Honestly, I probably wouldn’t hate the metric system if I saw it in isolation. Yes, it’s a little bit silly, like the tennis scoring system, but it’s just a system of measurement after all.
It’s the fucking proponents of it I can’t stand. More specifically, it’s the self-righteous more-sciencey-than-thou “educators” who will voxplain how it’s sooo superior and anyone who doesn’t recognize this is an inbred Luddite. Before there were vegans, before there was crossfit, there were metric proponents. And even they wouldn’t be so bad if their arguments weren’t completely, absolutely, 100% full of shit.
Myth #1: “It’s more scientific”
First of all, what does that even mean? Seriously, what? The closest thing I’ve found to an answer is that “it’s used by more scientists.” Which is like saying Nathan’s hotdogs are “more medical.”
Myth #2: “It’s based on nature, not arbitrary units”
Holy fuckballs no. Not even. Prior to the modern metric system, there was an idea to make a “natural” system wherein the unit of length would be the length of a pendulum with a period of 1 second. This… is actually a pretty good idea. And pretty close to a system based on natural laws. Yes, there is still some arbitrariness involved with choosing the place where the standard will be set since gravity is inhomogeneous, but for the 18th century, pretty good. This is not what we got. What we got was a second set of arbitrary units with the pretense of objectivity. To go into detail relates directly to the objections to:
Myth #3: “It’s self-consistent”
Just stop. Let’s talk about this “consistent system” for a while, shall we? The meter, what is it? “It’s 1/10,000th the distance from the pole to the equator.” No, it’s not, shut up. First of all, everything in this “consistent” system is based on factors of 1000. Except for this, the principal unit of the system, which is mysteriously based on a factor of 10,000. But of course it isn’t even that since it’s not 1/10,000th of anything, it’s 1/10,000th of a quarter of something. So it’s really 1/40,000th of something. What the meter is, is a juggling around with numbers until they could find a unit of measurement that is as close as possible to a yard, and then making a physical, constantly-changing arbitrary standard based on that. If they weren’t trying to duplicate the yard, they would have made the meter based on some factor of 1000. If they were determined to use the earth, they could have taken 1/1,000,000th of the circumference of the earth and gotten a serviceable unit of about an inch and a half, or 1/1000th the radius of the earth and gotten something close to 4 miles, but those units are just too weird and exotic and we need to make this change easy for the peasants to digest while we’re force-feeding this change to them and we really need to sharpen the guillotine again and… sorry, I was getting too deep into the revolutionary mindset for a minute there. Anyway, a meter is a Froggy yard and I don’t care what anyone says they‘re just trying to post-hoc rationalize it. Now moving on in our “self-consistent” system, we have the base unit of mass, the kilogram. Does anyone else see the problem here? We have a base unit… that requires a prefix. Qu’est-ce que c’est le face-palm en francais? And again, this base unit which is supposedly (but isn’t – it’s actually a terrible waste of platinum) the mass of a liter of water, which is a cubic decimeter. A cubic decimeter of water… which is a liter… weighs a kilogram. I’m so glad this system is so self-consistent. And the most ludicrous thing about this inconsistency is that these last two are that they are derived units in the first place! If they were self-consistent, and they kept with water, their base unit of volume would be about 264 gallons and the base unit of mass would be a long ton. Which is simply inconvenient and puts to lie…
Myth #4: “It’s easier to use”
Here’s the speed of light as George Washington would have reckoned it:
186000
Easy to recognize, and it’s in miles/second because that’s really the only sensible combination of units to use for speeds like that.
Here’s the Macron version:
30000000
Or is it? Do I have the right number of zeroes there? And what units? I mean km/s would be the analog to mi/s, but since one of the purported advantages to metric is adding and dropping prefixes willy-nilly, they could be anything. Usually, I see the speed of light given in m/s, but I can toss a random number of zeroes and still be correct as long as I claim to be using a particular prefix-unit combination. To be fair, there are instances where the metric system is easier to use. Those instances are when you are:
-performing a calculation
-with a pencil and paper
-with abstracted numbers
But other than that, nope. And part of that is because the Top Men promoting the system are promising completely contradictory things. To claim that you can create a system of measurement based on natural laws that is convenient for humans is that quotidian mix of ignorance and arrogance that has categorized progressive thought since time immemorial. Repeat after me: Nature hates you and wants you to die. Nature is supremely unconcerned about being convenient. By picking one unit to be human-scaled (the meter) they pretty much guaranteed that any of the other measurable aspects of nature are going to be stupidly awkward when expressed in terms of that unit. When was the last time you bought a capacitator measured in a whole number of Farads? A magnet in Teslas? (People who buy NMRs don’t count.) If you want to quantify exactly how terrible of an idea it is to try and build a measurement system around the fundamental properties of the universe, take a looky here.
So what is the metric system if none of those myths? It’s the product of a decimal fetishist. Which is frankly a pretty low grade of fetish. It’s like being preferentially attracted to Americans while you’re vacationing in Prague. Prague, Czech Republic, not Prague, Oklahoma. They’re not even pronounced the same. The metric system was made by shallow-thinking revolutionaries who thought themselves wise. For them, the decimal system had totemic value, like black guns or Maggie McNeil’s “sex rays.” Their cook could understand halves and thirds, and quarters, but it took a man of the proper social class to understand 3/10ths. All the good things about the metric system happen because it’s tied to the decimal system. Which is also its biggest problem, because the decimal system is pretty crap. But in one of the most unfortunate examples of existence bias in history, Messrs. Haut-Hommes never considered that maybe the decimal system was what they needed to take forth on the tumbrel.
We already have the basis of the dozenal system in our language (dozen, gross, great gross) and Glibs of a certain age may remember when multiplication tables ran up to 12. Those of you with rugrats can let me know if this is still a thing, but freaking muppets were able to recognize the superiority of the dozenal system. Even metric-loving Eurotards are starting to clue in; though the specific example in that video is also chock-full of existence bias. Yes, you could keep Arabic numerals and add a couple of symbols, but it really would be better to replace all of the numerals so it would be obvious what system was being written. That’s a system that would have been an improvement over an older one. It’s not what the metric system was. The metric system was a waste of a good opportunity for a bunch of hubristic murderous progressives (but I repeat myself) to make a positive change but couldn’t because they were stupid (but I repeat myself yet again).
That is why I hate it. That is why you should too.
Comments
385 responses to “Why I hate the metric system and you should too: an uninformed rant based on no research whatsoever”
There are two types of countries: those that have gone to the moon, and those that use the metric system.
Could it be the fact that NASA has adopted the metric system is why we have not gone back to the moon?
Woah
“3821680 furlongs is one hell of a trip and if your calculations are off by even 1 chain or a few rods you’re screwed.”
And that conversation is any different because it uses -affixes instead of full names to delineate a different sized arbitrary chunk of distance?
*polite applause*
On the topic of Glib achievements, you earned one – got me to read the entire article before commenting.
*blushes*
And a great article it is, Hat’s OFF! to You
I did the same.
*jumps*
In more examples of people valuing convenience over systems, I’ve been working on reports today that involve Angstroms and wavenumbers.
Wavenumbers, ugh
Enjoy your Kaysers.
I prefer a 16th system myself. Keeps things nice and square.
You are straightening and perfectly lining up all of the things on your desk right now, aren’t you?
Just the targets
an uninformed rant based on no research whatsoever
CNN, is that you?
He said no research, not faked research.
Eh. Close enough for “research.”
Best Glibertarian article ever!
You forgot the “it’s easier to convert between units” argument. Who the fuck cares?
Upon seeing a road sign saying”Cleveland 253 miles” who has ever asked “how many inches is that?”
The one place I used the metric system was judging distances in the military. Let’s face it, nobody knows how to convert yards to miles in their heads. But when I talked to the artillery or close air support people on the radio, I could go from meters to kilometers and back in my head instantly.
5280 feet or 1760 yards per mile.
But why are you using yards anyway?
How else would you judge distances for a rifle shot, artillery strike, or golf drive? It’s yards or meters which are pretty close. I was always good at estimating yards, and if necessary rounding up a bit to approximate meters. Kinda important when calling in close air-support danger-close.
