I feel compelled to point out that these are also "contrived" examples, specifically chosen to favour the imperial system.
But they are also real--I've had to do them far more times than I've had to do paper unit conversions (not been made to do paper conversions--there were plenty of them in school which served no purpose at all). When I've done woodwork and scaled things by 1/4 or 1/3; when I've been brewing beer and have scaled amounts up or down, or have made sub-batches; when I've been cooking and measuring out spaces: all these times the inter-relationships of the standard system have proven useful.
French units optimise for the uncommon case: unit conversion on paper. In real life, this occurs almost never--and when it does, it's just not that much of a hassle. Meanwhile, the standard units were optimised for use (not surprising, since they were used for centuries, and changed accordingly--for instance, the pound was originally 12 ounces, but this was too small, so it was made larger), which in real life is far more common.
French units are just another Enlightenment flim-flam brought to us by the same folks who tried to divide an unevenly-populated state into equal-sized, equally-populated areas.
I bet I can eyeball 1/2 or 1/3 a metre just as well as you can eyeball 1/2 or 1/3 of a yard.
But 1/2 of a metre is not a French unit, but simply 5 decimetres/50 centimetres/500 millimetres/&c. 1/3 of a metre isn't even exactly representable in the French system--it's 3.3333 decimetres/33.3333 centimetres/333.3333 millimetres. Meanwhile, 1/2 of a yard is 1 ell, 1 1/2 foot or 18 inches; 1/3 of a yard is 1 foot/12 inches. The convenient fractions of the foot, the yard, the cup, the gallon, the pound &c. are all units or integer multiples thereof.
Of course it's going to be easier to eyeball 1/2 than 1/10 - they differ in size by a factor of five.
But 1/12 is even smaller than 1/10. But I can work by parts to get 1/12 (halve, halve, cut in thirds); 1/10 doesn't work that way (halve, then try to cut in fifths?).
Similarly, I bet I can eyeball 1/10 of a metre just as well as you can eyeball 1/8 or 1/12 of a yard.
I call BS. Take a piece of metre-long paper and--without using a ruler--cut it into tenths. I can easily cut the yard-long piece of paper into eighths (half, half & half again) or twelfths (half, half and thirds). I don't believe that you'll be able to divide your paper into tenths without use of a ruler or some other such device--it's too difficult to eyeball fifths.
Why do you call it the French system when everyone else in the world calls it metric?
Because 'metric' means 'measuring,' and the standard system is just as good, if not better, at measuring as the French system. I've been calling that since before the current anti-French hysteria, although it amuses me now that perhaps I can latch onto some of that.
You yourself call it SI below--does that indicate a bias?
Calorie is not an SI unit, the Joule is.
Which set of units are we aruging about? The original French set (steres and all), the later set (with calories), the so-called International System (which is no more international than the standard units were and are). Calories are certainly a so-called 'metric' unit in the French system: kilocalories, decicalories &c.
I'm old enough to have been taught the Imperial system in great detail at school. As a result when I first saw the metric system I took it to heart instantly
I wonder how much of the irrational hatred of the standard system was driven by school systems teaching curricula which seem almost to have been designed to make students hate the subject. Why do kids need to spend months performing pointless unit conversions on paper? It's silly. One needn't memorise conversions any more than definitions--they can be looked up in a table. What's the definition of a volt? Answer: 99.99% of the world doesn't care, and doesn't need to; the other.01% can look it up, and will probably memorise it after awhile.
I'm not talking about working on paper! Why is it that proponents of French units focus on paper manipulations (apart from the fact that it's their system's only advantage)? How often do you convert between units on paper in any system? Almost never: it's a contrived problem. Most of the time, you're dividing and multiplying actual objects. I have a true barrel of beer which needs to be packaged into gallons: that's easy, as a real barrel is 32 gallons, so all I need to do is halve five times. I have a foot-wide piece of paper I'd like to cut into 1-inch strips: I eyeball thirds, then halves and then halves again. Simplicity itself.
Meanwhile the fellow with a dekalitre of beer is trying to fiddle about with tenths and fifths and nonsense. The fellow with the decimetre-wide paper can't eyeball centimetres to save his life.
