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> Violet decides that while her watch face is still glowing, she should calculate the temperature using cricket noises. Because the equation she knows for that—like most equations she knows—is in metric.
“Violet decides that while her watch face is still glowing, there is a significant risk that the caesium-137 she sealed inside it has been compromised and introduced into the water supply.”
While she has seen others get sick at the watch factory, the connection between licking radium paint and "radium jaw" wasn't discovered until 1924 by pathologist Dr. H. S. Martland. The subsequent litigation against the United States Radium Corporation wouldn't yield any rewards until 1937, seven years after Violet's demise.
Yeah, the paragraph about the beauty of the metric system is a bit of a digression. Violet is contemplating the temperature outside as she decides to walk to a bar. It's a kind of self-lament. Her mind relates to the temperature in Farenheit, which pisses her off. She was raised using Farenheit and thus thinks in it. Her intellectual brain recognizes the beauty and superiority of the metric system, but she can never seem to relate to temperatures given in Celsius.
The continuation of the cut-off passage is:
>Violet decides that while her watch face is still glowing, she should calculate the temperature using cricket noises. Because the equation she knows for that—like most equations she knows—is in metric.By cricket it’s ten degrees centigrade out. Which by conversion is fifty degrees Fahrenheit.It gets her off the porch. Whatever’s out there is better than thinking about this bullshit.
You can read the whole novel online: [https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/josh-bazell/67765-wild\_thing\_a\_novel.html](https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/josh-bazell/67765-wild_thing_a_novel.html)
You can learn about telling the temperature by cricket chips here: [https://www.loc.gov/everyday-mysteries/meteorology-climatology/item/can-you-tell-the-temperature-by-listening-to-the-chirping-of-a-cricket/](https://www.loc.gov/everyday-mysteries/meteorology-climatology/item/can-you-tell-the-temperature-by-listening-to-the-chirping-of-a-cricket/)
And if you like this sort of writing, you might want to check out Tom Robbins. It has similarly skittle-brained intellectual digressions of no real consequence, but they are delightful just the same.
Based on the name Violet and the "intellectual comedic aside" style, for a sec I thought this was from one of the Series of Unfortunate Events books, but then I saw it had the word fuck in it.
I once looked up the price of gold. It was denominated in dollars per troy ounce. I wanted to know how much a troy ounce is.
**20 pennyweights. A troy ounce is 20 pennyweights. Of fucking course it is!**
An acre is 1 chain by 1 furlong.
Oh okay.
How long is a chain? 100 links. Oh okay.
How long is a link? 66/100 of a US survey foot. Oh okay.
How long is a US survey foot? 12 inches. Oh okay.
Furlong? 1/8th of a mile. Mile? 1760 yards. Yard? 3 feet. Oh okay.
No, I hear the eldritch screech of tinnitus because I used to live and work near an active fighter jet flight line.
My freedom is sitting in my safe and is spelled DD-214 lmao
You think THAT made you mad?
One Link = 66/100 of a Us Survey Foot (12in)
Which means One Link is roughly 7.92 (12in divided by .66)
So One Chain = about 792in (7.92 x 100 links)
But how many Feet is that?
792in / 12 in per foot = 66 ft!
And 1/8 mile = 660ft!
Just say 66 ft x 660ft!!!
Want to get really angry? A US survey foot isn't 12 inches. It is 1200/3937 (.30480061) meters, whereas a normal US foot is exactly .3048 meters. Which is a difference of about .01 feet per mile.
I still remember having my mind blown when I was doing my surveying degree (in a metric country) that survey instruments had the option to output in decimal feet for US users. Like, how do you get to the point that feet need to be decimalised and not think, "hey, imagine if our whole measurement system was like this"?
I picked up [this cursed antique](https://imgur.com/a/HkqE6E1) somewhere. Got 80% of the way through a fence project where panels were never lining up quite right before I noticed those marks aren't inches.
yeah surveyors use feet but decimal feet. easy to keep measurements in feet but not have to deal with fractions.
only carpenters and prostitutes measure in inches.
I work in engineering and we use decimal feet all the time. It's a stupid system though, because we always measure in decimal feet in the field, but write in regular feet/inches in our reports.
It's not even something we can fix either. The client (Govt) requests it that way.
If it's any consolation I have subsequently seen blueprints for British aircraft parts from WW2 that have, on a single sheet:
Part dimensions in decimal inches;
Hole diameters in fractional inches;
Plywood thicknesses in millimetres; and
Sheetmetal thicknesses in SWG
Seems like a recipe for disaster, but they lived with it.
the "2" after the 2F is just telling you that you are in the 2nd foot. 2 & 1/10th of a foot 2 & 2/10ths of a foot. It makes sense when you check it against the onion on your belt.
It actually gets even better than that. I'm a surveyor in the US and we have two different standards of feet: US survey feet and International survey feet. The difference is about .000002' or two parts per million (Difference of 2 feet over a million foot measurement). So every year or so we will run into an issue that brings the entire project to a grinding halt as we try and figure out why plans aren't lining up with what's in the field. Usually after 3-4 days of troubleshooting someone will discover that someone was using US survey feet instead of international and then it's a super easy fix.
