Oh, like the plural of denarius wasn't 'denarii'?
(Roman coinage, in case you were wondering).
I'm sure there are plenty of other examples for the grammar nazis to add.
How many bets that the original complainer about virii is a well-educated US citizen who still only speaks his own retarded-spelling version of English?
color! donut! OH, how I tire (sic) of these Amoronicisms (tm).
Shame on you, cjw44 - is that flatline thing the record of your brainwaves?
Miles
The French had an image-capable fax system running over telegraph lines in *1869* - using synchronised pendulums kept in time with tacho pulses. The input end was a contact point moving over an embossed foil or similar to give a pulsed current representing the image or text. Each tacho pulse represented one raster line, and the printing was direct, using electrochromic ink to respond to the incoming pulses. I think it operated over ~20 km at least. There was a reference to this in New Scientist about 5 years ago. Not bad, 20 years ahead of the telephone!
Simple measures are easy to convert - a simple numerical factor, usually not too hard to find to sufficient precision. No-one has mentioned the hassle it is to convert useful values (constants, heats of combustion, thermal conductances etc) which are composite quantities, from one system to another. You look for a factor to tell you how much heat will flow through your wall, say, and the US books tell you something in (BTU/hr)/(sq.ft . degree F), and an SI list will have J/m^2.s.K . OK, if you are comparing walls with other walls, the task is not hard, all the values are in the same scale, even if they are the ones you are not comfy with, either way round. For calculating anything across disciplines, SI makes life a whole lot easier. (By the way, there are at least 6 different BTU's for a start!) As anyone involved in developing technology will tell you, interdisciplinary regions are where the action is, so why not lubricate understanding by using SI where it really helps? Miles, gallons, pounds etc are rarely the basis units used for anything composite & important, so they don't often enter into the sort of conversion trickery above. I'm all for keeping sensible measures for daily life. Someone is 5 feet 6 inches, rather than 173 cm; we like to have small absolute values for casual measurement and conversation. Litres/gallons is borderline - we changed over and there is a psychological element to not seeing £3.50 per UK gallon ($5.70 !!)if you can remember thinking that £1.00 was damned expensive! Shame we had to waste a hundred million dollars (that's some wierd currency, right, like real pounds and pence but smaller?) to get the issue on the air. No doubt there will be the usual US-style fundamentalists on either side, when a very happy middle position is possible and already well-populated - the UK seems to manage, mostly SI but Imperial for 'homebrew' stuff. As a last tease, when is the US going to drop MM/DD/YY date format - now that one really is dumb, and don't get up on your hind legs to tell me it isn't, 'cos you know that the DD/MM/YY(YY!) order, or its inverse, makes more sense. Where did the US system come from, anyhow? Was it transfer from "Jan 4th, '02" or similar?
Slashdot Mirror
At the bottom of the Gabor page:
.sig, just sMiles
"This document was created with StarOffice 5.1 for OS/2..."
Well, someone had to be using it, I guess - OS/2 would score on the No-Bill-Here-o-Meter, but StarOffice as well! Heroic!
No
Oh, like the plural of denarius wasn't 'denarii'? (Roman coinage, in case you were wondering). I'm sure there are plenty of other examples for the grammar nazis to add. How many bets that the original complainer about virii is a well-educated US citizen who still only speaks his own retarded-spelling version of English? color! donut! OH, how I tire (sic) of these Amoronicisms (tm). Shame on you, cjw44 - is that flatline thing the record of your brainwaves? Miles
The French had an image-capable fax system running over telegraph lines in *1869* - using synchronised pendulums kept in time with tacho pulses. The input end was a contact point moving over an embossed foil or similar to give a pulsed current representing the image or text. Each tacho pulse represented one raster line, and the printing was direct, using electrochromic ink to respond to the incoming pulses. I think it operated over ~20 km at least.
There was a reference to this in New Scientist about 5 years ago.
Not bad, 20 years ahead of the telephone!
Simple measures are easy to convert - a simple numerical factor, usually not too hard to find to sufficient precision. No-one has mentioned the hassle it is to convert useful values (constants, heats of combustion, thermal conductances etc) which are composite quantities, from one system to another. You look for a factor to tell you how much heat will flow through your wall, say, and the US books tell you something in (BTU/hr)/(sq.ft . degree F), and an SI list will have J/m^2.s.K . OK, if you are comparing walls with other walls, the task is not hard, all the values are in the same scale, even if they are the ones you are not comfy with, either way round. For calculating anything across disciplines, SI makes life a whole lot easier. (By the way, there are at least 6 different BTU's for a start!) As anyone involved in developing technology will tell you, interdisciplinary regions are where the action is, so why not lubricate understanding by using SI where it really helps?
Miles, gallons, pounds etc are rarely the basis units used for anything composite & important, so they don't often enter into the sort of conversion trickery above. I'm all for keeping sensible measures for daily life. Someone is 5 feet 6 inches, rather than 173 cm; we like to have small absolute values for casual measurement and conversation. Litres/gallons is borderline - we changed over and there is a psychological element to not seeing £3.50 per UK gallon ($5.70 !!)if you can remember thinking that £1.00 was damned expensive!
Shame we had to waste a hundred million dollars (that's some wierd currency, right, like real pounds and pence but smaller?) to get the issue on the air. No doubt there will be the usual US-style fundamentalists on either side, when a very happy middle position is possible and already well-populated - the UK seems to manage, mostly SI but Imperial for 'homebrew' stuff.
As a last tease, when is the US going to drop MM/DD/YY date format - now that one really is dumb, and don't get up on your hind legs to tell me it isn't, 'cos you know that the DD/MM/YY(YY!) order, or its inverse, makes more sense.
Where did the US system come from, anyhow? Was it transfer from "Jan 4th, '02" or similar?