
1 m/h --------- 1.6 Km/h
60 m/h -------- X Km/h
(60 * 1.6) / 1 = 96 Km/h
Maybe that'll help some of you guys to make your life easier.
It's spelt *metre* not meter.
I worked at NASA back in the early 90s. They had a big campaign to push the metric system, including posters which read "Metric is a Perfect 10!". So I got out my ruler and measured the posters, and found them to be exactly 2 feet by 3 feet...
I object to that article, and to the next reply.
I am Japanese and we changed to Metric system 50 years ago. Of course it took over 10 years until finish the transitional trouble, but now we all use Metric system. I wondered why American still use inch system, causes various problems in this global age. Why don't they change to Metric system?
One day my friend lives in the US told me, "So why do you still run on the wrong side ofthe road?"
I realized it is absolutely difficult to change the system.
it's funny! laugh!
The metre is French in origin (originally from the Greek word metron) ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre
Sometimes simpler is not better ... just lazy and/or manipulative.
We predominantly use the metric system. We do however cling to the use of imperial measurements for important tasks such as weighing drugs and measuring parts of our anatomy. Or so I am told.
So why are these exactly wrong...
Half the others are only one digit away and if that's all the spelling mistakes you can find on the internet...
It's based on stellar parallax as measured from Earth - good thing all our observatories are on Earth, huh? Oh, wait, there are those ones in orbit... stellar parallax is a little different for those, yeah. And if we go back to the moon, well, it'll be different there... and on Mars... and so on.
Bleah. At least light traveling in a vacuum should be the same on other celestial bodies.
Who'll get the next zero-g product placement?
because I measure those things in English that need to be measured in English and those things in Metric that need to be measured in Metric and do not mix the two.
Ever.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
Well, I think the solution to that problem would have been to use 140cm trim.
The English system is much more accurate than the metric system is. It's also simpler (in most cases) to add in the English system. Take the above example. To add the width of my sawblade (1/8") you quickly come up with 54 7/16 inches. In metric you would have to spend an extra 10 seconds doing the addition (.95375 + .125=1.07875) and you're still left with the problem of not knowing exactly where to mark your lumber!
Same counter argument here.
You are kidding, right? You realise that those oh-so-convenient values have come about because you use the imperial system?
In a metric world, your window will probably be either 135 or 140 cm, your hacksaw blade is probably 2 mm, and your tape measure comes with imperial units on the other side for when you work with older gear.
"Software is too expensive to build cheaply"
I'm an American living in France. Once when moving out of an apartment a potential new tenant asked how high was the ceiling in the loft area (about 4.5 feet; not even enough room to stand up.) I told her I didn't know metric well enough for an accurate conversion (in fact I didn't even know the true height in inches; I was merely making a guess based on my own height.) So she asked "how many miles is it?"
The US is ment to be one of the most advanced countries in the world and is using one of the oldedst and anoing systems of measurment. Your currencey is based on the decimal system it wouldent be to hard to change everyhting to metric, everyone has the base idear. Would have been harder for the uk there momeny works off like base 6 or something
they invented the imperial units!
Wasn't the foot based on Charles the Great's foot? You know, the Holy Roman (Frank) emperor.
... and poster rants about others not having a clue.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Given the number of sources cited as incorrect, I wonder, how do you know that the answer you gave is correct and that the others are wrong?
Damn right... Can you imagine walking into a pub and asking for 568.26125 millilitres of your favourite brew?
No... What would happen is that you'd get 500ml and still pay the same!
*note* Some pubs already do this! ;-)
I've never shoed a horse, but I once told a donkey to piss off!
Also the imperial system is _far_ better for estimation. An average bloke is 6 feet tall, around 12 stone and has a stride of a yard. Nice round numbers that are easy for everyday use. The units you use imply the accuracy - if you hear someone is 6 feet 2 inches you can infer they are within an inch of that measurement. Hold your hands out in front of you - estimate the distance between them and you should be able to do it to within an inch. Repeating with the metric system won't work - you will most likely have to quote a range because you _can't_ say e.g. 37cm I've never understood why a fraction of the meridian should form the basis of a measurement system. http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/meter.html
Now take a look at a tape measure and tell me exactly where the .95375 mark is. It isn't there! The English system is much more accurate than the metric system is.
No human can read a tape measure to that degree of accuracy. You can see .9cm on the measure, you can propably judge the 0.95, but after that your into the realm of error anyway.
Here is the thing though, even if 5/16th is marked on your measure, you aren't really measuring to exactly 5/16ths. You have the same degree of error, your line on the meaure has some width, the measure isn't exact, or placed exaclty and so on. If your measuring to cut or nail that will have width.
The English system isn't more accurate (and I'm English, I use both), it is just equally inaccurate about simpler number. Yes you can't measure exactly 1/3 of a metre on a measure, but you can't measure exactly a 1/3 of a yard either.
There are times when one is easier than the other, metric rules for most scientific and engineering stuff, but imperial can be easier of everyday quick in your head calculation. But neither is more accurate.
Using Google:
:P
10 (furlong per fortnight) = 5.54748858 × 10-12 light year per year
Pints are an interesting special case of Imperial units. Over hundred of years, UK men have evolved the ability to quickly convert pints of beer into litres of bile. In fact our whole recreational life revolves (often literally) around the pint, and it's associated unit, the just-one-more. Strangely, no measuring scale for hang-overs exists. May I be the first to suggest the Beerfart scale?
--- Yx3 = Delilah ---
Similar story, over 10 years ago when Ireland went metric (apologies if my attemps at written brogue sound like talk-like-a-pirate-day):
My dad: Good morning, I'd like some quarter inch pipe please
Hardware guy: Ah no surrr, we have the metric system now surr, it's all in millimeters.
My dad: Ok fine, I need some 8mm pipe
Hardware guy: Foine, foine! How many feet would you like?
Not confused enough? http://translate.google.com/translate?u=www.slashdot.jp&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=ja&tl=en
1000 m is one km.
The imperial ton is 20 hundredweight (2240 lbs) while the american ton is 2000lbs
like a meter measures things
and a metre is a unit of measurment
www.nist.gov
You'll have to dig around a bit, but it's all there.
BG
for the firebrands proclaiming its legitimacy as a word because "everybody knows what it means." The article will likely be entitled "Nucular Virii: Choose or Loose," or some such.
The metric system is just so well designed. It makes conversions dead easy:
1m = 10dm = 100cm = 1000mm
As simple as base 10.
But what's really neat is conversion with volume and weight:
1 dm^3 = 1 litre
1 litre of water = 1kg
Can't be easier!
Is bigger than your foot! So if one feet is 12 inches, then one inch should be about....
hmmm... 3.21 cm or 0.311 inch per cm if you wish..... this stinks.
The US Land Survey used 1 meter = 39.37 inches exactly. All other uses are 25.4 centimeters = 1 inch. (See Google for details)
The meter is the same in both cases, but the inch is different.
Size matters.
Andrew Yeomans
Like most else in American culture, having additional imperial measurements around is a wasteful exercise in ignorance.
Get with it. The metric system is a concise and well thought-out system - well rooted in science and interdependent across different domains.
-giggle-
This may be flame-bait/troll-esque, but I feel I need to get back at you for my University Physics textbook being outdated before I even bought it!
A stone is 14 lbs, so Americans say 98 pound weaklings. I always wondered how that came to be.
Mutt: That dude's a seven stone weakling!
Jeff: Seven stone?
Mutt: (calculating quickly) Uh, I am mean a 96 pound, uh, I mean a 98 pound weakling...
Jeff: Yeah, you're right.
In other news, the Germans started using the metric system in Napolean's day. Before that most of the North Germans used the Hanseatic systems, which I think is basically the Cologne system, but it varied from region to Region. God knows what the Bavarians did. They say the clocks run backwards down there, which is a joke, but some clocks did run counterclockwise in the old days.
But (to get to the point) even today, you buy veggies by the pound in Germany. Pound ("Pfund") means exactly 500 grams.
My Dad wrote a gardening book, when NZ went metric they 'translated it to metric' ... converted all the places where he said "plant the seeds an inch apart" to "plant the seeds about 2.54cm apart" .... silly of course and people quickly learned to do the everyday approximations we mostly use for day to day usage. 50mph is the speedlimit because it's a ound number in the right range, so is 80kph. Buying a pound of meat for dinner is about the same as buying 1/2 a kilo - both will get you fed about right. Half a litre is about a pint, a metre is about a yard. A 2x4 is about a 10x20 etc etc ... honestly I don't understand why americans are so scared about changing
Okay, should have used preview:
<0: Frost, Snow (below the freezing point of water, so that's to be expected...)
0-10: cool
10-15: moderate
15-20: warm
20-30: ramp towards hot
>30: TOAST!
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Interestingly, there are at least a couple of groups that are trying to promote the use of base 12 over base 10 for exactly this reason.
Grandparent needed to be informed.
You can use google to convert between units if it feels too hard. ;)
s
http://www.google.com/search?q=1+meter+in+inche
It's actually "metre" thanks.
Damn these cars and trucks made with half metric and half standard nuts/bolts. I know I can use either wrench. But really... which one of them should I be using on which bolt? If I use the 1/2inch wrench... maybe it was really a 13mm bolt. Or what if it is the other way around?!?! It's so damned confusing!
There are 2.54 centimeters in an inch. 2.54 is easier to remember than 39.37.
From 2.54 cm per inch, you find there are 39.37 inch per m. (Or 40 inch per m if you use 2.5 cm per inch).
3 inches in a foot
3 feet in a yard
*1760* yards in a mile.. Geez! Where the f* did that come from?
Metric is easy:
10 mm in a centimetre
100 cm in a metre
1000 m in a kilometre
.. And there are other, lesser used, units in between (ie. decimetre, decametre, hectometre)
And these units should be familiar to anyone who has used technology:
Where do you thing MEGAbytes, TERAbits, etc. come from? (Of course, in computer terms, everything should be on base 2, which complicates things a little, but..)
I am the maverick of Slashdot
"That was an idiotic thing to post on slashdot.
There are, however, perfectly valid reasons to use the metric system of measurement rather than English.
Take a simple measurement like 100 cm (which I had to use quite a bit the other day when I re-trimmed all my windows)
100cm = 39.37007874015748031496062992126inches
Now take a look at a tape measure and tell me exactly where the .37007874015748031496062992126 mark is. It isn't there!
The metric system is much more accurate than the English system is. It's also simpler (in most cases) to add in the metric system. Take the above example. To add the width of my sawblade (1 cm) you quickly come up with 101 centimeter. In English you would have to spend an extra 10 seconds doing the addition (.37007874015748031496062992126 + .125=.49507874015748031496062992126) and you're still left with the problem of not knowing exactly where to mark your lumber!
Along a similary line, why not always use decimal degrees? (wait that's a perversion of base 360. Get rid of it!) Why bother with radian measure? Base 2pi? I mean come on, I can't count to that on my fingers!
Oh yea, since we're abolishing the metric system, let's get rid of decimal, octal, hexadecimal, and binary. Clearly the world would be a simpler place if everything worked in base 12.
