Slashdot Mirror
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?
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!
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.
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.
Umm an inch is exactly 2.54 cm. And I think you can convert from there.
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
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.
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.
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.
No roundoff!
To quote grandpa Simpson "My car get 40 hogsheads to the ramrod, and that's the way I like it."
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.
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
2.54 cm/inch
1609 m/mile
39.37 in/m
These are off the top of my head. This guy doesn't know what the conversion rates are, I didn't know how many cubic inches are in a liter which I needed today, so I fucking looked them up. Search on your favorite search engine for conversion factors this isn't news.
"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
Actually I thought the point was the "Our friend, the meter" web page, and how many people fuck up the conversion and/or have posted completely wrong conversion factors on websites etc, not the press release from SS1.
"With your centilliters and you milliliters." /Eddie Izzard
You cant fight in here, its a war room!
And it matters because in the linked blog he gives a long list of incorrect conversion factors from supposedly authoritative sources. I doubt he actually submitted the article; the Slashdot summary just makes him out to be an idiot who can't do simple arithmetic.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
haven't you heard the stonecutters song:
Who controls the british crown?
Who keeps the metric system down?
We dooo! We dooo!
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
Maybe they don't change because it'd cost more money for the nation to convert than it would for the US to buy every nation in Europe. Are you going to pay for that?
You might just as well ask what is the rationale behind the UK (and Australia, and Japan, and ...) driving on the left. IOW, something not perceived as broken is unlikely to get fixed any time soon.
Those who don't know Lisp are doomed to reimplement it.
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.
No compelling reason to change. Same reason why we don't use 220 volts as wall current.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
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
The mayer of the next town over to me gave this gem in a speech recently, "If we don't have it, we don't need it!". I think a lot of it just boils down to something similar. For every one of us geeks out there who love spending a little time to write a script to gain us time in the long run, there's a hundred people out there who don't like the idea of putting in a little effort now to get a non-imediate gain. Especially when that gain comes in the form of the ever nervewracking "other" - da feriners use it!
Everything will be taken away from you.
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.
So thats why Mars is NASA's weekness.
Open Source Sushi
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.
No, it's so that after we conquor you, we can plague you with so many little things you have to learn to adapt to your new overlords that you won't have time to even remember what your nationality was before we took over.
Er, I think, anyway.
Seriously, I think it's just part of good ol' American laze. I worked hard to learn the metric system and to be able to convert imperial units to metric when I was in school under the false belief that we'd be completely switched over by the time I grew up. After I grew up (arguably so, anyway), I forgot all that. Now I can't convert shit even in Imperial. How many cups are in a quart, again? How about teaspoons in a tablespoon? I think it's 3. And no matter how many times I cut up a stick of butter, I still can't remember the tablespoon -> cup conversion. :(
Like what I said? You might like my music
Oh come on now, do you really believe that the USA converting wholesale to the metric system would suddenly endear it to the rest of the world?!?
Frankly, it's really a supply-and-demand issue, AFAIC. Where I live (in the USA, but probably holds true for most of Europe and Japan too), most of the industrial infrastructure is mature (i.e.-no new factories, maintain what you've got) and the market demands components that will work with what is already in place, ergo Imperial units here in the USA.
Elsewhere (China!), new factories and infrastructure are going in and they have the luxury of specifying anything they want, so it makes sense to use SI systems.
As a engineer in the classic sense (i.e.-I can design more than software) I work in both systems most every day, and my education took great pains to include both systems as well. As long as you aren't an idiot and include the units in your calculations, it frankly doesn't matter because my CAD program, MATLAB, and even my HP48SX can all understand and convert units on the fly.
The white zone is for loading and unloading only. If you need to load or unload go to the white zone. It's a way of life
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
This is a popular misconception. The fact is, the U.S. does use the metric system. See here for a list of laws.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
What is the rational given in the USA for not using metric?
Its benefits are over-rated. Is it some badge of honour to continue to use an outdated, more complicated system of measurement?
10 is divisible by 2 and 5. 12 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6. This makes mental division twice as easy with feet than with meters. To my mind that's a good reason to stick with Imperial for all but scientific purposes (where we've already been using metric for decades.)
Also, we've gotten screwed from previous times the government has tried to force it on us. 1.75 liters of whiskey is a nontrivial amount less than a handle of whiskey.
Google confirms: Ruby is the world's most beloved programm
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.
It'd create jobs, so why not? (Construction, sign-painting robots and the people who build them, truck drivers, IT.. etc)
And replacing all those mile-marks on the highway... imagine how many jobs that would make!
It's not like there are a surplus of jobs around..
Base 10 system?
Using prefixes to express multiples of base units?
No memorizing antiquated and imprecise ratios?
You have a base unit for every type of measurement; length(m), mass(g), weight(N), pressure(Pa), energy (J), etc. Just add prefixes and numerical values and you're all set! So easy..
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.
Because it takes longer than seven days to reach Mars?
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
or what you manage. You can still be an idiot. Just take a look at the president...
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.
Nobody uses 220 Volts as wall current. Volts are a unit of potential, not current.
Josh
Isn't the point that searching in your favourite search engine may very well turn up a page with the incorrect conversion factor?
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
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.
It's usually printed on the wax-paper wrapper that the stick of butter comes in. Look for a pattern of evenly spaced lines, labelled in denominations of tablespoons and cups. Cut accordingly, or segment and recombine if timid.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
There is, in fact, no Birchall in administration at NASA, and as far as I can find, there is no Birchall associated with NASA.
The program director of NASA's Mars program is Scott Hubbard. http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/newsroom/pressreleases/00 -10-26.html
(search for mars program director)
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
Um, yeah. And no matter how many times I look at that, I can't for the life of me remember how many tablespoons are in a cup? When the conversion is right there on the packaging for the stick of butter?
