An extra something, is my point. It doesn’t simplify the process, it adds a new complication.
The color temperature (in K) tells you what color the light is. The candela and/or lumen rating tells you how bright the light bulb is. That is not a complication, just two separate pieces of information.
Horsepower is hard to figure out.
I think “stone” is useful when you need to weigh something but dont need to be exact since “stone” is about 10 us pounds. So 20 stone is around 200 pounds and I guess that could be between 190-220.
A “standard” stone is supposed to weigh 14 pounds, but I agree that outside the US and UK nobody really uses pounds and moreover not stones, tods, sacks, etc.
Never underestimate the desperation of a crossword puzzle constructor. You see the rare units and prefixes all too often.
Everytime I wear shoes.
It adds choice.
Incandescent bulbs could only produce warm (reddish) white light, so that’s all you got. Other than novelty bulbs with colored glass, you didn’t have a choice of color.
LEDs can be made to produce pretty much any color. So now you have a choice of colors. Low color temperature (~3000K) means warm light, more like incandescent bulbs. High color temperature (~5000K) means a pure white light, more like sunlight or conventional fluorescent bulbs. You generally want a low color temperature for homes, especially bedrooms. Higher color temperatures are better for offices and workshops.
Of course it’s a complication. For any given lamp in my house I have to search through all the bulbs in the shop (which appear to arranged in no logical order) for one which is:
[ol]
[li]The right type, AND[/li][li]The right physical size, AND[/li][li]The right wattage, AND[/li][li]The right shape, AND[/li][li]The right fitting, AND[/li][li]The right brightness, AND NOW[/li][li]Just the right shade of white[/li][/ol]
And because I’m in a real world shop, which doesn’t have every bulb in existence, every new variable on the list only increases the likelihood that they won’t stock that specific combination.
And every lamp in my house (apparently out of sheer perversity) seems to need a different bulb. The lamp next to me as I type this takes two entirely different bulbs. Why, for god’s sake?
Look — I’m a simple man, with simple needs. I just want to be able to turn on a light when it gets dark, so I can see where I’m going. I don’t NEED another piece of information to record and recall and — presumably — attempt to coordinate throughout the multifarious multitude of different bulbs, of various types and manufacturers, around the the house.
I get that. I really do. I understand what colour temperature is, and how it relates to lightbulbs, and LEDs in particular. And in an ideal world, I can see the value.
But in the real world, which is where I have to live, I’m not about to replace every bulb in the house with colour-matched LEDs, even if such a thing were possible (which I suspect it isn’t) and convenient (which it certainly isn’t).
It’s not as if incandescent bulbs matched perfectly either. Halogen bulbs have higher color temperature than regular incandescent bulbs. 100W bulbs have slightly higher color temperature than 60W. If any lights are on a dimmer, the color temperature changes a lot when you adjust the brightness.
With LEDs, as long as you stick to the lower end of the color temperature range, they match as well as various incandescent bulbs did.
Saturday Night Live did a bit about converting the old 26-letter alphabet, to the improved 10-letter “decibet.” I can’t find a clip, but there’s a transcript here.
No, no; it is the millihelen. Shame!
No, no; it was corrected in the very next post. Shame!
Just earlier this morning when I used my 10mm wrench to remove a 6X20X1mm bolt. My 3/8 wrench didn’t quite fit. I also used my 17mm to check the ft-lbs on a nut. I set the air pressure in bar. Most anyone that has a tool set has at least a few metric wrenches.
Except for those that did. Most school track distances are metric. Soda and many alcohol bottles are metric.
I never thought about it but now I want one.
Some soda bottles, but not all. I’m looking at a bottle right now labeled as "20 oz (1.25 pt) 591 ml)
So it’s a 20 oz bottle that’s labeled in pints and milliliters as well.
I kind of suspect without any actual proof, that the US is metric where it counts, or at the very least, decimalized.
For example, the military is pretty much metric, with the exception of aviation and the Navy, where their use of knots, feet and nautical miles is in keeping with international convention, rather than some weird US holdout.
And surveying is done in decimal feet (i.e. tenths of feet) which is not quite metric, but a lot easier to deal with also.
A lot of it is kind of neither here nor there; I’m sure that my local grocery store’s deli could very easily flip a switch or make a menu choice and show me the weight of my corned beef in metric. I’d bet that most modern digital scales probably go one further and can show in grams, hectograms or kg.
And I’m not sure what the LED light kerfuffle is about; you have maybe one extra option that you didn’t have in the incandescent days- i.e. color.
Otherwise it all tracks back to the old incandescent days- a LED bulb of whatever size/shape is going to be within a certain band of brightness for the equivalent wattage, and all you really have to worry about that’s new is whether you’re getting one of basically 3 colors - daylight, bright white or soft white (from blue to red essentially).
Everyone has always had to figure out size, shape and wattage, and the only difference with LEDs is color temp, which is almost always soft white, unless someone just bought bulbs willy-nilly, or intentionally bought something else.
Has no one pointed out that Volts Watts are SI units, which you’ve probably been using since you were small?
actually, if you go to liquor store, you see liter not quart or gallon; now grocery stares use quart, gallon for milk, etc
This discussion requires at least a jeroboam.
And don’t forget that US Customary units are not the same as Imperial units; 1 US gallon = 3,78 litres; 1 Imperial gallon = 4,55 L…
While on the subject of Imperial units, let’s note that the pound/shilling ratio has hardly been constant. In 1527 King Henry VIII standardized the silver penny at ⅓ of a troy pennyweight, so that 60 shillings worth of coins were minted from one troy pound of sterling silver. By 1601 a troy pound yielded 62 shillings of silver coins.