Then again, it's rather challenging to discern an ACTUAL "point of no return" from "nothing promulgated vociferously", particularly when the people INSISTING that THIS TIME the sky REALLY IS FALLING are basically the same crew that has told us the same thing about running out of water, running out of food, running out of oil, running out of land, etc, etc, ad infinitum, the same people that would lay in front of bull dozers to stop that horrible nuclear power because it was certainly going to kill everyone (when their choices in fact condemned us to more pollution, acid rain, and accelerated CO2 production), or who screamed 'SILENT SPRING!' until we stopped using DDT...which was a death sentence for tens of millions of malaria victims that may never have died.
It's that old "boy who cries wolf" thing. Now, of course it IS absolutely possible that this time he is telling the truth. But his track record sucks pretty hard, so no, I'm not listening this time.
Every example you use points to the fact that Imperial is a more practically usable system, in particular for people that don't have handy tools.
The mile: first, if you're obsessed over 'multiples of 10' for your measurement system, I'd invite you to check the etymology of the name "mile", it means literally "one thousand" (Roman strides). Each stride is 2 normal paces, which are (particularly when people were all 5'5") then 2000 paces to the mile. Pretty simple. Further, I bet if you and I walked down a road, I could come more closely to estimating I've gone 1 mile than you could estimate you've gone 1km. THAT'S what matters in the imperial system: human usability, not conversions. Metric is beautiful and elegant for conversions. But in daily life, if I want to know how many miles away someone lives, I don't care at all how many inches that is.
As far as those measures, you'll notice they're all easily achievable without tools, as they are neat integer fractions. If you give me an inch, I can easily and precisely accurately derive half-inch, quarter-inch, eighth-inch, or even 1/16" or 1/32". Just cutting them in half. If I gave you a centimeter, it would be rather hard for you to come up accurately with a millimeter.
BTW it's 2000 lbs in a US ton, not 32,000.
And with all those liquid measures? They're each neat doubles of each other. (OK the quart isn't, but that pretty clearly warns you by its name.) This is useful in context because - again, in terms of everyday usability - conversion up and down don't have to be symmetrically easy. One may be needed, the other almost never. By far the most likely use for such measures is cooking, in which case the process is additive or multiplicative, not subtractive or divisive. Nobody says "put in a cup of milk divided by 3", but instead you may often have to double or triple or quadruple a recipe.
"Used frequently"? By whom? In normal day-to-day usage, nobody uses cubic feet (or cubic measures, generally). Did you buy your new apartment based on the cubic meterage? Are your shoes measured in cubic centimeters? I work in transportation, and while I know that a 20' container is 33 cubic meters (~1170 cubic feet) nobody actually gives a crap, because it's about floor space and height, not actual cubic space.
Also, FYI, your metric comparisons to water aren't exactly true, either. First, the liter isn't even a standard SI unit. The SI unit for volume is the cubic meter. And in fact, 1 kg = 1.000025 liters of distilled water at 4 deg C So the conversion only approximately works...but only IF you have a perfectly distilled water (never found normally) at a very specific, unusual temperature (who would run their lab at 4 C?). How is that less arbitrary than the imperial system?
Finally, let's remember that it's the metric advocates that bear the burden of proof here. Nobody is saying "you guys should all use the imperial system" - I frankly don't care what measuring system any other country uses. The metric evangelists are the ones interfering and asserting prima facie that 'metric is better'. Honestly, in my job I use both all the time, and it doesn't bother me in the slightest. I simply don't believe that metric has in any way won the argument in any persuasive context.
A brief promo video about a dead weight going off the bow. Personally, I'd have hoped a sciency-site like/. would discuss a little more about the technical details or comparison between it and the steam alternative.
Except, interestingly, we seem to have 'evolved' past the idea that we are allowed to make any such judgements, as it inherently involves subjective value - a (secular) sin in the modern era of cultural relativism..
In the Roman era, I doubt that *anyone* would have argued if you stated "Rome is more advanced than the Gauls" - neither Roman, nor Gaul, nor an objective 3rd party.
Yet try to make a similar assertion today, and half of the listeners immediately object that any such value-judgement is impossible and wrong.
How is one to "choose" when one is forbidden to even make a value judgement (or even worse, dare to discuss it openly)?