Considering a meter is longer than a yard (yard is .914 meters roughly a yard) wouldn’t your round down?
Yes – i was thinking backwards – as in rounding up the unit of measure.
Figured as much bro, but wanted to make sure you were in the right frame of mind before you convert the lenght of your member to metric and end up cheating yourself…
“5280 feet or 1760 yards per mile.”
Land descriptions in Louisiana are in feet and tenths of feet. I have spent my whole life measuring them, pacing them off, and looking at them. Feet and yards are a snap for me. What the hell would I do with a kilometer? I can look at a distance and tell you pretty close in miles. I have no idea what a kilometer looks like.
On old deeds in Texas, distances are often measured in Spanish customary units. Varas, cordels, and leagues.
Why is carpeting sold by the square yard?
It’s usually some wise ass that wants to know the distance in toes.
Being brought up in the UK, I have an even worse situation here in the US. I find it hard to judge road distances in feet – I’m a yards guy.
So, when I run my GPS, I have a choice. Pick Imperial, and I totaly grok the miles, but have to convert turn-by-turn instructions from feet to yards in my head – yeah, I know it’s simply divide by three, yeah I get it, but it’s a pain.
Or, I put it in metric, and I just treat meters as yards. Easy Peasy. Except then, I’m 463km from my destination and I can’t for the frickin’ life of me figure out how many miles that is.
All these systems of measurement are at their heart, arbitrary, but at least the multipliers in metric are easy to figure.
Kilometers, divide 100 by 61. You’re halfway plus betwen 244 and 305, call it 275.
Me
Terrific!
My complaint about metric supremacists is how arbitrary it is; not the system, but the idea that we should upend our conventions for no discernable reason. “But the whole world uses metric!” Fine, but we’re not the whole world. “But it’s what scientists use!” Well, that’s dandy for scientists, and people training in the sciences will inevitably learn to use it, but not everyone needs to. It’s not as if it adds anything to our comprehension of the universe. It’s not like we’re less parochial and self-involved if we can natively make sense of metric quantities, any more than metric-based countries are more worldly or contemplative because they don’t use Imperial units. And converting into metric is fairly straightforward: 1lb is a bit under half a kilogram. One mile is a bit over 1.5km. There’s no need for specificity beyond that for the vast majority of Americans.
So it comes down to just another load of America-bashing horseshit.
I prefer to define a kilogram as 2.2 pounds.
I define it as weird furriner talk.
Does converting from Fahrenheit to Celsius also qualify?
Why would you do that?
To tell IFH how hot it is in Florida in terms she can understand?
Kilograms are units of mass not weight so the conversion between the two depends on the gravity.
/pedant off
It’s more an issue of exporting into foreign markets and competitiveness. Japan does not provide Imperial specifications in RFQs and don’t even think about using them when responding. Regardless of the utility of the system, it’s as necessary or more necessary than learning a foreign language.
The internet has done wonders for conversions so it’s not nearly as much of a pain in the ass as it used to be.
As someone that measures stuff for a living, I can say that the metric system is way simpler to use, mainly because the conversion scales are in rounder numbers and it is an SI Unit. I’m in 100% full agreement, however, that there is absolutely no reason to force people and businesses to change the way they measure just because some Top Men says that everyone should.
I would prefer to measure something in a way that allowed 2/3 to be twice as large as 1/3.
There is a good reason cubic yards are used for measuring concrete.
I think that’s the overall point though; the pompousness of it all.
I emphatically do not measure stuff for a living, but I can use a computer to handle conversions between units on the fly, so that’s not an advantage of metric for me. The issue I have is that, while it’s mathematically simple to convert a millimeter to a meter in my head, I don’t have a good grasp on what those sizes actually mean, whereas at the expense of an additional second or less I can deal in inches, feet, and yards and have a good sense of what those look like superimposed on the world around me.
We tried to a basic physics problem in Imperial units in class one time. Man that sucked.
But I hate travelling to Europe and deal with everyday products in metric units.
lb(f) and lb(m) can get annoying. ESPECIALLY when you have a boss that insists on differentiating the two but doesn’t understand the difference.
When I went to school we did everything in Imperial units. I could do a lot of it in my head or whip it out on paper with ease. Hell, I still measure gunpowder and drugs in grains. We did some parallel solving in metric units so we could do both, but one is not easier than the other. Adan is correct, it is arbitrary and which is best is subjective. A meter is no more 1/10000th pole to equator than a foot is the length of the king’s dick.
Very good Adan. One of the best articles yet. I relate because of the time I went to school, that is when this debate was at its pinnacle.
Old joke dad used to tell: Why don’t women make good carpenters? *holds palms ~4″ apart* Because they’re always told this is six inches.
The main reason I find the metric system easier, at least from a scientific standpoint, is that very basic units that we use to calculate how much stuff we use is based on SI units, converted from metric numbers. This is especially true with electricity: Watts, Volts and Amps are all SI units. In all honesty, though, I can’t think of anybody that isn’t in STEM or in some trade that measures electricity that needs to give a shit about learning the metric system.
Trades? oh my.
BTUs?
Fahrenheit?
PSI?
This right here
Metric units are easier because they are base 10, and that is more natural to us than say a base 8 or otherwise system.
There are 60 seconds to a minute, 60 minutes to an hour, 24 hours to a day. Seems the metric system blew it on base 10 time. And the speed of light in a vacuum is 299792458 meters per second.
I would have 10 hours before noon and 10 hours after noon with 100 minutes each and each minute 100 seconds.
Never thought of time as being metric or otherwise man…
I think the Vernon Vinge book A Deepness in the sky made me consider metric time. Approximately 4 kilosecs in an hour. Approximately 22 metric hours in an Earth standard day. A megasec is about 2 weeks and a gigasec is about 31.5 years.
an uninformed rant based on no research whatsoever
Those Glibs. Always basing everything on the feelz.
Which leads me to a thought. What is the feelz based measurement system?
Cat butt incoming?
Ah, no, a direct quote from the title and a faulty sarcasm detector.
This is why I should never be entrusted with the power of the cat butt.
I tink it was the old Kim du Toit that used to have a rage-o-meter. The highest level was “red-curtain-of-blood”.
The basic unit is one trigger.
I’m Canadian and I approve this message. The metric system never quite caught on with me. The only thing I adapted to was the Kilometer – and even then.
It’s also used as a wedge to point out how ‘backwards’ Americans are.
The kilometer is awkward. Too short for long distances and too long for short distances.
Only when we get down to milimeter and sub-milimeter scale do I tend to start with metric units.
And I wish they’d just stop using liters on soda bottles and call them what they are – funny quarts.
Doesn’t bother me either way. I was in junior high in the early 70s when Canada made the switch, so I’ve thought in both measurement systems ever since, and can convert from one to the other in my head with nary a thought. Freaks my nieces and nephews out. 8^>
*golf clap*
Good article. I never liked when I drove to Mexico the turn off to I-19 S converts to kilometers. I’m not even in Mexico yet, WTF?
Aside from “Let’s be more Euro!” sentiment among lefties, I think most people reject the Imperial system due to the word “Imperial”.
Let’s change the name to Superial.
I’ve tried metric woodworking and it sucks.
With a metric measuring tape you get only two LSBs: the big one and the little one (I refuse to learn their names). The big one is too big to be useful and the small one is too small for some things and too big for others
With my good old ‘Murican tape I can easily switch among inches: fences,lot lines; 1/2 inches planters and other rough stuff; 1/4 inches rough framing ( someone else’s house); 1/8 inch not so rough framing (my house), 1/16 inch trim; and 1/32 for cabinetry (probably use a jig anyway).
I suspect the Imperial system was born of building. It is custom designed for making useful things.
Not necessarily on building things, but the imperial system had its roots in the measurements that were used in various trades. That’s why the system has such strange conversions, feet were never meant to have anything to do with fathoms or miles, they were different measurements for different things that were later unified.
Imperial is bottom up design, and metric is top down. Both are useful in different ways because of that.
It is the easy, logical way to divide things. Cut in half, cut in half again, cut in half yet again.
Scott Adams. Awesome.
https://www.pscp.tv/w/1DXxyOAbAleGM
“Progressives” just have a fetish for standardizing everything on the broadest level possible.