Otherwise, thanks for the help. ;)
Like what I said? You might like my music
Still don't understand how someone would wonder that a something-k is 1000 times that something (ok, not for computing/bits/etc where the K is 1024).
Anyway, i'm cheating here, i live with the metric system since i have memory, so for me looking at bigger scale measures as powers of 10 more is natural, but probably is easier to do the math for going from inches to yards than the one needed to go from centimeters to kilometers.
My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it.
;-)
201.168 meters / 238.48 liters...
That's 118547.6815 l / 100km - I don't think you'd be allowed to use your car in any country using the metric system anyway. I suppose it's some sort of SUVs?
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 ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
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`
All food? Looks at gallon of milk, 12 oz dr pepper, 1 lb bag of chips, 4 lb bag of sugar and medicine for my son that says to give 1 3/4 teaspoons per 12 hours.
;->
You where saying?
The metric system is superior, atleast in the case of temperature (C vs F) because Fahrenheit is a scale based upon 0 degrees being the temperature of an equal ice / salt mixture and 212 being the boiling point of water. However, those temperatures fluxtuate based upon your altitude. Celcius however is based upon the freezing and boiling points of pure water at sea level. These values are constant and do not change.
Well, I hope your boss doesn't read Slashdot...
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.
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!
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.
There's 16oz in a lb, 20fl.oz in a pint.
That just doesn't make sense.
In some ways, the imperial system is better. For cooking, the ratios often work out. I've gone metric, though because the best set of kitchen scales I found were in France.
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.
Wrong.
.0044 is pretty significant when you start talking a hundred thousand of them.
328491 feet is 3941892 inches. (12in per foot)
3941892 inches is 10012405.7 centimeters (2.54 cm per inch, exactly)
10012405.7 centimeters is 100.124 kilometers.
Your conversion is wrong; 1 yard = 0.9144 meters. That
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
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
The only reason you find it easier is because you were born and raised in a society using imperial measurements.
To me, metric is much, much easier to work with since everything is in powers of 10. And it's a lot easier to keep track of what a milli-, centi-, deca- and kilometre is, compared to 1/32s, inches, yards and miles.
It's all a matter of culture, and the US is the only developed country in the world which stubbornly sticks to imperial measurements, even though it is an outdated, more complicated system of measurement.
Eat the rich.
Aaaaaand... here's the full content with all the links, for those who prefer to only click on links that go to Slashdot.
I'm still being astounded that amidst the expected discussion of metric, there's this fervent metadiscussion of whether I did in fact post it. Of course, even though I'm making it clear that I did post it, there's the possibility that I am not who I say I am. Although, why I would choose to impersonate me is beyond the reach of my imagination. And of course there's the possibility that I am who I say, but not who others say. Which is, in fact, more than a possibility -- at least one poster has attributed to me a status which I haven't held for quite some time. Or... maybe I'm me, but only in Imperial/SAE, and in Metric I'm something ever so slightly different than me, due to the inevitable conversion/rounding errors.
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
Kiwaiti
Member of the Legion Of Microsoft Haters
Isn't the point that searching in your favourite search engine may very well turn up a page with the incorrect conversion factor?
;)
Well, if your favorite search engine happens to be Google, the search engine itself will do the math for you.
But that's just Google...
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
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.
> Can someone tell me why using the metric system is superior to the American forms of measurement?
Read The Answer of the Internet Oracle:
Mean Mr. Metric against Igor Imperial
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.
Actually, it's closer to 5.7 L. 2.54^3*350/1000=5.7354724. 5.7 L is also the number GM has used for years in reference to its 350s.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
I think I can put a spin on this, though, like so:
"Why yes, I did learn in 2004 that I had been operating with an incorrect conversion factor for going from inches to meters. At that time I researched the extent of use of such incorrect factors, made public my findings, and of course corrected my own notes so as to avoid error in any further calculations.
"By the way, Mr. $BOSSNAME, I notice that $COMPANY's web site currently states that a meter is $INCORRECTNUM inches..."
Shouldn't be a problem at all, you see? And if that doesn't work, I can always say, "Look, at least I've realized I was wrong and found the right answer, unlike these teachers, professors, rocket scientists, engineers..." :)
Exactly.
Being able to evenly divide things into thirds and/or fourths is VERY handy in Real Life.
Especially construction.
The metric system is great when you need to do serious number-crunching on your measurements, but for day-to-day use, Imperial measurements are handier.
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.
Because American units are arbitrary.
If you're working in a lab, and you need a precisely calibrated kilogram mass, you can derive it all to exact precision with a light source and a clock:
You can calibrate your clock by counting oscillations of a caesium atom (I can't remember how many oscillations there are per second; But the point is that it's readily obtainable by physical measurement)
If your clock can measure 1/299,792,458th of a second, you can measure how far a photon of light can travel -- That's 1 metre.
You can obtain the standard unit of speed (metres per second) from that, using your clock and your metre.
If you divide your metre up into 100ths you get centimetres. 1000 of them (a volume 10 x 10 x 10 cm) gives you a cubic decilitre, otherwise known as a litre.
A litre of water weighs exactly 1 kilogram.
Furthermore, the temperature at which that water freezes at sea level is 0 degress celsius, and the temperature at which it boils is 100 degrees celsius.
The point of all this is that it's possible to derive units of mass, distance, temperature, volume (and electrical charge, and force, and torque, and everything else you ever need to measure) using nothing more than OBSERVATIONS of physical phenomena. Anyone in any laboratory can perform these observations, and they'll always come out with the same answers. It's a readily duplicatable system of measurement.