The fact is that sometimes (often) bases other than 12 make calculations and measurements much simpler.
To say that one system is absolutely better than the other shows an amazing ignorance of mathematics. (ed: nice contradiction of your own words there)
Just my EUR 2/100."
In other words: of course using one measurement system is inaccurate when working with tools and objects that are designed with a different measurement system in mind. That has nothing to do with whether one measurement system is better than the other, dumbass, it has more to do with the intelligence of the operator...
For Win32, there is ESBUnitConv. It's free for non-commercial use. No source, binary-only. It's useful.
http://www.esbconsult.com/esbcalc/esbunitconv.htm
For unix, there is "units", but it's a little too hard-core for the average user.
Bitch, I'm an American.
I think in feet, pounds, and miles.
The only time I do metric is in chemistry or bio lab.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Along similar lines. Where metric measurements shine is inter-unit conversion. Suppose you have a quantity of water and you wish to know what amount of energy will be required to heat it a given amount. Well this is a huge clusterfuck in imperial units, but simple in metric units. A calorie is the amount of energy necessary to heat one mililitre (or gram or cuibic centimertre, all equivilant) one degree C. Do just take the amount of water, multiply it by the increase, you have the energy.
When doing scientifi calculations, it is simply invaluable. It eliminates so many conversion factors, each wich is another calculation and another point of fuckup, that it is great.
However in everyday life, it really doesn't matter. People don't need to perform much math on units, they just need to have a feeling for what they are. You need to know about how much a litre or gallon is, not any conversion on it. The units could be more or less any arbitrary thing and it would make any difference. Just that people have a sense for what it is is what's important.
When surveying I worked in both imperial and metric. Normal jobs in the US are done imperial, government in metric. Our digital theodalite worked in either. It would even convert for you, if you needed. Not really necessary, I know about how long a foot is, and about hold long a metre is. Which ever was given to me, I could visually estimate to about the same degree of accuracy.
...it's probably pre-calculated. I figure that it took them longer the first time around.
I would say the major reason has been the usage of metric system in education. I have almost never come across a single problem which talked of length in inches or weight in pounds. At the same time, I remember "Fundamentals of Physics" (by Resnik/Halliday/Walker) hardly had any mention of metre(er) anywhere except the customary appendices.
Huh. I have a compass graded in gradians, where the full circle is 400 gradians.
And then you have the various "mils" systems, popular in militaries. It's quite useful, too.
Just ask the British - we've been doing the calculations in our heads for 35 years :)
I had a long argument with a particularly reactionary friend about the subject. He believes England should revert to imperial as well as leaving the EEC (and probably cloning Queen Victoria & Margaret Thatcher too)
What are you listening to? (http://megamanic.blogetery.com/)
That's the simple way to do measurement. Meters, kilograms and seconds. Only problem is, if we do go SI, we'll have to resort to using Kelvins for temperature. Metric on the other hand, uses Celcius. I do admit though, it would be weird to see the Weather channel showing a temperature map with 30's in red and 40's in white.
What's the temperature out there? Oh, it's 303 Kelvins.
It's Metre.
http://efil.blogspot.com/
You non-metric people have nautical miles and miles.
<p>
So what's the fuzz with having nautical, astronomical (NASA), normal, imperial and inaccurate inches?
<p>
Btw. my reference says 1 in = 25.4 mm (exact)! huh!
Dyslexics have more fnu.
Like the cost of moving a road sign's going to be a huge burdon compaired to the rest of metrification.
Did little green men help them conspire to make 1/3 a nice number in imperial but a nasty number in metric too?
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Not to put too much of a point on it, but the rest of the planet doesn't have to give a damn about how many inches there are in a meter, because they don't have inches anymore. Or stones. Or bushles. Or cubits. Or zentner. Or... This is a Yanks-only problem: even the Brits can think in meters, their problem is that they can't spell the word right.
You have two choices, my fellow American friend: Either convert to metric like the rest of the world in the 21th Century, or stop complaining.
As great as Slashdot is, this U.S. bias is getting to be a pain in the ass. It is beyond me why a simple complaint about the known problems of math education in the U.S. makes the front page.
Actually the US did start on becoming metric, long ago when France was your friend (you do remember that that big statue holding the torch was a gift from them dont you?)
... they just did a really half-assed job at it.
To be less like the evil British, whom the had to fight hard against for their freedom, They started to adopt the french metric system.
BUT got lazy, and stopped converting after making the money metric.
The US was actually one of the first countries to go metric
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
My car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!
With all due respect, but if the US wants to remain on their isle of exceptionalism for every single issue people around the world are bound to lose patience.
The absolute monstrosity that is the "system" of measures in the US and other few countries is something an elightened society should have ditched decades ago.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Well, not for most engineering. I can't believe anyone would be masochistic enough to use imperial measurements for anything involving types of measurements (as in time, space, mass, pressure, etc) due to the crazy constants needed to switch between them.
And anyway, in the us Imperial and Metric units are both used. You buy milk and gasoline in gallons, but you buy Soft drinks and pretty much every other liquid by the liter.
Inches are used frequently when you're talking about size offhand (want a 4"x6" or a 5"x8"?) but centimeters are used in any detailed spec (ie measurements 20x340x3cm).
Really, imperial is only used when only relative comparisons are needed. It doesn't really matter that much how tall exactly people are in every day life, you just want to know how big they are compared to other people, so we use imperial measures for that. Same with gas mileage or photo sizes. Things where absolute measurement is needed, metric is used.
The thing is, for the vast majority of everyday life, only relative comparisons are needed.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
rods (5.5 yds)
chains (4 rods, 22 yards)
220 yards in a furlong (or 10 chains)
8 furlongs to a mile.
A mile is a metric unit from Roman times; it's the approximate length of 1000 paces.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
I'm amazed that this article, about converting
inches to metres, gathered so many replies.
Should "News For Nerds" be replaced by "Math For Dummys" ?
The Philippines were an American colony, well, they never got around to putting their own people over there but when it was taken over it was viewed very openly as 'imperialism' We were going to go over and 'convert' the people Christianity. Never mind the fact they were majority catholic...
The only 'true' american colony was Libria, which was made up of freed slaves.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
... baring road signs, you can happily trade in metric (which is by law BTW, imperial measures are still used for the convenience of old folk, but metric is perfectly OK) or provide your height and weight in centimeters (Brits: in the parts of the world that saw the light earlier, you just say 1 menter and 75 centimeters, not 175 cm or even worst 1750 mm!) when you go to the hospital or GP.
...
As for milk, you buy in a container celarly labeled as containg 1.whatever litres (the equivalent to 2 pints). Hint: in other metric places all containers are whole number of litter (1, 2, 3)
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
> To accelerate 1kg by 1m/s you need a force of 1N. If you push with a force of 1N over a distance of 1m you've used 1joule. If you did this in 1s then your power is 1watt.
You are confusing units to the base of the numerical system. These are two independent issues.
If you use base 12, you still need a force of 1N to accelerate 1kg by 1m/s. And so on, and so forth...
It just so happens that when you get to 10N to accelerate 10kg by 1m/s, if this is base 12, you would really be speaking of 12N to accelerate 12kg by 1m/s (the latter in decimal units).
It would even work out if you have to say that you need 100N to accelerate 10kg to 10m/s. In decimal this would be 144N to accelerate 12kg to 12m/s.
Cheers,
Mario.
Expressions such as "country kilometre", "missed by a centimetre", "in for a gram, in for a kilogram" never really took on is Australia. The other big cultural influence in the US. For example, my son, 9 years old at the time, referred to people's heights in feet. He was born 11 years after the metric system came in to Australia. He was collection basketball cards at the time. Generally, the change has been for the better though. Volumes in particular.
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
The USA is far from perfect, but it's the best place around.
... but does that make it the best country to live in?
Most people would disagree with you though. Even though I don't live there, Sweden is apparantly the best place to live (all things considered: safety, well-being, child-care, employment, environment). I myself am from The Netherlands which is very ok and scores high on the things that define happyness for an average human being. (see Sweden)
I have been to the US a couple of times and I always liked it there; lots of space (between cities), nice people, and so on. But the US is also a country where there is much poverty, much more then is being shown to the world via TV (maybe even to you). I always have the strange feeling that in the US less is cared about an individual then in many countries in Europe. Some People still have to take a second morgage on their house if their kid gets cancer. (An extreme example maybe, but I've heard it first hand from Americans I've worked with)
It struck me like this; If you live in the US and you're doing well, then you're doing really well, if you're doing not so well, you're doing bad.
The US is no doubt technically superior, I immideatly believe you
The Netherlands is far from perfect, but I'm not going anywhere.
Actually.. for cooking, such things are still metric. As far as I am concerned, a teaspoon is defined as 5mL, a dessertspoon is 10mL and a tablespoon is 15 mL. A cup is 250 mL.
(Yes, this is a metric teaspoon and a metric cup. The point is that there are still metric definitions for them. I'm a New Zealander, and I have a bunch of measuring cups at home, and they have these values written on them. Recipe books too expect me to use metric cooking units.)
So, in other words, are you so sure you're using imperial cooking units? I wouldn't be surprised if your cookbooks are actually metric and you didn't know.
"Take a simple measurement like 54 5/16" (which I had to use quite a bit the other day when I re-trimmed all my windows) 54 5/16inches = 137.95375cm"
While that might have struck you as handy I should probably mention that your window is probably 138cm (supposing factory made windows) and your imperial measurements are actually off a bit.
Not that it is an amount that would matter. Since no normal construction obtain precision higher then -+2mm, at the very best.
1 US/UK inch is 2.54cm
1 Danish inch is 2.62cm
other countries have other sizes
Since 72 points=1 inch in both countries, a 12 point Times font has different sizes in different countries. Most countries have adopted the US/UK point size though after DTP software started to be used professionally.
Most other non-SI units are also available in different sizes. For instance, a mile is:
1 US/UK mile: 1.6km
1 nautical mile: 1.852km
1 Danish mile: 7.5km (same as North Germany)
1 Swedish mile: 10km
Nowadays, many days use 1 mile = 10km though, because Sweden is our neighbor, and they still use "miles".
When doing stuff around the house I use a metric/imperial tape/ruler and I just pick the closest metric or imperial measurement.
e.g. if I'm over 1cm then I may go with 1/2 inch and if its over that then maybe 2cm then maybe 1 inch etc. You get used to it. Long measurements I use meters and centimeters as they are easy to do the maths on a calculator. Also easy for weights - 10cm x 10cm x 10cm of water is a liter and it weighs 1 kilogram. 1m x 1m x 1m is a cubic meter and it weights 1 metric tonne. Easy for measuring tanks in roof or pools.
And (in the UK) they are only now starting to lead with the 1742 temperature scale instead of the 1724 temperature scale (Celcius vs Farenheit) on the weather...
As a result of all of the conversion hooplah, the US decided that sticking to the imperial system of using units based on museum artifacts was kinda silly, so they abandonned it without telling everyone.
The "inch" is now defined as being 2.54 centimeters. That's not a conversion factor, that's a definition.
