That state of metric conversion in the US

[George Herold]

Isn't the Kelvin scale based on a number of fixed points?

http://www.its-90.com/realise.html

I thought is was the triple point of water... and absolute zero.
(two points to make a line.)

George H.

 

[Uwe Hercksen]

Pressure was defined in torr, then in atmosphere, then in bars, and then
in hektopascals which have a 1e5 relationship to everything else. Not
1e3 or 1e6 but 1e5.

Hello,

you are wrong, 1 hektopascal is 1 millibar, 1000 hektopascals are 1 bar.
The factor is 1e3 as you prefer. 1 bar is 1e5 pascals.

Bye

 

[Lord Valve]

It makes more efficient use of the available area.

So what?

Can't you see that that is better?

Can't you see that no-one gives a shit?

You can't admit that just in this one tiny thing the
Europeans had a good idea?

Why, sure I can.

The Yurps have been having fabulous ideas for, hell,
thousands of years. Communism, socialism, fascism,
Nazism, falangism, feudalism, the Divine Right of Kings,
hell, all of these Yurp ideas were just peachy fuckin'
keen, weren't they?

American paper sizes are all different shapes...

No, Sherlock, they ain't. They're all rectangles.

but at least they are *American* shapes goddam it!

I don't think Americans invented the rectangle.

However, were we to claim so, the Russians
would certainly file a counter-claim that they
did it first.


Lord Valve
Square

 

[Lord Valve]

Hello,

Europe is not so simple. The syphilis was called neapolitan, italian,
french, spanic, castilianic, english, scottish and polish disease.

But did you know of this experiment:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment

Gosh, that makes the USA look pretty crappy, doesn't it?

However, this little experiment was just a bit worse...

<http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005143>

Clean up your own back yard, asshole.

"Bye"

 

[Uwe Hercksen]

Also a nautical mile is 2000 yards to within 1% or so (6080 feet).

Hello,

I found in a dictionary:
1 fathom is 6 feet,
1 cable length is 100 fathoms
1 nautical mile is 10 cable's length
1 yard is 3 feet

therefore 1 nautical mile should be 6000 feet, but in fact it is 6076.115.

But there is also the US cable length of 120 fathoms or 720 feet.

We have:

1 cable length (Imperial) = 100 fathom = 600 feet = 182,88 m
1 cable length (US) = 120 fathom = 720 feet = 219,456 m
1 cable length (GB) = 608 feet = 185,3184 m

and 1 nautical is given as 1852 m

A US nautical mile was defined as 6080.20 feet or 1853.24 meter until
1954, but the international nautical mile was defined in 1929 as 1852.01
meter.

If we take 1 arc minute of the earth, we get 1 nautical mile as 1852.216
meters (WGS84), but we also get in north south direction at the
equator 1842.90 m and 1861.57 m at the poles. In east west direction at
the equator we get 1855.31 m.

Bye

 

[Jeroen Belleman]

Pressure was defined in torr, then in atmosphere, then in bars, and then
in hektopascals which have a 1e5 relationship to everything else. Not
1e3 or 1e6 but 1e5.

Hello,

you are wrong, 1 hektopascal is 1 millibar, 1000 hektopascals are 1 bar.
The factor is 1e3 as you prefer. 1 bar is 1e5 pascals.

Bye
[/QUOTE]

That, and the unit is pascal, 1 N/m^2, not hectopascal.
Hecto is a prefix that can be used with any unit. It's
merely a crutch for people used to think in millibars.

People trained to think in SI would rather say that normal
atmospheric pressure is about 100 kPa.

Jeroen Belleman

 

[Jeroen Belleman]

What pressure units do europeans use to fill tires?

Bars.

We're not quite there yet either.

Jeroen Belleman

 

[John Devereux]

Bars.

We're not quite there yet either.

It's getting there, industrial pressure gauges have generally changed
over from Bar to kPa in my working lifetime.

 

[[email protected]]

OK, show us a board that you have laid our recently. Surface mount, multilayer
ideally... something modern.


Tiresome old hen. You're always playing with words and not with electronics. I
suspect you have, basically, nothing to do. Enjoy.

The pedantic dumbass is arguing about your use of the word "endless".

 

[[email protected]]

But they don't have equal aspect ratios.


I didn't say it was the best shape, I said it was the best mathematically.

Math has a lot of elegant and aesthetic features, but this isn't one of
them

Your post just sounded so contradictory that I just *had* to ask for
clarification. ;-)

Besides the overpopulation of 1080 LCDs, I just don't like their color,
slow refresh rate (my Trinitron runs at 85Hz, fast LCDs are special
order), and especially the funky contrast at odd angles -- if you're
trying to do subtle design work with precise colors, you have to sit
perfectly still.

What's wrong with the refresh rates? It's not like you're getting
flicker. It's a computer monitor not a movie theater (which isn't any
better).