I was talking to a “progressive” once about how the traditional university is obsolete and how we should open up the market to allow more innovative methods of higher education to fill that role. Surprisingly, he didn’t disagree, but he added, “It would need to be standardized, though.”
If you’re a physicist, the metric system is a must. If you’re a chemist, the metric system is useful. If you’re a prog who “fucking loves science!”, the metric system is of no use to you, so stop bitching about how unsophisticated the rubes are because we use inches and feet.
It would only need to be standardized if the market felt the need to standardize it.
I tried to explain that, but he seemed to think that private companies doing college accreditation would be unreliable because of profits or something.
Because we all know that government bureaucrats are never concerned about money and only act out of goodwill towards their fellow man.
Every time I watch Top Gear I can tell that the British government forced them to convert, but Brits still think in terms of gallons and miles. They get excited about car that can go 200 mph, not 300 kph.
Every time I watch
Top GearThe Grand TourThat’s another conversion I do subconsciously.
Lol!
Yea, on weight lifting forums, the Brits are always ragging on Americans for not using the metric system, but they themselves use oddball measurements like “stone” to say how much they weigh.
When I lived in Stockholm in the 90s, I watched a lot of BBC. It always entertained me to see the British weathermen in front of screens with temps in Celsius and wind speeds in km/hr, but they would narrate in Fahrenheit and mph. Similarly, newsreaders would have screens citing kilograms but would talk in pounds and stones.
In my interpretation, it was their stiff upper lip way of saying FU to the Continent/Brussels.
I approve that message.
How come I never hear any demands to switch to the metric system? Whining that the rest of the world no longer uses miles and pounds, on the other hand… Honestly, it’s boring.
Oh yeah? Well, you’re boring! And your measurement system has to approximate as soon as it gets divided by three!
And your mom wears combat boots!
Then of course, there’s the CGS system, which I had to go thru’ as a yoof, before SI units were introduced. I remember the books I was using in science were replaced when I was 12, so in addition to a fat slab of physics, I also had to be re-educated in a bunch of concepts I thought I’d already mastered.
Superficially, it’s metric, but the base units are centimeters, grams and seconds, and as a result, had some very odd derived units such as the biot, dyne, erg, etc., all of which are simply bastardized versions of the far more common modern metric units, skewed by a couple of 10e2.
There’s always some asshat whole use dynes in an equipment spec just for shits and giggles.
And don’t get me started on grads.
I assume you’re referring to that “other” unit of angular distance that is on my RPN calculator but has never been touched.
Useful for surveyors, but not for humans.
our surface tensions specs are in dynes/cm2
This type of “you kids get off my lawn and leave me alone” thinking is a hallmark of a libertarian. I did read the whole thing, and it was great. Nice job!
My favorite piece on here so far. Bravo.
I feel like I have some privilege to check here. Much of my trucking life was spent hauling goods betwixt Canada and the USA, so I’ve had to use both systems since forever. I’ve become very good at doing weight and distance or speed conversions in my head. Almost second nature.
Fun fact –
Despite Canada being ‘officially’ metric, all of your typical building supply manufacturers, such as lumber and drywall, still make all of their products in imperial. It’s all 2×4’s and 4×8 sheets and whatnot. There is not separate lines making anything in metric; especially when 90% of your product is being sold South of the border. Thus, the entire Canadian construction industry, for all intents and purposes, does everything in imperial.
Good point! So true.
There’s no resisting Uncle Sam’s gravitational pull. Money doesn’t just talk, it dictates.
Even in Quebec?
when I saw “a louer” signs in Quebec shopfront windows, the interior areas were always given in square feet (pp) not square meters.
Here in B.C., house areas are specified in both systems. Makes sense, considering the number of foreign (COUGH **Chinese** COUGH) buyers.
Yes.
Thus, the entire Canadian construction industry, for all intents and purposes, does everything in imperial.
Yep, ‘ceptin’ for the building of faceless (i.e., face-frame-free) cabinets for things like kitchens etc. Then all the quality stuff’s System 32 (metric), until you get to the actual widths, heights or depths of the carcasses themselves. Then they switch back to Imperial.
Good times. Takes a REAL MAN to build stuff in Canada. 😉
Count me as the contrarian. Having been inculcated with imperial measurements since birth, I can’t relate to the metric system for any of my typical day-to-day frames of reference and it would be prohibitively inconvenient to change at this point. But If I had my druthers, I vastly prefer a system where everything is divisible on my fingers and toes. Especially when I’m fishing through a toolbox looking for a hex key, combination wrench, drill bit, tap, etc. I couldn’t give a shit that it’s completely arbitrary. Every measurement system is. The Babylonians and their moonbat sexagesimal system are responsible for no end of geometric fuckery to this very day. But as long as we’re picking an arbitrary system, give me one that a retard can use – it suits me.
As far as the political genesis of the metric system, I don’t care about that either. it isn’t as if the imperial system sprung from the loins of liberty. Half of it is just a hodge podge of rules handed down by various monarchs, mostly to upend the local standards in common use so they could screw their subjects on matters of weights and measures for tax purposes. The people who invented any of these systems are long dead. Who cares. Use what you like.
This.
I’d say I agree with this. Metric is clearly easier to use, which makes it superior as far as I’m concerned, but having been raised in the inferior imperial system, it’s what I’m used to and I’m sure I’d have a pain in the ass time switching to metric for everything.
They can pry this box of .357 magnum from my cold, dead hands too.
It’s more fun to give them the box. One bullet at a time.
He only has the ammunition – he’s still saving up to buy the gun.
The model 66 is on order direct from S&W. NRA Instructor pricing.
“First of all, what does that even mean? Seriously, what? The closest thing I’ve found to an answer is that “it’s used by more scientists.”
I know this is semi-tongue in cheek, but in all seriousness, when I’m dealing with surveyors and civil engineers, they’re often working in tenths of a foot.
“17.5 feet” means both seventeen and a half feet and seventeen feet six inches–but that’s only because a half foot is six inches. “17.6 feet” does not mean 17 and a half feet; it means 17 and six-tenths of a foot–because what comes after the decimal isn’t an inch. It’s tenths of an inch.
So, why don’t surveyors and civil engineers, for that matter, move to the metric system rather than imperial?
Because civil engineers and surveyors, unlike other engineering and scientific professions, need to deal with the general public. Their plans need to be read by construction guys and the members of the city council as well as other engineers, so they need a hybrid system both the engineering/scientific world and the general public can use. Doing math with inches and feet is complicated by the fact that there aren’t ten inches in a foot–there are twelve. You could convert back and forth every time you do another calculation, but why make something that’s already a pain in the ass even harder?
Also, the original surveys that set up the township lines were in feet and inches, the legal descriptions on your title are in those terms, too–and for legal purposes you want those to match up with your drawings. Change all that shit to meters, centimeters, and millimeters, and there’s going to be a ton of confusion over things like fences that have already been built. Mistakes that have been made way back in the 19th century have been incorporated into legal descriptions on titles. Change that stuff now? Mass hysteria, cats and dogs living together, real biblical fire and brimstone stuff.
I find the following to be generally true, also. Civil engineers tend to be engineers who are quite capable of communicating with ordinary people. Civil engineering departments in universities will even make civil engineers take public speaking classes–that may even be required by the ASCE for accreditation. Your job as a civil engineer will entail explaining your plans to people who are not engineers. They may not even be city staff. It may be people from the general public who oppose your plan–and you need to be able to answer their objections brought up at a city council meeting. They need to intuitively understand your explanations, and telling them that the street needs to be widened in front of their house by x number of meters simply doesn’t accomplish that.
Civil engineers also need to be able to communicate with other engineers and, sometimes, scientists, too–so they need to be able to convert feet and tenths of a foot to meters easily–without converting inches to meters in the middle of every calculation. Those scientists and other kinds of engineers are sometimes somewhere out on the autism spectrum (descriptive “autism”, for practical purposes) and need everything to be in scientific terms or they’ll go hyper in their diaper. After civil engineers, I think mechanical engineers are probably the easiest to deal with–the ones with the second most people skills. Mathematicians can be okay under certain situations. Electrical engineers are practically unfit for human cohabitation. They’re brains on a stick. You put them in a back office somewhere and take away their phones–so you won’t lose any clients or valuable employees for having interacted with them–and when you need your electrical engineer, you let them out of their cages to solve some problem while you change the their paper in their cages, and then send them back into cryofreeze until they’re needed again.