It did change the length of an inch by a very small amount when they did that, though. So, some of those numbers on the other websites may be historically accurate, and others may be the result of people rounding the 2.54 to 2.5 before inverting the factor, or doing some other approximations.
Even as for now, Americans are the most obese nation in the world. If they would start approximating a pound as half a kilo, the US would sure burst at seams. :-)
what sucks about the metric system is people insist on "weight" being expressed in kilograms. thats mass, you dumbasses around the world. _drugs_ that you take, are weighed in kilograms. any brits know if thats still a problem?
And on top of it all, a US foot is not even equal to a standard foot! Standard foot conversion = 0.3048 US foot conversion = 0.30480060960 Yes people, those extra decimal places at the end to make a difference!
Ok, reading the guy's linked page with lots of confused conversion numbers, now hear this:
An inch is defined from the meter these days. It is exactly 25.4 millimeters.
This definition dates back to when Europe was more precise in measurements than American counterparts about the 1800s, and the American and Canadian inches were slightly different from each other.
A European factory - I forget which - made industrial pieces to fit exactly one inch, and exported to North America. For all practical purposes, they had a monopoly on the market. Of course, they needed different pieces for the US and Canada.
They undertook an experiment and started to make the American and Canadian pieces equally large (probably for profit reasons but htfc), deviating slightly from the standards for the respective cultures, and using an effectively home-made inch of 25.4 millimeters. After having been in production with this piece for a couple of years, with this piece being used for measurements in industrial production all over North America, the factory proclaimed that the US and Canada didn't have the tools to know the difference between the new-inch and their respective old-inches, and therefore, they shall henceforth use the same inch: 25.4 millimeters.
The proclamation stands to this day.
Here in (metric) Europe, the commonly used paper/poster size that comes closest is 59.4 cm by 84.1 cm.
Those numbers don't sound like round numbers in metric, do they?
But it makes sense. The format is known as A1. Its surface area is about 5000 square cm, or half a square meter. A0 is twice as big: a square meter (84.1 cm by 118.9 cm). The ratio of all An formats is sqrt(2), so that the width of An equals the length of A(n+1).
Hence: A4, the standard lettre size, measures 21.0 cm by 29.7 cm; its surface area is 1/16 square meter.
My 10 month old baby boy is weighing in right about XXX pounds right now.
Have you been en|arging your baby na7ura11y?
qwerty brillig trombone tmesis gerbil
By reading this comment, you immediately waive any and all rights regarding it.
i ask
first name: friendly
last name: meter
Without trying to bemoan the poster's inclusion,
Why does everyone need to mention that 12 is divisible by more real numbers?
12/1, 12/2, 12/3, 12/4, 12/6
10/1, 10/2, 10/5
It seems the only application this would have is for measurement of materials when building something by hand. I've helped frame several homes and spent many hours in a woodshop -- It is exceedingly rare than numbers fall into exact inches. In my experience, I have found myself doing calculations like dividing 31 3/16" by two and adding half the width of a stud (~1 1/2") to it.
Perhaps I'm just bitter, but using Imperial isn't really helping anyone in America... It's just that we're too lazy to change.
Here's some rhymes I learnt to cope with metric conversion:
A meter measures three-foot three,
it's longer than a yard, you see.
Two and quarter pounds of jam,
weighs about a kilogram.
A litre of water's
a pint and three quarters.
That's assuming a US pint is the same as our Imperial pint... I know the US gallons aren't the same....
Baz
No. That happens in the US as well. The difference is that in the US the childs gaurdian helps.
Ooh me me!
Jerry Yang: jyang (at) yahoo.com
please please!
And me too, please.
romeozet @ poczta.onet.pl
If you'd been posting to this thread as an AC, we'd all be posting at +1 by now.
One can see the original poster had no idea of arithmetic, as incorrect values listed included 39 and 40.
39 is as correct as 39.37 is. *Both* are rounded values.
40 is just rounded up, and even though further from the real value, still conforms to some system of mathematics.
The same would go for 39.4 (and 39.5)
Tsk. Tsk.
With 39.37 one would lose the Mars rover all over again anyway...
I dunno why its so hard for usa/brits?
Australia was using old units a long time ago too, how the hell did australia change so quickly and easily? Maybe coz we had damn lots of immigrants that all used metrics ? perhaps.... or are we just not so old school?
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Hey, I forgot to give my first and last name.
First: Mag
Last: Romeozet
an inch is exactly 2.54 it has changed over the years as also has what a meter is see the history of length. I can see how this causes problems.
never noticed it?
All distances in Star Trek are in meters.
Georges
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.
correct me if i am wrong...
Didn't you all learn in school that 1 inch = 2.54 Centimeters? So, 100 / 2.54 = 39.37 What's really at trial here is the relation of centimeters to inches. 2.54:1
Better luck next time with that Mars Probe!
;P
Hang in there!
I was thinking this was a good reason to use standard measurements instead. A yard is exactly 36 inches, and you can calculate most anything likely to come up when using it without getting these ridiculous long decimals involved. Of course, living in Europe everything around me uses the napoleonic system, and I've got no choice in the the matter, but I can't understand at all why folks in the states seem so willing to give up the perfectly good standard measures we've used for centuries and try to graft this crackpot hyper-cartesian system on top of it. Just because everyone else does? If everyone else jumped off a cliff... come on people, wake up.
It's those oil companies. Just when we REALLY start screaming over gas prices, the Secret Government (on which the oil companies have a seat) will change the US over to metric.
Then we'll buy gasoline by the litre, and the pump price per unit will drop by almost a factor of 4. (The units will be litres instead of gallons.) But the average US citizen won't realize that we're also getting shaved to the right of the decimal point in the gallons/litre conversion.
(insert humor emoticon here)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Google can do conversions although I don't know how accurate they are. They get 100 124.057 meters (3 decimal places of accuracy)
Also in civil engineering we use tenths of feet to measuse distances. Slightly longer than an inch. Its an odd bastardization of the english system. Some tapes where double sided so you had to be carefull.
...if the US would just catch up with the rest of the world and thinKMetric !
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
One thing that confused me on a trip to a US hardware store was the practice of measuring pipes an fittings by thier external diameter ...
in the UK we go by internal diameters. Solution get out the tape measure lol. Most pumbing fitting are still sized in imperial in the UK although metric approximations are used on the labels e.g. 1/2 pipe is 12 mm
Its actually against the law to price label stuff using imperial weights and measures in the UK since about 2002 - 2003 there was a big argument about it for about a month when all the labels changed.
What's an inch? Get with metric.
...saying that the government should *force* people to switch to metric? What kind of fucking dictatorships do you all live in, where your version of Big Brother gets to say what you can and cannot use for measurements?
Yet another reason to thank god I'm not European!
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Why does everyone stick with these out of date crappy units known as "imperial"? Metric is a universal standard everywhere except the friggin US, and it's a darn sight more logical and easy to use.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Mexico 1978.
My 6th grade teacher had a long chalkboard ruler in the corner of the classroom. It was "el metro".
It was excactly a meter long.
Every now and then one of us will try to do
some mischief the teacher will threaten us to get
"el metro" and wap our behinds.
Then we all will glance with fear at the nasty big'ol ruler leaning on the corner. We all knew
exactly what "a meter" was.
Also every year some people get killed by "el
metro" in Mexico city. But that's another story.
The lesson is you have to embrace your fears and
get metric.
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
Years ago I worked in a motor shop and observed that with metric bolts and nuts, we stripped the threads noticibly more frequently than with SAE threads. I then remembered from shop in high school that the SAE thread is a percentage of the bolt diamater chosen such that the thread is just strong and deep enough to break the bolt before the thread. Not necessarily so with the metric ones, they appear to be table driven so your bolt quality varies with where it falls in the table! btw I use 16404.2 feet = 5000 meters for a conversion factor :-).
In order to ease the transition from Imperial to Metric units in the US, maybe we could replace metre by Freedom meter ?
This post is displayed with recycled electrons
Who the heck hasn't learned from day 1 that 1 inch is exactly 2.54 cm? I learned that in grade 1. Then again, I'm in Canada.
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
If you try to remember the "inches to meters" conversion factor, you will screw it up. I just use the inverse, sorta. The number of Centimeters to the inch is 2.54 EXACTLY. Now divide that by 100 to get meters per inch, or .0254 Now hit that 1/x button on your calculator. Aha!
It seems oddly inappropriate to have a metric story posted on the front page with a foot icon...
Ceci n'est pas une sig
how many attoparsecs is that?
They're all metric (SI) units.
The only metric/English distance conversions I remember are .62137 miles in a km, and 1.609344 km in a mile. (Yeah, one is 5 sig digs and the other is 7, so sue me.) All other distance measurements I have to get into miles or km first. Or punch up my trusty old Sharp EL-506D. (Anyone noticed how later revisions of the 506 have really sucked?)
Constitutionally Correct
How much does a liter of salt water weigh?
A liter of lead?
A liter of pure water at 0 degrees C?
How often do I need to know how much one liter of pure water weighs at sea level at whatever the standard temperature is?
BTW, it's not weight anyway, I think; I believe that the relationship is by mass, not weight.
I support converting to the metric system, but I don't think that being able to easily convert between the weight and volume of water is a good reason for changing.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Can you imagine the utter confusion in the NFL if they had to convert to 100 meter football fields?
-Malfaetor
This is the stupidest /. post I think I've ever seen.
"News flash! Some idiot can't convert units and thinks a lot of other people have trouble, too!"
I guess I'm the real idiot for actually posting how dumb it it.
Go ahead mod me down. I have a life. Kinda.
MAKE YOUR TIME
how hard is inch-meter conversion? 1 inch per 2.54 centimeters, times one hundred centimeters equals 39.37 inches per centimeter... it took me 4 seconds to plug that into a calculator, and i didnt have to google 20 pages... (if you dont know how many centmeters in an inch... look at any ruler that has both. i just remembered it from junior high school physics...)
Meters to feet is bad enough but i can more or less approximate it, but these square feet kill me (npi). I read these nice /. posts about new offices and they measure things in fifteen thousand square feet and i have absolutely no mental image of how it relates to square meters. Not nice.
~llauren
"Yes but how long is it?"
1 liter (litre) = 1 cubic decimeter = 1 kilogram of water
So, if the litre of water is in a box shaped like a perfect cube, it would be 10cm long(or wide, or tall).
My TI-86 claims the number to be 39.3700787402
FYI
According to a quick search, 328 491 feet = 100 124.057 meters.
Some people still don't know how many pounds are in stone!
i could not think of anything clever.
Are you for real? You're actually suggesting that the use of the metric system is some form of America bashing; that people use the metric system out of spite? Then you bash France and Germany.
What a world.
Pick units that makes sense for what you're doing and stick with them.
Just pick one set of units and use them. Sometimes metric is better, sometimes "american" units are better.
A great example of this is temperature. Celsius is too coarse a scale to use for a room thermostat. People will get in arguments over 1 deg F, let alone 1 deg C, and it seems pretty silly to need three significant figures on something like that.