Personally, as a long-time reader of Archaeology magazine and enthusiastic amateur in the field, what I keep being surprised by is the field's routine assumptions that people before us were somehow stupid. Not just ignorant in the sense of technologically, but scholars seem to always be 'amazed' when ancient peoples are discovered to have done things that were rather clever.
Considering that you'd HAVE to be much more 'on the ball' all the time to even survive in ancient eras (where a relatively trivial cut could easily kill you or a failure to prepare for winter meant you DIED instead of just another trip to the supermarket) I wonder faintly if, from ancient peoples' point of view, we're not already living out a sort of Idiocracy ourselves.
I know it sounds trivial, but it's the same for me.
I've got maybe 20 devices, of which maybe a half dozen are static ip's that it's useful to have in my head like printers or my onkyo receiver that has a great smartphone app (but which seems to constantly forget the ip of the receiver). It would be a non trivial annoyance to switch to ipv6, for pretty nearly no benefit (on my internal net). Thus, I haven't switched.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M......signed into law on December 23, 1975.[1] It declared the Metric system "the preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce", but permitted the use of United States customary units in non-business activities.
But they are HUMANS, with goals, friends, and a very human desire to do the right thing.
Simultaneously, I find a rather high proportion of "scientists" - particularly the preachy ones - seem to assume that gobs and gobs of knowledge in a niche field somehow logically equates to other fields frankly outside their expertise.
For example, the Union of Concerned Scientists cheerfully opines on issues of geopolitics and military matters. Why? I submit they would think it risible if Henry Kissinger wrote article after article about theoretical physics, yet they don't see their own hypocrisy here.
Finally, there's the relevancy question. (I first saw it mentioned by Lomborg) - if you are going to have a medical exam, you go to a doctor. - if you are going to have your house inspected, you have a home-inspector do it. If you are going to decide whether to spend $10,000 this year on removing that benign tumor, or removing the asbestos in your old home, NEITHER one of the specialists is the 'right person' to decide your priorities. Currently, climate scientists screaming that we must urgently "do something" about climate change are the equivalent of only listening to the house-inspector. Of COURSE he sees that as your biggest issue, but the question is where to spend finite resources.
First, the US is officially metric. The problem most non-Americans can't understand is that the US government/system ostensibly has few tools to compel this transition, CERTAINLY none that are worth political cost of using on an issue that most people don't give two shits about. In short: the people who need/want metric use it. The people who don't would strongly resist doing so.
Second: there's no "automatic" value inherent in the metric system. It's a SHIT TON easier to use with computers and calculators, certainly, as it's all decimal. But otherwise its less wieldy in daily use as 10 doesn't divide neatly by 3 or 4. If your pro-metric argument is about the value of universalization, hell, we can't even agree that we should all speak ENGLISH in this country, and the 'universalization' value of that would be orders of magnitude more useful/immediate than all switching to a measuring system most of us don't use in the first place.
Of course it does. It's a truism of evolutionary theory that evident characteristics - particularly if they persist through thousands of generations, and PARTICULARLY if they're universal to a species, *strongly* implies some sort of survival advantage.
Your irrational hatred of religion doesn't change that.
I'm not saying religion HAS those answers, I'm just saying that it's an organized structure attempting to (that has in *many* instances been co-opted by people seeking power and control like in every other facet of human endeavor; the fact that in our world religious structures are pretty much the only corporation that has existed 1000+ years means that this coopting is deep, durable, and pervasive). But to fail to see the distinction between the concept of religion and the human agency of it is simply naive or deliberately disingenuous.
I actually have read it, it's interesting but I have trouble with the chronological 'convenience' of this breakdown, and the lack of apparent purpose, except as a theoretical deus ex machina. Essentially, Jaynes posits that humans spent a million years developing consciousness (& bicameralism) and *poof* it withered suddenly.
It's an interesting hypothesis, and worth thinking about, but ultimately unpersuasive.
On a serious note, I'm not even a particularly religious person, but there's not a single human society in existence (or even historically documented) that didn't develop religion of some sort. To me that would suggest that there's some long-term survival advantage.
Further, there are still boundaries to what science knows and always will be. The WHY questions, as opposed to the HOWs. As a mechanism of cultural psychology, I don't see a problem with religion attempting to give people a method to approach those questions.