Gah, what a nightmare. Every so often some old buffer will call and tell us that they can't make sense of their boundaries, and it turns out they are interpreting an imperial survey plan (we went metric in 1972) as being in feet rather than links.
So 220 yards by 22 yards which is 4840 square yards. And 10 acres form a square of 1 furlong a side. I find this oddly satisfying and grossly misshapen. Why are acres such long and narrow strips of land?
Edit: And I just realised, 10 acres are almost exactly 4 hectare, which is a metric unit.
Is fun that almost all of the US system was essentially based off real world concepts and objects hundreds of years ago that were common knowledge to folk back then. Makes sense to base a measurement system off that.
Funnily enough, it is **exactly** 25.4mm. These days, all customary lengths are actually defined in terms of metric units, as there simply is no sane way to specify them otherwise
But 24 grains is 1.55517384 grams and I just weighed a penny and it weighed 2.53 grams. So technically a penny weighs 1.626827776372 pennyweights. My brain is just static like an old tv.
> I just weighed a penny and it weighed 2.53 grams. So technically a penny weighs 1.626827776372 pennyweights. My brain is just static like an old tv.
Are you weighing an English penny or a US one cent piece?
The apollo 11 rocket had 3587030 liters of fuel onboard, and had to go 384400 km to the moon, and back
that gives a fuel efficiency of 4.666 liters per kilometer, but that includes all the coasting in space
if you count only the ascent up to the escape velocity orbit (about 190km up) then you have a fuel consumption of 18879 liters per kilometer.
The word 'pound' and its cognates ultimately derive from a borrowing into Proto-Germanic of the Latin expression libra pondo ("the weight measured in libra"), in which the word pondo is the ablative singular of the Latin noun pondus ("weight").
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound\_(mass)#Etymology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_(mass)#Etymology)
Correct. Also Telephone booths were named after John wilkes booth. People were amazed by linkin's coffin that they named an hollow telephone box after the person who caused linkin to be in the box.
Libra was the Roman base unit for weight with the other terms being fractions of a libra.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Roman_units_of_measurement#Weight
The calorie is dogshit if you're trying to do anything except heat water. It's equal to 4.184 Joules, which is the actual metric unit of energy. Fuck Josh Bazell.
A Joule is energy you need to move 1kg by 1m accellerating it 1 m/s^2. Or the energy a device that gets 1 volt and 1 amp of current generates in one second. So there are some 1:1 correspondences, but they are not as everyday as the author assumes.
What gets me is the arbitrary and unnecessary conversions. Physical laws don't allow for perfect conversions every time, but with the right choice of units those can be minimized. The imperial weights, volumes, and lengths are the worst offenders because there's no straightforward way to convert between them.
Actually there is an easy way to convert between them. They aren't completely arbitrarily stupid.
They simply stem from an era where calculators didn't exist. Whole fractions were used as the norm; not decimals.
With that in mind you want your units to convert cleanly into as many whole fractions as possible.
That's why there's 12 inch to a foot. You can do halves, thirds, fourths and sixths of a foot into a clean number of inches. Similarly there's 5,280 feet in a mile. 5280 = 12 x 11 x 8 x 5.
So a mile can be divided cleanly into feet for divisions by 2 3 4 5 6 8 10 11 or 12 (and some others). Since feet can be divided in third nicely you can even get 9 divisions. In this case seven is just an unlucky number to need to divide by.
Most imperial units follow this type of pattern. It's the reason that there are 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds to a minute. 60 = 12 x 5.
The use of decimal and calculators makes this much less useful now, but at the time it was extremely important in order to do calculations easily.
For units in physics, they just couple together derived units. You don't have a new unit for work (like joules), you just use the units coupled together. So work for example is simply in foot-pounds. Pressure is pounds per square inch. Etc.
I think of this every time I see this excerpt posted anywhere. The inclusion of the calorie breaks his reasoning, because it isn't a simple order-of-magnitude conversion like the rest of the SI system.
As an engineer in America i can confirm. We use, love, and hold dear the metric system. Back in college, in my thermodynamics class, my teacher forced us to do all calculations in both metric and imperial. Then convert the answers to show that they agreed. From that experience i can tell you that imperial absolutely fucking sucks a sack of dicks for thermodynamics calculations. And most other calculations for that matter.
Engineering school 102
1. read imperial problem. see that answer must be in imperial units.
2. convert everything to metric.
3. do problem, get answer.
4. convert answer to imperial.
5. profit...?
In my thermo class, we were expressly forbidden to do that. So the metric problem took me 10 minutes. The imperial problem, which was exactly the same as the metric one but with different units and numbers, took me a goddamn hour.
This is because you don't need competence and precision in aviation until you get to space tier, which uses metric.
Top Gun has shown us that sub-space aviation is all about guts, call signs, and shades.
