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Metric and how not to use it.

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Re: Metric and how not to use it.
Post by phillies   » Tue Oct 09, 2018 12:40 am

phillies
Admiral

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Location: Worcester, MA

kzt wrote:The preferred velocity measure is furlongs per fortnight.

phillies wrote:I don't see any basis for this claim. A kilometer is a type of distance, and it is similar within a factor of two to a mile. I believe someone carefully set up software that would let the illustrious writer get all his numbers right on missile firings.


Quoting from my novel MinuteGirls

"The Stellar League shall comprise the linear distance travelled by visible light in a region of space having a pure-diagonal metric tensor in a period of 1/60,000 of one American second.
...Americanization of Units Act, 48 U.S.C. 372, 2049"
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Re: Metric and how not to use it.
Post by Annachie   » Tue Oct 09, 2018 1:48 am

Annachie
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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You are so going to die. :p ~~~~ runsforcelery
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
still not dead. :)
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Re: Metric and how not to use it.
Post by Bill Woods   » Tue Oct 09, 2018 11:25 am

Bill Woods
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Bill Woods wrote:
Relax wrote:PS> Land navigation should be same as nautical..... Knots.

PPS. Darned Babylonians... we still use base 60. Why 360 degrees.....

2π radians == 360 degrees is okay; you want a circle nicely divisible by 3 and 4. And by coincidence the year is about 360 days. But using 60 for the subdivisions of the degree ... no! Scrap the minutes and seconds, and use tenths, hundredths, etc. of degrees.

And the meter should have originally been defined as 1/9M of the distance from pole to equator, not 1/10M. Then a degree of latitude would be 100 km, and the knot would be 1 km/hr, usable on land and sea.
Relax wrote:Uh, before that, you have to get rid of seconds, minutes, hours and redefine into 10 hours/day, either 10 minutes or 100 minutes/hour, and either 10s or 100 seconds/minute.
No, you could drop minutes & seconds for angles but still use them for time. And being able to divide the day nicely in thirds is good.


Relax wrote: NO, circles do not need to be divisible by 3. 4 only. For quadrants. 100 degrees works just fine in that case. 25 degrees/quadrant and 100minutes/degree and 100seconds/minute.

I believe the French tried it in the 18th century but too many things changed and it turned into mass confusion.
Again, it's good to have a factor of 3 in there, so that the angles 1/6th and 1/12th of a circle have nice values. (60° and 30° in our system.)
----
Imagined conversation:
Admiral [noting yet another Manty tech surprise]:
XO, what's the budget for the ONI?
Vice Admiral: I don't recall exactly, sir. Several billion quatloos.
Admiral: ... What do you suppose they did with all that money?
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Re: Metric and how not to use it.
Post by tlb   » Wed Oct 10, 2018 10:57 am

tlb
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TFLYTSNBN wrote:The United States made the mistake of allowing the National Teachers Association write the curriculum to teach the metric system. Since the goal was to teach metric in elementary school, they appointed a committee of Elementary School teachers to develop the curriculum who had zero knowledge or experience to enlighten them. They didn't understand that while the English system gradually evolved in a primitive era and was painfully adapted to accommodate science and technology, the metric system was designed to enable scientific and technical calculations.

As a result, rather than focus on converting centimeters to millimeters or meters of kilometers, they focused on conversions to inches, feet and miles. I actually got sent to the principal s office for pointing out the absurdity.

American s would embrace metric if they were taught how to use metric in isolation rather than in context of the English system.

stewart wrote:Depends on the context for me --
In a scientific application ex chemistry -- metric only --> calculations are much easier
in Engineering, depends on the end customer needs / preferences -- conversion factors introduce errors that must be corrected for parts to match/be consistent
Daily life -- Baseball is in Feet / Inches; water bottles in 500/750ml; Iced Tea in 32 oz ; Gasoline in gal.

PLEASE do not change gas to liters -- the Calif legislature would LOVE to suck more tax dollars at the pump.

-- Stewart

ldwechsler wrote:That last explains it best. Conversions that are really used often have practical reasons behind it. And some changes are really difficult to make. Changing acres, for example, to meters, etc., would lead to great confusion about property lines.

I doubt that Americans would embrace the metric system if it were taught in isolation (outside of scientific areas where it is in wide use). Most people have no need to change from what they are familiar.
Property lines would survey the same no matter what units were used: a precision to the centimeter is sufficient to handle the normal placement in feet and inches (and millimeters are still available). The only awkward part is in saying how many hectares there are in a plot. How did other countries that made the transition work things out?
When driving in Canada it was convenient that the speedometer shows both MPH and KmPH. The biggest mental struggle for me was when contemplating my fuel consumption per distance traveled.

A 500ml bottle of water is about a pint.
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Re: Metric and how not to use it.
Post by Hans   » Fri Oct 12, 2018 11:32 am

Hans
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Location: Stuttgart - Germany

Hello,

tlb wrote:A 500ml bottle of water is about a pint.