Of course, as a postmodern western American, I find that religion that becomes pre- and proscriptive is oppressive and frankly obnoxious. But to throw out the baby with the bathwater by flat-out criticizing faith is overstepping pretty far.
- try to learn whatever they're willing to teach - if it "seems" dumb, tedious, or backwards: don't immediately assume you know better. Instead, assume that you don't have all the information (because likely you DON'T: someone else has very likely tried whatever you're going to suggest many, many times). - At the end of the day, this is a simple transaction: they are PAYING YOU MONEY to DO something. Odds are, that "something" isn't "check your instagram account" or play "words with friends". Just fix it in your head that you have nothing better to do elsewhere at all, and try to internalize (or pretend) that you really give a shit about how well your task is done. - you're not a precious snowflake.
Seriously, if someone is running around breaking windows (pun intended) in your neighborhood, they're outed in the local crime report. If they did it to 1.5 million homes, I'd bloody well expect that yes, they should be identified.
I personally wouldn't object to having them branded, either. Or, if you're more Adam Smithy, just suspend their ability to file civil lawsuits allowing people to do whatever they want to them that doesn't actually rise to criminal activity.
"... in a little less than ten years from now, they will have caught up with where the US was around almost two decades ago..." should be "... in a little less than ten years from now, they will have caught up with where the US was around almost FIVE decades ago..."
There may not be a direct link, no, but if you don't see the precedential parallel between Montreal and Kyoto that is being drawn here, you're not paying attention.
Slashdot Mirror
And how are you going to "send them a message" when all you have is their phone number?
You know that normal phones don't handle texts, right? So what then, write them a letter?
The idea that voicemail is dead is asinine.
I only have your phone number, and you don't answer (yes, I'm over 25, I actually call people on the phone), now what?
Dumb fucking emo hipsters, the rest of the world doesn't live on Instagram.
Then again, it's rather challenging to discern an ACTUAL "point of no return" from "nothing promulgated vociferously", particularly when the people INSISTING that THIS TIME the sky REALLY IS FALLING are basically the same crew that has told us the same thing about running out of water, running out of food, running out of oil, running out of land, etc, etc, ad infinitum, the same people that would lay in front of bull dozers to stop that horrible nuclear power because it was certainly going to kill everyone (when their choices in fact condemned us to more pollution, acid rain, and accelerated CO2 production), or who screamed 'SILENT SPRING!' until we stopped using DDT...which was a death sentence for tens of millions of malaria victims that may never have died.
It's that old "boy who cries wolf" thing. Now, of course it IS absolutely possible that this time he is telling the truth. But his track record sucks pretty hard, so no, I'm not listening this time.
What precisely did we expect when the dumb fuckers don't even read the bills before they vote?
Of course it could simply be a lie, like the collusive anti constitutional deniability that congress and the white house have shared since Korea?
Every example you use points to the fact that Imperial is a more practically usable system, in particular for people that don't have handy tools.
The mile: first, if you're obsessed over 'multiples of 10' for your measurement system, I'd invite you to check the etymology of the name "mile", it means literally "one thousand" (Roman strides). Each stride is 2 normal paces, which are (particularly when people were all 5'5") then 2000 paces to the mile. Pretty simple. Further, I bet if you and I walked down a road, I could come more closely to estimating I've gone 1 mile than you could estimate you've gone 1km.
THAT'S what matters in the imperial system: human usability, not conversions. Metric is beautiful and elegant for conversions. But in daily life, if I want to know how many miles away someone lives, I don't care at all how many inches that is.
As far as those measures, you'll notice they're all easily achievable without tools, as they are neat integer fractions. If you give me an inch, I can easily and precisely accurately derive half-inch, quarter-inch, eighth-inch, or even 1/16" or 1/32". Just cutting them in half.
If I gave you a centimeter, it would be rather hard for you to come up accurately with a millimeter.
BTW it's 2000 lbs in a US ton, not 32,000.
And with all those liquid measures? They're each neat doubles of each other. (OK the quart isn't, but that pretty clearly warns you by its name.) This is useful in context because - again, in terms of everyday usability - conversion up and down don't have to be symmetrically easy. One may be needed, the other almost never. By far the most likely use for such measures is cooking, in which case the process is additive or multiplicative, not subtractive or divisive. Nobody says "put in a cup of milk divided by 3", but instead you may often have to double or triple or quadruple a recipe.