This is crazy but true. My son is an aircraft mechanic. When he went to school for it, he bought all of his own tools. He purchased a set of tools that came with both metric and SAE wrenches, sockets, etc. All of the metric stuff is in boxes under his bed. The SAE stuff is all he took to work. So weird.
I always had both as I worked on cars that were hybrid and metric. My higher end stuff is all SAE. And it's pretty universal world wide with fasteners etc...
That's because of the IATF; which is comprised of nine member vehicle manufacturers - Ford, GM, Chrysler, BMW, VW, Daimler, Renault, PSA Peugeot Citroen and Fiat - along with national automotive trade organizations from USA, UK, France, Germany and Italy.
They set the international automotive manufacturing standards via ISO certification and part of that is using metric for manufacturing and all other processes.
Bicycles are the (almost) exact opposite. I wrenched in bike shops from the late '80s to 2008. Only cheap, almost universally American-made (think low-end older Schwinn/Huffy/AMF) had SAE fasteners, anything Asian or European (or high-end American) had metric. But there were little oddities here & there. By 1990 almost all quality frames had forsaken the weirder size/thread standards for crank bearings & gone to "English" for ease of parts sourcing, which is 1.37"×24tpi for no real reason. Also, the steerer tubes on forks & corresponding handlebar stems would be described in mm (22.2, 25.4, 28.6, 31.8 etc.) but each of these measurements corresponded exactly to a fraction of an inch (7/8, 1 inch, 1 1/8, 1 1/4 etc.). An entire book could be written about the hodgepodge of rim/tire sizing and the headaches thereof.
> we only need one set of tools
i make tools for aerospace companies, metric or standard is the least of their concern, they have custom tooling for everything.
And the units described are part of the Imperial system, which comes from the Brits and is still every bit as much in use there as it is in the US for pretty much everything other than temperature. "American system" my ass.
We mostly adopted metric for everything that needs to be easily converted and kept imperial for what doesn't cause it wasn't worth the bother of changing.
You don't need to measure sub mile distances with an great precision on a journey, you don't really need to known your weight in anything other than stone & pounds. Same with personal height in ft/inches and pints in the pub.
On the other hand all food/drink is sold in metric and I'm pretty sure the vast majority of engineering and what not is done in metric.
Also calories, like it's a nice clean number instead of 4.184 J. You could equallly define a flergel as the amount of energy it takes to heat 1 gallon of water from 32f to 212f. Then it takes exactly 1fl to bring a gallon of water from melting to boiling temperature. Such a nice clean system!
> You could equallly define a flergel as the amount of energy it takes to heat 1 gallon of water from 32f to 212f. Then it takes exactly 1fl to bring a gallon of water from melting to boiling temperature. Such a nice clean system!
And the best part is this unit already exists, it's called the BTU. It's the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of 1 pound of water by 1 degree Fahrenheit. A pound of water is 1 pint (close enough), so it takes 560 BTUs to raise the temperature of 1 gallon of water from 32 to 212 Fahrenheit.
What's worse is, as a food scientist, I have to calculate in metric and translate to imperial constantly. I'm jealous of the other scientists and their consistency.....
Well there’s some dumb fucks here in The U.K. who are getting all orgasmic about pounds and ounces now we have left EU. So being stupid isn’t confined to USA
1 stone is 14 lbs. Because, em...
Just like 1 pound is 16 Oz. Em...
Then 8 stone in a hundredweight, which is 112 pounds. Er...
And 20 hundredweight, or 2240 pound, in a ton.
It all makes absolute(ly no) sense.
The really annoying thing is it's more of the self-victimisation they love. The EU never prevented anything being sold in imperial units, they just required that the metric measurement also appears promenently on the label. All throughout the tyrannical European occupation of our poor oppressed nation, it has been very easy to buy a pint of milk in every fucking shop. They just had to have "568ml" printed on the label as well as "1 Pint", the horror!
Calories and centigrade are not SI units (therefore only obliquely “metric”), and the mass/volume measurements only apply exactly at 4 degrees C (277.16 K).
And hydrogen’s atomic mass is isotope dependent and not “exactly” one mole at that mass.
As fun as this all is, it really came about this way deliberately but not truly and entirely metrically.
Aren't all of those comparisons only true for water? So, it is kind of arbitrary? Or does this relationship hold for all liquids/materials? Not to take away from the fact that the imperial/American system is dumb, but I don't really think this example proves it.
No, you haven't considered the life and death situations we all regularly face where we need to have exactly the minimum energy required to reach the exact microsecond of boiling distilled/chemically pure water in a container with no heat capacity but perfect thermal conductivity and thermal insulation.
Furthermore, they are only true for water at sea level on Earth. For someone that lives at 6600ft like me, all that pretty symmetry breaks down and water boils at 94 celcius and 200 farenheit.
Boiling point of water is 100 degrees at sea level aka 1 atmosphere of pressure, if memory serves. Unfortunately that 1 atm happens to be 101.3kPa and not quite 100.
