That's the reason we have courts--when everything else breaks down, they are the final arbiters of right and wrong.
No, that's why we have the military--they're the final arbiter when everything else breaks down. Fortunately, it has only once gotten to that point, and hopefully it never will again. The courts are the last peaceful recourse, but there are others available.
A funeral is a ritual, a sending-off of those who have fallen asleep. It does not change whether they are dead or not, it is a series of prayers for them.
A wedding, OTOH, is a sacrament. It turns two people into one. It's not merely a 'recognition of their love.' Without it, the two remain their separate selves. That's the difference.
And what's amazing is that it was a lie. The anti-tobacco forces deserve every single slashdotting they get. Filthy nanny-state bastards. There's a special circle of hell reserved for them.
I'm sure that TeX has some (low-level) way to do this, but LaTeX is better--just use the figure or table environments. The tables are another instance in which LaTeX outshines WYSIWYG. There are several good LaTeX books; Helmut Kopka's Guide to LaTeX is a good one, as is The LaTeX Companion; the author of the LaTeX macros, Leslie Lamport, has his own book, but I've not read it.
Back in college I'd a roommate who watched Everybody Loves Raymond. I never understood the appeal--it was a terrible show, with annoying characters and annoying accents.
OTOH, he's the only person I know who watches it. Perhaps it's more popular out East?
Well, it's not so much Computer Modern which is beautiful as it is the TeX layout algorithms which yield beauty. TeX could make an eviction notice pretty.
Why anyone uses anything besides LaTeX to prepare documents is beyond me. Complete control of glyph composition; astoundingly beautiful and readable styles; PostScript rendering; BibTeX: it's truly the most magnificent thing going.
'Horribly high uid'? Take a look at mine--and to think that I was actively reading and posting to Slashdot before it even had accounts. I was lazy, and figured that I didn't need the benefits an account offered. I forget, now, what it was that made me actually bother to sign up. All I know is that my uid is so high that even small children laugh at me:-)
Ummm...considering that the BBC is government-run, and considering that Great Britain was at war, broadcasting both sides isn't exactly cricket. Also, consider that in many cases the BBC was behind in reporting the facts, simply because it disliked them (well-documented; search on National Review from the war period).
Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean by "concrete" and "abstract" conversions.
I think so. What I mean by a concrete conversion is taking x of unit Y and cutting it into x' of unit Y', e.g. taking a gallon of beer and dividing it into pints, or a dekalitre and dividing it into decilitres. What I mean by an abstract conversion is simply doing unit conversion on paper, e.g. writing 1 gal = 8 pts or 1 dekalitre = 100 decilitres. The standard system is optimised for the first and (admittedly) not nearly so good at the second; the French system is optimised for the second and (I contend) not nearly so good at the first.
I further contend that in normal life one performs a lot more concrete conversions than abstract, and thus that a system optimised for concrete conversions is more useful than one not.
I'd propose to you that a significant chunk of the younger population would have a great deal of difficulty doing that sum in their head - not because of the 1/3 left over, but because few of them would know the tricks of in-the-head division.
No tricks involved, just standard long division, keeping track of the result digit-by-digit; the sort of thing I learned in second or third grade (7 or 8 years old). Although yes, you're probably correct that a large number of people cannot do that anymore.
For estimations and in-the-head calculations, no argument - but it's a heck of a lot easier to measure out 3mm on a ruler with 1mm divisions than try and eyeball 3/10ths of a centimetre with centimetre divisions.
Of course--but the world is not always ideal. And remember my earlier point about the concrete conversions: it's really easy to eyeball 1/12, 2/12, 2/13, 4/12, 6/12, and only slightly more difficult to work out 8/12 or 9/12. 10/12 is a bit more difficult, and 5/12 and 7/12 are not all that much worse. Meanwhile, 1/10, 2/10, 3/10 &c. are all a uniform pain (well, except for 5/10:-). Likewise the rest of the system.
Also not forgeting that decimals *are* fractions, just with base 10 denominators
Of course--but they are a limited subset and IMHO not nearly as useful as they could be.
The standard system is imperfect, but is in several regards superior to the French system (e.g. concrete manipulation, philosophical flexibility), and inferior in few (e.g. abstract manipulation, use internationally). Moreover, the strengths of its superior characteristics outweigh the strengths of its inferior characteristics. I would like to reform the system we've got (and it could certainly use reformation), not toss it out.