"Used frequently"? By whom? In normal day-to-day usage, nobody uses cubic feet (or cubic measures, generally). Did you buy your new apartment based on the cubic meterage? Are your shoes measured in cubic centimeters? I work in transportation, and while I know that a 20' container is 33 cubic meters (~1170 cubic feet) nobody actually gives a crap, because it's about floor space and height, not actual cubic space.
Also, FYI, your metric comparisons to water aren't exactly true, either. ...but only IF you have a perfectly distilled water (never found normally) at a very specific, unusual temperature (who would run their lab at 4 C?). How is that less arbitrary than the imperial system?
First, the liter isn't even a standard SI unit. The SI unit for volume is the cubic meter.
And in fact, 1 kg = 1.000025 liters of distilled water at 4 deg C
So the conversion only approximately works
Finally, let's remember that it's the metric advocates that bear the burden of proof here. Nobody is saying "you guys should all use the imperial system" - I frankly don't care what measuring system any other country uses. The metric evangelists are the ones interfering and asserting prima facie that 'metric is better'. Honestly, in my job I use both all the time, and it doesn't bother me in the slightest. I simply don't believe that metric has in any way won the argument in any persuasive context.
A brief promo video about a dead weight going off the bow. /. would discuss a little more about the technical details or comparison between it and the steam alternative.
Personally, I'd have hoped a sciency-site like
Anyway, more substance at http://www.defenseindustrydail...
Except, interestingly, we seem to have 'evolved' past the idea that we are allowed to make any such judgements, as it inherently involves subjective value - a (secular) sin in the modern era of cultural relativism..
In the Roman era, I doubt that *anyone* would have argued if you stated "Rome is more advanced than the Gauls" - neither Roman, nor Gaul, nor an objective 3rd party.
Yet try to make a similar assertion today, and half of the listeners immediately object that any such value-judgement is impossible and wrong.
How is one to "choose" when one is forbidden to even make a value judgement (or even worse, dare to discuss it openly)?
Personally, as a long-time reader of Archaeology magazine and enthusiastic amateur in the field, what I keep being surprised by is the field's routine assumptions that people before us were somehow stupid. Not just ignorant in the sense of technologically, but scholars seem to always be 'amazed' when ancient peoples are discovered to have done things that were rather clever.
Considering that you'd HAVE to be much more 'on the ball' all the time to even survive in ancient eras (where a relatively trivial cut could easily kill you or a failure to prepare for winter meant you DIED instead of just another trip to the supermarket) I wonder faintly if, from ancient peoples' point of view, we're not already living out a sort of Idiocracy ourselves.
"Police: Why we decided to prosecute this self-rationalizing asshole for theft and fraud."
I know it sounds trivial, but it's the same for me.
I've got maybe 20 devices, of which maybe a half dozen are static ip's that it's useful to have in my head like printers or my onkyo receiver that has a great smartphone app (but which seems to constantly forget the ip of the receiver).
It would be a non trivial annoyance to switch to ipv6, for pretty nearly no benefit (on my internal net). Thus, I haven't switched.
How about a law passed by congress that says so?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... ...signed into law on December 23, 1975.[1] It declared the Metric system "the preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce", but permitted the use of United States customary units in non-business activities.
But they are HUMANS, with goals, friends, and a very human desire to do the right thing.
Simultaneously, I find a rather high proportion of "scientists" - particularly the preachy ones - seem to assume that gobs and gobs of knowledge in a niche field somehow logically equates to other fields frankly outside their expertise.
For example, the Union of Concerned Scientists cheerfully opines on issues of geopolitics and military matters. Why? I submit they would think it risible if Henry Kissinger wrote article after article about theoretical physics, yet they don't see their own hypocrisy here.
Finally, there's the relevancy question. (I first saw it mentioned by Lomborg)
- if you are going to have a medical exam, you go to a doctor.
- if you are going to have your house inspected, you have a home-inspector do it.
If you are going to decide whether to spend $10,000 this year on removing that benign tumor, or removing the asbestos in your old home, NEITHER one of the specialists is the 'right person' to decide your priorities. Currently, climate scientists screaming that we must urgently "do something" about climate change are the equivalent of only listening to the house-inspector. Of COURSE he sees that as your biggest issue, but the question is where to spend finite resources.