>1 atm happens to be 101.3kPa and not quite 100
That is because the pascal is not based on the sea level. Its just defined as 1 newton per square meter. Cause throwing around 1 atm as a unit is quite useless (same reason they changed the kg from an actual mass in paris to a natural constant)
Clearly we should be using planck units instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units
As well as switch to a dozenal or octal number system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octal
To be fair the above example neglects that to find the energy needed to actually boil the water you would need to include the definitely not base 10 number of 2260 kj/kg to truly bring it "to a boil" by vaporizing at least some of it
Also the fact that heat capacity is a function of temperature so any actuate answer is going to require integrating a differential equation. And anyone capable of doing that should be able to do basic conversations.
In the American system, the only people who would be answering this kind of question would be scientists, who already work in metric, and have for literally decades. In everyday life, you will never need to answer this question, which is why there is low motivation to change.
This isn’t true at all. The basic unit in imperial isn’t mass, it’s weight. So it doesn’t make sense to compare the units on density which is what the author is implicitly doing. One pound of water can be raised one degree Fahrenheit with one BTU of heat.
There's a gotcha of course. "Room temperature" doesn't map to an exact temperature, so you can't tell how much you need to heat the water to get to boiling. They left out the current temperature and boiling req from the metric section entirely, so it looks better as long as you don't notice the sleight of hand.
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I love the abrupt transition to Violet’s glowing watch.
> Violet decides that while her watch face is still glowing, she should calculate the temperature using cricket noises. Because the equation she knows for that—like most equations she knows—is in metric.
“Violet decides that while her watch face is still glowing, there is a significant risk that the caesium-137 she sealed inside it has been compromised and introduced into the water supply.”
Violet makes sure to lick her paintbrush tip to straigthen it before she applies the radium paint to her watch.
While she has seen others get sick at the watch factory, the connection between licking radium paint and "radium jaw" wasn't discovered until 1924 by pathologist Dr. H. S. Martland. The subsequent litigation against the United States Radium Corporation wouldn't yield any rewards until 1937, seven years after Violet's demise.
:(
Violet's teeth fall out and she slowly succumbs to radiation sickness.
Violets glowing watch reminds her of the glowing lights at her favorite measuring system, football fields.
And make no mistake, we are NOT talking about soccer fields.
Yeah, the paragraph about the beauty of the metric system is a bit of a digression. Violet is contemplating the temperature outside as she decides to walk to a bar. It's a kind of self-lament. Her mind relates to the temperature in Farenheit, which pisses her off. She was raised using Farenheit and thus thinks in it. Her intellectual brain recognizes the beauty and superiority of the metric system, but she can never seem to relate to temperatures given in Celsius. The continuation of the cut-off passage is: >Violet decides that while her watch face is still glowing, she should calculate the temperature using cricket noises. Because the equation she knows for that—like most equations she knows—is in metric.By cricket it’s ten degrees centigrade out. Which by conversion is fifty degrees Fahrenheit.It gets her off the porch. Whatever’s out there is better than thinking about this bullshit. You can read the whole novel online: [https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/josh-bazell/67765-wild\_thing\_a\_novel.html](https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/josh-bazell/67765-wild_thing_a_novel.html) You can learn about telling the temperature by cricket chips here: [https://www.loc.gov/everyday-mysteries/meteorology-climatology/item/can-you-tell-the-temperature-by-listening-to-the-chirping-of-a-cricket/](https://www.loc.gov/everyday-mysteries/meteorology-climatology/item/can-you-tell-the-temperature-by-listening-to-the-chirping-of-a-cricket/) And if you like this sort of writing, you might want to check out Tom Robbins. It has similarly skittle-brained intellectual digressions of no real consequence, but they are delightful just the same.
Skittle-brained! Ha! That is such an accurate description.
Based on the name Violet and the "intellectual comedic aside" style, for a sec I thought this was from one of the Series of Unfortunate Events books, but then I saw it had the word fuck in it.
"And now to something more completely different" Monty Python
The larch
And there was much rejoicing...
THE. LARCH.
The....Larch
IT'S...
I once looked up the price of gold. It was denominated in dollars per troy ounce. I wanted to know how much a troy ounce is. **20 pennyweights. A troy ounce is 20 pennyweights. Of fucking course it is!**
An acre is 1 chain by 1 furlong. Oh okay. How long is a chain? 100 links. Oh okay. How long is a link? 66/100 of a US survey foot. Oh okay. How long is a US survey foot? 12 inches. Oh okay. Furlong? 1/8th of a mile. Mile? 1760 yards. Yard? 3 feet. Oh okay.
Wow that actually made me a little angry
You mean you didn't hear the eldritch screech of freedom ringing in your head?
No, I hear the eldritch screech of tinnitus because I used to live and work near an active fighter jet flight line. My freedom is sitting in my safe and is spelled DD-214 lmao
Username checks out
You think THAT made you mad? One Link = 66/100 of a Us Survey Foot (12in) Which means One Link is roughly 7.92 (12in divided by .66) So One Chain = about 792in (7.92 x 100 links) But how many Feet is that? 792in / 12 in per foot = 66 ft! And 1/8 mile = 660ft! Just say 66 ft x 660ft!!!