And French units aren't even consistent with the ease of conversion bit: a calorie is 4.1868 Joules. Whoops.
The standard system is imperfect, and can use some updating. That updating would be to regularise things, remove some historical kludges and tampering and so on--it's not to switch over to a mathematically poor base chosen solely because it happens to be the number of fingers on the average man's hand.
Are you telling me that moving the decimal place back and forth is HARDER than dividing by, say, 3?
What decimal point? I'm talking about manipulating concrete objects, not numbers on paper. Ever try to cut a line into tenths by hand, or divide a pot of soup into tenths? It doesn't work: you have to sit and measure it out. But it's very easy to divide objects by thirds and halves, which is why the standard system optimises for that.
Yes, French units are optimised for unit conversions on paper. But how often in life have you needed to figure the number of inches in a mile, or cm in a km (not been made to by a teacher, but actually needed to)? Very rarely. How often have you needed to divide a quantity into smaller amounts by eyeball? Prett often, I'd guess. Isn't it nice that in the standard system those sub-quantities are still nice round units.
In French units, OTOH, one is stuck talking about 37.5 cL and the like, rather than simply 3 gills.
My point is that it's very, very difficult to do anything like that using French units. How do you convert a litre into mL? How do you cut a metre into a decimetre? Ten isn't nicely divisible: you can half, but then you must eyeball fifths, which is just about impossible.
The standard system is optimised for concrete manipulation; the French system for abstract manipulation. I have often had to turn cups into gills, or pints into gallons (I brew beer); I've never had to figure out how many cubic inches a gallon takes up and how heavy it would be if it were full of water (which would, of course, be different for beer, or wheat, or lead). If I did, the chore of looking up the conversion would be a minor nuisance, compared to the days of time I have saved over my life whilst performing concrete conversions.
We've been officially using French units for well over a century, and you'll note that most of us haven't bothered to change. This is due to two reasons: first of all, the US government has not forced us to change (funny how advocates of the French system always claim it's better, but won't let it sink or swim on its own--they always demand coercion); secondly, we're too smart to use it. It's an inferior system based on Enlightenment principles. Ten is a poor base for linear measure, and idiotic for volume or weight.
Not that our system can't be improved: it can. For one thing, it's acquired some stupid historical baggage (e.g. a barrel should be 32 gallons; it's only 31 because some merchants lobbied for it centuries ago--they short-changed the customer and pocketed the profits). But fundamental insights such as the fact that 12 (with divisors 2, 3, 4 & 6) makes a better base than 10 (with its paltry 2 & 5), or that doubling & halving make a great deal of sense for a liquid system--those should not be thrown away chasing after the foolishness of easy paper conversions.
How many times in real life does one have to figure out how much 1,237 cL of water weigh, anyway? Note that 1,237 cL of lead would weigh something else, and none of the vaunted equivalencies would help there...
Then I asked him how many tablespoons are in a ton of water, and he decided that metric had something going for it after all.
Because, of course, that's the kind of thing one spends so much time doing. Meanwhile, I can turn a gallon into gills simply by halving, halving, halving, halving & halving. And I can cut a foot into inches but cutting in half, half and thirds. And a pound into ounces by cutting in half four times.
But gosh, I have to use a piece of paper to figure how many inches are in a mile--like I have ever, in my entire life, needed to know.
It would be nice to have the liquid & linear systems tie into one another more cleanly--I understand that it's currently based on cylinders rather than cubic solids (e.g. a 3-in. radius, 6 in-long cylinder or whatever would be X), and that's just a chore.
Base 10 is so natural to use, not this base 12, no, base 3, no, base 5280, no, fractions baby!
Yeah, because fractions like 1/2 are so much more difficult than decimals like.375...
The fact of the matter is that 10, with half as many divisors, is less natural than 12, which has many interesting mathematical relations making it useful for trade. It's also less natural than 2 (the basis of our liquid system). Try eyeballing 1/10th instead of 1/2, or even 1/12 (which is 1/3 of 1/2 of 1/2).
Not that our system could not be improved. The mile should be changed to the nautical mile (6,000 ft), which is also some nice round fraction of a degree at the equator. The liquid system needs to be normalised back to being completely base 2 (the 31-gallon barrel should be 32 again). The weight system's actually pretty decent.