Even better: if you have an arbitrarily precise measurement of any one of these units, you can use it to derive the others. E.g., in the example above I could use a precise derivation of a meter to work out what a degree celsius was. I can just as easily use (say) electron volts to work out hectopascals (pressure), for example.
Now -- Can you do any of that with American imperial units? How does every single laboratory in the world derive an imperial pound? Or a mile? And if you know what a mile is, can you use it to determine a 100% precise degree farenheit (like you can with the SI system?)
That's the science behind the superiority of the metric system. It's the only complete system of measurement which is derived 100% from measurable physical phenomena, and which is interlinked sufficiently well such that knowledge of any one unit is sufficient to derive every other unit in the system -- regardless of how obscure that unit is.
Even better, it all works in powers of ten. Nobody needs to remember how many inches there are in a furlong to convert between them; you'd think about how many millimetres (10^-3 meters) there are in a kilometre (10^3 metres), any any middle-school kid can do exponential arithmetic like that and conclude that there's a million (10^6) of 'em.
For some reason, the US has resisted converting while the rest of the world has moved on (it isn't just france and germany -- it's EVERYWHERE). The US says, "But it'll cost too much to convert," while the rest of the world has proven that conversion is well within their somewhat inferior resource limitations. I'd have thought that it'd be EASIER for the US to convert than anyone else, because they actually have the money to spend on it, but no, it isn't happening.
I wonder why?
- mark
-----
I tried an internal modem, but it hurt when I walked.
No...
1 inch is by definition *exactly* 2.54 cm. This is not rounded off, or an approximation. It is the definition of an inch.
so 1 yard, which is 3 feet, which is 36 inches, is 91.44 cm.
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 ^-^
This may, or may not, prove or disprove that I am the "right" Dan Birchall.
Metadiscussion is great.
Thanks for that announcement. Why anyone felt it was important to announce this to everyone on slashdot is beyond me.
Thanks for that announcement. Why you felt it was important to announce your confusion to everyone on slashdot is beyond me.
"Screw causalilty!" -- Prof. Farnsworth
10 is not used as often as 1000, which is divisible by 2, 4, 5, 8, 10, 20, 25, 40, 50, 100, 125, 200, 250, 500
which makes 1000 a VERY practical number.
i can work out that there are 100,000 cm in a km alot faster than you can work out there are 63,360 inches in a mile.
also, an inch is simply too large a mesurement to measure things accurately without using fractions. In metric, we can use millimetres or centimetres to measure things as accuratly as the situation requires, where someone using imperial measurements is forced to use fractions of an inch. Also, working out that 5.67856 kilometres is 5 kilometres, 678 metres and 56 centrimetres is easy as pie... (mmm tasty pie...) where it is rather hard to work out that 5.67856 miles is 5 miles, 1194 yards and just under 10 inches.
Good for you. (No sarcasm intended.) But in my personal experience, admitting errors never evokes respect (no matter what your Sunday School teacher might have told you) and pointing out mistakes your boss has made is a mark against you, the more so if it's of the "potatoe" style obvious-to-a-schoolchild one.
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.
To me, metric is much, much easier to work with since everything is in powers of 10. And it's a lot easier to keep track of what a milli-, centi-, deca- and kilometre is, compared to 1/32s, inches, yards and miles.
Metric is better for large-magnitude and small-magnitude measurements, also for converting between magnitudes (lop off or add 0's). Imperial, however, is better for medium-magnitude measurements and conversions that stay within one level of magnitude. Which is why I used meters and liters for physics homework, but I will always use miles on the highway and gallons in the kitchen.
This has nothing to do with culture. Mathematically, the funny multiples that Imperial measures work in makes it easy to divide without remainders. Likewise, using base-10 for number and measures makes it easy to scale up and down. The idea that the government should force us to choose one or the other for all uses is insane and illiberal.
Google confirms: Ruby is the world's most beloved programm
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.
That's not quite right. Heat dissipation varies exponentially with current. That means it's more efficient to transfer at high voltage and low current, which is why the biggest power lines have huge voltages. It's stepped down before it gets into your home, and the Europeans just don't step it down as far. So their extension cords are better, though we are safer.
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
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.
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.
It's spelt *metre* not meter.
Official SI mass unit is kilogram (kg), not gram (g).
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.
Got me. Really. I've submitted much more interesting stuff in the past (no, you never saw it), but the /. guys work in strange ways, and if they choose to accept this one, oh well. Their site, they can do what they want. :)
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.
See, now, you're thinking far too clearly there.
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.
The kilogram is not a unit, it is 1000 grams..
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?
0 degrees centigrade is the freezing point of pure water at a pressure of 1 atmosphere. 100 degrees centigrade is the boiling point of water at 1 atmosphere.
A salt-ice mixture has a temperature of ~ -14 degrees C.
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.
The official SI unit of mass is the kilogram, not the gram. Yes, the original 1791-vintage metric system was meant to use the gram as a base unit, that's a bug.
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"
And you know it uses the correct conversion factors, because...?
Fahrenheit is measured at standard pressure. It is not subject to the fluctuations you cite.
Now while celsius seems to make more sense based around the freezing and boiling points of water, notice that fahrenheit is as well:
0 degrees is the freezing point of an equal ice/salt mixture
32 degrees is the freezing point of water
212 is the boiling point of water
Now, 96 degrees (for the mean human body temperature) was originally the top bound (base-12 system, making eight segments). The boiling point of 212 was introduced later bumping 96 up to 98.6. However, since we're talking about base-12 here you can see that with a zero of 32 degrees and a high of 212 there are 180 degrees (360/2) of fidelity which are in 15 equal segments of 12 (12*15+32 = 212). So it really has the same characteristics of celsius, but it is using a different base.