Exactly. And since conversion between measures of varying magnitudes is uncommon, why optimise for it? Why try to cram the real variety of magnitudes into a base-10 straitjacket? The metre's not a bad size, but the decimeter is silly, and the dekametre absurd. The centimetre's not entirely bad, and the millimetre's actually decent. On our side, the inch, the foot, the yard and the mile are all quite nice units, well-suited to human-sized measures, striking a nice balance between exactness and concision (i.e., a human is never 2 digits of feet tall, but tends toward the high single-digits).
Why not optimise for the common case? French units are a classic case of premature optimisation.
I'm not opposed to reworking standard measures--it'd be nice were there 16 cu. in. in a cup, and if a fl. oz. of water weighed exactly 1 oz. (of course, that does no good for anything other than water, but still...). But throwing out the baby with the bathwater is ridiculous. And neglecting our true advantage in favour of something less likely to be useful is insane.
When you live somewhere that's had the metric system for ages, most of the numbers you want to divide, and divide by, tend to be "right".
Not really. One sees it all the time in this country: the sheep never divide by aught but 5 and 10, which are ugly. One is seeing fewer and fewer fractions nowadays--too difficult for the unwashed masses to comprehend such a difficult thing as 3/4, I suppose. There's even a decimal traffic sign in Dallas, Tx.
Did it ever occur to you that dividing a foot into inches *is* a "unit conversion"?'
My point was that concrete conversion is easy in the standard system, while abstract conversion is easy in the French system, and that while concrete conversion is pretty common, abstract conversion is almost unknown outside of grammar school.
Having said that, three is an "ugly number" number to divide by IME, because most of the numbers you want to divide aren't easily divisible by three.
In base-12, 1/3 is non-repeating, which is nice. And if one's using fraction, then division by three is easy: 8,674/3 = 2,891 1/3 (random number, divided by sight--no calculator used). Pretty easy. Fractions, of course, have the advantage being able to exactly represent any rational number, and are hence superior to decimals.
Interesting; I had ever read otherwise. Of course, considering that Germany didn't exist in 1868, that's somewhat difficult to believe (looking, I see that the independent German states agreed to use French units should they ever unite). And it's far from obvious why, two years after defeating the French, Germany would sign on to using French units. Still, stranger things have happened.
My point was that switching to duodecimal would have given a genuine advantage; switching measurements to decimal had none.
Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds; different bases make sense in different places. There used to be twelve ounces to the pound (the word inch and ounce are cognates), but it was too small, so four more were added. For liquids, anything other than base-2 is stupid; for lengths, it doesn't matter, so using base-12 is awfully handy (and yes, I'd revise the length of the mile--the nautical mile is better); weights are somewhere in between, and arguments may be made either way.
But note, I'm talking about crafting the units to their purpose; this attitude is foreign to users of French units, who spend their lives trying to fit square pegs in round holes, all the while crying out how much easier it is to stack square pegs.
Quick, without looking: what's the multiplier for yocto- or pico-?
Your solution requires a ruler; mine does not. Which one of us will do quicker work?
Units of measure not being related by a factor of ten is nothing but a nuisance here.
Explain the nuisance. All I know is that when I cook, I quite commonly take advantage of equivalences like 1 1/2 = 2x3/4. When I brew, it's very common to play with fractions--sometimes I'm brewing partial batches; sometimes I subdividing my wort to experiment with different things; sometimes I'm just bottling part and kegging part. In my cooking and brewing, the standard system works awfully well.
Considering that it was tested in the fires of thousands of years of cooking and brewing, this is not surprising.
When, unlike many other numbers, it has no--or very few--interesting properties. Some numbers (e.g. twelve, one, three or two) have loads and loads of near properties and uses; others (e.g. ten) don't. Basing any number system on a number with few useful properties seems awfully silly, no?
I suppose that calling ten 'useless' was a bit over-the-top, but it does get awfully old when French unit proponents blather on and on with the same hackneyed old saws: 'Look: one can convert from gigametres to millimetres just by moving the decimal point!' (to which I query: who wants to?); 'Look, it's all based on 10!' (which raises the question of what would be a better basis) &c.
Of course I do. Let's say I wish to cut a foot-wide piece of wood into inch-width segments: I cut in half, then in half again, then in thirds. How would I cut a decimetre-wide piece into centimetres? In half, then into fifths? Ever try eyeballing a fifth? There are very easy ways to estimate a half or third quite accurately, but I am aware of none to estimate a fifth.
Let's say I have 1 gallon of beer and need to serve it in 1 pint measurements. Dead simple: I cut in half (yielding pottles), in half again (yielding quarts) and in half one last time, yielding pints. Doubling and halving are extremely easy with liquids and masses; anything else is a right royal pain in the ass.