If anyone bumps your monitor, you have to spend minutes
scooting it back into just the right position. Not high priority for most
schematic jockeys, but I hold mine to higher standards.

The perfect geometry of LCDs is, however. I can't stand CRTs. There's
always visible distortion. Can't stand my new glasses, either
(no-line bifocals), but that's a whole different topic.

 

[[email protected]]

It's funny how some folk around here get so worked up about the
"communist". He is actually near to the "far right" - and virtually
indistinguishable from a republican - when viewed from a more
dispassionate, global perspective.

http://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2012

http://www.politicalcompass.org/analysis2

Only a total idiot would believe that claptrap.

 

[Spehro Pefhany]

The pedantic dumbass is arguing about your use of the word "endless".

It appears that even endless isn't endless.

http://www.endless.com/

 

[John Devereux]

Only a total idiot would believe that claptrap.

Everyone thinks they are "central" politically - not too far left and
not too far right.

That drawing does not say that the "right-wing" tendency of western
economies is *wrong* - or that Obama is not to the left of Romney. Just
that there is a wide spectrum beween - say - Obama and Chavez, or
Stalin. And that the right-left spectrum is orthogonal to the
authoritarian-liberal spectrum.

 

[John Devereux]

It's interesting, to see stuff others have done.

[...]

 

[cameo]

Actually, I don't think that is exactly correct. They call it a "unit"
and I'm not certain it is still pint. I've been doing platelets lately
and there you give a relatively smaller amount even though it takes a
lot longer. You get to watch a movie while you donate!

I haven't donated now for years, but even then they kinda' used the pint
and unit terms interchangably. I think "unit" just sounds a bit more
clinical, than the pedestrian pint.

 

[Joerg]

Hello,

you are wrong, 1 hektopascal is 1 millibar, 1000 hektopascals are 1 bar.
The factor is 1e3 as you prefer. 1 bar is 1e5 pascals.

Yeah, sorry, I meant pascals. Why on earth did they pick 1e5? And any
hints yet when they'll change the unit for pressure again or are they
done changing now?

 

[Joerg]

Hello,

I found in a dictionary:
1 fathom is 6 feet,
1 cable length is 100 fathoms
1 nautical mile is 10 cable's length
1 yard is 3 feet

therefore 1 nautical mile should be 6000 feet, but in fact it is 6076.115.

But there is also the US cable length of 120 fathoms or 720 feet.

We have:

1 cable length (Imperial) = 100 fathom = 600 feet = 182,88 m
1 cable length (US) = 120 fathom = 720 feet = 219,456 m
1 cable length (GB) = 608 feet = 185,3184 m

and 1 nautical is given as 1852 m

A US nautical mile was defined as 6080.20 feet or 1853.24 meter until
1954, but the international nautical mile was defined in 1929 as 1852.01
meter.

If we take 1 arc minute of the earth, we get 1 nautical mile as 1852.216
meters (WGS84), but we also get in north south direction at the equator
1842.90 m and 1861.57 m at the poles. In east west direction at the
equator we get 1855.31 m.

That would all be within the usual +/-3dB

 

[[email protected]]

If you are in the US you must be the only one!

All of our dimensions are metric. We often talk in Imperial terms
("062" boards, etc.) but the actual dimensions are metric. If it can
be done in the South, certainly you lefties on the left coast can do
it.

Every once in a while I
see someone from outside the US in a PCB layout forum talk about board
dimensions in metric and I have to do all the conversions myself.

Boo hoo. Buy a calculator.

No
one else in these groups uses metric for layer/board thickness or trace
widths.
Wrong.

The layout package I use can't even be set for metric trace
widths in spite of the fact that in the data files *all* dimensions are
in nanometers to make conversions easy (its easy to go from inches to
metric exactly, but not the other way so much).

Bullshit. The computer has no problems dividing rather than
multiplying.

Some foreign vendors
expect metric dimensions and give metric design rules. One thing that
always bugs me is when I do a metric based layout and get design rule
errors because something is 9.84... mil instead of 10 mil. Or I have
even seen design rule checking tools barf on 9.999... which turns out to
be round off error in the durn tool!

On my next design I plan to do all the work and documentation in metric.

It's probably best to do it in the units your customer uses.

 

[whit3rd]

.... I was a blue water navigator

where plodding along at 300 nm/day was pretty typical

*WOW*. Heck of a navigation feat, measuring progress of 300 nanometers
in a day. It can't be GPS, are you doing optical interferometry?

 

[[email protected]]

Not to be confused with the "golden rectangle" where you take off a
square and are left with another "golden rectangle".

I wonder if there is some significant advantage of the American way of
sizing paper. I guess it was just about making the dimensions fit round
numbers... well in the sizes above A anyway. BTW, what do they call
half an A sheet?

"Half letter" or "Statement"

I know it is used, 8.5 x 5.5 inches, for something, I
guess just not engineering drawings. B size is called "Tabloid" in the
printing industry.

It's also called "Ledger".