Now one thing that is interesting is that 0 - 100 degrees fahrenheit is roughly the extents of normal temperatures in which we live and are able to function normally within. These map approximately to -18 to 38 degrees celsius. Now which system is more logical? The boiling point of water is not as important to me as my body temperature is, since our bodies cannot tolerate temperatures much beyond our internal temperature.
Also the celsius system has roughly half the fidelity of the fahrenheit system (56%). That means that when reporting temperatures I have a better idea what temp it is since there is less room for error. This could be avoided by providing temperatures with decimal points, but this isn't neccessary with the Fahrenheit system.
I don't really have much of a beef with celsius other than the lower useful bandwidth of whole numbers in the (meaningful) range of human habitability. That and base-12 is very handy. Speaking of twelve, check out this interesting link that shows the sequence of 12 repeating numbers for the iteration of -1/(sin(x)cos(x).
because it is Google.
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?"
We do. You're misinformed.
- 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.Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
the ten base system of our numerical system has no real place in the natural world
You mean besides the 10 fingers you mentioned? Anyway, please tell us where the base 12 can be found in nature.
:w!q
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
I'm of the opinion that total honesty saves time, and in the business world, money than candy-coating everything so as not to piss anyone off.
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
... 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
You know, this thread is about 10 times more confusing than the whole meters-to-inches thing.
Hey, 10 times, that's metric!
oh, puh-lease. Not again the "12 is better" argument AGAIN. .125 = 1/8 (actually, I parse .375 much faster than 3/8, and it's definitely faster to see that .375 is less than .83, while comparing 3/8 and 5/6 is a certain mental effort)
.6 is parsed by the brain faster than 6/10. [*] (OK, pretty dumbass to pass for 600m, but on the A86 it's fair game)
YOU have been trained to divide by 6. I've been trained to recognise instantly that
Surveyors around here are frequently using the grade to measure angles. 400gr = 360° (360deg if slashcode eats the proper symbol). They're about the only ones with this strange custom. Still brain dead, it should be radians all over the place anyway. The time and nondecimal geographic coordinates measurements are simply a PITA to handle, if you really think about it.
When I drive in the US, I took a couple of habits.
If there's a warning sign in feet (ANY number of feet), put the foot on the brake pedal NOW and be ready to stop. If the exit is posted in miles, OK drive the speed you would, but if it's posted in ANY fraction of mile, don't think, pull right.
When driving home, I would not hesitate to pass even if my exit is posted 600m away, as
My point is: the earlier you've been trained with a specific system, the more trouble you have adapting to other systems (especially when, like in my case, you have a strong prejudice that the foreign system is outdated and antiquated [yes I'm French, hence arrogant, thank you very much]), and the more likely you're going to find phony excuses that the system you've been breastfed with is the most natural and self-evident.
[*] yes, this was another culturally-biased overgeneralisation. So is "12-based systems are more natural because 2,3,6 are God-given Natural Super-Efficient Divisors" or some similar bs.
The only appropriate base system for units of measure is that of the number system they will be used in.
We work in decimal - base 10.
You arguments are a red herring, they are arguments for us adopt a number system that is base 12 system (which incidently, imperial is not) over the base 10 one we use at the moment, not arguments to have your metrics in a different base to the one they are used in.
In the computer world we work in binary instead of decimal, and relevent computer metrics are base 2 rather than base 10 because of this. Having 12 bits in a byte, 3 bytes in a word and 1760 words in a kb (or whatever) would just be daft, exactly as daft as the imperial system infact.
Also, using an imperial measure of angles to justify the imperial system is a bit circular.
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 ---
I don't trust Google's conversions. :) I think their conversion is just like their spell-checker, i.e. based on reading a whole bunch of pages and then just guessing, based on all the pages it reads. Since very few people can do conversions properly (no good reason for that), I don't trust Google to do it for me. ;)
Like what I said? You might like my music
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
The imperial ton is 20 hundredweight (2240 lbs) while the american ton is 2000lbs
Its benefits are over-rated. Is it some badge of honour to continue to use an outdated, more complicated system of measurement?
Well, that's exactly how many Brits feel about the imperial system :). It's national pride that we aren't using some system the French, of all people, use.
for cooking, try measuring fluid ounces with an electronic scale.
Now do the same with a metric electronic scale....
(Obdisclaimer: this is, provided you're not trying to measure the "volume" of liguid plutonium! I'm talking volumes of water and milk at a standard kitchen precision).
Somehow, I have the impression that construction workers and designers over here don't suffer too much from not being able to divide "easily" by 3 or 6. There must be a trick somewhere!
www.nist.gov
You'll have to dig around a bit, but it's all there.
BG
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!
it's also more like 120V in North America these days. Yay2 for engineers!
(and especially Yay^3 for the engineers who came up with cheap inexpensive "universal" "100-250V 50-60Hz just worry about the mechanical interface" wall warts)
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.
1 yard = 36 inches
1 inch = 2.54 cm
so 328,491 feet = 100.12405 Km
realkiwi
You forgot a point
The metric system doesn't need any conversion tables.
n gauge wire has no size relation to n gauge sheet steel, which has no size relation to an n gauge shotgun or n gauge railway tracks etc They're all using different arbitrary units of measure (that share the same name).
In metric, 3mm wire has the same thickness as 3mm sheet steel, and a 9mm pistol round is obviously three times that.
True story:
I needed 250 grams of salt for a dye, I don't do much cooking so had no scales that could measure that little, however I did have a measuring cup (regardless of the measuring cup, getting 1/4 a litre of water would be easy).
250grams = 250ml of water
place a chopstick under a board with two cups on it, fill one cup with 250ml of water, pour the salt in the other glass until the board balances on the chopstick.
Water might seem an arbitrary choice for the metric system, but I must say it's handily available when you need it.