Similarly it also makes more sense to order "1 pint" instead of "500ml" of beer.
This is because imperial units were derived from everyday quantities. This makes them well suited for many non-enginnering tasks, and since most people on this planet AREN'T enginners, they don't care about how much more annoying it is to calculate blah-blah-blah in metric.
Life is too short to proofread.
Buzzzz, sorry and thank you for playing our game.
Unfortunately, there are many laws on the books requiring things to be a certain size and most if not all of them are in inches, gallons, and pounds.
When (if) that get's changed then we'll be able to use the metric system.
PS: I still see road signs here in Miami, Fl. that have kph on them (right below the MPH!!).
Assuming decent margins, text formatted for 8.5x11 can be printed on A4 and vice versa.
(Admittedly, it looks kinda scrunched.)
And tech docs created in HTML or XML can be formatted for either size very easily.
(The only problem then would be someone reading an A4-formatted manual telling someone reading an 8.5x11-formatted manual to "look on page 96".
However, if sections/paragraphs are numbered, then it doesn't matter whether the document is 8.5x11, A4, or one long HTML/XML page.)
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
as opposed to using it to find results, just use it to perform the conversion: http://www.google.com/search?q=328,491+feet+in+met ers&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
gives a result of 100,124 km
e to the pi i plus one equals zero
I just don't get it. So according to the press release (which the article uses), the flew to 328 491 feet. Then the press release says: "approximately 62 miles or 100 km". The article here has a problem because 100km doesn't convert exactly to 328,491 feet.
Rather, 328,491 feet converts to 100.124057 Km. And anyone can tell you, when you say approximately, 100.124057 km and 100 km are are WAY off.
Jason Lotito
Then there are the idiots that want a metric calendar. No kidding, there really is a metric calendar. Our concept of a second would change and the calendar would be off by a lot quickly. Think leap week instead of a leap year. That is because our universe is not base 10.
That is because American units are right. That is why the US is on top, we use the right measuring system. Even Airbus realized that and switched to American units in their planes. Now they are a world competitor. Even the French can make something of themselves when they use correct American measurements. No confusion on if it is 1"(inch) or 1' (foot), is it 10mm or 10cm? No one would make a mistake on the American measure, metric measurements are messed up all the time.
Everyone should dump the failed Metric system and use the correct American measures! Learn the conversions, it will do your brain good.
I remember seeing this in a conversion table given out by some TA while I was at LSU. It specifically stated that the figure was exact.
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
I knew about the legal definition in the USA as 2.54 inches (the proclimation has been turned into formal legislation), but I didn't know the details about how it was defined.
BTW, here is the exact legal definition of metric to US measurement conversions (BTW, this is a MS-Word document, but I got it to open in OpenOffice). This is as close to an authoritiative source as you can get, since it is just a definition anyway.
Just an FYI, according the U.S. Code, the formal definition of a conversion of meter to U.S. measurements is: 1 yard == 0.9144 meters
That converts without error (exact definition) to 25.4 mm == 1 inch
This document is also interesting, because it includes definitions of grains, gills, ounces, townships (a unit of area), bushels, pecks, cords (of firewood), therms (a unit of energy), and other fun units of measure.
It also has detailed metric conversion policy, including the original legislation that "permits" the use of metric measurements in the USA, so they could also be used in legal documents and contracts. Believe it or not, the metric system was at one time illegal to use in the USA.
"NIST Reference on Constants, Units, and Uncertainty " clearly show the SI as being their standard units of measure.
here's also the entry on wikipedia about the SI
And also, the metric system is easy to understand, when you know that 1 liter of water = 1 dm^3 = 1kg, you can easily convert between things.
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
Should have hit preview. Correct answer is 8 pounds.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
How tough is this?
What I don't understand is why the heck you used inches?
...we simply kicked the puritans out and they deemed fit to settle there.
;o)
"The Founding Fathers - so stuck up even the British kicked them out"
I am NaN
the distance that light emitted by a cesium 133 atom transitioning between the two hyperfine levels of its ground state will travel as it vibrates exactly 9,192,631,770 / 299,792,458 times
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/inches.html
A Usenet Troll Triumphs on Slashdot
Why can't you stupid and stubborn americans just use the SI units like the rest of the world?! IT's OK that you invade countries just to keep your own homeland business' going, but not using the SI's is just too stupid!
For the record, I am American, but this gives me a chance to relate my favorite beer-related joke (told to me by a German).
Q: How is American beer like two people having sex on the beach?
A: They're both fucking close to water.
There are some people in this country who do appreciate good beer, but the overwhelming majority do think that the beer world begins and ends with *shudder* Bud Light. Blargh.
49 20 68 61 76 65 20 74 6F 6F 20 6D 75 63 68 20 66 72 65 65 20 74 69 6D 65 2E
Then how much does a pentagram weigh?
Carthago delenda est!
Metric is easier for length as long as you remember the decimal point for different units.
10m +150cm = 1150 cm or 11.5m
This is much easier than
30'+59" = ????
If you are working on a metric or imperial item, staying with the same unit is easiest, using different units is annoying. My tape measure has both.
Angles, whatever you are used to is good.
Radians are convenient for engineering purposes.
Slopes ratios are good for construction.
Degrees and grads are unnatural and not relaly good for much (IMNSHO)
If you don't know the conversions within a measuring system, you will be unable to use it. The point was that people were having problems converting BETWEEN metric and brittish standard( I love how we blame the brittish, but they don't even use it anymore). 2.54 cm/inch is very good for that.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
> To accelerate 1Kg by 1m/s you need a force of 1N . If you push with a force of 1N over a distance of 1m you've used 1joule . If you did this in 1s then your power is 1watt . If you prefer to have an electric motor doing this work for you, it can produce this 1watt by drawing, for example, 1A at 1V . For 1A to flow at a volate of 1V , this means your motor will have an internal resistance equal to 1ohm.
Excellent. Too bad there's not an +20, Informative.
According to textbooks and conversion tables from the 1950s, the conversion factor is actually 2.54001 centimeters to the inch. That number seems to be been "officially" rounded down maybe 30 years ago to 2.54. I've always been curious if the centimeter got longer or if the inch got shorter in that process.
I use this (JavaScript) code:
// Metric length measurements // kilometre // metre (si base unit) // centimetre // millimetre
// UK (Imperial) length measurements
// Convert length to metres, e.g. 200 inches to metres:
// lengthToMetres(200, "inches");
// Convert metres to length, e.g. 10 metres to inches:
// lengthFromMetres(2, "inches");
lenFactor["km"] = 1000;
lenFactor["m"] = 1;
lenFactor["cm"] = 0.01;
lenFactor["mm"] = 0.001;
lenFactor["inches"] = 0.0254;
lenFactor["feet"] = 0.3048;
lenFactor["yards"] = 0.9144;
lenFactor["chains"] = 20.1168;
lenFactor["furlongs"] = 201.168;
lenFactor["miles"] = 1609.344;
function lengthToMetres(n, strUnit) { return (n * lenFactor[strUnit]) }
function lengthFromMetres(n, strUnit) { return (n / lenFactor[strUnit]) }
And as far as I can tell, this works! (note, the code might have lost some line breaks due to slash-dot; I did my best!)
If memory serves me, it was largely based on information from A Dictionary of Measures, Units and Conversions. Again (if memory serves), all the conversion factors are set such that they should not produce any rounding errors.
The only issue here is that they're set from a UK perspective so you *might* need to change them for US measurements!
$ units
2112 units, 59 prefixes
You have: metres
You want: inches
* 39.370079
/ 0.0254
You have: meters
You want: inches
* 39.370079
/ 0.0254
$ uname -a
Linux ****************** 2.4.24-002-i686 #1 Tue Mar 2 18:10:53 EST 2004 i686 unknown
The only reason all cover-ups appear to fail is that you never hear about the ones that succeed.
you should try to look up avogadro's number.
The point isn't to actually convert between mass, volume and length on a day-to-day basis. But that, given the need to, one could figure out all the other measures with only one fixed measure available... without the need for any conversion charts or anything but the simplest of math, and with reasonable accuracy.
This logic carries into measures of temperature, energy, current, etc. Thus you could calibrate an entire laboratory based on only one known measure.
The fact that there IS logic to conversions within the system is what makes the Metric system so powerful.
-- "Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur."
- Whatever is said in Latin sounds profound.
1/3 in + 1/3 in + 1/3 in = 1 inch.
0.33cm + 0.33cm + 0.33cm != 1cm.
As for tradition, it is illogical to use tradition as an excuse. Just because something is traditional, doesn't mean that it is right. An example would be female circumcision (or male for that matter).
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
well done. Everyone here thinks you're a genius. We're so impressed that you can use perl. yawn.
Well according to convertit.com, 1 meter = 39.3700787401575 inches
That would make the shuttle at 328,491 feet be about 100,124.0567 meters or 100.1240567 km so I guess you could round to 100 km, but don't let your highschool science teacher know that
redvsblue.com
::BANG!::
Sarge: Did you just shoot yourself in the foot?
Simmons: Yeah I do that sometimes now..
The thing about 10 having only two factors has been a red herring ever since we started writing fractions in decimal notation. Express any fraction decimally, round to the greatest accuracy that you can actually measure, and -- provided your subunits are on a scale of 100s, 1000s, or some other power of ten -- there's your answer.
.....} and divide a space 1.2192m. wide into five equal portions. The idiot-calculator gives us 0.24384m., or 0.244m. after rounding.
The canonical carpentry problem used to discredit the metric system is to divide a space one metre into three equal portions. Grab any old idiot-calculator; evaluate 1/3; and you get (assuming an 8 digit display) 0.3333333. Now, you can read a tape measure to 0.001m., and you might just be able to estimate 0.0001m. if you really try; but in any case, the width of the pencil mark will compromise your accuracy. So I will go with 0.333m.
For fairness' sake, let us divide a space 4 feet wide into five equal portions. Then each one should be 0.8 feet, and this is more problematic since most rulers are marked in feet and inches rather than fractions of a foot. (Actually, most rulers are marked in metric units only, so we should qualify this and say most rulers that are marked in feet at all.) So we have to convert 0.8ft. into inches, by multiplying by 12 to get 9.6 inches. Then we find that this measure is marked in 32nds of an inch, so we must find the nearest 32nds to 0.6. 0.6 * 32 = 19.2, so the answer is 9 and 19/32 inches. With only an idiot-calculator at our disposal, we needed three calculation steps plus the use of a pen and paper.
To show there is no cheating, let us take a really contrived example {or maybe it is not that contrived
Metric system => easy to manage using simple 4-function calculator.
American system => needs programmable scientific calculator.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
No, because people don't like change.
Gotta love the Canadian way, it's a wonderful mesh of them.
I'm 28 and from Southern Ontario so I might have a different opinion.
I use C for air, F for my furnace and swimming pools.
I'm 5'11", but it's 50km to drive home.
I buy 1 kg of steak at the grocery store, order a 16oz steak at a restaurant, and weight 160lbs.