Try dividing a decilitre into centilitres or millilitres. Good luck.
The standard system, used as it was for millennia, was optimised for use, for manipulation of concrete amounts. The French system was optimised for conversion between units. The one is needed daily; the other almost never (now that we have computers, practically never). Which would an unbiased observer prefer?
The standard system is, of course, imperfect and could use certain improvements. Its basis, though, is sound. The French system is also imperfect, but its sole basis is a silly attachment to 10 (a mathematically ugly number anyway). I'd rather spend effort on the system with a future.
Mathematically, ten is an ugly and useless number; twelve and two are far superior. The only ten is at all attractive is because our number system is based on it; it'd be much smarter to switch to another number system (duodecimal or hexadecimal) than to switch units.
Proponents of French units always bring up unit conversions--but how often do you convert between metres and kilometres? Almost never, I daresay: it's just not a common exercise in everyday life. OTOH, one often has to divide a foot into inches, or a pint into jills, or whatever: those are basic tasks, and quite easy to do by hand.
As for converting feet to yards: if one cannot divide by three easily, even in one's head, can one really be considered even semi-sentient? Don't the schools even teach long division anymore?
French units are allowed here in the US. In fact, just about everything is marked using them. And yet we don't bother to actually switch. Why? Because we're just about the only people who realise that there is no useful advantage to the damn things. It took dictators and tyrants (Lenin; Hitler; the original French savages) to force people to switch to the inferior (in practise; on paper, of course, French units appear far superior) units. Not that our system is perfect, of course. There are some equivalences which would make life nicer.
But still, for direct manipulation, nothing beats the standard system (a system, I should note, used by most of the world, ebfore most of the world switched to French units): 12 has twice as many divisors as 10; powers of two are much better for weight & liquids than powers of 10; the distribution of units fits men better (tell me, does anyone still use steres or dekametres?); and we're remarkably free of the sort of doctrinaire spirit which refuses to recognise that a kilobyte is 1,024 bytes and not 1,000 bytes.
Why should we convert to French units? Their only advantage is that the rest of the world uses 'em, and advantage overshadowed by the fact that they're next to useless for any kind of concrete manipulation. Heck, even the French switched back after nearly twenty years (and then back again, later on, for nationalist reasons). Face it: being base-10 is no advantage.
If the Frogs had really wanted to revolutionise things, they'd have switched counting to base-12.
Actually, once one gets use to the info keybindings and way of doing things, it's quite nice. I couldn't live without the bash info pages (and I recall the old days of thumbing through ksh or csh man pages). It does take some getting used to, though. Part of that is due to the emacs-inspired keybindings; these were a lot more intuitive when emacs was more commonly used (I use it almost constantly, so to me this is no big deal); part due to info's origin as a pre-HTML hypertext platform.
Considering all it does, though (online and prettily printed docs), it's damn nice. Anyone who has ever used TeX or its derivatives (e.g. LaTeX or texinfo) cringes at the thought of going back to HTML. Even roff is better than HTML at real document preparation.
It's kinda cool (unlike some, I don't belittle the effort to configure the insides &c.), but it's running, not modern Mac OS, not a real OS like GNU/Linux, *BSD or something, but Windows. It's akin to Hagia Sophia (the greatest of Christian churches, used as a mosque for nearly half a millennium). The guys really should slap a free OS on there. Other than that it's pretty sweet.
Yes, yes, we know. Having established themselves as the party of people too brain-damaged to figure out a perfectly legible ballot in 2000, the left wing of the Democratic party is courting the ever-valuable felon vote in 2004. Why, next they'll probably come out in favour of infanticide. Wait a sec...
There is simply no unique functionality in watches on the market now. They're all just variations on a theme: alarm/chronographs.
What sort of uniqueness do you need in a watch? All it needs to do is display the bloody time--everything else simply gets in the way, makes it too expensive or both.
Slashdot Mirror
No, that's why we have the military--they're the final arbiter when everything else breaks down. Fortunately, it has only once gotten to that point, and hopefully it never will again. The courts are the last peaceful recourse, but there are others available.
Those of us who use a Real Browser don't see the Google main page anymore...
A wedding, OTOH, is a sacrament. It turns two people into one. It's not merely a 'recognition of their love.' Without it, the two remain their separate selves. That's the difference.
And what's amazing is that it was a lie. The anti-tobacco forces deserve every single slashdotting they get. Filthy nanny-state bastards. There's a special circle of hell reserved for them.