Just so you know, in some places it's illegal for bikes to ride on the sidewalk, and many roads don't have shoulders. Here in Colorado the former is almost always the case, and the latter quite often holds. I generally ride on the sidewalk anyway, because it's safer and less of a nuisance, but it is illegal.
Yes, a cyclist should stay as far right as he can.
It is crap but is also a hit. Popularity != excellence; popularity == what people want. People don't want excellence--which is not an entirely bad thing.
It's not really a problem if no-one owns something--then it's up for grabs: the first person to lay hands onto it gets it. There's a word for this, but I cannot recall it (land tenure or something, perhaps?).
But, while $800,000 seems like a collosal, life changing amount of money to me, that's peanuts to Gates. It is probably 1 week's income for the guy.
Much less than that, I figure. Bill is currently worth about 40 billion; $800,000/$40,000,000,000 is 2.0e-5. Take your net worth and multiply it by 2.0e-5: it'll be less than a dollar if you are worth less than $50,000 (net--that means subtract liabilities from assets).
Here in Colorado, we have ABC: Always Buy Colorado. For my part, I'd like to be able to avoid goods made in New England and patronise those made in the South and West. It'd be cool if products were labeled.
I'm a Coloradan, a Texan, a Virginian and only then an American.
China's government must be doing things that those in the US like. Otherwise, we wouldn't support their economy for moral reasons.
We buy from China because it's cheap, not because they're a good lot. Heck, even American leftists admit that they're brutes, which is an improvement over what they'd admit about the Soviets.
It's not greed; it's intelligence. Why pay more for less? Americans produce shoddy products at high prices; others produce fine products at lower prices. Would you pay $1 for a moldy pear when the grocer's down the way sells good, tasty pears for a dime a dozen?
And the ownership economy is for everyone. That's a good thing. It means that workers have a voice because they are also owners. It's a better solution than unions, that's for sure. Ask my co-worker, who was once kicked out of a union (and thus lost his job) because he dared to work through his break.
In the mean time, try booting up a Knoppix CD. In a few minutes, you have a complete Linux system with 2 gigabytes of software (including two office suites and a couple of browsers), with no compiling. Even better, your hard drive is not even touched.
2GB of software on a 650MB disk? It compresses that well?
OTOH, that could explain why using Knoppix is akin to swimming through molasses. Upstream. With one's hands and feet tied together.
Should they be rewarded for this development? If successful, it could lead to the prolonging of millions of lives. Surely that deserves something. Those who oppose the patent system outright would take away that reward--and the incentive to do such research. Yeah, some folks might want to do it on their own, but it's filthy expensive to do, and so the only way any work would get done is if some rich guy decided to spend his money on it.
Now, a more nuanced view of the patent system would have no problem with rewarding these guys while not giving Microsoft a monopoly on timed button presses.
Not so sad, really: one is to be respected for what merits respect, not for what fails to. Helen Keller succeeded in spite of her blindness, which is laudable, but was a political fool, which is not.
Squeak is very cool, but (at least the last time I looked into it, about a year ago) the documentation for the GUI stuff, esp. tutorials, was extremely lacking. Hopefully that's changed. Even if I was trying to go about things the wrong way, it'd have been nice to have a doc showing the correct way.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it's the Happy Hacking Keyboard. Looks pretty nice, although I kinda wish there were a full-size version.
There is: gnuplot, an utterly wonderful little program. I use it all the time.
I feel compelled to point out that these are also "contrived" examples, specifically chosen to favour the imperial system.
But they are also real--I've had to do them far more times than I've had to do paper unit conversions (not been made to do paper conversions--there were plenty of them in school which served no purpose at all). When I've done woodwork and scaled things by 1/4 or 1/3; when I've been brewing beer and have scaled amounts up or down, or have made sub-batches; when I've been cooking and measuring out spaces: all these times the inter-relationships of the standard system have proven useful.
French units optimise for the uncommon case: unit conversion on paper. In real life, this occurs almost never--and when it does, it's just not that much of a hassle. Meanwhile, the standard units were optimised for use (not surprising, since they were used for centuries, and changed accordingly--for instance, the pound was originally 12 ounces, but this was too small, so it was made larger), which in real life is far more common.