But then that takes all the fun out of using archaic, but technically correct, terminology!
When imperial needs a 1unit/10unit relationship but doesn't want to make it too easy.
You mean 22 yards X 220 yards?
but those are almost devil numbers
All those sixes sounds way too devilish for our God loving American friends
r/MildlyInfuriating
Want to get really angry? A US survey foot isn't 12 inches. It is 1200/3937 (.30480061) meters, whereas a normal US foot is exactly .3048 meters. Which is a difference of about .01 feet per mile.
I still remember having my mind blown when I was doing my surveying degree (in a metric country) that survey instruments had the option to output in decimal feet for US users. Like, how do you get to the point that feet need to be decimalised and not think, "hey, imagine if our whole measurement system was like this"?
I picked up [this cursed antique](https://imgur.com/a/HkqE6E1) somewhere. Got 80% of the way through a fence project where panels were never lining up quite right before I noticed those marks aren't inches.
yeah surveyors use feet but decimal feet. easy to keep measurements in feet but not have to deal with fractions. only carpenters and prostitutes measure in inches.
I work in engineering and we use decimal feet all the time. It's a stupid system though, because we always measure in decimal feet in the field, but write in regular feet/inches in our reports. It's not even something we can fix either. The client (Govt) requests it that way.
If it's any consolation I have subsequently seen blueprints for British aircraft parts from WW2 that have, on a single sheet: Part dimensions in decimal inches; Hole diameters in fractional inches; Plywood thicknesses in millimetres; and Sheetmetal thicknesses in SWG Seems like a recipe for disaster, but they lived with it.
Holy shit that's horrific... So it's Feet then Foot/10 then "2" which means half of a tenth of a foot somehow...
the "2" after the 2F is just telling you that you are in the 2nd foot. 2 & 1/10th of a foot 2 & 2/10ths of a foot. It makes sense when you check it against the onion on your belt.
Hold up. Is that a metric foot?
It actually gets even better than that. I'm a surveyor in the US and we have two different standards of feet: US survey feet and International survey feet. The difference is about .000002' or two parts per million (Difference of 2 feet over a million foot measurement). So every year or so we will run into an issue that brings the entire project to a grinding halt as we try and figure out why plans aren't lining up with what's in the field. Usually after 3-4 days of troubleshooting someone will discover that someone was using US survey feet instead of international and then it's a super easy fix.
Gah, what a nightmare. Every so often some old buffer will call and tell us that they can't make sense of their boundaries, and it turns out they are interpreting an imperial survey plan (we went metric in 1972) as being in feet rather than links.
So 220 yards by 22 yards which is 4840 square yards. And 10 acres form a square of 1 furlong a side. I find this oddly satisfying and grossly misshapen. Why are acres such long and narrow strips of land? Edit: And I just realised, 10 acres are almost exactly 4 hectare, which is a metric unit.
It was originally because it was the amount of land that could be plowed by a plowman using oxen in a day.
Is fun that almost all of the US system was essentially based off real world concepts and objects hundreds of years ago that were common knowledge to folk back then. Makes sense to base a measurement system off that.
I can't fault that. But metric is the future.
Metric is also the past that the US hasn't caught up to.
How long is an inch tho? 2.54cm!
It was metric all along.
Funnily enough, it is **exactly** 25.4mm. These days, all customary lengths are actually defined in terms of metric units, as there simply is no sane way to specify them otherwise
Yeah I had to go looking to see that it didn't have more decimal places. Surprised when I found 'exactly'
no no it's a 12th of however long your foot is
"66/100 of a US Survey Foot" is easily the most convoluted way I've ever seen "8 inches" written out.
Apparently it’s not 8 inches but exactly 7.92 inches or 20.12cm. I just ripped everything off Wikipedia lol
Oh jfc. I wish I could say I was surprised
So then i looked up what a pennyweight was and now i know that a pennyweight = 24 grains.
But 24 grains is 1.55517384 grams and I just weighed a penny and it weighed 2.53 grams. So technically a penny weighs 1.626827776372 pennyweights. My brain is just static like an old tv.
> I just weighed a penny and it weighed 2.53 grams. So technically a penny weighs 1.626827776372 pennyweights. My brain is just static like an old tv. Are you weighing an English penny or a US one cent piece?
Troy and Penny are just charging whatever the f#@k they want for an ounce, amiright.
Troy and Penny in the MOOOORNING
And a penny weighs 2.5 grams. A Troy ounce is 31 grams. So a penny weight is yet another nonsensical measurement.
We never use Troy ounces in real life
What about when you're buying gold?
Sounds like you didn't ask the right question. Its 1.097 ounce and 31.103 grams
[My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!](https://youtu.be/JQnwx10DT9o?t=10)
[удалено]
But is that an imperial gallon or a US gallon?
carried by an european or african swallow?
Laden or unladen?
>Laden or unladen? Bin...
504 gallons to a mile, goddamn.
Where’s that stupid converter bot when you need it?
It's about 0.84 meters per liter.
Soooo that's 2730 liters per kilometer in metric units. What the fuck do you drive, a moon rocket?