“17.6 feet” does not mean 17 and a half feet; it means 17 and six-tenths of a foot–because what comes after the decimal isn’t an inch. It’s tenths of [a foot].”
FIXED!
Ken just increased the mass of this thread by a kilodump.
What is the conversion to shit-tons? I learned everything in shit-tons.
Hey now, I used to manage EEs….
No wait, you’re right.
Fuck off, slaver.
(Brain on a stick, reporting back to cryofreezer as ordered.)
My favorite engineering compromise is the fantastic unit “mil” , one thousandth of an inch. When we specify short distances or tolerances, 64ths of an inch and so on get a bit hairy, so we talk about “60 mils”. The CNC operators and machines get it, the clients get it, and I know how many mils I need to keep this voltage from that voltage.
I have had to explain to my technicians that a mil is not slang for a mm.
I work with a guy 15 years older and more experienced than I am, but he has a physics degree and thus no formal training in anything practical. He knows how to run a mean mill or lathe operation though, and how to set the CNC milling machine for so many inch +mils and such. After 10 years I dropped a casual comment about the quasi-metric unit of the “mil” and he had to confess he had previously not known it was a 1000th of an inch.
I kind of wanted to remeasure everything he had previously built for me over the years…
Speaking of mils, how about 6400 of them per circle. (Good for FOs calling for left and right artillery fire adjustment.)
ooh! And the awesome obscurity of cable dimensions. We have AWG (American Wire Gauge), which many people understand pretty intuitively: 12-14 AWG sold for a lot of house wiring, 20-24 AWG for guitars and “medium” circuits, 30 AWG for wirewrapped stuff. So the smaller the number, the bigger the diameter. Until you get to 2 AWG but need bigger. Then it’s not “Zero AWG”, it’s Aught. And the next size up is “2-0” pronounced “Two Aught.” That works until 4-0 “Four Aught” after which comes the joy of the Circular Mil.
There is nothing intuitive about the Circular Mil. Based on linear Mils, you might think you know, but go Wiki that mo-fo and prepare for brain asplode. Better yet is the kcmil, pronounced “Kay-cee-mil” or “”Kay-Cee-Em”, thousand circular mils. And, as God is my witness, that is the standard unit of measure for large capacity power cable. 350 kcm being one of the favorites.
So, if you believe nerdy EEs are the cause of the perpetuation of the unholy metric system, clearly you have not talked to an electric power engineer.
https://hotair.com/archives/2017/09/19/people-still-beating-libertarian-alt-right-pipeline-drum-rant/
Conservatives defend libertarians against accusation of being a ‘pipeline to the alt-right’
Meanwhile, ostensibly ‘libertarian’ publication declares “Perhaps it’s not fair to lay blame for Rothbard the heretic at the feet of the mainline libertarian church”
https://reason.com/blog/2017/09/22/using-negative-collectivist-generalities
Not good
I think you’re being too hard on matt. He makes a better argument than that, and i missed the part where he threw Rothbardians under the bus.
also he linked to this, which i think was a pretty sane-take, worthwhile read.
I didn’t mean to be harsh. I like Matt, I just think the premise should be disregarded outright.
If libertarians have to account for Christopher Cantwell, Richard Spencer, and a hundred other kooks, perhaps the respectable types need to explain the long parade of money-grubbing nullities marching through political media and political power. All the way from Dick Morris and Morris Dees to Tom Daschle, Trent Lott, and the functionaries at the Clinton Foundation. What pipeline produces these, and who is willing to clean it up?
This.
Great article.
+1
I could see a pipeline if the alt-right were remotely libertarian.
There are lots of libertarianish in the alt-right. You just have to go look. I. E. See Vox Day’s 16 points, much of which libertarians would agree.
But know one is going to actually take the the time, because icky maxis.
I’ll read it. Thanks.
The Kochs have had a raging hard on for Rothbard since the 1970s when they were tussling over the proper strategy for libertarianism and the Libertarian party. Any publication that has ever accepted a red cent from them will inevitably shit all over Rothbard and whatever straggling shreds are left of the “paleolibertarian” movement – it’s part of the deal. Mind you, they won the debate even back then, and Rothbard had lost interest in fighting the battle a good decade before he died… 22 years ago. The issue still has to be corpse-fucked on the regular. Cato is probably the worst.
I don’t care what they do with Rothbard’s corpse. it’s throwing Austrian economics under the bus that’s the problem.
I don’t agree with their arguments that property is theft, but they are still valid arguments. They in fact agree with Ayn Rand in that property rights require a government to protect. The burden of proof lies with the anarcho-capitalist to demonstrate the morality of defending one’s “property” in a state-less society.
Again, I don’t agree with them, and think they are in error, but so long as they hold to the non-aggression principle then they are libertarian.
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WakaWaka|9.22.17 @ 12:35PM|#
So socialism is totes fine, but anarcho-capitalists are suspicious. Yeah, I’m starting to think this whole movement is over
The first comment was from brandybuck
Forgot to add quotation marks. Fyi
Probably one of the dumbest contentions I have ever heard in my life.
One groups wants to expand government, but they promise to do this through the non-aggression principle (which negates their whole premise). They’re totally libertarian.
The other group wants no government and the market to replace the activities of government. Prove it.
“Libertarians- making Ted Cruz look like John Galt each day at a time”
An awful lot of people are throwing the word ‘fascist’ around these days. I have yet to see a single one of them define the word.
Most of them probably couldn’t locate Berlin on a map. It’s just a way to shut down opposition.
I’m coming more and more to the recognition that the only way to counter that is simply to say:
Fascist = Socialist + Racist.
Jacob T. Levy and his merry band of statist cunts at the Niskanen Center for the Furtherance of Liberaltarianism can kiss my motherfucking ass. Slapping a “LIBERTARIAN” label on statist policies doesn’t make them libertarian.
Oh, by the way, did you know that we’re an “alt-right offshoot blog”? One of TOS’ lamer new trolls proclaimed it thusly in the comments of that article Just Sayn linked.
And I’d say 60% of the commentators there are socialists. Maybe not in response to that article, but judging from other comments that I’ve read there recently, Reason looks more and more like Nick Sarwark’s wet dream
he even commented!
What else does he have to do? Tom Woods doesn’t even respond to his shit talking tweets anymore.
Wait a minute. If we’re the “alt-right”, then we’re probably Nazi sympathizers, right? Does this mean I have to get rid of my SKS and my Mosin?
Hail Rataxes went into the Reasonable blank space within the first couple of comments they made.
This place is Alt-Right?! Did Free Society, Robert, and Eddie know?
Lewis Carroll would be perfectly at home here these days, writing about modern political and cultural discourse.
Yes, but we’re certified family-friendly!
I didn’t have a problem with Matt’s article per se, but I agree with you that the premise should be trashed. Collectivism as a policy isn’t a part of libertarianism or classical liberalism. Whether or not someone is bigoted is a different issue entirely. And, frankly, since the “alt-right” now apparently includes everyone to the right of Mao, it’s a meaningless distinction. The only value the term has is that when someone uses it you immediately know that nothing that person says will have any value whatsoever. People who consider libertarians or classical liberals or whatever as linked in some fashion with fascism or ethnonationalism or authoritarianism are not going to be convinced otherwise, and engaging in the debate just lends it a legitimacy it doesn’t deserve. It’s better to just let those people screech themselves hoarse than waste any time defending yourself against ridiculous accusations.
Conservatives at National Review and Hot Air just outright rejected the premise that libertarians had anything to do with anything related to ‘white nationalism’ or racism. That is how Reason should have responded, instead of Gillespie’s virtue signalling and Welch’s rationalization of the topic.
“I reject the whole premise of the assertion, because no one who views people as individuals first can view people as representatives of some amorphous group.”
That should be the whole article. Period
The jacket thinks he’s the second coming of Mencken.