French units are just another Enlightenment flim-flam brought to us by the same folks who tried to divide an unevenly-populated state into equal-sized, equally-populated areas.
But 1/2 of a metre is not a French unit, but simply 5 decimetres/50 centimetres/500 millimetres/&c. 1/3 of a metre isn't even exactly representable in the French system--it's 3.3333 decimetres/33.3333 centimetres/333.3333 millimetres. Meanwhile, 1/2 of a yard is 1 ell, 1 1/2 foot or 18 inches; 1/3 of a yard is 1 foot/12 inches. The convenient fractions of the foot, the yard, the cup, the gallon, the pound &c. are all units or integer multiples thereof.
Of course it's going to be easier to eyeball 1/2 than 1/10 - they differ in size by a factor of five.
But 1/12 is even smaller than 1/10. But I can work by parts to get 1/12 (halve, halve, cut in thirds); 1/10 doesn't work that way (halve, then try to cut in fifths?).
Similarly, I bet I can eyeball 1/10 of a metre just as well as you can eyeball 1/8 or 1/12 of a yard.
I call BS. Take a piece of metre-long paper and--without using a ruler--cut it into tenths. I can easily cut the yard-long piece of paper into eighths (half, half & half again) or twelfths (half, half and thirds). I don't believe that you'll be able to divide your paper into tenths without use of a ruler or some other such device--it's too difficult to eyeball fifths.
Because 'metric' means 'measuring,' and the standard system is just as good, if not better, at measuring as the French system. I've been calling that since before the current anti-French hysteria, although it amuses me now that perhaps I can latch onto some of that.
You yourself call it SI below--does that indicate a bias?
Calorie is not an SI unit, the Joule is.
Which set of units are we aruging about? The original French set (steres and all), the later set (with calories), the so-called International System (which is no more international than the standard units were and are). Calories are certainly a so-called 'metric' unit in the French system: kilocalories, decicalories &c.
I'm old enough to have been taught the Imperial system in great detail at school. As a result when I first saw the metric system I took it to heart instantly
I wonder how much of the irrational hatred of the standard system was driven by school systems teaching curricula which seem almost to have been designed to make students hate the subject. Why do kids need to spend months performing pointless unit conversions on paper? It's silly. One needn't memorise conversions any more than definitions--they can be looked up in a table. What's the definition of a volt? Answer: 99.99% of the world doesn't care, and doesn't need to; the other .01% can look it up, and will probably memorise it after awhile.
Meanwhile the fellow with a dekalitre of beer is trying to fiddle about with tenths and fifths and nonsense. The fellow with the decimetre-wide paper can't eyeball centimetres to save his life.
And French units aren't even consistent with the ease of conversion bit: a calorie is 4.1868 Joules. Whoops.
The standard system is imperfect, and can use some updating. That updating would be to regularise things, remove some historical kludges and tampering and so on--it's not to switch over to a mathematically poor base chosen solely because it happens to be the number of fingers on the average man's hand.
What decimal point? I'm talking about manipulating concrete objects, not numbers on paper. Ever try to cut a line into tenths by hand, or divide a pot of soup into tenths? It doesn't work: you have to sit and measure it out. But it's very easy to divide objects by thirds and halves, which is why the standard system optimises for that.
Yes, French units are optimised for unit conversions on paper. But how often in life have you needed to figure the number of inches in a mile, or cm in a km (not been made to by a teacher, but actually needed to)? Very rarely. How often have you needed to divide a quantity into smaller amounts by eyeball? Prett often, I'd guess. Isn't it nice that in the standard system those sub-quantities are still nice round units.
In French units, OTOH, one is stuck talking about 37.5 cL and the like, rather than simply 3 gills.
The standard system is optimised for concrete manipulation; the French system for abstract manipulation. I have often had to turn cups into gills, or pints into gallons (I brew beer); I've never had to figure out how many cubic inches a gallon takes up and how heavy it would be if it were full of water (which would, of course, be different for beer, or wheat, or lead). If I did, the chore of looking up the conversion would be a minor nuisance, compared to the days of time I have saved over my life whilst performing concrete conversions.