There have been some accusations that the data is being 'massaged' to get to a specific result:
https://stevengoddard.wordpres...
First, the US is officially metric.
The problem most non-Americans can't understand is that the US government/system ostensibly has few tools to compel this transition, CERTAINLY none that are worth political cost of using on an issue that most people don't give two shits about.
In short: the people who need/want metric use it.
The people who don't would strongly resist doing so.
Second: there's no "automatic" value inherent in the metric system. It's a SHIT TON easier to use with computers and calculators, certainly, as it's all decimal. But otherwise its less wieldy in daily use as 10 doesn't divide neatly by 3 or 4.
If your pro-metric argument is about the value of universalization, hell, we can't even agree that we should all speak ENGLISH in this country, and the 'universalization' value of that would be orders of magnitude more useful/immediate than all switching to a measuring system most of us don't use in the first place.
Of course it does.
It's a truism of evolutionary theory that evident characteristics - particularly if they persist through thousands of generations, and PARTICULARLY if they're universal to a species, *strongly* implies some sort of survival advantage.
Your irrational hatred of religion doesn't change that.
I'm not saying religion HAS those answers, I'm just saying that it's an organized structure attempting to (that has in *many* instances been co-opted by people seeking power and control like in every other facet of human endeavor; the fact that in our world religious structures are pretty much the only corporation that has existed 1000+ years means that this coopting is deep, durable, and pervasive). But to fail to see the distinction between the concept of religion and the human agency of it is simply naive or deliberately disingenuous.
I actually have read it, it's interesting but I have trouble with the chronological 'convenience' of this breakdown, and the lack of apparent purpose, except as a theoretical deus ex machina. Essentially, Jaynes posits that humans spent a million years developing consciousness (& bicameralism) and *poof* it withered suddenly.
It's an interesting hypothesis, and worth thinking about, but ultimately unpersuasive.
And you know this how?
On a serious note, I'm not even a particularly religious person, but there's not a single human society in existence (or even historically documented) that didn't develop religion of some sort. To me that would suggest that there's some long-term survival advantage.
Further, there are still boundaries to what science knows and always will be. The WHY questions, as opposed to the HOWs. As a mechanism of cultural psychology, I don't see a problem with religion attempting to give people a method to approach those questions.
Of course, as a postmodern western American, I find that religion that becomes pre- and proscriptive is oppressive and frankly obnoxious. But to throw out the baby with the bathwater by flat-out criticizing faith is overstepping pretty far.
Did I hurt your precious snowflake feelings?
QED.
- try to learn whatever they're willing to teach
- if it "seems" dumb, tedious, or backwards: don't immediately assume you know better. Instead, assume that you don't have all the information (because likely you DON'T: someone else has very likely tried whatever you're going to suggest many, many times).
- At the end of the day, this is a simple transaction: they are PAYING YOU MONEY to DO something. Odds are, that "something" isn't "check your instagram account" or play "words with friends". Just fix it in your head that you have nothing better to do elsewhere at all, and try to internalize (or pretend) that you really give a shit about how well your task is done.
- you're not a precious snowflake.
Don't be anything like in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (Millenials in the Workplace)
Seriously, if someone is running around breaking windows (pun intended) in your neighborhood, they're outed in the local crime report.
If they did it to 1.5 million homes, I'd bloody well expect that yes, they should be identified.
I personally wouldn't object to having them branded, either.
Or, if you're more Adam Smithy, just suspend their ability to file civil lawsuits allowing people to do whatever they want to them that doesn't actually rise to criminal activity.
That was kind of my point as "examples of stupid pop-media MISunderstandings of things that aren't that hard"
You don't have to worry your pretty little head about that. It's already been taken care of.
Astroturfers != trolls.
This is as stupid as every Fox or CNN commentary that calls anyone posting anything 'naughty' or bothersome a troll, or anyone under 30 as "gen-x".
Christ, people. If this site can't get it straight, what hope do we have that anyone else would?
Just to be clear:
"... in a little less than ten years from now, they will have caught up with where the US was around almost two decades ago..."
should be
"... in a little less than ten years from now, they will have caught up with where the US was around almost FIVE decades ago..."
Not that that makes it better.
There may not be a direct link, no, but if you don't see the precedential parallel between Montreal and Kyoto that is being drawn here, you're not paying attention.