If Mencken were to be resurrected as a chicken-shit.
I just eyeball things and call it good.
What I want to know is when we’re going to smooth out the damn calendar. 30 days hath November? I can’t remember that. 10 months, with 6-6 day weeks. Bonus 5 days we get drunk and forget about at the end of the year.
I am intrigued by your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
What is wrong with moons and fortnights?
I don’t really see the need for weeks or months. Just number the days. Say you were born today. Instead of saying your birthday is September 22, 2017, you would say your birthday is 263, 2017.
I also hate astrology.
What has Uranus ever done for ME?!?
It’s a gassy giant.
Ask not what Uranus can do for Steve Smith, Ask what Steve Smith do to Uranus
Julian dating does help with queue times.
Sweet, we can just use Unix time.
Another 10 years to go. Paging John Titor!
Instead of saying your birthday is September 22, 2017, you would say your birthday is 263, 2017.
265, actually. The documents at work are given ID numbers that in part use such dating, so I’ve gotten adept at noticing what number corresponds to what day of the year.
+1 Saturnalia
I know no one signs up for Foreign Affairs “one free article a month”, but you really should.
They have a long (20page/10,000 words) essay up about the relationship between Stalin + Hitler. I’m about halfway through it while eating my lunch, and its very good. All you have to do is sign up for an account, and they mail you about once a month with their ‘headline’ stories. there’s normally only one worth reading anyway, so its sort of a fair deal.
if y’all are too lazy for that, i’ll put a copy of the essay up on a google drive or something if you want.
Didn’t know they did that. Thanks.
I am lazy and hate Google.
Can it be put on archive or mirrored somehow?
It’s Gilmore, he’ll put it in the wrong place anyway
see if this works
It did. Many thanks.
cool thanks
This is awesome. Thank you!
My dad emails me the FA article every week wether I want it or not.
Have you ever read The Chief Culprit by Viktor Suvorov? I’m not sure how much I believe it, but it’s an interesting theory. Suvorov is a former Soviet intelligence officer who argues that Stalin deliberately worked to encourage the Germans to wage war with the ultimate intention of attacking Germany to bring about the final worldwide Communist revolution. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was his strategy, designed to both facilitate German war plans by reassuring them that they had not fear a fight with the USSR, as well as buying him time to build the war machine needed for such a war.
Sounds a lot more ideologically based for Stalin’s motivations than I’ve read was ever the case for him. IIRC, Stalin liked power, and humiliating his enemies, and paranoia.
I seriously doubt Stalin gave two shits about bringing about the worldwide Communist revolution, but did care very much about removing threats to his skin (the various ’37-39 Red Army and other military purges) and threats from outsiders (adding buffer space with the Baltic States and Poland, peace treaties with Japan.)
IOW, it sounds as based in reality as the rest of “Suvorov”‘s other revelations. Like the Defence Council, the GRU cooking a guy alive and showing it to everyone, or that you could look at Lenin’s Tomb during parades and figure out who was more powerful than whom.
Eh, I think Stalin was more ideologically motivated than that even if you think Suvorov is full of shit.
National Interest > Foreign Affairs
“Neocon, Neoliberal, whatever”.
I take both with lots of salt. but NI’s main problem is that they never seem to find an “enemy” they won’t blow absurdly, wildly out of proportion.
e.g. Read anything about Iran or Russia in NI, and you’d be convinced we’re all involved in some mutually-exclusive existential crisis. Its like an elephant graveyard for 1990s russia-hawks and crusty neocons.
Sure, FA has its similar flaws in how its the same for “multilateralist Clintonian micromanaging asshats who think the US+UN have a mandate to solve every problem on the planet ranging from “Water-Access Issues” in Africa to Homophobia in Russia…. Or the odd excuse-making for Benghazi from some fucking serial liar like Mike Morrell… But, as long as you know what you’re getting into, the content is a little more diverse, both topically and ideologically, than NI.
National Interest is more of the realist school of foreign policy. They have Andrew Bacevich on their board of directors and he’s pretty far from a neoconservative.
More than anything I was just giving you grief with the remark
Ever since the Nixon Center took over as publisher, the magazine has retreated from its neoconservative policy. That’s why the American Interest was founded by people who wrote for the National Interest and were upset with its editorial change
I think on the few occasions i check in w/ them, i keep stumbling across things just as boneheaded as when Kristol et al were running the show.
the fact Robert Kaplan has their headline piece right now is sort of what i mean by “graveyard of the 1990s”. He was someone i read a lot back then. Now i find him sort of obtuse.
example from his recent piece:
the fact w still have troops in Afghanistan, Iraq, AND Syria, and that we’re still very much trying to micromanage all of them from afar, seems incidental to him.
And its very odd for a ‘realist’ magazine to ever worry terribly about the ‘spiritual’ zeitgeist of nations.
e.g.
that is, if anything, a clear articulation of the nexus between neoliberal and neocon thinking: that the US is a crucial *moral* actor, whose goodness relies on ending other people’s badness (neocon), or turning all the baddies into people just like us (neoliberal). and if we didn’t have this moral purpose, why, we’d just dissolve into thin, nihilistic air.
what it is not is a sober consideration of what threats the US might pose to others, and how that perceived threat might influence their behavior; which in my view is the ‘realist’ question, very rarely addressed.
In any case, i wasn’t really disputing that one is really any better or worse than the other (FA vs. NI); just that i find myself sometimes hating both for different reasons. I probably read FA more often just because they push stuff @ me.
A roach, a Tallboy, and a Fifth of bourbon.
Case fuckin closed
My peeve about imperial is the dividing of inches into fractions. Design for 7/16 = .4375 well that’s four decimal places and you show that to a machinist and he is flipping his lid. Well then, lets go .44 , I don’t need it that accurate. Now someone else looks at it and doesn’t get you were really meaning 7/16.
Metric works well for drug calculations too. I don’t even know imperial units for drugs. Drams to fish bladders?
I’ll take a lid, man
Sorry, I only have it decagrams.
Grains.
1 lb = 7000 grains
FL Man, I’ve mentioned it here or at TOS before, but one of the funniest metric conversion stories I have is when I was working in a restaurant, about 25 years ago, and we were trying to work through some metric to Imperial conversion for mass. We were hung up on ounces to kilograms, when the gigantic stoner assistant manager instantly blurts out, “An eighth is 3.5 grams!”
Re, distances, the 5/8 ratio about perfectly describes the relationship between the mile and kilometer.
teenagers are very good at that conversion. either in the math club or pot heads. or both!
There is a ton of that misapprehension around, especially in the media.
I get that reporters usually don’t have STEM degrees, and when they do, they forgot most of what they learned, but did everyone fall asleep during significant figures class?
I am looking at my nifty little machinists scale that I paid about a dollar for and on the face it has 1/32 and 1/64 while the back has fraction to decimal conversions for 8ths, 16ths, 32nds, and 64ths but only to three places.
My stepfather was a machinist and had an identical scale in his shirt pocket everywhere he went. I think he even slept with the damned thing.
The metric system is a tool of white supremacy. Don’t give in.
Apparently a whole country is too retarded for the convenience of moving a decimal point.
I’m not saying I am not retarded. I am. Just not so retarded that I can’t figure out how to use the metric system.
Just to be painfully obvious, too.
Look at the effort (and opportunity for mistakes) in converting yards to inches.
9.5 yards*(3ft/yard) * (12 inches/ft) = 342 inches.
Now look at the effort in converting meters to centimeters.
9.5 meters = move the decimal over twice = 950 centimeters.
Point is, in the metric system, once you’ve calculated any unit, you’ve already calculated all the smaller and larger units, too. It’s just a question of moving the decimal.
In imperial measurement, you have to recalculate that stuff every time you change units.
It might have been easier to adopt if they had kept the most basic imperial unit and simply created the metric system based on those central imperial units. What if one meter were the same length as one foot. People already have an intuitive grasp of how long a foot is. They’d have a pretty good idea of how long a tenth of an inch would be, and ten feet wouldn’t have been a problem to grasp either.
I suppose there may have been some confusion about which system you were working in if a meter were the same length as a foot, but if the problem is adoption of the system, then you’ll need to take account of people’s reluctance to embrace a system with which they have no intuitive sense of proportion.