And no, you can't do this with ounces and fluidic ounces, because (just like gauges) a fluidic ounce of water does not weight an ounce.
That's not quite right. Heat dissipation varies quadratically with current:
P = I^2 R
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
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!
"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.
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.
The UK used to have 240 V and the mainland 220 V. About 10-15 years ago, it was changed into the average of the two (230 V) such that there is one single standardized voltage in whole Europe. (Never mind that the voltage depends on the distance to the nearest transformer as well)
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
...it's probably pre-calculated. I figure that it took them longer the first time around.
Actually the only 'base' unit is the meter (hence the name). 1kg of water = 1 litre = 1000cm^3, etc. There are no 'conversions' really.
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Yeah, and denying you were wrong works _SO_ much better
TIAEAE!
I've actually made a concerted effort to submit whatever science work I can in the Imperial system.. I personally just don't like the metric system.. to me, it represents a startling problem with society; people are getting so dumb that they can't even divide things in their head by a base other than 10. I'm proud that the good old USA still uses the Imperial system, and I hope it stays that way during my lifetime.
"Make it idiot proof, and someone will make a better idiot."
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.
Well, if what you're *raised* with is the system you should use, then I'd personally prefer a system based in powers of 2. I can make those conversions faster than I can Imperial or Metric. And it makes so much more sense than powers of ten anyway.
Like what I said? You might like my music
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/)
Except that absolutely *none* of your conversion examples are practical in any meaningful sense.
Contrarily, I can eyeball a foot, then I can eyeball a quarter of it and know that it's 3 inches, write it on my paper, go buy a piece of wood that measures 3 inches, and then nail it on the end of my dick to give my wife more pleasure.
Like what I said? You might like my music
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.
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.
As long as you can remove any evidence, yes. Or I was actually thinking of mistakes where no one else has or is likely to notice; if you can't fix it (as in a shipped product) it's really not going to help anyone, especially you, to admit it. (I'm not talking about actual dangerous flaws, of course, more cosmetic errors, typos, etc.)
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!
if i didnt already know you were wrong, I'd agree with you. that is one place where they fucked up. the kilogram should really be named the gram, but its too late to fix that now.
TIAEAE!
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.
speed has no base unit in any measuring system, its a comparion of distance traveled to time taken. i fail to see where you're trying to take this smart guy
TIAEAE!
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.
The Water/weight/volume thingie is not part of SI (since 1889), it's just handy and was part of the original standard, but nowadays the kilogramm is defined as the mass of the international kilogram prototype, which happens to be the only SI base unit that is not derived from a fundamental constant, and really ought to be replaced.
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
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.
As long as you can remove any evidence, yes. Or I was actually thinking of mistakes where no one else has or is likely to notice...
Wow, I mean wow...
Be sure to keep an up to date list of the companies you work for somewhere in the public domain. I, for one, suddenly have a strong urge to make sure you are nowhere near anything I plan to buy/use/depend on.
Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.
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".
Selective quotation, or short attention span? You omitted the qualifictions I made. I'm not talking about a buggy air traffic control system, more like a typo in documentation. Also, I'm describing the real world.
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. :-)
I hope it's a troll. I *really* *really* hope so...
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.
It understands 'metre' too, though.
:)
:)
I'm a Brit, and seeing 'meter' used instead of 'metre' makes my brain itch. It's exactly that kind of spelling 'mistake' that'd lose us points in our exams
But to each their own! Personally, my electricity meter is mounted about 1.25 metres up the wall
What's the frequency, Kenneth?
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
OK, mod me troll here, but I love the US system. I was born in and spent most of my life in continental Europe, and for a long time to me the the meter was the only right way of measuring the world.
But seeing the advantages of working with smaller units I just loved it. "I'm 6 foot tall" instead of "182 centimeters". "It is on this page, 3 inches from the bottom" instead of "7... or perhaps 8 cm from the bottom".
It simply is more convenient in some situations. Metric is the way to go in spite of its drawbacks, not because it would not have any.
And often, of course, metric is clearly better. When it comes to science and international deals, the metric system is by far superior. Not to mention conversions between short and long: "This map is of the scale 1:20 000. That means that one inch on the map is, ehm 20 000 inches in real life, which is a lot of feet but not that many miles..."
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.
Because countries varied between 220v and 240v (& when you factor in local power fluctuations, some places may have dip as low as 200v) This made it tough to transfer power between countries; the grids were out of sync and all sorts of problem arose. So as part of the Common Market, power supply was standardised onto 230v and everyone synced. This made trading power between EU member states much easier.
Hardly, no states exchange power at 230v, electrical grids in all countries run at much higher potentials. However, having a consistent supply voltage does mean that a device built for one country will work in all the others (ignoring the fact that several different plug designs are used).
Actually it is rocket science...
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.
In fact, it's been suggested that "gram" is not correct within the SI. It should be "milli-kilogram". :-)
never noticed it?
All distances in Star Trek are in meters.
Georges
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.
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
One problem: the ten base system of our numerical system has no real place in the natural world....plus you really can only divide 10 by 2 and 5 but with a 12 base system you can divide by 2 3 4 and 6 plus our angle system 360 degrees is 12 base. The only reason we use a ten base numerical system is we have 10 fingers...
It's about multiplying and dividing. You can express meters in kilometers simply by moving the decimal point a few spaces, you can't do the same with feet and miles. Since the system is entirely base 10, you know that a square decimeter is 10 x 10 = 100 square centimeters, and for a cubic decimeter, just move up the decimal point one more place so it becomes 1000 cubic centimeters, better known as 1 liter (because one cubic centimeter = 1 milliliter = 0.001 liter). Doing that kind of math in the imperial system is a lot more difficult, since you actually have to calculate things, instead of just being able to juggle with the decimal point to get things done more quickly.