I buy gas in L, drive km, and people still insist on fuel efficiency in mpg (I use $/km, which is currently pretty close to $US/mile for my American friends)
The products my company sells are sized in mm, but they're called by the imperial size 1/2" 3/4" etc.
>How often do I need to know how much one liter of
>pure water weighs at sea level at whatever the
>standard temperature is?
It's a pretty good guesstimate reference point for most people. If someone says something weighs 2kg I think "Oh yeah, about as much as a 2 litre bottle of Coca-cola. Yeah I know it doesn't count the bottle etc, but it's a useful mental model.
What is wrong with having odd metric sizes?
I have a 355mL can of pop on my desk.
I know it is a can of pop, the exact size to 3 significant figures doesn't matter.
As long as the packages stay about the same size and cost, people will accept it a bit better.
If sellers start dicking around with the size and price to rip people off, they'll be upset. Best would be to just put both sizes on the container.
To further confuse people there are actually two conversion factors for standard to metric length.
one is for u.s. geodetic surveys and the other is an international standard.
mind you the difference is small but it shows up when you start talking about things like space flight.
the two standards are:
1 foot = 0.304 800 609 6012 meter(geodetic) and
1 foot = 0.304 8(anything else)
for reference here is where I got the information: http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Metrics/ftmtr2.htm -Brent
I hear this same old tired "but the metric multiples of ten system is so much SIMPLER!!!!" argument every day.
And it is, ON PAPER.
Meanwhile, out in the real world using real materials things aren't quite so simple....
As I've have said elsewhere on slashdot, I'm in my 40's and living in the UK, as a child I grew up with a monetary system known as LSD, being the symbols for Pounds, Shillings, and Pence.
1 pound (Sterling) = 20 Shillings = 240 Pennies.
12 Pennies to the shilling, 20 Shillings to the pound, so book-keepers would work with a three column row of entries on every page, one in base 10 (Pounds) one in base 20 (Shillings) and one in base 12 (Pence) and could add them all up mentally at any speed you like, no big deal.
Now we have a metric currency, nobody can do mental arithmetic, but I digress, just like the old Imperial currency mentioned above, Imperial weights and measures (don't forget there was Troy as well as Avoirdupois weights in everyday use) were NOT english, they were common european measures that had by and large evolved over CENTURIES and were developed to work with the actual materials people were handling.
I newton applied to 1 kilo will accelerate it by 1 etc etc etc is ALL VERY WELL ON PAPER, in the real world of physical materials things are different.
Some number bases are historic, ancient sumerians started out counting stuff in base 60, many other bases were very common, in england base 12 was both pennies in a shilling and inches in a foot, a lot of these weights came from ancient historic equivalents to do with coinage and metals and liquid, for more years than I can remember dope smokers used to use old pennies, halfpennies and farthings as weights on the scales, because their weights were in perfect fractions of an ounce, again for historical reasons....
Non-technical people often cite the wheel as the greatest first major invention, it wasn't, the screw thread was, and there are many different types with variations on the angles and profiles the threads are machined at....
Metric has metric fine and metric coarse, both are shit threads, henry ford went metric years ago, but for many mnay mnay years kept his wheels nuts in imperial threads, because metric ones kept working loose...
BSP is still used for hydraulics, because metric threads leak, NTP is used in the states for hydraulic, but it is still basically BSP with a different end.
I could go on and on, but people need to remember that just because something looks clever and easy on paper, that does not mean it is worth a damn in the real world of engineering as applied to real materials....
cheers
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
I might be mistaken, but I believe in the mid-eighties, the IEEE (mainly engineers used grad's) changed gradians FROM 400 = circle TO 100 = circle.
Course, I also believe changing a unit midstream is also why nobody uses that anymore.
The real conversion (for those who can't find it anywhere else) is 1 inch = 2.5400000 cm.
A google search of NIST did not even give easy access to this number as they give approximately 2.5.
Diet or regular Coke.
:)
Sugar (or corn syrup) disolved in the water will change the density of the Coke. So you should say "about a two liter of spring water" really...
Who read the title and thought it said "Our Friend, The E-meter"?
I love the metric system, as do most geeks I know, it's just so damned logical and organised. I am 1.8796 meters tall, and I weigh 111.13 kilos, before someone asks. I don't know why we are the only country that does not use the metric system, just to be different?
I hate sigs.
A colony is a foreign land over which another country has full authority, colonization is not a necessary part of colonization in a modern sense.
....
The US commited so many attrocities in the Philliphines that Saddam Hussien gassing of the Kurds pales in comparision
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
A nanometer is a metric unit.... :)
I figure by 2030 or so my 6-digit UID will be something to brag about.
Remember the Air Canada Boeing 767 that ran out of fuel? Story at http://www.wadenelson.com/gimli.html
The original poster has it wrong: the inch is ~0.0254 of a metre. It doesn't matter how many inches there are in a metre since noone would ever want to convert *from* metric *to* imperial, would they?
While we're bashing countries that still use imperial weight and length measurements, how about temperature measurements? Fahrenheit might be just one of many whacky temperature scales (e.g. the Reaumur scale; the Rankine scale), but most have been relegated to their proper place as historical curiosities....
While there is no good excuse for using Fahrenheit, I have heard one, and only one, good argument for using imperial length measures (I don't know if the same applies to imperial weights since I can never remember how many pints are in a hogshead). The argument for imperial lengths really only applies to things like framing a house or other constructions: an imperial foot is divided into twelve units, and each of those units is divided into rational fractions (1/2, 1/4, 1/16, etc), which makes it easy to quickly calculate ratios, etc., when filling in details not supplied in blueprints. The same back-of-the-2x4 (or is that 5x10?) calculations in metric lead too often to irrational numbers. Of course, it is a weak argument since deciding whether to cut a piece of wood at the 3mm mark or the 4mm mark or in between is irrelevant when you are using a 3mm wide blade and marking with a 1mm wide carpenter's lead...
Never trust an engineer who knows what a BTU is...
A whole new way to impress the lady.
:
:
Man, thinking in metric terms
"oh you know, I'd say it's about 18 or so in length"
Lady, listening to man, all the while thinking in the imperial system
"wow... I've never been with someone so... Well shall we leave the restaurant now and head back to my place ?"
The french are just pissed cuz we stole their "Croissant" and turned it into a "Crosandwich"!
Ask Google to search for:
'100km to feet'
It will return before the results:
100 kilometers = 328 083.99 feet
The same works for other math operations.
jyang@yahoo.com
romeozet@poczta.onet.pl
That some idiot can't convert inches to meters? Jesus.
Units is also your friend. There's also a Cygwin port for you Windows types.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
That was a slashdot story a couple of weeks ago, and I was rather surprised that it was newsworthy - it just seemed obvious to me, having grown up with it.
NIST says that to convert from inches to centimeters, multiply by 2.54. Inverting that (1 / 2.54) yields 0.3937 inches per cm, and multiplying that by 100 yields 39.37 inches per meter.
For more conversion factors, go to:
http://physics.nist.gov/Pubs/SP811/appenB8.html
search for "inch (in)"
There are two ways of defining an inch, both done in terms of SI units. You have just described the internatinal inch.
An internatinoal inch is defiend to be 25.4 mm exactly. In that case, the figure basically has unlimited accuracy. This leads to a conversion like the author made:
2.54 cm defined_as 1 int'l in
1 cm = 1 / 2.54 intl in = 0.393700787401574803149606299212[...] int'l in
1 m = 100 cm = 100 * (0.393700787401574803149606299212[...] in)
1 m = 39.3700787401574803149606299212[...] in
On the other hand, a US survey inch is defined to be 1 / 39.37 meter. In other words an International Inch is 78.74 micrometers longer than a US survey inch.
According to the press, SS1 reached a height of 328491 Feet.
In US feet, 328491 feet equals 3941892 inches, which equal 100124.25704851409702819405638811 meters more or less. If there were unlimited precision in these numbers then if the figure was survey feet the height attained was 25cm higher than if the figure was international feet. Assuming six digits of accuracy (which the number appears to be -- its not a simple rounding of a hundred km for example), these figures are identical.
Does anyone know how they measured altitude and how much precision the number has? It's hard to believe it has five digits of accuracy. It is possible that they used something like radar to judge this against a ground tracking station, but how did they know the height above sea level of the tracking station so accurately? I'd be very suspect of that last digit.
Frankly, I can't see where the other conversion factors on the web come from. The math for the Int'l inch is basic elementary school arithmetic. The only reasonable ones that doesn't start with 39.37[...] = 1 m are 38 inch = 1 m from Arkansas State and 39.4 from the US Navy. Both are these correct to the number of digits of precision given.
Probably most of the other conversion factors are typos.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
100 / 2.54 = 39.37007874015748031496062992126
NIST uses the meter internally (the cm is derived from the m). Thus, the inch is defined in terms of the meter/centimeter. The meter is defined as the number of wavelengths a laser from krypton gas in a vacuum or something like that. It's also defined in terms of the speed of light in a vacuum, or it used to be.
So the inch got shorter. There is no official inch/pound/gallon anymore; they're all defined in terms of SI units.
Or, in continued fractions, it is precisely
[39; 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 4]
The convergents serve as approximations to the desired accuracy.
I was going to post the convergents, but the slashdot "lameness filter" won't let me, really.
In any case, I can get the final one in, so here it is...
39 + 1/(2+1/(1+1/(2+1/(2+1/(1+1/4))))) = 39.370078740157... (exact)
The author said that Fife corporation listed the meter as 39 inches. But in the particular page listed, it is clear from the context that this was meant only as an approximate measurement. If you go to Fife's conversion page here you will find that they correctly give the length as 39.37 inches.
BTW, Fife's conversion page here is worth bookmarking.
Proverbs 21:19
When Sweden introduced the metric system in 1883. Karl-Hilmer Johansson Kollén invented the comparison rule, which showed both the old and the new measurement system. Maybe this invention could help the folks in the USA to solve their conversion problems?
For more info see: Hultafors AB
The length of a meter (which has a very direct effect on the length of a centimeter) has been redefined a couple of times. I don't know for sure, but I guess that with each redefinition, the length has actually changed slightly. .1 micrometer per inch - so a very good guess is that the inch got a little shorter...
The last two redefinitions happend in 1960 and in 1983, but in either case it's very unlikely that the meter became exactly so much longer as to cancel out that extra
May we live long and die out
Why haven't we joined the rest of the civilized world in just using metric?
Divisibility is overrated. I propose heptadecimal system instead.
Multiplication tables would become nice permutations without annoying information loss on the last digit. In fact you'd probably learn to use discrete logs instead: lookup, add, lookup. Now wouldn't that be insanely cool?
Even more, you could probably do NTT without pen and paper. You have whole sixteen roots of unity for that! Think of the future of cryptography when children find all this as something natural instead of annoyingly complex stuff you need to go university for..
cheers...ank
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
Being a Canadian Pilot, I've forced myself to learn SAE overtop of my Mertic knowledge. Why? Take a look at some of these things used in Avionics:
Fuel: Pumped in Liters. Measured in Pounds.
