That state of metric conversion in the US

[delo]

Edward Teller in his "legacy of Hiroshima" wrote about that in 1962:
http://books.google.it/books?hl=it&id=nW4KAAAAMAAJ&q=metric#search_anchor

bye
delo

 

[Uwe Hercksen]

I'm sorry, I don't quite get this. What is 4 mm in fractional inches?

Hello,

10/64 is 3.969 mm.

For that matter, if I want 0.1 inches what standard fraction should I use?

What about 1/10? But 26/256 is very close to 0.1 inches.

Bye

 

[[email protected]]

Sure but +/-5% is good enough lots of times.  I've used 8lbs in a
gallon which is ~231 cu inches.. and an acre is ~22,000 sq feet.  Lots
of silly non-metric coversion factors are stuck in my head.

George H.

Best brush up on your figures for Acres.

Dan

 

[Syd Rumpo]

Best brush up on your figures for Acres.

Dan

Indeed, an acre is a chain by a furlong.

Cheers

 

[Syd Rumpo]

Indeed, an acre is a chain by a furlong.

Or, if you prefer, very close to European paper size of A-13.

Cheers

 

[Lord Valve]

Time for some Golden Oldies:

From April 10, 2001 -

Lord Valve Speaketh:

The metric system, which was based on an arbitrary
measurement (one ten-millionth of the distance from
the equator to the North Pole along the longitude
line which runs near Dunkerque, France, or somesuch
nonsense) to begin with, is not inherently more precise
or accurate than any other system. The fact that the
international standard for the meter is now specified
as a certain number of wavelengths of a specific
frequency of light, or as the distance light travels
in 1/299,792,458 of a second,

[flash forward to today - I should have mentioned that
the second is also an arbitrary unit, no matter how
finely we can slice it with modern equipment...]

Metric system is not just about the unit of measurement, but perhaps
more importantly, about the decimal system that goes with it. That's
what makes it so much simpler IMHO.

Yeah. It's a bitch on fractions like 1/3, though. .3333333........

 

[George Herold]

Best brush up on your figures for Acres.

                                              Dan

Grin Thanks... faulty head.
Goerge H.

 

[[email protected]]

[email protected] wrote:
josephkk wrote:
On Sat, 16 Feb 2013 08:58:41 -0700, Jim Thompson

rickman wrote:
[snip]
Heck, I
worked at a company just a few years ago that made push to talk radios
for the US military. I was surprised that the mechanical engineers were
still using inches and converting all the metric stuff rather than doing
it all in metric!

Surprised? Some of my work is in aerospace. There it's all inches,
pounds, PSI, slugs, knots, feet and so on. To some extent that is even
so in the medical device industry. The topper:

[snip]

You forgot "Jerk"... the derivative of acceleration... used in
elevator specifications >:-}

...Jim Thompson
That reminds me of the day i saw dA-dt on a licence plate.

Maybe I should get this vanity plate: *PHUT*
No asterisks. Maybe you could get "PHUTTER". ;-)

In California you can get asterisks. Even heart shapes AFAIK. It's crazy
out here.

First I've heard of non-alphameric characters in license plate
numbers. I wonder how other states handle it in their software?
The strangest thing I've seen here on license plates were Auburn and
LSU logos (on GA plates). GA and GA Tech, I understand but the
competition? I guess if they can get you to volunteer $25/yr to the
treasury, why not?

Some are a bit gross though:

http://www.r8pl8z.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/love-to-fck-funny-license-plate.jpg

I've never seen characters other than alphanumeric ones. Strange. I
wonder how out-of-state police departments handle them? Ignore the
special characters?

Then the macabre ones:

http://www.r8pl8z.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/UARNEXT-funny-license-plate.jpg

There are some pretty clever ones. One Illinois urologist had "PPMD".
A Jaguar driver took CA to court over APUSSY (and won). Then there's
the whole controversy about the Matthew 10:16(?) thing.

 

[Joerg]

[...]

Some are a bit gross though:

http://www.r8pl8z.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/love-to-fck-funny-license-plate.jpg

I've never seen characters other than alphanumeric ones. Strange. I
wonder how out-of-state police departments handle them? Ignore the
special characters?

No idea, it's their problem

Other parts of the world are used to that. For example, in Germany we
saw many Russian trucks after the iron curtain crumbled away. Their
plates were partially unintelligible to anyone not familiar with the
kyrillic alphabet.

https://secure.flickr.com/photos/cecotto30/5265336675/

Then we had the occasional cars from North Africa:

http://www.olavsplates.com/foto/et_3043.jpg

[...]

 

[[email protected]]

[email protected] wrote:

[...]

In California you can get asterisks. Even heart shapes AFAIK. It's crazy
out here.
First I've heard of non-alphameric characters in license plate
numbers. I wonder how other states handle it in their software?
The strangest thing I've seen here on license plates were Auburn and
LSU logos (on GA plates). GA and GA Tech, I understand but the
competition? I guess if they can get you to volunteer $25/yr to the
treasury, why not?