Besides, every other part of human life uses either the base 10 or base 2 system, the only base 12 system in popular use is the imperial measurement system, making you remember a way of calculation that you can't apply to anything else.
Additionally, degrees are a major pain to work in, since any kind of higher order trigonometry is a LOT more counterintuitive in degrees than in radians. Admittedly radians are not part of the metric system.
Finally, nature doesn't seem to have a natural base (google doesn't immediately turn up anything useful anyway). It does have a natural ratio, known as the golden ratio (of 1.618 to 1), which defines the optimum relative ratio of different parts of a living entity (because of the geometric properties of that ratio, which makes the most efficient use of resources). In fact, we define beauty in humans not because measurements are all fitting to some kind of base system, but because they all match the golden ratio. See this site for more detail.
Better luck next time with that Mars Probe!
;P
Hang in there!
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.
One place the change would cause huge problems is in the building industry. All our codes can be rewritten and architects can make the adjustment in time. Where it would be extremely hard is for the contractors and product suppliers.
Have you ever tried to get a drywall contractor, mason, plumber, or carpenter to "do something different"? It's not easy. Copper water pipes are sized in 1/8" increments. Bricks are 8" wide and when you stack 3 of them, 8" high. Concrete block fits within that module. Plywood and drywall come in 4'x8' sheets. Framing is usually 16" on center and comes in lengths to accommodate a single 4'x8' sheet of drywall once the wall is framed with top and bottom plates. I could go on forever.
There is such a legacy of "Imperial buildings" and the system is so ingraned into the day to day life of contractors that changing would really be a monumental task. Imagine trying to renovate a building in the future that was constructed with Imperial measurement, and you had to then use metric supplies. All the piping would need Imperial/metric adapters, studs would need to be ripped down to the right floor to ceiling height (hopefully they're not too short now), drywall will need to be trimmed excessively, and make sure you don't order 20,000 metric brick by mistake!
...if the US would just catch up with the rest of the world and thinKMetric !
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
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?
Yes, it is the real world you are describing. Good job. But also a factor in that real world are customers that never return and return whatever they bought for just such lack of concern by the people who made/sold it to them.
Also in that real world are bosses who will, if not fire you, make sure you never get promoted to any position of responsibility. Because after all, if you can't do trivial things like spot a scratch or proof your own writting, what makes them think you can be trusted to do something important?
In that real world you speak of, there are thousands of jobless losers sitting on their couchs wondering why they can't hold a job for more than a year and their references from old jobs are bad.
Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.
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
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
I don't know about base 12, but I do know that base Phi (1.618...) is popular in nature, and that "natural" logarithms use a base e (2.718...).
Irrational numbers appear to dominate the ratios in nature...
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
I don't know why everyone claims that 10 is only divisible by 2 and 5, 10 is divisible by EVERY SINGLE number aside from 0.
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
Some people still don't know how many pounds are in stone!
i could not think of anything clever.
well then, how do you know that even a calculator uses the right conversions?
//i have as many lives as people i know.
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.
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
I see people are taking this far too seriously. Partly I was stating an attitude that I believe is common, and probably too common. Birchall's willingness to point out his own errors is remarkable because it went against this. Personally, to describe a "real world" example of an error I thought it better to quietly forget, I noticed after some documents had been printed that some of the text was 11 points, and some 11.5. Since no one else had noticed and everyone was very happy with the document I saw no reason to point out the flaw; I just determined to double check this every time and fix it if it ever came to a reprint.
I've often been criticised for being too much of a perfectionist, unable to let something below my standards go by. So your remarks on my "lack of concern" with my work are ironic, as well a insulting and unwarranted.
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
Same reason why we don't use 220 volts as wall current.
230, actually, except in the UK, where it is 240, or in Mexico or Saudi Arabia where it is 127, or Japan where it is 100, or Canada or the Bahamas, where, like here, they have standardized on 120, or is it 110? 115? (depends on where you are in the country and what your local utility decides)
Bottom line, no significant effort has been made to standardize on electrical supply voltage, and no effort has been made to standardize the plug, except to put IEC plugs on the appliance (most notably computers) and have the end user buy a power cord that fits their local plug.
Japan doesn't even have a standard frequency! Half the country is 50Hz, and the other half is 60Hz.
www.wavefront-av.com
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?
...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!
And on a similar note, Chrysler refers to their 360 as a 5.8L.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
On google you can type "convert 100 kilometers to miles" and google does the conversion *for you* (and then shows you search results)
meh
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When I was in engineering school, a good part of one of our first-year courses was taken up with doing unit conversions.
Okay, force is measured in pounds (force), written lbf. Mass is measured in lbm. One pound of force is equal to one pound of mass, but only when measured at sea level.
Honest to God, when you are working with force, pressure, momentum and things like that, the easiest thing to do is convert all the input into metric, do the calculations, then convert back to Imperial at the end.
I'm old enough (40) to have been in high school when Canada made the switch, so I straddle both worlds. Basically, I have no problem for measurements that are in metric in my everyday life. There are a few holdovers (I tend to think of car efficiency in terms of miles per gallon rather than litres/100 km), but it really does make things much easier.
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
It does with a large number of people. Humility is an amazing tool. Defuses a lot of the testosteronal willy-waving.
Though it's really all in the way it's done. People that refuse to acknowledge the reality of their dysfunctionally incorrect ideas don't get much respect. Neither to people that drop ideas at the drop of a hat.
The middle way is best here: gather evidence and go where it leads you. Let the evidence support your ideas, and you will be able to more compellingly get your ideas across to people, and get their respect, even when your ideas need to change in response to changing evidence.