Air Pressure: Adjusted in Inches of Mercury, Given in Heptopascals.
Altitude/Distance: Altitude is in Feet, Distance is in Meters. (IE: Altitude 3000ft AGL, Distance 5000m from destination)
Velocity: Horizontal in Knots (Nautical Miles / Hour), Vertical in Feet / Second (IE: Moving at 120 knots, Ascending at 3 feet per second)
As you can see, we have one hell of a time converting. Thank god for pocket calculators and quick-reference sheets.
Frink: Nice try floyd, but you were designed for scrubbing, and scrubbing is what you shall do.
1 inch = 25.4 mm
3 lousy digits to remember... how can anyone get it wrong?
tone
tone
Okay, so SS1 achieved an altitude of 328,491 feet.
328,491 feet * 12 inches/foot * 2.54 cm/inch * 1 m/100 cm * 1 km/1000 m = 100.1240568 kilometers.
Convert all industry and govt. agencies to the metric system
Change the paper standard to A series. i.e. 8 1/2" x 11" to A4
Change Month/Day/Year to Day/Month/Year on all forms and databases.
Use only open source software in all govt. agencies.
Invest much more research and support renewable energy
Invade countries that drive on the wrong side of the road and bring those evil doers to justice.
My policies will create jobs for the thousands of unemployed programmers sitting idle since the Millennium bug scare and allow our fellow Americans to drive anywhere around the world, without the fear of driving into on coming traffic.
There used to be about 2.54000508 centimeters per inch (exactly 39.37 inches per meter). Even Einstein didn't remember that number. In 1959 either the U.S. got larger or Europe got smaller, and an inch became 2.54 centimeters exactly.
h tm l
http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/63332.
I grew up in Canada with, superficially, the metric system, and I've been living here in the U.S. three and a half years.
I personally think it's absolutely wonderful that this country, almost entirely alone, elected to have people change how they think and work at their own pace rather than having the government shove it down their throats.
Speed limits? Temperature? Bottle sizes? These are all superficial measurements and pretty irrelevant for areas when it counts.
You go to Canada, you see metric everywhere, until you try to build something -- try purchasing lumber, buying nuts and bolts, actually trying to do something that requires a lot of measurements. Then you see that pragmatism wins out and Canada is no different than here. (using the most appropriate tools for the job -- which takes into account the installed base!)
Thus why I respect the fact that this country has never shoved a superficial and, in the end, irrelevant, conversion down the throats of its people. It'll switch in its own time. (and it is)
Although technically you should be stating you weight in newtons, as kg is a unit of mass. Weight is variant dependant on the gravity field you're in, mass is not.
;)
I know I mass about 55kg, and I'm Canadian
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
##Oooohh...If you want it to be possessive it's just I-T-S but, if it's supposed to be a contraction it's I-T-APOSTROPHE-S ## ... scalawag
ITS Song
The greatest hindrance to success is a well-rationalized excuse
Shouldn't that be...
I am NaN... I am a person!
Those who complain about affect & effect on
The reason America won't switch to the metric system? Football. It's our favorite sport. People will freak out about saying a first-down is 9.144 meters instead of 10 yards.
You idiots.
It reached 100km and the press release rounded it off to 328,491 feet not the other way around.
This is pure americanizum at work.
There are two valid conversion factors: the 1959 standard linking the inch to the cm as in 1 inch = 2.54 cm exactly, and the previous standard (1893) that is used in US surveys and that defines the foot in terms of the meter as 1 foot = 12/39.37 meters.
The full story is here:
http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Metrics/ftmtr2.htm
I for one welcome our new metric overlords.
Explain this to me.
How can you supposedly derive incorrect distance conversion factors for distance? You shouldn't NEED to look anything up. Because... inches are DEFINED to be 2.54 centimeters.
So everything is just multiplication. You derive your own conversion factors (it takes too long to look stuff up). I don't understand this at all...
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Y'know, I did this conversion in a bit easier (if inexact) a method: I remembered that my car's speedometer is marked for both MPH and KPH, and that 60MPH and 100KPH share the same node. So when the article says "approximately 62 miles or 100 kilometers," that seems to just about work out.
you're a US surveyor. In that case, according to U.S. standards set in 1893 and 1959, you should use: 1 inch = 100/39.37 centimeters. This is approximately 2.54000508001016. For details, see: http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Metrics/ftmtr2.htm
Strangely, though an inch is defined as 2.54 cm, they open the web page by indicating that a meter is approximately 39 1/2 inches. No, I'm not implying they mean 39 (1/2 inches) [or 19.5 in]--rather that they approximate poorly. 39.37 does not equal 39.5 inches (even if NIST, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, says so.)
Bizarre!
1 Imperial gallon of water, = 10 pounds
The problem comes with US gallons.
You give 'em and inch and they take a kilometer!
They probably should have said "aproximately 39 1/3" inches, which would have been closer. But I think "approximately 39 1/2" is "good enough for government work."
Maybe they should have checked with the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), who set the standards for measurement. Oh wait, that's who they used to be! If even they can't get it right, we're screwed.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
The US Metric Law of 1866 said that one meter was equal to 39.37 inches, exactly. In 1959, the relationship between inches and centimeters was redefined to be that one inch is equal to 2.54 centimeters, exactly. Maps produced by the US Coast and Geodetic Survey continued to use the old standard. To clarify which foot you are talking about, the old foot, derived from 1 meter = 39.37 inches (exactly), is referred to as the "US survey foot". The new foot, derived from 1 inch = 2.54 cm (exactly), is referred to as the "international foot".
Join the fight against metrics! We don't want no foreign rulers!
Actually, it does sort of make sense
.0001, but I suspect it could be.
quick background:
1889 - a measure of a physical object distance
1893-1960 - a measure done through interferometry (wavelengths of light) on the physical object.
1960-present measurements of krypton or light (not physical object) for creation of SI units.
The problem is, the interferometry measurements were done using white light, not laser light (laser invented in 1960, incidentally), so there potentially is a fair degree of error in the interferometery measurements. I don't know if that is enough to make
Noooo! Year-Month-Day, you insensitive clod!
It's ISO standard and collates properly if zero-padded.
DNA just wants to be free...
Mass doesn't ever change because of temperature or pressure or stuff like that. The only way to change mass is to convert energy to mass or mass to energy. (ie. fission or fusion)
What is the point of this "news post"? Is it simply to point out the writer is a moron?
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
All that depressing government_will_save_me_crying is ... Insightful?
You have a right to persue happiness, not have it handed out to you for free.
You'd think that geeks would love the imperial system. Volumes are great!:
1 gallon
= 4 quarts
= 8 pints
= 16 cups
= 256 tablespoons
Measurements however are all messed up. 12 inches in a foot? 12!?
Why in h@ll are you pushing the inches/metre number, which is approximate, and not the exact (and what I've always found easy to remember) 25.4 mm/inch?
Actually, these days the speed of light is defined as a constant, 299,792,458 m/s, and the meter is derived from that. The meter is defined as 1/299792458 of the distance light travels in one second.
set to US letter are an [imperial] pain in Europe.
'nuff said.
Lyrics to "The Standard Metric System" -- music for geeks!
I once thought a mile was 1609.334m. Looking at this mess, I now feel silly at having been upset the 6th digit was wrong =p
Of course NIST gives Imperial to Metric conversions. http://physics.nist.gov/Pubs/SP811/appenB.html
- $ units 20thousand-furlongs light-microseconds
- * 13420.511
(the second number is the inverse of the first)/ 7.451281e-05
or:
/ 0.00029307107
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Damn. Thats why I can't get shoes that fit. One foot is international and the other one is survey.
Note: 100/39.37 = 2.54000508 so we're not talking about a very large difference here.
Ask "How far is that place from here" and you'll get answers that resemble these:
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
Keep passing the open windows...
When we moved to the States in the late 80's I had to do it all in reverse. It took a lot longer than a few months to get back to the Imperial system, though. Once you've become familiar with the Metric system you see how insane inches & pounds & gallons are.
I realize that the biggest cost of changing over would be the recalibration of all the machinery and production plants and equipment. But I don't think it'd be prohibitavly expensive. All the manyfacturing plants already product things in Metric for sale outside their countries. Most vehicles have duel speedometers so just swap the smaller Metric and the larger Imperial for a little while. There would be a lot of work involved but the long term savings and benifit would far outweigh it.
The fact of the matter is that there's no critical or compelling reason not to change to Metric.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
Nope:
Under the command of test pilot Mike Melvill, SpaceShipOne reached a record breaking altitude of 328,491 feet (approximately 62 miles or 100 km), making Melvill the first civilian to fly a spaceship out of the atmosphere and the first private pilot to earn astronaut wings.
-Scaled Composites press release
Sure sounds like the foot measurement is the most accurate, given that it's both the most precise and not prefaced by "approximately". Also, 100 km is 328,084 feet, so how they'd round up to 491 I'm not sure.
NOT to go metric. I was taught both systems in school since the changeover was immenient, but they dont even bother teaching metric stuff nowdays it seems (at least the young un i asked) ! Yet, nothing was actually in metrics except those little foreign cars vs virtually everything being metric or dual labelled now. Guess we figure the world will get bored and change back for us ...
If we're talking about transistors on a circuit board it's a big difference.
The inch is defined as precisely 25.4 mm. All the other conversions flow very straighforwardly from that. If you can't handle the algebra, you shouldn't be doing anything that requires you to try.
Here is some info on why the inch is _exactly_ 25.4 mm. www.eng-tips.com/gviewthread.cfm/pid/769/qid/12918
(scroll to the middle part)
It is thus a Swedish conspiracy (the French are innocent for once...)
Another piece for the metric aficionado: Engineers use mm, physicists use cm! The use of the prefixes centi, deci, hecto and deca is deprecated in most cases nowadays. The few exceptions are hectopascal (hPa) instead of millibar, and the decibel (dB), which is more practical than the bel.
In the mid eighties I saw something in a newspaper on "US is going metric inch by inch" that except for US, the only countries left with the non-metric units were Burma (aka Myanmar) and Brunei. All important high-tech nations...
(between 2.54 cm per inch as opposed to 39.37 per metre) cannot explain how you can derive 39.77 inches to a metre.
The 2.54 vs. 39.37 is close enough to work for almost everything (except possibly slingshotting mars probes... and then I would use the 2.54 definition because you want to work in SI units internally anyway)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Or a pitcher (2 quarts or 3 litres?????) of beer
Posted 20040623T190431Z
"This is pure americanizum[sic] at work."
If, by that, you mean Slashdot, Space Travel, The Internet, and Computers in general, then yes, it is Americanism at work. Hard at work.
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
That isn't the point. The point is, if you have some obscure recipe that says 'one litre of water', and you don't have a litre scale jug, but you do have some scales, then you can instead measure 1kg of water. If it isn't water but something else, you can make an order of magnitude guess on the density (in comparison to water) and hopefully the cake will still turn out OK. For practical cooking, this is really useful!
Once thing I hate is the Miles per gallon when buying a car.
My brain works fine when you say you can go 10 miles per gallon of gas.