Some are a bit gross though:

http://www.r8pl8z.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/love-to-fck-funny-license-plate.jpg

I've never seen characters other than alphanumeric ones. Strange. I
wonder how out-of-state police departments handle them? Ignore the
special characters?

No idea, it's their problem

Other parts of the world are used to that. For example, in Germany we
saw many Russian trucks after the iron curtain crumbled away. Their
plates were partially unintelligible to anyone not familiar with the
kyrillic alphabet.

https://secure.flickr.com/photos/cecotto30/5265336675/

Then we had the occasional cars from North Africa:

http://www.olavsplates.com/foto/et_3043.jpg

A diplomatic tag, surely.

 

[[email protected]]

VA plates can include the & symbol in addition to dash and space. I've
heard that the & is mapped to the letter A in the databases but have
no source for that.


VA also used to be home to "The World's Greatest License Plate"
<http://jalopnik.com/5724684/virginia-dmv-revokes-worlds-greatest-license-plate?
but we've also got Pat Robertson and clan so that's no surprise.

That is pretty funny.

I've only had one vanity plate and that for only a couple of years in
Vermont ("SHIVVER"). A lot of people noticed. ;-) ...which is
pretty much why I got rid of it.

 

[rickman]

Hello,

10/64 is 3.969 mm.


What about 1/10? But 26/256 is very close to 0.1 inches.

Both of these responses prove my point. Fractions aren't very useful
for anything other than fractions and have a hard time dealing with
anything outside of that domain.

BTW, why would you write 10/64 rather than 5/32? But then that also
shows the absurdity of these fractions. Fractions divide, decimals rule!

 

[Richard Henry]

and an acre is ~22,000 sq feet.

That's off by a lot more than 5%.

 

[Anthony Stewart]

Canada reverted back to pounds for food and US gallons which are smaller when free trade started and US goods appeared cheaper as did any food by the pound rather than kg or 2.2lb.

old People still use inches, feet &miles if they prefer but are equally conversant in millimeters and km

But to use 'F which is non-linear is so wrong to be used by any engineers compared to 'C.

The cost of education unfortunately is higher than the benefits of converting to metric for Americans, so they shall be in their archaic units of measure for a long time.

 

[[email protected]]

I seem to remember that a few dacades ago (maybe in the '70s) there was

some kind of federal push to convert the country to the metric system by

a certain date that is already in the past. As it's painfully obvious by

now, not much came out of that initial excitement.



Why do you think it is that the US public so resistant to such a change

when the metric system is so much simpler? Much of the rest of the

industrialized world is already on the metric system and not following

their lead just impedes international commerce.

There is a Wikipedia article on it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_States

It's missing a section Electronics Engineering. Maybe somebody here can add it. You can reference the Wikipedia page on surface mount technology and printed circuit boards.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-mount_technology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printed_circuit_board

 

[Tauno Voipio]

But to use 'F which is non-linear is so wrong to be used by any engineers compared to 'C.

Fahrenheit is a linear transformation from Celsius (Centigrade):

F = 32 + C * 9 / 5,

so it is as linear as Celsius, but with different gain and bias.

 

[[email protected]]

You really are a dumbass.

 

[[email protected]]

Canada reverted back to pounds for food and US gallons which are smaller when free trade started and US goods appeared cheaper as did any food by the pound rather than kg or 2.2lb.

Why not just require packaging to be in metric units?

old People still use inches, feet &miles if they prefer but are equally conversant in millimeters and km

But to use 'F which is non-linear is so wrong to be used by any engineers compared to 'C.
Huh?!

The cost of education unfortunately is higher than the benefits of converting to metric for Americans, so they shall be in their archaic units of measure for a long time.

There are no benefits for 99% of the population. It's not going to
happen.

 

[Spehro Pefhany]

Fahrenheit is a linear transformation from Celsius (Centigrade):

F = 32 + C * 9 / 5,

so it is as linear as Celsius, but with different gain and bias.

Fahrenheit could be considered more modern conceptually than Celsius
because it's based on a 2^6 binary division between two arbitrary
temperatures (the freezing point of water and human body
temperature)-- rather than the old fashioned base-10 division between
two arbitrary temperatures of Celsius.

It's also more sensible for measuring the temperature of rooms because
a 1°F change isn't noticeable by most people, whereas a resolution of
1°C is a bit coarse.

(-4°C with winds of 39km/h here)

 

[Spehro Pefhany]

F is perfectly linear, it just has a different slope than C.

Different intercept too. Which causes confusion with conversions since
a delta-T of one is just a ratio of the delta-T of the other, but
absolute temperaturs have to have another term in there.

Eg. 100 degrees per second F = 55.556 degrees per second C

100 degrees F = 37.778 degrees C

If everyone used Kelvin this problem could be avoided.

A hot day could be 313K, a very cold day might be 250 or 260K.
Preheat the oven to 450K.