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.
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.
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)
um...WHAT??? Last time I checked, 10/3 (and 10/4 and 10/6 and 10/7 and 10/8 and 10/9...let alone every number greater than 10) is NOT an integer, thus 10 is NOT divisible by every number aside from 0. The prime factors of 10 are 2 and 5, thus it is divisible by 2 and 5, aside from 1 and itself.
dbirchall remarked....I think I can put a spin on this, though, like so: "Why yes, I did learn in 2004 that I had been operating with an incorrect conversion factor for going from inches to meters. At that time I researched the extent of use of such incorrect factors, made public my findings, and of course corrected my own notes so as to avoid error in any further calculations.
Oh, so you're the guy responsible for the loss of Mars Climate Orbiter!
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
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?
You've been reading too much Science Fiction.
old geek
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.
10 is maybe not very easy to divide, but it's very easy to multiply. For 12 x 15 you need to think a bit, for 10 x 15 you don't.
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.
You use Butter? Over here, we still use margarine.
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
OK, so the term is wrong. But if you just want to lose weight, move to the moon, but you're still fat. What you really want to lose is the mass. So we really need to change the expression, "how much do you weigh?" to "how massive are your?". That should really get people to like you!
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
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
Are you serious? You got that exactly backwards. US has to use thicker, more expensive wires everywhere because of the lower voltage. Of course the both systems use the thinnest, cheapest wires they can get away with. In the 220V system the wires for the same power are a lot thinner than in the 110V system.
--
If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, where does the road paved with evil intentions lead to?
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.
Except that 1/0.3937 is not 2.54. The difference is approximately 0.00000508001016009. It is simply a matter of scale to find a conversion where this would cause a problem.
Especially construction.
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Look at the friggin' blueprints of what you're constructing, look at the raw materials, measure according to blueprints, cut, assemble, repeat. NO division required. What are you constructing anyway where you need to divide stuff into thirds? And how easy is it to divide that 2' 1 5/16" piece of plywood into thirds anyway? Remember to take the loss into account too, unless you have a molecular monofilament cutter.
--
If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, where does the road paved with evil intentions lead to?
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".
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)
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.
Because it would cost gigabucks to switch. Any other questions?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
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?
set to US letter are an [imperial] pain in Europe.
'nuff said.
Ever notice how books are mostly within the same size range? That's because the maximal span of an object on which the human eye can usefully focus at close range is somewhere between 9 and 13 inches. Which is about the span from page to page of most open hardcover non-reference books. And also the range within most "foot" measurements fall in traditional measuring systems. Metric has no such equivalent because the meter is too long and next thing down is too-small decimeters (does anyone even use those?).
Similarly, a pound is about the optimal weight for throwing a rock or hefting a tool with one arm - a tennis racket is just under one pound and a baseball bat is about two pounds for a reason. An inch is about the width of the thumb. A yard is about one pace at a medium walk. A pint is the volume of a pound of water.
The mile, I'll grant you, is not a terribly intuitive measurement. It started off as an early attempt at decimalization by the Roman military - 1000 paces at a march. Then it subsequently got all fucked up by later English attempts at reconstruction and standardization. Personally I'd be okay with a "metrimperial" mile of 1000 yards (which was the original idea anyway) because decimals are indeed better at larger scales.
That's why American football works so well; its rules mix dozenal Imperial measures with a decimal frame: 100 yard field. That means large-scale movements that demand more precision can be done in decimal while smaller-scale estimating benefits from the advantages of dozenal. I'd wager Canadian refs generally calculate in fourths and thirds for short-distance things, which just goes to show the superiority of Imperial.
Google confirms: Ruby is the world's most beloved programm
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
I didn't advocate anything here. But using numbers to the base 10 ist simply intuitive cause you can use your fingers for counting. How often have you seen someone counting with his/her arms? Hardly, I guess, and for a good reason. Binary is just too impractical for everyday use.
:w!q
- $ 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.
10 can be divided by every single number apart from 0, but this is not the same as saying it is divisible by every single number apart from 0.
Division is the act of finding, for two numbers, a third number (called the 'quotient') such that the first number is equal to the quotient multiplied by the second number.
Calling a number 'divisible', however, is to say that it can be divided an exact number of times by another number.
So 10 can be divided by 3 but it is not divisible by 3. They are different words, they mean different things.
"10 is divisible by 2 and 5. 12 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6. This makes mental division twice as easy with feet than with meters."
Now, now. Let's compare like with like: 10cm is divisible by 5cm and 2cm; 3.937007874 inches is divisible by...um...er...
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.
Because we can type in a simple conversion, such as "1 meter in feet," and get an answer of 3.2808399 feet.
If you're paranoid you can then go look up the conversion factors and make sure they are correct.
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.
I also, would like to make it as clear as possible that I am in fact me. Just in case there was any residual doubt.
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
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!
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
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
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
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.
I count binary on my fingers. I can count from 0 to 1024, or -511 to +511. With all of the mental conditioning, I don't even need my fingers... so there!
Having worked in construction, which is still often imperial, I would say that metric is simpler than imperial. The reason is, there are no shortcuts. For example, convert 1 mile, to yards, feet, and inches. You probably won't, you'll just dredge up the memorized ones, and calculate the ones that aren't. Now, convert 1 km to m, cm, and mm. Easy, 1000 (from memory), 100 000 (the last times 100), and 1 000 000 (the last times 10). Most people typically aren't interested in going lower than mm, but I'll commoly use 1/32" (about a mm) or 1/64". Quick, what's the next size up, in 32nds of a inch, from 5/32" (I want a bit of play in the hole I have to drill for a 5/32" bolt)? Well, let's see, that's 6/32", which converts to 3/16". Or you can use factoring (WTF! I just want a bit size!) to figure out that there is only one factor (2) common to both. Yeah, that sounds easy. In metric, I can just add 1 mm.