But here in Canada they now post new cars as Liters per kilometer. So you say your car use X leiters to go Y Kilometers. Which seems a little backwards to me. For example I get about 12.45 liters per 100 Kilometers..... that is how it is offical printed on my new car. I have no clue from that how far one liter will get me.
I think it should be changed so i could see that I was getting say 8 KMs per Liter. That would actually tell me someting usefull.
I don't see anybody complaining about the time measurement system wich is less than decimal. 1 year has 12 months, an historically generated mess count of days in each month, 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, 60 seconds in a minute. Thanks for the 100 year per century and 1000 per millenium!
"This is pure americanizum[sic] at work."
what is [sic] ??
Interesting story about this sort of thing that came up in the local liquor store the other day:
I live in Western Canada, and am accustomed to finding bottles of hard liquor in 750mL (roughly 26oz.) and 1.14L (rougly 40oz.) -- in fact in causal conversation, they're often referred to as a "2-6" or a "40". So imagine our surprise when we found a bottle of Crown Royal (good stuff, btw) in a 1L bottle, which was right next to the 1.14L bottles, and you'd have to look pretty close to tell the difference. They also happened to be a really awesome deal as compared to the other two (only a couple dollars more than the 750) so we got one.
Upon closer inspection, it was labelled for sale in the US (listed the US importer, and the location of manufacture was "Toronto" instead of wherever they're actually made... Kitchener, I think.) So basically, this case of bottles must've ended up on the wrong truck or something and landed at this liquor store (who was apparently trying to sell them as fast as they could, at that price).
Since Crown Royal markets itself as "Canadian Whisky", do they actually sell it in a 1L size in the states? If so, I find it fairly funny that they would offer a nicely-metricized size in the states to look "all Canadian and novel", but sell it in sizes based on Standard/Imperial measure in Canada.
Has no one stopped to think that the measurements that most of these sites are giving are in inches, then they throw in a metric 'about this much' measurement?
That was the impression i got from reading through the first couple of links. I don't believe those sites were claiming that meters were actually the length of their inventory item or riverbed, just providing an approximation. It may have been more appropriate for the to measure in units of similar scale like centimeters, but I don't see what all the hubbub is about.
At least two of the links used 'about 1 meter' when they gave their measurements.
Not that this defense stands for all of the sites, but its something to keep in mind.
Sanity is a sandbox. I prefer the swings.
Latin: thus; so (not a mistake and is to be read as it stands)
in other words, it's used in a quotation that contains something that may be considered a mistake (misspell or using a non-existant word) and is included so the reader know it was intended (or explicitly stating that it is taken as a direct quote).
"I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious." - Albert Einstein
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/units/units-1.80.tar.gz
Q: Which has more mass: a pound of gold or a pound of feathers?
A: The feathers have more mass. 16 avoirdupois ounces in a pound of feathers. Gold is measured in troy pounds, of which there are 12 troy ounces. (483.6 g feathers vs. 373.2 g gold)
Q: Which has more mass: an ounce of gold or an ounce of feathers?
A: The gold has more mass. 1 avoirdupois ounce is equal to 0.91 troy ounces. (28.3 g feathers vs. 31.1 g gold)
- AlanH
nice try, but somehow I doubt that any of the semiconductor manufacturers are working in survey feet....
I grew up in the iddle of the transition ...
My height is imperial, speed is metric.
My weight is defined in pounds, the weight of food I buy in stores is in kilos.
Any wood products are in feet and inches. Most fasteners are metric (bolts etc).
Fuel efficiency is MPG - litres/100km means nothing much to me.
I'll use British spellings of some words and Americanized spellings of others. During the course of a day we'll see all the variations.
Anyone slightly older than me is only imperial, anyone slightly younger than me is all metric.
I get so confused some days. =)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
$ units
1989 units, 71 prefixes, 32 nonlinear units
You have: 328491 ft
You want: km
* 100.12406
/ 0.0099876097
You have:
I don't like
39.37 inches * 2.54 (cm/inch) = 99.9998 cm
Close enough for government work.
there are 8 pints in a gallon.... the rest is left as an exercise for the reader
Last time I checked 2.54 == 2.540000 So why the Actually? It helps to read the subject of yor own post before you press submit :-)
You overlook a significant advantage of metric; weights and measures have a direct relationship. How heavy is a gallon of water in Imperial/English units? Fucked if I know; but I can tell you that a litre of water weighs 1kg. .03333333.
But how heavy is a liter of petrol. Or how much does a cubic centimeter of pure iron weigh? It is all based on arbitrary standards in the first place where there was a mistaken impression that it was exactly 10,000,000 metres for a North pole to equator path through Paris. Then they worked backwards. Of course since we know the FAS survey was not that accurate the whole metric system is based on an inaccurate datum casting its supiority in doubt. In addition "English units" have a variety of measures where there exists a single syllable word for the needed unit of measure such that the number of units expressed will be a relatively small number. And the use of binary fractions is far easier in some environments. Divide a pile of grain into quarters or eighths. Pretty easy with a dual pan scale (balance) w/o need of reference weights. Now divide it into tenths. Divide a string into 32 equal length pieces now try to divide it into 3/100 length pieces(of course you'll generate some scrap) or just cut it into 30 pieces. 1/32 or
Besides, saying I weigh 23 stone sounds better.
By the way, you missed the really useful relationship of 1 cubic centimeter equals one millileter. That's the one that lets you convert from cubic inches to liters for those fancy engines (as long as you know 1 inch equals 2.54 centimeters)
Of course you'd have to walk 1.609344 kilometers in my moccasians to truely understand. It is OK to have a variety of tools. Decimal and binary are not good friends. So lets start building all those BCD CPU chips! It will save tons of rounding errors and inaccurate conversions.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
It's a latin expression.
Sic
"Thus", "just so" -- states that the preceding quoted material appears exactly that way in the source, usually despite errors of spelling, grammar, usage, or fact.
Yes, I am a
The basic premise is this; in engineering everything works in millimetres. There are 25.4 millimetres in an inch. Therefore, millimetres per metre / millimetres per inch = inches per metre.
:)
1000/25.4 = 39.370078740157
It's a basic enough conversion - a single division - and it confuses me that people seem to have such a difficult with these things.
Now, mod me down for spelling 'metre' correctly
who still uses inches? you people need to upgrade their system...
Here in Argentina we are almost totally metrical. No other system is learned at school. However, there are few notorious exceptions, like plumbering and carpenters, where pipes and wood thickness is usually measured in inches, and you can request wood length in feet. Inches, 'pulgadas' (thumbs) in spanish, is the only imperial unit widely known here. Almost everybody knows is 2.54cm. Of course, despite the nautical and aeronautical units used internationally..
I don't think it's fair to compare a country with the population of Los Angeles County to the entire United States. Also, please don't forget that your country has been the beneficiary of a lot of help from the United States over the years. First of all, Austria wouldn't have existed as an independant country if not for the intervention of the United States in World War II. Remember Austria was annexed by Germany in 1938 and didn't have a military that could do anything about it. Soviet forces only left because you adopted a treaty of neutrality which basically meant they could come back in any time they wanted without western nations like the U.S. and Britain being forced by treaty to defend you. Despite that, the U.S. and NATO allies at great expense defended Europe from invasion by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Austria was a recepient of that protection whether they wanted it or not.
My other first post is car post.
It's Metre up here!! !Take that America
thedillybar (677116) sez: "The US Metric Law of 1866 said that one meter was equal to 39.37 inches, exactly."
How spectacularly American. Pass a "law" and redefine reality. We tried it with pi, too. And still we wonder why the rest of the world thinks we're arrogant.
So, if I go ahead and use the real relationship between English and metric/CGS in order to properly place electrodes in epileptics' brains, rather than using the "legally defined" relationship and placing them improperly, do I need to worry about the USGS Cops arresting me for felony unit conversion?
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Here is an idea. Join the rest of us planet earth and learn what a meter is. Then you dont have to convert into a flawed and illogical measurement system.
...just mixed. We have imported (and continue to import) a lot of words into English, and we tend to preserve the pronunciation and spelling from the original language, more or less. So all the words obey standardized spelling systems (more or less) -- just several of them.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
The e-mail address you have provided is invalid.
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
Pass a "law" and redefine reality. We tried it with pi, too.
Pi is a natural constant, defined as the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter.
A "meter" is an artificial definition. And, in particular, the "definition" of a meter has changed many times over the year, starting with the first adoption in 1791, being re-defined many times over the years, and only ending (for the moment) with the current definition in terms of c, the speed of light, in 1983. This article gives a history
Nobody was trying to legislate reality, just clarify definitions.
http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mmetric.html
Dude, how much karma did you get from this story? All I see is:
dbirchall (191839) +5 Funny
dbirchall (191839) +5 Insightful
dbirchall (191839) +5 Interesting
dbirchall (191839) +5 Informative
I haven't gotten that many +5's in my entire slashdot career!
I... oh I can barely be bothered....
Slashdot and the Internet maybe. Not spaceflight or computers, sorry...
# units
2083 units, 71 prefixes, 32 nonlinear units
You have: meter
You want: inches
* 39.370079
/ 0.0254
Duh!
Is it coincidential that the engine blocks of American hot rods are measured in cubic inches (ci) and Asian street racers it's in cubic centimeters (cc)? That's how I see it all the time in articles and magazines.
For the lucky among us with a hard science education, 2.540000cm really means 2.540000 +/- .0000005 cm. In other words trailing zeroes are an indication of an inexact measurement and the number of digits tells how exact.
2.54 cm exactly means that you can add as many zeros as you like and it will be a true conversion.
Really?
100km = 328083.989501 feet
Tell me. What rounding rules are used to go from the above to 328,491? Even for a math ignorant journalist.
NASA has nothing on airline oopses: Gilmi I wonder how many other disasters of this type don't end up with enough survivors to tell how it happened.
But it makes sense. The format is known as A1. Its surface area is about 5000 square cm, or half a square meter. A0 is twice as big: a square meter (84.1 cm by 118.9 cm). The ratio of all An formats is sqrt(2), so that the width of An equals the length of A(n+1).
Hence: A4, the standard lettre size, measures 21.0 cm by 29.7 cm; its surface area is 1/16 square meter.
So you are saying that in the metric system it is logical to scale paper sizes in base 2. Thanks, I've learned a lot today!
Proof: Freedom Fries.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
Blah blah blah...
...
Two flights above 100 km or 62.137119223733 mi
blah blah blah...