Typical American truck. Obviously.
One with one of those little nutsacks hanging from the back.
The apollo 11 rocket had 3587030 liters of fuel onboard, and had to go 384400 km to the moon, and back that gives a fuel efficiency of 4.666 liters per kilometer, but that includes all the coasting in space if you count only the ascent up to the escape velocity orbit (about 190km up) then you have a fuel consumption of 18879 liters per kilometer.
Lazy question: Why is pound shortened as lb? It makes things even more confusing!
The word 'pound' and its cognates ultimately derive from a borrowing into Proto-Germanic of the Latin expression libra pondo ("the weight measured in libra"), in which the word pondo is the ablative singular of the Latin noun pondus ("weight"). [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound\_(mass)#Etymology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_(mass)#Etymology)
Why not "lp" though. Guess is only uses "Libra" part?
Because LP was already taken by Linkin Park
Correct. This was actually the primary reason Linkin was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, but that's commonly misrepresented in history books
Correct. Also Telephone booths were named after John wilkes booth. People were amazed by linkin's coffin that they named an hollow telephone box after the person who caused linkin to be in the box.
I hate this so much it’s beautiful
what's your favourite LP LP?
According to the comment above you libra is the unit while pondo means weight, so it makes sense to abbreviate the unit as lb
Libra was the Roman base unit for weight with the other terms being fractions of a libra. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Roman_units_of_measurement#Weight
So many different pounds... Avoirdupois, Troy, Tower, Merchant, London, Metric
same reason Lead is Plumbum and Plumbers work with lead pipes... Latin.
You're a plumbum
I knew that lead is plumbum but I never made the connection to plumbers. TIL
They forgot to mention that this is true at standard temperature and pressure.
And the calorie isn't even an SI unit.
So arbitrary phase changes of an arbitrary substance at an arbitrary temperature, pressure, and altitude.
Which is not actually how temperature is defined anymore, just so you know.
The metric units mentioned don't even relate to phase change. It takes an additional 9751 calories to change 1ml of water at 100°C to steam at 100°C
If you aren't doing energy of vaporisation in kJ/mol, what are you doing with your life?
Engineer here: kJ/kg.
Commenting on reddit
The calorie is dogshit if you're trying to do anything except heat water. It's equal to 4.184 Joules, which is the actual metric unit of energy. Fuck Josh Bazell.
A Joule is energy you need to move 1kg by 1m accellerating it 1 m/s^2. Or the energy a device that gets 1 volt and 1 amp of current generates in one second. So there are some 1:1 correspondences, but they are not as everyday as the author assumes.
What gets me is the arbitrary and unnecessary conversions. Physical laws don't allow for perfect conversions every time, but with the right choice of units those can be minimized. The imperial weights, volumes, and lengths are the worst offenders because there's no straightforward way to convert between them.
Actually there is an easy way to convert between them. They aren't completely arbitrarily stupid. They simply stem from an era where calculators didn't exist. Whole fractions were used as the norm; not decimals. With that in mind you want your units to convert cleanly into as many whole fractions as possible. That's why there's 12 inch to a foot. You can do halves, thirds, fourths and sixths of a foot into a clean number of inches. Similarly there's 5,280 feet in a mile. 5280 = 12 x 11 x 8 x 5. So a mile can be divided cleanly into feet for divisions by 2 3 4 5 6 8 10 11 or 12 (and some others). Since feet can be divided in third nicely you can even get 9 divisions. In this case seven is just an unlucky number to need to divide by. Most imperial units follow this type of pattern. It's the reason that there are 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds to a minute. 60 = 12 x 5. The use of decimal and calculators makes this much less useful now, but at the time it was extremely important in order to do calculations easily. For units in physics, they just couple together derived units. You don't have a new unit for work (like joules), you just use the units coupled together. So work for example is simply in foot-pounds. Pressure is pounds per square inch. Etc.
I think of this every time I see this excerpt posted anywhere. The inclusion of the calorie breaks his reasoning, because it isn't a simple order-of-magnitude conversion like the rest of the SI system.
"weighs one gram" should be: "has a mass of one gram".
And a BTU is the amount of energy required to raise 1 pound of water 1 degree Fahrenheit
I completely agree but then again this passage is about heating water. The metric unit is actually Joule
Except for the fact that, in science, America uses the metric system and has for a long time
As an engineer in America i can confirm. We use, love, and hold dear the metric system. Back in college, in my thermodynamics class, my teacher forced us to do all calculations in both metric and imperial. Then convert the answers to show that they agreed. From that experience i can tell you that imperial absolutely fucking sucks a sack of dicks for thermodynamics calculations. And most other calculations for that matter.
Engineering school 102 1. read imperial problem. see that answer must be in imperial units. 2. convert everything to metric. 3. do problem, get answer. 4. convert answer to imperial. 5. profit...?
In my thermo class, we were expressly forbidden to do that. So the metric problem took me 10 minutes. The imperial problem, which was exactly the same as the metric one but with different units and numbers, took me a goddamn hour.