We could be talking about kilopounds or centigallons? That’s the way people would understand it if a meter were the same length as a foot, a kilogram was comparable to a pound, etc.
Yeah, I suspect the metric system was imposed on humanity by electrical engineers–without any consideration of what makes people reluctant to adopt things. If people are reluctant to abandon a system of measurements that they already understand intuitively, then make your new system more intuitive. Well, either that, or you could denigrate them as stupid until they accept your intellectual superiority in matters both quantitative and qualitative.
I am an EE and I still think in inches. 1 inch clearance distance holds off 10 kilovolts in air. Easy peasy.
Triple digits are hot. 30 degrees is cold. Negative numbers are really fucking cold.
Take your metric and shove it. It’s 21C today, whatever the fuck that means.
You just need to open your mind to the elegance of fractional degrees centigrade.
70 degrees?
This is the silliest complaint of all, about temperature. Celsius rules, Fahrenheit drools.
Water freezes at zero, boils at 100. Easy peasy.
A wise man amongst the glibs. And from Florida of all places.
Hey, Mr. Wizard: If it’s that important to you, why don’t you just use Kelvin?
^This guy gets it. Kelvin’s where it’s at. 273K is on the coooool side of the pillow.
And recognize a “lord”.? No sir! Regicide is my favorite crime.
Let me put it this way – Farenheit is anthropocentric, Celcius is hydrocentric.
100 is hot for a human, 0 is cold.
Just because water thinks 216 is hot and 32 is cold, doesn’t make it magically more applicable to how the human sees the world.
For human purposes, Fahrenheit is more accurate.
What does that even mean? 36.6 Celsius is as accurate as 98.6 or whatever.
What it means is that it conveys a more precise idea of what the temperature outside is.
50s = wear a jacket
60s = a bit chilly
70s = comfortable
80s = warm
90s = hot
100s = stay inside with the AC on
0 = ok this is pretty cold. need a jacket and more
10s = jacket
20s= maybe that jacket gets unzipped
30s = fuck yes flannel time
40s = t shirt time is here!
anything higher than 70? oh god why is it so hot?
to be fair, this is how I act during ski season. by the time fall hits, I only think 80 is too hot.
It’s a beautiful, warm, sunny day outside. And it’s 21 degrees above freezing. Does that make any sense to you?
It probably does, so I can’t help you.
21 is one of my favorite temperatures, actually. Not to warm not to cold.
21 is the best snow temp.
Evidently you aren’t snow miser.
I believe that means its pretty nice out.
But we can’t know for sure, can we? I mean, not without a calculator.
Individual Celcius degrees are also too big, being 9/5ths of what they should be…
A calculator? Walk outside, remove your pants. If your balls start to shrivel and your dick looks like snake wearing a turtleneck its cold. Problem solved.
Way back in the 90s, I use to travel to Moscow. The information age hadn’t exactly crossed the Russian border yet. So basic information was hard to get sometimes.
The hotel staff would leave a note on the table next to the bed when they came in for turn-down service providing the forecast for the next day. Typically it was just the high and low temperature, but good to know in January. So they would a note that the low temp would be 25 and the high would be 10.
A bit confusing for a foreigner, but soon you would know what the Russian know. It’s fucking January, so no need to waste ink on negative signs.
It means it is 210 degrees Milligrade.
30 is hot
20 is pleasing
10 is not
0 is freezing
There ya go you now know what celsius means to your every day life.
Totally neutral on the imperial vs. metric bigotry scale. Enjoyed reading this rant immensely. The imperial foot and its inches subdivision are highly intuitive, smooth system that works with division by factors of 2, 3, 4, and 6 that is very useful for practical trades such as carpentry. Metric is far more convenient for manipulating various SI units in the sciences, but anyone that seriously needs to complain about having to convert from arcane imperial units into metric, is really just making an argument for laziness and moaning about conversion processes. Fact is that you do a shitload of conversion between units in SI, where metric is often useful for fuck all when you need to do some bullshit with 4π*10-7 farads/meter capacitance of free space or talking about the 120π characteristic impedance of free space…da fuck is that shit even supposed to be, yo?
Carpentry is a big one.
If I build shelves or cabinets using centimeters, it’s going to look stupid. Like a Peugeot.
Or cool like a BMW. Lets face it when it comes to automobiles, you USans don’t have a leg to stand on
^This guy gets it. American basic consumer autos are shit.
1968 Dodge Charger. End of discussion.
C’mon man, that was like 50 years ago. God damn.
Still is the pinnacle of gorgeous vehicle design.
Besides, while BMW has had some beautiful designs over the years, their current models don’t really fit that description. In any case, I wouldn’t say that BMWs are basic consumer autos.
I blame the bad looks on fighting commies and regulations.
seriously, why did we build those concrete cubes during the cold war? that’s architecture?
chevy square body pickups?
stingrays?
Dude, all that permittivity talk is getting me hot.
*charges dielectric*
Don’t get too hot, I ejaculated out the incorrect free space capacitance after all. Everyone knows I should have written the highly intuitive and correct quantity of ~1/(36π)*10-7 farads/meter.
::self flagellates like these guys::
*approaches catastrophic voltage breakdown, shoots plasma*
10^-9. I’ll stop now.
People think easier in base 10. It is that simple. I assume its mostly what you are used to. For me your system seems just as silly as mine to you.
And also, real men squat and deadlift kilograms. Pounds are for wusses and I’ll fight anyone who says anything differently. If you buy me a plain ticket to the US that is. Also I need a visa.
The plates at my gym have both units, so really I’m lifting twice as much.
I am sure Warty can’t squat kilograms no matter how many pounds
Wait wuh?
Your fair country does not allow my third world ass in without special permission and about 100 bucks or two
That’s a bunch of bullshit right there. EU membership really isn’t the silver bullet I imagined it would be.
We are getting visa free to Canadia from 2018 as far as I know. The US still don’t want us, although we kissed plenty of ass and supported anything you people wanted us to support. Well not us, I am, not a collectivist, but you know what I mean. I guess I am reduced to fighting Rufus and Titor . I’ll fight both of them with one hand tied behind my back.
I get it. After my Hongkongese wife was granted permanent residency, we tried to get visas for the in-laws to visit not long afterward. Wasn’t happening. Net assets and bank account balances were too “illegally immigrantey” for the interviewing officer to even grant the visas. We’ll try again one of these days since she’s been a citizen for years now.
There are 5 EU member States that aren’t in the visa exception program; Romania happens to be one of them. Theoretically, since they are listed as a “roadmap” country they should be admitted soon. Unfortunately, that is the bureaucratic definition of soon, so someone in the next three decades or so.
The silliest thing is they want me to say which hotel I’m staying at on my visa application. How the fuck should I know? I wanna get the visa and then I plan the trip.
Just make a refundable reservation at a Marriott or Hilton chain hotel in the general area you want to go to & dates you want. After visa is approved, cancel reservation.
That’s what I did for my Chinese 10 year visa. Make refundable plane & hotel bookings. Printed out receipts. Canceled all and sent them in to the visa agent to take to the Chinese consulate. I’m assuming the US might actually check on your reservations because they’re more picky than Chicom bureaucrats about “doing their job” so that’s I’d wait until canceling the hotel after issuance.
That’s overkill. I don’t need to have a reservation. I just need to put the name of any hotel on the application.
Oh, well that’s even easier.
Brazil needs a visa too, which sucks because Brazilians love coming to Orlando. I need their revenue to keep my taxes low.
That’s a quid pro quo situation. Brazil makes it very difficult to get a temporary work visa for Americans, even if it’s to visit your own plant.
Did not know that.
When I was at the Mouse in January a few years ago, it was LOADED with South Americans on summer break.
I enjoy their festive songs while waiting in line.
I’ll get you a plain ticket. For a fee.
Using kettlebells regularly has helped me develop a pretty good sense for how much kilograms weigh. Granted, 16kg, 24kg, and 32kg, but still.
In light of getting kicked out of my current digs to make room for brother’s baby #2, I’m considering a tiny efficiency close to campus with no stove. Any of you tried to make that work?