They still had imperial when I came to school in Canada (1957) but I always used metric for my own purposes anyway because I was lazy I guess. What got my goat when Canada went metric is that they seemed to come up with their own slant and thus didn't really "internationalize". I see some odd units with which I'm not familiar. For example "mcg". Now what is that supposed to mean? I find too that the common household units from my childhood in Denmark (eg. deciliter) are not used here. Most foods are in grams and millilitres, which I think is an inappopiately small measure for things like sugar and flour which might explain why som many people use cups instead. I think the problem is that many people just simply aren't interested in measureing things. I say that because I find that the people who don't want to switch to metric, usually don't really know any other system either. My fabourite trick question is: What weighs more, a pound of gold, or a pound of feathers? People generally can't answer that one because they are unaware of the fact that there are different systems in common use. A pound of feathers is, of course much heavier because gold is measured in troy, as opposed to avoidepois. BTW, the stone is listed in my colliers American (USA) dictionary as about 14 pounds avoidepois. There is no mention of this not being in use in the USA where the dictionarey is printed and published. I think if you were to check the literature, you would find the word used a lot in the US. Mark Twain must have used it, no? My general feeling though is that for most purposes, it doesn't really matter. especially since the calculator has become a personal item. Really, the many non metric systems are quite charming. The mixture of bases makes for entertaining arithmetic.
Yeah.. so 1 meter = 5000/127 inches.
Try being a mechanic in Australia. My dad has wrenches/spanners in metric, US imperial, and British imperial.
The CO2 expands when the temperatures rises. Therefore CO2 cannot explain that the coke expands when the temperature falls.
Actually, nearly everything expands as the temperature rises, but you failed to point out that water ice is one of the few (only?) solids that is actually larger than its liquid form. So you've got to be careful with it.
they were .6098 meters by .9144 meters. . .
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Don't touch the fahrenheit system.
I like the metric system, but for climate temperature, fahrenheit is just more intuitive.
Good to see that EngineerSupply.com have adjusted their conversion to 39.37...
I hope their wheel measures 1m and that they just needed to adjust the number, not that their wheel was 39.14'!
"40 rods to the hogshead",
No, he said RAMRODS, as in kilometers, not meters.
Dr Fred.
Metric is more than just units and a self consistent system. It is also consistent with the fact that our numeral system is base 10.
Until the american stock exchanges converted to decimal, it was not immediate how $8 37/256 was comparable to $8 9/64.
So things are improving
what is [sic] ??
:)
Google is yer friend...:
"Sic means 'thus, so, in that way', and is the same word scholars and snarky journalists use to quote a misspelled or ungrammatical passage, like Dan Quayle's 'potatoes [sic]'. The sic assures the reader that the mistake was made by the person quoted, not the quoting author or his editor."
P.S. Don't ask what "snarky" is.
The inch (WATEVER THAT IS) was re-defined from whatever measure it used to be (the old wooden yardstick national measure or something) and re-defined to be 2.54 centimetres or 2.54 1/100 ths of a metre. Centi is the metric prefix for 1/100, much like there are 100 cents in a dollar (think hard people, this isn't that complicated). That means that there are 2.54*12=30.48 centimetres per foot (or five toes, depending on your foot). If I converted the other way, I could start as before and say there are 2.54 centimetres per inch, then take the reciprocal and say 1/2.54 inches per centimetre. If I then multiply by 100, I get 100/2.54 inches per metre, or 39.37 inches per metre. It shall be left as an exercise to the user to determine if 100.1 kilometres (the reported height of spaceship1) is really 62 miles, 1052 feet, and 28/32 of an inch.
The correct measure of a meter in inches has many more than four digits, but 39.37 is correct when rounding to four significant digits. Likewise, 39.4 is correct when rounding to three, and 40 is correct when rounding to two or one.
/.'ers will mod up any reference to Douglas Adams.
And although it has nothing to do with rounding, 42 is also correct when you're a karma whore who thinks
Actually no (in math yes, in science particularly in chemistry and physics, no). Giving a value of 2.54 means you are only certain of your accuracy to 2 decimal digits. Giving 2.540000 means you are certain of your accuracy to 6 decimal digits. One measurement is 10,000 times as accurate as the other. What that means is when you are measuring 1000 miles in the first case your error can be as much as 100 miles (+/- 50 miles). In the second case when measuring 1000 miles your error can be no more than 52.8 feet (+/- 26.4 feet). If you are in a large city homeing on a GPS in a stolen car, being 50 miles off is useless. Being 26.4 feet off means you found the car. Get the idea?
Metric fuel consumption is fuel _consumption_, not _efficiency_, and stated in Liters per 100km. Here in Chile we use efficiency as in 12 kilometers to the liter. 8 liters per 100 km seems odd to me. Why not 83 cc/km?
Here in Chile we use letter sized paper. Its measures are 21,59 cm × 27,94 cm. No one cares if that means 8 × 11 inches.
...successfully, that is. Without the booster blowing up :)
That's why I said "It also happens to be the official definition of the inch". No rounding errors to worry about.
Of course, it isn't quite, but close enough, and given that the Avoirdupois and Imperial systems were established when scales weren't so accurate, pretty good.
Furthermore, the Avaoirdupois system is based on binary, not decimal.
An obscure recipe like soup, for example? :)
..and I'll form the head!!
Go to this site and you probably find your answer. This is the site linked in the heading.
http://lava.net/~djb/meter.html
The 39.37 conversion factor was based on comparing the measurements of two yard standards with meter standards. What they discovered was that the two meter standards disagreed. One worked out to slightly under 2.54 cm per inch and the other slightly more.
They eliminated the two yard standards and redefined the "English" system based on the metric system.
In other words, there is only one system of standards, the metric system.
The conventional units might be in meters, kilograms, feet, pounds, yards, etc., but for the industrial world, all are based on the metric system BY DEFINITION.
Australian currency was converted to decimal in 1966. In Come the Dollars, In Come the Cents
I think that this conversion led the Australian conversion to the Metric system of measurement.
I found it a challenge as, after being schooled in Pounds, Shillings, & Pence, and Stones, Pounds, Ounces etc., when joining the workforce I was paid in Dollars!
.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
This is an interesting topic:
In Australia television screens are measured, on the corner to corner diagonal, in centimetres!
But computer display sizing remains in inches.
.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
Or call Deutschland "Germany" or something equally strange.
I've been posting on the net since 1994 and I still haven't come up with a good sig!
It's snde and sarky?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Wow. I've always been amazed by that kind of nationalism, based on a flawed silogism.
-The Internet/Slashdot/whatever was made by americans.
- I'm an american.
- So, I have a right to be proud of the accomplishments of others.
On the other hand, I'm sure Tim Berners-Lee, Yuri Gagarin, Alan Turing, Charles Babbage and a hell of a lot of other people (plus Laika the dog) would be really amused at your comment. Or pissed off.
They don't call it a Quarter
Pounder with Cheese?
Nah, man, they got the metric system,
they wouldn't know what the
fuck a Quarter Pounder is.
forii (49445) sez: "Pi is a natural constant, defined as the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter.
A "meter" is an artificial definition."
As reductions in abstraction, all definitions are artificial. You mean 'arbitrary'. Regardless, the distinction is irrelevant here.
"Nobody was trying to legislate reality, just clarify definitions."
From snopes.com, the urban legends people, after debunking the article (written by April Holiday, nudge, nudge) about Alabama voting to redefine pi as 3.0, they add: "In 1897 the Indiana House of Representatives unanimously passed a measure redefining the area of a circle and the value of pi. (House Bill no. 246, introduced by Rep. Taylor I. Record.) The bill died in the state Senate."
Of course it's just trying to clarify definitions. Just ask a politician.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I'm Scottish and naturally learned the metric system at school in the 1970s, so you can imagine my shock and disappointment at emerging into the world of adulthood only to discover that (in my country) most oldies persisted in using archaic units for many things back then (unlike almost all of the rest of the civilised world).
However, since then, things in the UK have oh-so-gradually got better, with us finally waving bye-bye to the unmissed and meaningless "ounce" (whatever that was: roughly how many of them were in half-a-kilo, I mean a pound, again? All these different conversion factors, too confusing!) in 1999, from which time onwards all products (milk and beer only exceptions) could at last only be sold in the sensible units we'd learned at school all those years before, namely, g, kg, ml, l, cm, m, etc.
(And funnily enough, for most people, it has not been a difficult conversion to make, given we'd been gearing up for it for 30 long years..)
Another blow to outdated units was the arrival of IKEA, which (rightly!) *mercilessly* gives sizes for everything in cm on product information and labels (although sometimes also with archaic measures grudgingly hidden away elsewhere in smaller print).
What a relief! At last I could go shopping for furniture and see on the labels measurements I could understand and relate to (unlike those quirky old feet and inches which I can't, and which mean nothing to me for measurements over 2m (err, 6 foot-odd) [and even that only being as some people still give their height in the archaic units])
Does IKEA provide the same 'helpful public education/metrication service' in the USA, or does it have to break the mould and go to the hassle and cost of producing special quirkily-enumerated labels to account for the USA's unfortunate ignorance about how the rest of the world measures?
(Also, some things which have really surprised me in this thread:
the staggering number of native-English-speakers of all countries who are unaware of the differing *valid* spellings of metre/meter in other languages and dialects, and have mocked each other unjustly (D'oh!);
the even more staggering number of USAns who (heck, it's even their system) are completely unaware that their pints and gallons (and those funny fluid ounce things) are completely different sizes from those that were used elsewhere (so much for a standard system!);
and, the even more staggering number of USAns who don't know that 1 inch = 2.54cm, and that's all you need to know, every other length conversion can be worked out from that. Join the rest of us in the rest of the metric system as well and find out how much simpler it really all is!)
As reductions in abstraction, all definitions are artificial. You mean 'arbitrary'. Regardless, the distinction is irrelevant here.
No, I mean that Pi is a natural constant that is true no matter if you define it in a certain way or not. Whether you name it "Pi", "DynaSoar", or "Bob", the ratio of a circle's circumference to diameter is 3.14159...
The "meter", however, is artificial, because it has been defined in various (different) ways over the years, each with different values. Arguing that the US shouldn't define the meter makes no sense when it is just another group in France who is just making up definitions.
Note that I wasn't commenting on past attempts to legislate a definition of Pi. In the case of the meter, it truly is a case of clarifying definitions.
Peace
Peace
Peace
Peace
Peace
Peace
Peace
Peace
Juropian Englisz.
The European Commission have just announced an agreement whereby English will be
the official language of the EU rather than German, wich was the other possibility.
As part of negotiations, Her Majesty's Government conceded that English speelig had
some room for improvement and has accepted a 5 year phase in plan that would be known
as "EuroEnglish": In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c".
Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump for joy. The hard "c" will be dropped of the "k".
This should klear up konfusion and keyboards kan have 1 less letter.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the trouble- some "ph" will be
replaced with the "f". This will make words like "fotograf" 20% shorter.
In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach
the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkorage the
removal of double letters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.
Also, al wil agre that with the horible mes of the silent "e"'s, the language is
disgraceful, and they should go away. By the 4th yar, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps
such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v". During ze fifz yar, ze unesesary "o"
kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer
kombinations of leters. After zis fifz yar, ve vil hav a reil sesibl riten styl.
zer vil be no mor trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech ozer.
ZE DREM VIL FINALI KOM TRU !!!
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
Laika is dead.
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
The Integrated Circuit was Invented in America by Americans, making both modern computers and spaceflight possible.
Maybe if you had 'bothered' to check the facts, you wouldn't look like a dork!
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
D'oh! Gotta talk to the boss!