And as an European you can't drink even a pint of American beer.
You will always prefer 1/2 litre (500ml) of German or Czech beer.
When i worked in the USA, as a mechanic setting up and fixing grinders, i got used to your imperial system.
And i have to tell you, i'm happy to be back in metric country.
Baseball is something nobody here cares about.
11m (penalty) at a football match (i don't use your name soccer) thats just 11 big steps. 1/1000mm is easier to handle than 1/12000 of a inch.
Why should use inches and it's fractions when i can use mm and commas..
1m is 1000mm is 100cm.
1 Kilogramm is 1000 Gramm
I would recommend - stay with your old fashioned imperial system, the rest of the world knows better.
Meter, Litres, Kilogramm, Bar are the units to use.

Somebody wrote that because kicking a foot up the xyzs ..... they never lost a war.
Corea and Vietnam?
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Re: Metric and how not to use it.
Post by cthia   » Fri Oct 12, 2018 11:59 am

cthia
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Hans wrote:Hello,

tlb wrote:A 500ml bottle of water is about a pint.

And as an European you can't drink even a pint of American beer.
You will always prefer 1/2 litre (500ml) of German or Czech beer.
When i worked in the USA, as a mechanic setting up and fixing grinders, i got used to your imperial system.
And i have to tell you, i'm happy to be back in metric country.
Baseball is something nobody here cares about.
11m (penalty) at a football match (i don't use your name soccer) thats just 11 big steps. 1/1000mm is easier to handle than 1/12000 of a inch.
Why should use inches and it's fractions when i can use mm and commas..
1m is 1000mm is 100cm.
1 Kilogramm is 1000 Gramm
I would recommend - stay with your old fashioned imperial system, the rest of the world knows better.
Meter, Litres, Kilogramm, Bar are the units to use.

Somebody wrote that because kicking a foot up the xyzs ..... they never lost a war.
Corea and Vietnam?

We didn't lose those wars. We lost the political battles surrounding them, back here in the States. LOL

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: Metric and how not to use it.
Post by tlb   » Fri Oct 12, 2018 1:52 pm

tlb
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Joined: Mon Sep 03, 2012 11:34 am

tlb wrote:A 500ml bottle of water is about a pint.

Hans wrote:Hello, And as an European you can't drink even a pint of American beer.
You will always prefer 1/2 litre (500ml) of German or Czech beer.
When i worked in the USA, as a mechanic setting up and fixing grinders, i got used to your imperial system.
And i have to tell you, i'm happy to be back in metric country.
Baseball is something nobody here cares about.
11m (penalty) at a football match (i don't use your name soccer) thats just 11 big steps. 1/1000mm is easier to handle than 1/12000 of a inch.
Why should use inches and it's fractions when i can use mm and commas..
1m is 1000mm is 100cm.
1 Kilogramm is 1000 Gramm
I would recommend - stay with your old fashioned imperial system, the rest of the world knows better.
Meter, Litres, Kilogramm, Bar are the units to use.

Somebody wrote that because kicking a foot up the xyzs ..... they never lost a war.
Corea and Vietnam?

I do not like the big name American beer, since it is now owned by a Belgium company. But there are good Mexican, Canadian and local US brands.
Although only the US might call it soccer now; that is a good old English word, which the British have only moved away from recently.
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Re: Metric and how not to use it.
Post by phillies   » Fri Oct 12, 2018 1:55 pm

phillies
Admiral

Posts: 2076
Joined: Sat Jun 19, 2010 9:43 am
Location: Worcester, MA

In fact, there is a European angular measure, used substantially in engineering...the grad. There are 400 grads in a circle. For angles, there are also radians, 2 pi in a circle, these being the only angular units in which all those calculus trig formulae are correct.
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Re: Metric and how not to use it.
Post by Annachie   » Fri Oct 12, 2018 7:03 pm

Annachie
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Posts: 3099
Joined: Fri Jun 17, 2011 7:36 pm

cthia wrote:
Hans wrote:Hello,

[quote="tlb"]A 500ml bottle of water is about a pint.

And as an European you can't drink even a pint of American beer.
You will always prefer 1/2 litre (500ml) of German or Czech beer.
When i worked in the USA, as a mechanic setting up and fixing grinders, i got used to your imperial system.
And i have to tell you, i'm happy to be back in metric country.
Baseball is something nobody here cares about.
11m (penalty) at a football match (i don't use your name soccer) thats just 11 big steps. 1/1000mm is easier to handle than 1/12000 of a inch.
Why should use inches and it's fractions when i can use mm and commas..
1m is 1000mm is 100cm.
1 Kilogramm is 1000 Gramm
I would recommend - stay with your old fashioned imperial system, the rest of the world knows better.
Meter, Litres, Kilogramm, Bar are the units to use.

Somebody wrote that because kicking a foot up the xyzs ..... they never lost a war.
Corea and Vietnam?

We didn't lose those wars. We lost the political battles surrounding them, back here in the States. LOL[/quote]Besides, they were police actions :D
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You are so going to die. :p ~~~~ runsforcelery
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
still not dead. :)
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Re: Metric and how not to use it.
Post by Annachie   » Fri Oct 12, 2018 7:07 pm

Annachie
Fleet Admiral

Posts: 3099
Joined: Fri Jun 17, 2011 7:36 pm

Actually, here's one that always bugged me.

In American football, they use a chain to measure out 10 yards, but as a unit of measure a chain is 22 yards.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You are so going to die. :p ~~~~ runsforcelery
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
still not dead. :)
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