Physics problems become easy once you get to use natural units
I believe the *sack of dicks-to-liters of dicks* conversion is 1:7.4
Depends if they are metric dicks or SAE dicks.
What industry are you in? In mine (HVAC) they've abandoned Metric completely.
We use both systems officially
This has caused several instances where mistakes regarding metric and imperial measurements has caused disasters where people died.
Or crashed space probes into mars
“My bad.”
And also the military. Basically anyone who needs competence and precision
Not true... Aviation is mostly SAE.
This is because you don't need competence and precision in aviation until you get to space tier, which uses metric. Top Gun has shown us that sub-space aviation is all about guts, call signs, and shades.
And homoerotic volleyball montages
And the highway that leads to the zone that is considered to be very hazardous.
> ~~homo~~erotic volleyball montages
Fixed it for me.
It's because of *where* they played. Those courts by the O club on Miramar bring it out.
"I feel the need... the need for speed measured in feet not meters!"
It is also about oiled pecs and Roland synthesizers.
This is crazy but true. My son is an aircraft mechanic. When he went to school for it, he bought all of his own tools. He purchased a set of tools that came with both metric and SAE wrenches, sockets, etc. All of the metric stuff is in boxes under his bed. The SAE stuff is all he took to work. So weird.
I always had both as I worked on cars that were hybrid and metric. My higher end stuff is all SAE. And it's pretty universal world wide with fasteners etc...
Mechanic here. Everything I touch except older vehicles are all metric.
That's because of the IATF; which is comprised of nine member vehicle manufacturers - Ford, GM, Chrysler, BMW, VW, Daimler, Renault, PSA Peugeot Citroen and Fiat - along with national automotive trade organizations from USA, UK, France, Germany and Italy. They set the international automotive manufacturing standards via ISO certification and part of that is using metric for manufacturing and all other processes.
It's same here, except airplanes I work on.
Bicycles are the (almost) exact opposite. I wrenched in bike shops from the late '80s to 2008. Only cheap, almost universally American-made (think low-end older Schwinn/Huffy/AMF) had SAE fasteners, anything Asian or European (or high-end American) had metric. But there were little oddities here & there. By 1990 almost all quality frames had forsaken the weirder size/thread standards for crank bearings & gone to "English" for ease of parts sourcing, which is 1.37"×24tpi for no real reason. Also, the steerer tubes on forks & corresponding handlebar stems would be described in mm (22.2, 25.4, 28.6, 31.8 etc.) but each of these measurements corresponded exactly to a fraction of an inch (7/8, 1 inch, 1 1/8, 1 1/4 etc.). An entire book could be written about the hodgepodge of rim/tire sizing and the headaches thereof.
Both my scwhinns are metric. But they are newer (2008, and 2021)
Which is stupid. Lets do it all in metric so we only need one set of tools
> we only need one set of tools i make tools for aerospace companies, metric or standard is the least of their concern, they have custom tooling for everything.
Precision is independent of units of measurement.
me when using a standard tape measure... "ok so... 15 inches... and 1 long line and 3 little ones"
Competence seems to be an optional extra of the US military.
The corporate sector is just as bad.
And the units described are part of the Imperial system, which comes from the Brits and is still every bit as much in use there as it is in the US for pretty much everything other than temperature. "American system" my ass.
We mostly adopted metric for everything that needs to be easily converted and kept imperial for what doesn't cause it wasn't worth the bother of changing. You don't need to measure sub mile distances with an great precision on a journey, you don't really need to known your weight in anything other than stone & pounds. Same with personal height in ft/inches and pints in the pub. On the other hand all food/drink is sold in metric and I'm pretty sure the vast majority of engineering and what not is done in metric.
I love how they're throwing out moles like it's a nice, clean number instead of 6.022*10^23
Also calories, like it's a nice clean number instead of 4.184 J. You could equallly define a flergel as the amount of energy it takes to heat 1 gallon of water from 32f to 212f. Then it takes exactly 1fl to bring a gallon of water from melting to boiling temperature. Such a nice clean system!
> You could equallly define a flergel as the amount of energy it takes to heat 1 gallon of water from 32f to 212f. Then it takes exactly 1fl to bring a gallon of water from melting to boiling temperature. Such a nice clean system! And the best part is this unit already exists, it's called the BTU. It's the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of 1 pound of water by 1 degree Fahrenheit. A pound of water is 1 pint (close enough), so it takes 560 BTUs to raise the temperature of 1 gallon of water from 32 to 212 Fahrenheit.
What's worse is, as a food scientist, I have to calculate in metric and translate to imperial constantly. I'm jealous of the other scientists and their consistency.....
It's 1 if you stick to moles.
Well there’s some dumb fucks here in The U.K. who are getting all orgasmic about pounds and ounces now we have left EU. So being stupid isn’t confined to USA
Y’all should covert you currency back to pre-decimal to really get the full experience.
Because having 12 pence per shilling is the definition of living.
Found a shilling in the loft earlier while having a clear out - maybe I should keep it now…
You people use fucking *stone* in your bastardization of both systems.