Do you know how to cook? If not, why pay for a stove?
I love to cook, so it’s a dilemma. I’ve made do without a stove before, used a toaster oven, but losing the range is a pain.
You can still go over there to mess up the kitchen, right?
Just get a hot plate to go with the toaster oven. That what I used to do in my barracks room in Okinawa – flagrantly violating the rules, of course. Hell, I had a deep fryer for a while on top it. Unfortunately, the deep fryer is what ultimately got us busted. The delicious aroma of my fried chicken drew the attention of the DNCO and the jig was up. Still, that was months of good eating.
You weren’t able to bribe him with chicken? Couldn’t have been that good.
Wasn’t any left – it was a Fry Daddy Junior, which meant you could only cook 3 or 4 pieces at a time, and my roommate and I had already scarfed it down by the time there was a knock at the door.
Ah… poor bastard.
This kind of portable convection oven got me through dorm living.
What campus?
UNM.
I try to keep my dreams small.
Did you say UNM?
Hah! So weird.
The lady has all grown up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZ9FYDECk2I Though you’d think someone trying to get past her Spelling Bee performance would choose something other than a Scrabble shirt to wear.
I’ve never used the app she wrote, ResearchMatch. NIH Clinical Center uses it, so I guess it’s not bad?
UNM? Well, you’re at least near some really tasty food. Mmmmmm, pork adovada and Blakes Lotaburger.
How tiny? Give dimensions in decimeters please.
200sqft43 decimeter^2ahhh, suitable for a family of ten Vietnamese immigrants
It sounds like you’re describing what used to be called a “dorm”.
Yeah, on second glance it’s a dorm room with its own bathroom. If I didn’t prefer eating at home I’d probably love it.
How much is a meal plan in the cafeteria?
Back when I was a yute, it came out to less that 3 bucks a meal, with unlimited cereal, salad bar, and ice cream machine.
The scrambled eggs were prison style but plentiful.
” tiny efficiency close” – but where will you store your orphans?
I just realized it hasn’t even got a sink outside the bathroom. Never mind that. Back to the search!
You could always try this
This is a slippery slope.
If we switch to metric, next, our street signs are going to look stupid and our fire engines are going to sound gay.
But you will have better baked goods
A pâtisserie on every corner, preferably with a nice selection of macarons? Almost sounds worth it.
Does me no good – I’m diabetic, I can’t eat much in the way of baked goods anyway.
But you will have better baked goods
What’s a baker’s dozen in metric? It better not be ten rolls…
Police sirens that sound like this, or a braying donkey? I think the choice is clear.
Just to make everyone know where I stand on all the Glib schisms: pro thin crust pizza, light lagers, crunchy peanut butter, metric system, progressive rock, whole wheat bread, national borders.
Anti Steven Seagal movies and the smell of perms.
You are half dead to me.
Zombie!
Zombitarians are for smaller government, lower taxes, and non-coerced braaaaaains.
whole wheat bread
That’s racist.
this is going to become our version of the “him/his” thing i see on peoples profiles on twitter and instagram.
lager/piss water
So I take it we all agree that Steven Seagal movies suck more Ass than the poor bar stool stuck with the burden of ssupporting OMWC?
Is there pineapple on your pizza?
Pineapple on pizza in an abomination
No stated position on circumcision?
Anti circumcision. Whether a man gets his cock chopped on should be his decision.
What does the metric system get us? The Gimli Glider, that’s what.
It isn’t a device for getting Dwarves off mountaintops?
Nice.
This error happens so rarely, we didn’t put it in the training materials. But it’s so bad we made the alert impossible to ignore.
I think I was in that design review.
They immediately searched their emergency checklist for the section on flying the aircraft with both engines out, only to find that no such section existed.
Should have checked the falling manual.
Wow, that is a wild story.
At least they simulated a gravity drop during training.
I knew about this event, but I hadn’t realized that it was a dead-stick landing with no instrumentation.
It really helped that the Captain used to fly sailplanes. IIRC, (I think it was covered in a Garrison article in Flying magazine) best gliding speed for greatest distance (as opposed to greatest duration of flight) is something like 15% above stall, and this relationship oddly works across a wide variety of airplane types and planforms.
Which would mean that a 767 stalls at about 190 knots clean, which seems rather high.
You know what, good: I’m ready for scorched earth primaries next year. This just helps keep the possibility of that open:
I hope whatever he has is painful. Guy really needed to be voted out after the Keating mess.
The seniority system in Congress is responsible for the voters rationally not kicking a lot of these old shitbirds to the curb.
We can do better working together… What a tool.
Yeah, the last time he did that we got McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform, a direct assault on the first amendment.
Fuck you John. Go home.
I am starting to think the R’s are just as oblivious as the D’s. A lot of those dolts are going to get their asses fired. Any genuine conservatives that are considering getting into politics…next year is going to be one hell-of-a-good opportunity.
A lot rides on what happens in Alabama on Tuesday. If Roy Moore’s the nominee, like I hope, you will see a bunch of well-funded, well-targeted primary challenges in the House and Senate.
I really wonder what would happen if Trump wanted to make an off-shoot party for Trump conservative-ish people—a la the Reform Party, but within the Republican Party—and ran those candidates in GOP primaries? I think he’d do a lot better than people’d think.
Steve Bannon and Breitbart are planning on something like that right now, actually. They don’t have a seal-of-approval stamp to designate their choices yet, but they really want to become anti-establishment kingmakers.
Come tumor. Get off your Ass and do humanity a favor.
I thought he and Lindsey were deeply in love? How could he do this?
Like many elderly demented, lashing out in pain at loved ones.
Oh, fuck it. John, I hope you die before you do any more damage in Congress.
Why is everyone upset about this?!?
First, the bill was a shitty bill. It made many of the worst element of Obamacare permanent.
Second, Obamacare was shitty precisely because it was crafted behind closed doors through an opaque process that was designed to prevent people opposed to it from having the time and organization to have their voices heard and arguments considered.
Third, McCain is correct that laws that are produced through a normal, deliberative process tend* to be less destructive and more widely palatable.
I understand that McCain is, in general, a colossal shitheel, and I remain glad that warmongering crankypans never got into the oval office. But that doesn’t mean that here he did a bad thing.
* I forgot to not that “tend” means something very different than “are”. 😉
I measure everything in Smoots anyway, even volume and mass. Oliver doesn’t seem to mind…
My truck is entirely metric, except for the speedometer, which doesn’t work anyway.
Not Adahn, you just blew my fucking mind. Seriously. Great article.
We already have the basis of the dozenal system in our language (dozen, gross, great gross) and Glibs of a certain age may remember when multiplication tables ran up to 12. Those of you with rugrats can let me know if this is still a thing, but freaking muppets were able to recognize the superiority of the dozenal system. Even metric-loving Eurotards are starting to clue in; though the specific example in that video is also chock-full of existence bias. Yes, you could keep Arabic numerals and add a couple of symbols, but it really would be better to replace all of the numerals so it would be obvious what system was being written. ‘
I completely agree with this. The funny part is that changing the math over to a dozenal system would have made much more sense than switching the system of measurement over to decimal, since three is a commonly recurring number in nature and human affairs. We only really ever use five because its half of ten. And we only have a base ten system because of an accident of human anatomy.
Good point. In a previous thread, weren’t we talking about being a dictator eentitlesyou to a harem of a dozen Philippine teenagers?
If I’m a dictator I’m going for a gross of Eastern Europeans but different strokes y’know?
Do you need a porn czar? Where do I apply?
You can test out all the potential actresses to make sure they are acceptable.
It’s almost like you don’t care that there’s a candidate with experience in the area 🙁
I like the ‘Murrican system for height and weight of individuals, driving distance and outside temperature. Metric is good for everything else. See, peace is possible in the Middle East.
*Ahem* I believe you forgot one of the most superior categories of Imperial measurements: drinking. Even the metricized anglosphere admits that the imperial system (base unit = pint) is superior in this instance.
RE: The Marxist/Feminist Slut from Morning Lynx, OT but since I try to avoid necroposting.