I'm sure that TeX has some (low-level) way to do this, but LaTeX is better--just use the figure or table environments. The tables are another instance in which LaTeX outshines WYSIWYG. There are several good LaTeX books; Helmut Kopka's Guide to LaTeX is a good one, as is The LaTeX Companion; the author of the LaTeX macros, Leslie Lamport, has his own book, but I've not read it.
OTOH, he's the only person I know who watches it. Perhaps it's more popular out East?
Why anyone uses anything besides LaTeX to prepare documents is beyond me. Complete control of glyph composition; astoundingly beautiful and readable styles; PostScript rendering; BibTeX: it's truly the most magnificent thing going.
'Horribly high uid'? Take a look at mine--and to think that I was actively reading and posting to Slashdot before it even had accounts. I was lazy, and figured that I didn't need the benefits an account offered. I forget, now, what it was that made me actually bother to sign up. All I know is that my uid is so high that even small children laugh at me:-)
Ummm...considering that the BBC is government-run, and considering that Great Britain was at war, broadcasting both sides isn't exactly cricket. Also, consider that in many cases the BBC was behind in reporting the facts, simply because it disliked them (well-documented; search on National Review from the war period).
I think so. What I mean by a concrete conversion is taking x of unit Y and cutting it into x' of unit Y', e.g. taking a gallon of beer and dividing it into pints, or a dekalitre and dividing it into decilitres. What I mean by an abstract conversion is simply doing unit conversion on paper, e.g. writing 1 gal = 8 pts or 1 dekalitre = 100 decilitres. The standard system is optimised for the first and (admittedly) not nearly so good at the second; the French system is optimised for the second and (I contend) not nearly so good at the first.
I further contend that in normal life one performs a lot more concrete conversions than abstract, and thus that a system optimised for concrete conversions is more useful than one not.
I'd propose to you that a significant chunk of the younger population would have a great deal of difficulty doing that sum in their head - not because of the 1/3 left over, but because few of them would know the tricks of in-the-head division.
No tricks involved, just standard long division, keeping track of the result digit-by-digit; the sort of thing I learned in second or third grade (7 or 8 years old). Although yes, you're probably correct that a large number of people cannot do that anymore.
For estimations and in-the-head calculations, no argument - but it's a heck of a lot easier to measure out 3mm on a ruler with 1mm divisions than try and eyeball 3/10ths of a centimetre with centimetre divisions.
Of course--but the world is not always ideal. And remember my earlier point about the concrete conversions: it's really easy to eyeball 1/12, 2/12, 2/13, 4/12, 6/12, and only slightly more difficult to work out 8/12 or 9/12. 10/12 is a bit more difficult, and 5/12 and 7/12 are not all that much worse. Meanwhile, 1/10, 2/10, 3/10 &c. are all a uniform pain (well, except for 5/10:-). Likewise the rest of the system.
Also not forgeting that decimals *are* fractions, just with base 10 denominators
Of course--but they are a limited subset and IMHO not nearly as useful as they could be.
The standard system is imperfect, but is in several regards superior to the French system (e.g. concrete manipulation, philosophical flexibility), and inferior in few (e.g. abstract manipulation, use internationally). Moreover, the strengths of its superior characteristics outweigh the strengths of its inferior characteristics. I would like to reform the system we've got (and it could certainly use reformation), not toss it out.
Why not optimise for the common case? French units are a classic case of premature optimisation.
I'm not opposed to reworking standard measures--it'd be nice were there 16 cu. in. in a cup, and if a fl. oz. of water weighed exactly 1 oz. (of course, that does no good for anything other than water, but still...). But throwing out the baby with the bathwater is ridiculous. And neglecting our true advantage in favour of something less likely to be useful is insane.
Not really. One sees it all the time in this country: the sheep never divide by aught but 5 and 10, which are ugly. One is seeing fewer and fewer fractions nowadays--too difficult for the unwashed masses to comprehend such a difficult thing as 3/4, I suppose. There's even a decimal traffic sign in Dallas, Tx.
Did it ever occur to you that dividing a foot into inches *is* a "unit conversion"?'
My point was that concrete conversion is easy in the standard system, while abstract conversion is easy in the French system, and that while concrete conversion is pretty common, abstract conversion is almost unknown outside of grammar school.
Having said that, three is an "ugly number" number to divide by IME, because most of the numbers you want to divide aren't easily divisible by three.
In base-12, 1/3 is non-repeating, which is nice. And if one's using fraction, then division by three is easy: 8,674/3 = 2,891 1/3 (random number, divided by sight--no calculator used). Pretty easy. Fractions, of course, have the advantage being able to exactly represent any rational number, and are hence superior to decimals.