Not that our system can't be improved: it can. For one thing, it's acquired some stupid historical baggage (e.g. a barrel should be 32 gallons; it's only 31 because some merchants lobbied for it centuries ago--they short-changed the customer and pocketed the profits). But fundamental insights such as the fact that 12 (with divisors 2, 3, 4 & 6) makes a better base than 10 (with its paltry 2 & 5), or that doubling & halving make a great deal of sense for a liquid system--those should not be thrown away chasing after the foolishness of easy paper conversions.
How many times in real life does one have to figure out how much 1,237 cL of water weigh, anyway? Note that 1,237 cL of lead would weigh something else, and none of the vaunted equivalencies would help there...
Because, of course, that's the kind of thing one spends so much time doing. Meanwhile, I can turn a gallon into gills simply by halving, halving, halving, halving & halving. And I can cut a foot into inches but cutting in half, half and thirds. And a pound into ounces by cutting in half four times.
But gosh, I have to use a piece of paper to figure how many inches are in a mile--like I have ever, in my entire life, needed to know.
It would be nice to have the liquid & linear systems tie into one another more cleanly--I understand that it's currently based on cylinders rather than cubic solids (e.g. a 3-in. radius, 6 in-long cylinder or whatever would be X), and that's just a chore.
Yeah, because fractions like 1/2 are so much more difficult than decimals like .375...
The fact of the matter is that 10, with half as many divisors, is less natural than 12, which has many interesting mathematical relations making it useful for trade. It's also less natural than 2 (the basis of our liquid system). Try eyeballing 1/10th instead of 1/2, or even 1/12 (which is 1/3 of 1/2 of 1/2).
Not that our system could not be improved. The mile should be changed to the nautical mile (6,000 ft), which is also some nice round fraction of a degree at the equator. The liquid system needs to be normalised back to being completely base 2 (the 31-gallon barrel should be 32 again). The weight system's actually pretty decent.
Yes, a cyclist should stay as far right as he can.
The site is slashdotted, so I cannot tell, but is it even free software/open source? Given that it's developed by a private concern, I doubt it...
It is crap but is also a hit. Popularity != excellence; popularity == what people want. People don't want excellence--which is not an entirely bad thing.
It's not really a problem if no-one owns something--then it's up for grabs: the first person to lay hands onto it gets it. There's a word for this, but I cannot recall it (land tenure or something, perhaps?).
African or European?
Much less than that, I figure. Bill is currently worth about 40 billion; $800,000/$40,000,000,000 is 2.0e-5. Take your net worth and multiply it by 2.0e-5: it'll be less than a dollar if you are worth less than $50,000 (net--that means subtract liabilities from assets).
You're worth $250,000? That fine for Bill Gates is equivalent to 70 cents for me. I don't think that he's hurting.
You owe me a new keyboard...
I'm a Coloradan, a Texan, a Virginian and only then an American.
China's government must be doing things that those in the US like. Otherwise, we wouldn't support their economy for moral reasons.
We buy from China because it's cheap, not because they're a good lot. Heck, even American leftists admit that they're brutes, which is an improvement over what they'd admit about the Soviets.
And the ownership economy is for everyone. That's a good thing. It means that workers have a voice because they are also owners. It's a better solution than unions, that's for sure. Ask my co-worker, who was once kicked out of a union (and thus lost his job) because he dared to work through his break.
2GB of software on a 650MB disk? It compresses that well?
OTOH, that could explain why using Knoppix is akin to swimming through molasses. Upstream. With one's hands and feet tied together.
Now, a more nuanced view of the patent system would have no problem with rewarding these guys while not giving Microsoft a monopoly on timed button presses.
Not so sad, really: one is to be respected for what merits respect, not for what fails to. Helen Keller succeeded in spite of her blindness, which is laudable, but was a political fool, which is not.
Squeak is very cool, but (at least the last time I looked into it, about a year ago) the documentation for the GUI stuff, esp. tutorials, was extremely lacking. Hopefully that's changed. Even if I was trying to go about things the wrong way, it'd have been nice to have a doc showing the correct way.