Does she realize that the Soviet Union (the most faithfully executed Marxist society to date) was *extremely* sexually repressed and she would have been gulagged for acting out her sluttish tendencies? Promiscuity was considered a mental illness. Just thought I’d chime in on that one. But, I wouldn’t expect intellectual consistency, rationality, or a room temperature IQ from a self-proclaimed Marxist.
The false notion of scarcity.
In her screed she outright denies reality. Even stupid people dont have her kinds of problems. She is delusional, that is all. Nuts.
Also, in the ussr you didn’t get gulaged for sluttery, you got gulaged for accusations of sluttery.
And gullaged for competency
Yeah, but everyone knows the Soviet Union wasn’t real Marxism! If it was real Marxism as practiced by feminist sluts, everything would have been totes different.
Maybe she would enjoy the Drawings from the Gulag.
Anyone who doesnt think communists and apologists for communists aren’t evil should see that.
Don’t think for one minute that the ones we have here assaulting people in the street are not the same kinds of monsters, they are. Their preferred philosophy really isnt anything other than an anti-human screed to start with. What kind of crazy would choose that?
Consider the Obama administration using the power of the government to go after his political enemies, investigating people instead of investigating crimes. It is a complete subversion of our system, the hallmark of totalitarian regimes and tells me a lot about how they think. This should scare the living shit out of any sane person.
By the way, i really liked the style of this piece.
i think it should be encouraged; if i had to choose between painstakingly organized/argued/crafted writing (see: Eddie), and off-the-cuff rants? (which still hit the right points?) Give me the rants every time. They inform and entertain. I think its the best way to approach the format of the ‘open blog’; not take the whole formal-composition part so seriously.
I think we need both. There needs to be some intellectual and empirical backbone here, but I just can’t seem to muster the will to undertake such a task. I will say that my favorite part of TOS was the fun, happy-anarchic Independents threads, which your fashion reviews were a staple of.
Someone shanghai GMSM and Kibby and get them here!
I haven’t read the full article OR the comments, so I’d like you all to read my 2 cents. Metric forever!!!!!
That is all.
Ban him. Now.
wankels were all designed in metric. that’s why.
When your Wankel rotor is a decagon, get back to me.
Anybody here have to deal with the centimeter, gram, second unit system in some German power plants? It is the ultimate metric idiocy.
Astrophysics uses cgs by and large. It doesn’t really make that much of a difference because the numbers are already so enormous what’s a few extra decimal places? But I always thought that was really stupid. Yeah, let’s measure a parsec in cm. SMH.
See below. Nuke Engineering is primary done in cgs.
It’s easier for me to think about when thinking about radiation safety issues. Grays and Sieverts just don’t resonate with me the way Rads and Rems do.
Can we all agree that horsepower is at least weird?
I measure speed in fathoms/fortnight.
Orphan power, instead?
It is weird and frustrating, and I need more of it.
like, twice the number of horses.
Double that again.
What the fuck is wrong with weird?
GREAT rant Not Adahn!
You sorta mentioned it, but the two major metric systems are mks and cgs
Thats meter-kilogram-second and centimeter-gram-second.
Because, as you sorta point out, using a meter-gram-second system is stupid.
And notice which part is consistent…the part in base 60.
Also, my favorite all time unit of measure is the barn. Which is 10E-24 square centimeters.
The great part about it is that when you are using it, you almost always are multiplying by Avogadro’s number, which in nuclear physics is .602E24, not the silly 6.02E23 that you learn in chemistry.
See, notice what happens? The 24 and -24 cancel out! Cool, huh?
the first thing i wanted to respond with\
that is actually pretty cool though. barns.
Legend is it got its name when someone said that it was very tiny and Enrico Fermi replied, “Too a neutron, its as big as a barn.”
Not true, but still a cool story.
Fermi notoriously spoke with bad grammar.
TOO.
ugh.
Whaddya expect from a friggin wop?
Proof that even euro-weenies prefer the english system.
What are the dimensions of a soccer goal?
It’s futbol!
/euro-weenie
Fußball.
And the dimensions of the goal (and the boxes and penalty spot were made long before Britain switched to metric.
It’s funny to me when UK folk use “football” instead of “soccer”, since soccer is such a British way of referring to it (association rules football = soccer …it’s a good think it didn’t end up as “asser”). Plus, the rules were basically determined by the British (as robc notes with goal size), so they shouldn’t use an exonym.
Pressure / Vacuum measurement have a slew of alternative units Metric and Imperial.
So you have gauge and absolute units:
mmHg
microns (umHg)
inHg
Torr, mTorr, (my favorite) 1mmHg = 1Tor
PSI
Barr / mBarr
Pascal
PSI gauge or PSI absolute?
Our vacuum specs for vacuum systems are in mmHg. For exhaust systems, they are in inches of water.
My current body temp is about 310.15 Kelvin. So there!
Kevin who?
That’s HAWT!
Base 10 sucks, Base 12 sucks, Hex for the win.
Any system that can’t handle threes can fuck right off.
Ecce Octal! FTW!
I have read the wiki page for Bar like 8 times, and my brain hurts. what the fuck is it?
Great article Not Adahn. I really enjoyed it.
<3
Can we get this guy a friggin prize? That’s gold.
Also, America is going metric… inch by inch.
I remember as a kid seeing the speed limit signs in mph, and then in metric underneath. Then eventually in the mid 80s or so they just gave up and went to all imperial.
Rule Britannia.
One more centralized bureaucracy rant on this topic: Our military customers (for example, TARDEC) require right in the contracts that all our engineering drawings be done in Metric. So we do, even though all the machine shops work in inches and their drill bits are in inches, etc. And then we present designs at customer design reviews; without exception, as we present info in Metric as required by contract, all the customers want to know is “How much is that in pounds?” “How big is that in inches?”
Why do we bother? Nobody wants the metric, and it just leads to rounding errors to go back and forth. But hey, gov’t and stuff.
At least in engineering college they frequently gave us problems in mixed units so we had it well-drilled into us to go back and forth and be careful about units. Thank goodness for a good ol’ land grant university education.
OK, one more.
I’m sending that to my MechE friends.
I always maintained that drugs were a government plot to force kids to learn the metric system.
But srsly, the consistency is super handy. Tell me you have 1.67 liters and I know what it weighs, 1.67 kg or 1670 grams. And it’s 1670 cc or 1670 ml.
OTOH, tell me you have a gallon and… well, I happen to know it’s around 8.3 pounds, but most people would have to look it up.
“Tell me you have 1.67 liters and I know what it weighs, 1.67 kg or 1670 grams.”
If it’s water, yes.
At 32F and pure, too.
More useful to me is that a pint of water weighs a pound. Makes cooking conversions much more intuitive, and if you put on your best Frank N Furter accent, you can hear that pound and pint have the same origin.
Knowing what 1.67 liters of water weighs doesn’t do me much good when I need to know what 1.67 liters of compressed oxygen weighs.
A foolish consistency….
Or 350F feed water pump discharge water.
You are many things, but NOT an organic chemist. Of course, I’m not either. But the only thing I work with that has a density within 1% of water is water. And when I care about the density of water, I care about it so much that I have to check a temperature/density table.
Interestingly, (my) lab chemicals are always sold by volume whereas production chems are always sold be weight.
” Repeat after me: Nature hates you and wants you to die.”
Sounds like nature and progressives are natural allies.
No love for the NM? C’mon now. 360 deg in a circle/Equator. Divide each degree into 60 mins, and each minute in 60 seconds. I don’t remember all the maths but it boils down to 1 min = 1 NM which boils down to about 2000 yards based on the circumference of the earth. Give or take. I think it is 6004 ft or something. I may have killed those brain cells so I could be wrong.
Grumpy old German Capt I worked for: ‘If you are aiming for an island and use nothing but dead reckoning and one noon shot a day to get there and you see land on the day you expect to see land it is probably the island you were aiming for. If not, you will eventually figure it out.’ (paraphrased)
Technically, a nautical mile is defined as a minute of latitude, not longitude (the equator is longitudinal). However, the Earth is not a sphere and so there’s more difference between a minute of latitude near the poles and a minute of latitude near the equator than there is between a minute of latitude and a minute of longitude both near the equator. That having been said, the difference is less than 1% in any case, so it doesn’t really matter in practice.