And how exactly does this multitude of factors affect the choice to stay with Farenheit?
The idea that there are a number of factors is useful, in theory, but the implementation is difficult at best (do you want to pay for drill bit manufacturers to etch in 4 different fractional measurements so you don't have to do that "easy" conversion?). It's also not valid in a number of areas. If you want something that's useful, and easy to implement, stick with standard numbering systems. Nowadays, that's base-2 or base-10. It's time to bid a fond farewell to our last icon of base-12 numbering.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
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
...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.
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.
Its the same reason we don't all speak Esperanto.
Think about it. Esperanto was supposed to be for language what the metric system was for measurement; international, easier to learn and just all around better.
Like Esperanto the metric system may actually be a marginal improvement over what it was designed to replace BUT it isn't a big enough improvement to justify the effort for the average person to forget everything they know and start tabula rasa with a new system.
[Begin new train of thought]
The best metric(pun intended) of how much a populace has accepted a system of measure is how accurately the average person can extemporaneously estimate. For example the average American could tell you that a kilometer is about 2/3 of a mile but ask them to estimate how far away some distant landmark on the horizon is and they would immediately resort to English measures. Thats because (going back to my language analogy); I don't merely speak English, my thoughts are in English: I don't merely measure in English Units, I think in English Units.
Imagine for instance if we imposed a metric-like system on time measurements. After all 24 hours in a day is a horribly unround number. Maybe we should divide a day into 100 metric hours. Then we could mystify people by saying cool things like "I'll be back in 2 deca-hours" or "Hang on, I'll be there in a centi-hour!". It may sound absurd but you better believe if someone did invent such a system you would have people out there touting it as easier, more efficient and (*groan*) more "scientific".
[Begin new train of thought]
That being said; the biggest popularizer of the metric system in the US is probably Coca-Cola. The average person doesn't have a clue how heavy a kilogram feels but they know exactly what 2 liters looks like. Its a bottle of Coke. If the metric system ever catches on here amongst the rabble it will be via the Coca-Cola model not by State fiat as it has in some other places.
[Begin new train of thought]
Regarding the US as the lone industrialized holdout: Any mother can tell you that "Because everybody else is doing it" is not a valid argument.
I never mentioned inches vs cm. In fact, I was not arguing for american/imperial vs metric, instead I was showing the similarities between Fahrenheit and Celsius and some of the benefits of the Fahrenheit scale.
Now I feel obliged to point out that a centimeter is not the official SI Unit of measure. The meter is. The centimeter is a base-10 fraction of the SI basic unit of measure, the meter, while the inch is a base-12 fraction of the imperial basic unit of measure, the foot. The foot has greater whole-number fidelity than the meter.
Does this really matter? Not really since many people express useful measures like their height in cm, or in USA as feet + inches (ie, 6'3"). But weather temperatures are generally expressed in whole numbers, giving the fahrenheit system a higher fidelity in these cases. And its easy to remember 0-100 is an approximate range of habitable temperatures. For scientific measurements kelvin is the way to go, but the majority of temperature measurements that the public cares about on a day-to-day basis are weather reports and earth temperatures. Having an almost 2x greater fidelity in this region is a good thing. Keeping fractions/decimals out of the equation is also better for the general public.
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.
If you managed to do 2s complements on the fly, you could even have -512 to +511!
And BTW, you can only do 0 to 1023 with 10 fingers.
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.
Obviously most of the mods are American, because everyone in Canada is laughing. Hey And we know comedy, don't get me started on the list of Canadian comedians in the US!
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
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.
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!!
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!
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.
I guess this means I'm not as susceptible to "Snow Crash", eh? If you've not read that book I'd highly recommend it.
You'd denounce a system that is easier to use (mathematically, at least) and more logical simply because you're stubborn? What about the thousands upon thousands of advances in the technical realm that are commonplace now because it makes life easier? Sure, computers can now be easily used by 'morons,' starting out only as neat tools for geeks... but the same ease of use that brings technology to the masses can even be beneficial to those of us that are very technically inclined.
With regards to computers, try going with binary instead of base-10 from now on. It *is* the natural base of the machines you'd be using, and I'm sure you can handle dividing by base-2 just fine ;)
LegendMUD
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
Easier to use and more logical? That's debatable.. Easier to use and more logical in scientific calculation - sure.. easier to use and more logical in practical applications? I would disagree.. The imperial system is far more practical for everyday tasks; having steps based on fourths, etc, instead of tenths allows for quick division into thirds, for example.. and the system itself revolves around standards that are far more easily estimated and/or derived (say you wanted to recreate farenheit, all you would need to do was measure 64 intervals between something frozen and body temperature)..
"Make it idiot proof, and someone will make a better idiot."
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
A professional mechanic and two others who have worked for years in a body shop agree that for all practical purposes the metric system is easier to use, more intuitive, and ultimately more helpful in their work. The mechanic (a family friend of ours) said lots of people in his field are skeptical of the metric system simply because they were brought up using only the imperial system, but many that are 'forced' to use base 10 give a begrudging respect for it. He mentioned that working with imperial-based measurements on some vehicles and projects is a pain, but unfortunately a necessary evil.
As far as practical applications go, I'd see what these three guys do as pretty applicable.
LegendMUD
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
Idiot. What would prevent me from measuring in 10s of cm (which I do), and then easily add fractions if I need to? (no, nobody calls them decimeters, just 10cm).
What size the base unit is in metric is irrelevant since the sizes scale so easily. All you really have proven is that you would be even more fucked it foot wasnt such a practical size.
Laika is dead.
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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!
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