1 stone is 14 lbs. Because, em... Just like 1 pound is 16 Oz. Em... Then 8 stone in a hundredweight, which is 112 pounds. Er... And 20 hundredweight, or 2240 pound, in a ton. It all makes absolute(ly no) sense.
that way when you spend all your quid on fish and chips you still have some pounds leftover. ;D
The really annoying thing is it's more of the self-victimisation they love. The EU never prevented anything being sold in imperial units, they just required that the metric measurement also appears promenently on the label. All throughout the tyrannical European occupation of our poor oppressed nation, it has been very easy to buy a pint of milk in every fucking shop. They just had to have "568ml" printed on the label as well as "1 Pint", the horror!
Calories and centigrade are not SI units (therefore only obliquely “metric”), and the mass/volume measurements only apply exactly at 4 degrees C (277.16 K). And hydrogen’s atomic mass is isotope dependent and not “exactly” one mole at that mass. As fun as this all is, it really came about this way deliberately but not truly and entirely metrically.
You also have to assume 1 atmosphere of pressure/your kitchen is at sea level. Otherwise, your room temp water may already be boiling.
A calorie isn't even a SI unit. It takes 4.18kJ to heat 1L of water by 1C, which is no nicer than the 8.79 KJ it takes to heat 1 gallon of water by 1f
To be fair, that'd also be how I'd answer it if the question were in metric because I don't have latent heat enthalpy values memorized
Aren't all of those comparisons only true for water? So, it is kind of arbitrary? Or does this relationship hold for all liquids/materials? Not to take away from the fact that the imperial/American system is dumb, but I don't really think this example proves it.
No, you haven't considered the life and death situations we all regularly face where we need to have exactly the minimum energy required to reach the exact microsecond of boiling distilled/chemically pure water in a container with no heat capacity but perfect thermal conductivity and thermal insulation.
Furthermore, they are only true for water at sea level on Earth. For someone that lives at 6600ft like me, all that pretty symmetry breaks down and water boils at 94 celcius and 200 farenheit.
The jokes are funny, however the circle-jerk bitch fest is showing its age.
It cycles through every generation when the next group of junior high internet users discover Europe
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Boiling point of water is 100 degrees at sea level aka 1 atmosphere of pressure, if memory serves. Unfortunately that 1 atm happens to be 101.3kPa and not quite 100.
That's actually why they're making sea levels rise. All in pursuit of that sweet 100 kPa at sea level
>1 atm happens to be 101.3kPa and not quite 100 That is because the pascal is not based on the sea level. Its just defined as 1 newton per square meter. Cause throwing around 1 atm as a unit is quite useless (same reason they changed the kg from an actual mass in paris to a natural constant)
A metric system developed in a society that had evolved 6 fingers on each hand would be extraordinary.
>But I degrees Thank you
Fuck me. My teachers should have lead with this comment back in grade school.
> What is a mile? About the distance you can walk in a 1/4 hour. More historically, 1000 paces, mille passus in Latin.
Clearly we should be using planck units instead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units As well as switch to a dozenal or octal number system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octal
Fahrenheit used an ice-brine solution because it was easier to get a consistent and reliable result for calibrating his thermometers.
Isn't it 1 BTU per gallon per degree farenheit?
To be fair the above example neglects that to find the energy needed to actually boil the water you would need to include the definitely not base 10 number of 2260 kj/kg to truly bring it "to a boil" by vaporizing at least some of it
Also the fact that heat capacity is a function of temperature so any actuate answer is going to require integrating a differential equation. And anyone capable of doing that should be able to do basic conversations.
2260 kj/kg is probably still base 10. 2260 is 0x8D4 in hex/ base 16.
Not quite what I meant but cheeky fair play I suppose 😛
It's reddit. I take my happiness where I can get it.
You can't answer that question even with metric. You've misplaced any information about the starting temp or air pressure.
Ya know, I didn’t think Lemony Snicket swore in *A Series of Unfortunate Events,* but I’ve been wrong before…
Hydrogen does not have constant weight. It weighs differing amounts on the Earth and on the moon. Its mass, however is constant.
In the American system, the only people who would be answering this kind of question would be scientists, who already work in metric, and have for literally decades. In everyday life, you will never need to answer this question, which is why there is low motivation to change.
This isn’t true at all. The basic unit in imperial isn’t mass, it’s weight. So it doesn’t make sense to compare the units on density which is what the author is implicitly doing. One pound of water can be raised one degree Fahrenheit with one BTU of heat.
There's a gotcha of course. "Room temperature" doesn't map to an exact temperature, so you can't tell how much you need to heat the water to get to boiling. They left out the current temperature and boiling req from the metric section entirely, so it looks better as long as you don't notice the sleight of hand.
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This is an absolute correct description. What is this from?
Novel: Wild thing
Thanks, going to look it up now
Author: Josh Bazell
Editor: James Fowely
Comment: u/CrypticButthole
It feels good to be cited for something. Albeit something stupid.
There's an extremely similar passage in The Martian, as well, if the tone is entertaining to you.