Interesting; I had ever read otherwise. Of course, considering that Germany didn't exist in 1868, that's somewhat difficult to believe (looking, I see that the independent German states agreed to use French units should they ever unite). And it's far from obvious why, two years after defeating the French, Germany would sign on to using French units. Still, stranger things have happened.
Bravo! You make another very important point: French units have been sold to us on the basis of their consistency--but that's a lie. Excellent post.
Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds; different bases make sense in different places. There used to be twelve ounces to the pound (the word inch and ounce are cognates), but it was too small, so four more were added. For liquids, anything other than base-2 is stupid; for lengths, it doesn't matter, so using base-12 is awfully handy (and yes, I'd revise the length of the mile--the nautical mile is better); weights are somewhere in between, and arguments may be made either way.
But note, I'm talking about crafting the units to their purpose; this attitude is foreign to users of French units, who spend their lives trying to fit square pegs in round holes, all the while crying out how much easier it is to stack square pegs.
Quick, without looking: what's the multiplier for yocto- or pico-?
Units of measure not being related by a factor of ten is nothing but a nuisance here.
Explain the nuisance. All I know is that when I cook, I quite commonly take advantage of equivalences like 1 1/2 = 2x3/4. When I brew, it's very common to play with fractions--sometimes I'm brewing partial batches; sometimes I subdividing my wort to experiment with different things; sometimes I'm just bottling part and kegging part. In my cooking and brewing, the standard system works awfully well.
Considering that it was tested in the fires of thousands of years of cooking and brewing, this is not surprising.
I suppose that calling ten 'useless' was a bit over-the-top, but it does get awfully old when French unit proponents blather on and on with the same hackneyed old saws: 'Look: one can convert from gigametres to millimetres just by moving the decimal point!' (to which I query: who wants to?); 'Look, it's all based on 10!' (which raises the question of what would be a better basis) &c.
Let's say I have 1 gallon of beer and need to serve it in 1 pint measurements. Dead simple: I cut in half (yielding pottles), in half again (yielding quarts) and in half one last time, yielding pints. Doubling and halving are extremely easy with liquids and masses; anything else is a right royal pain in the ass.
Try dividing a decilitre into centilitres or millilitres. Good luck.
The standard system, used as it was for millennia, was optimised for use, for manipulation of concrete amounts. The French system was optimised for conversion between units. The one is needed daily; the other almost never (now that we have computers, practically never). Which would an unbiased observer prefer?
The standard system is, of course, imperfect and could use certain improvements. Its basis, though, is sound. The French system is also imperfect, but its sole basis is a silly attachment to 10 (a mathematically ugly number anyway). I'd rather spend effort on the system with a future.
Proponents of French units always bring up unit conversions--but how often do you convert between metres and kilometres? Almost never, I daresay: it's just not a common exercise in everyday life. OTOH, one often has to divide a foot into inches, or a pint into jills, or whatever: those are basic tasks, and quite easy to do by hand.
As for converting feet to yards: if one cannot divide by three easily, even in one's head, can one really be considered even semi-sentient? Don't the schools even teach long division anymore?
But still, for direct manipulation, nothing beats the standard system (a system, I should note, used by most of the world, ebfore most of the world switched to French units): 12 has twice as many divisors as 10; powers of two are much better for weight & liquids than powers of 10; the distribution of units fits men better (tell me, does anyone still use steres or dekametres?); and we're remarkably free of the sort of doctrinaire spirit which refuses to recognise that a kilobyte is 1,024 bytes and not 1,000 bytes.
If the Frogs had really wanted to revolutionise things, they'd have switched counting to base-12.
Considering all it does, though (online and prettily printed docs), it's damn nice. Anyone who has ever used TeX or its derivatives (e.g. LaTeX or texinfo) cringes at the thought of going back to HTML. Even roff is better than HTML at real document preparation.
It's kinda cool (unlike some, I don't belittle the effort to configure the insides &c.), but it's running, not modern Mac OS, not a real OS like GNU/Linux, *BSD or something, but Windows. It's akin to Hagia Sophia (the greatest of Christian churches, used as a mosque for nearly half a millennium). The guys really should slap a free OS on there. Other than that it's pretty sweet.
Yes, yes, we know. Having established themselves as the party of people too brain-damaged to figure out a perfectly legible ballot in 2000, the left wing of the Democratic party is courting the ever-valuable felon vote in 2004. Why, next they'll probably come out in favour of infanticide. Wait a sec...
What sort of uniqueness do you need in a watch? All it needs to do is display the bloody time--everything else simply gets in the way, makes it too expensive or both.