Likewise, when an adjustment was made in converting inches to millimeters so there weren’t so many damn numbers after the decimal, it was the inch that was jiggered.
On the subject of different “pounds” it may be interesting to note that during the reign of King Henry VIII, 20 silver shillings made up one “pound” of money, but 60 silver shillings were actually minted from each troy pound of sterling silver. This was not due to any confusion about weights or measures, but because English authorities had found it convenient to gradually devalue their money.
By the death of Queen Elizabeth the Royal Mint was producing 62 shillings per pound.
Nitpick: There are actually TWO standard inches:
[ul][li] The International Inch, which is equal to 2.5400000 centimeters.[/li][li] The Survey Inch, insisted on by — Guess Who? — the United States of America. One meter is equal to 39.370000 of these survey inches.[/li][/ul]
The Earth’s equatorial circumference is something like 1577846357 international inches, if my arithmetic is correct, but 1577843201 American survey inches. The conversion error, exactly 2 parts per million, is enough that accurate or long-distance surveyers will need to be concerned.
Just as U.S.A. throws its weight around — all banks all around the world are required to determine whether customers have green card, etc. and file required W-9 forms; countries are not allowed to buy Persian oil without U.S. permission; etc. — that I’ll bet surveyers all around the world are using the American Inch rather than good old 2.54000000.
How much error is there in measuring the circumference of the Earth, what with mountains and things?
Just across the street in fact, the Next Door Neighbours of The Beast live in 664 and 668.
I’m not sure what you’re asking here. The Earth is not a perfect sphere anyway; it’s an oblate spheroid. It bulges more at the equator due to centrifugal force from spinning.
As far as mountains go, if the Earth were reduced to the size of a billiard ball it would meet the international smoothness specification, all the way from Marianna’s Trench to Mount Everest.
It’s a Fox staple. Gretchen Carlson used to do it too; I recall a late show montage of her mispronouncing words often to show how home-spun she was, real salt-of-the-earth type, just like her viewers, don’cha know… but she was her class valedictorian, went to Stanford and studied at Oxford. :rolleyes:
Due to the embargo, people couldn’t import American computers into the Soviet Union. So, if you wanted a good model, what could you do? Reverse-engineer and clone it, of course.
When doing this, the stories go, some manufacturers took an inch to be 2.5 cm (so pins would be placed 2.5 mm apart, etc.), because that’s pretty close, right? This worked OK some of the time, but was the cause of some mysterious bugs when they started to increase the clock speed.
Or steal one. I was introduced to someone who had worked in a secret lab in the Armenian SSR where they interfaced a stolen IBM 360 or 370 to modern peripherals (which they could buy.) They did this by adding microcode to the mainframe, and he used some of my papers to help do this job.
Back in the '70s and early '80s you’d get postcards from Eastern Europe asking for copies of papers, I guess because they were not allowed Xerox machines. I guess this was why microprogramming was so popular in Eastern Europe.
I should think that comparing the diameter in inches vs centimeters would be meaningless.
I did not explain my question well; an oblate spheroid has an equator.
I’ve personally heard a doctor telling to patient her temperature in Farenheit in a NY hospital. Maybe internally they use Celsius but I’m quite convinced that to patients they talk in Farenheits.
At my old hospital we used centigrade, where I work now we use Fahrenheit.
James Burke – the Connections guy – used to show up in San Jose for PBS station KTEH’s fundraisers; he loved Silicon Valley. He got his start as the BBC science reporter covering Apollo and later, Apollo-Soyuz flights. He told how he’d had a conversation with the head of the Soviet space program and he asked the guy technologically speaking, what did he fear most about the West. The answer was that if someone were to invent a computer that could fit on a desktop* so all engineers could have one, “With the West’s huge talent pool and freedom of information access, I don’t see how we could keep up.”
That story was told in 1985, a few years before the USSR collapse.
*This was in 1975 when there were hobbyist computers like Altair but before the TRS-80, never mind PCs.
Back when I was in elementary school (late 70s, early 80s), there was a half-assed effort afoot to convert the US to the metric system. I remember, for example, highway signs telling me that St. Louis was both 100 miles and 161 kilometers away. Or my math textbook giving us word problems in kilograms.
The problem, however, is that these efforts at teaching Americans the metric system just resulted in confusion. By teaching Americans, for example, that a kilogram is 2.2 pounds, you’re just giving him another layer of information to have to take in. A layer of information complicated by the fact that he already knows a perfectly reasonable way of measuring weights. So instead, those highway signs should have simply said that St. Louis was 161 kilometers away, and get used to thinking in kilometers.
Similarly, rather than teaching me that a kilogram was 2.2 pounds, my textbook should have left pounds out of the equation and simply compared a kilogram to something more relevant; a pair of shoes, for example, or a small watermelon, or something.
Long story short: if the US is going to go metric, over the objections of jingoistic proclamations of American exceptionalism and the system’s origins in the anti-Jesus French Revolution, the government MUST go whole-hog, all at once, not gradually, and ditch the imperial system in the process. Put up highway signs (distances, speed limits) in kilometers, and kilometers ONLY. Car manufacturers will follow suit and start putting only metric on the speedometers. Then gas stations will start selling gas by the liter. And so on and so on.
Canada, or Ontario at least, changed all its road signs over one weekend in September 1977. The signs were not replaced; they just put big stickers with new numbers over the existing numbers. There were also little tabs added to the edge of the existing signs that said “km” (for distance signs) or “km/h” (for speed signs) as appropriate, to let people know the sign had been changed.
Later, of course, new signs were made in metric and if necessary placed at appropriate metric distances, but AFAIK they didn’t move existing ones. A sign that says “Main St. 500m 
” doesn’t have to be exactly 500.000 metres from the exit
My father also got little stickers with km/h numbers to stick on the speedometer of his car. (The odometer remained in miles). Newer cars were in km and km/h, of course. For the longest time, Canadian speedometers had km/h prominent and mph as a supplement for crossing the border, but lately I’ve seen cars (mostly German ones) with km/h only. I’m not sure whether you can flip a switch and put it in mph, or what.
Even now, on back roads, you occasionally find an ancient maximum-speed sign with the sticker wearing thin, letting you see the old 35 (mph) number under the 50 (km/h). But the “km” tabs at the top of distance signs have long gone.
Gas stations and other retailers were mandated to switch to selling in litres (not sure just when). There were some old fossils who protested and set up a “freedom to measure” gas station to sell to you in whatever units you wanted, but that got shut down, because the legal measure had to be in litres. I am not sure why they just couldn’t sell you 4.54 L of gasoline and continue to call it an imperial gallon…
It was a few years after this, in 1984, that the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney suspended metric conversion in Canada, and we have been Stuck Between ever since.
I actually did wonder if the comments were correct when pointing out that the video was showing 2 liter Coke bottles while his guest was talking about how proud he was that the US stands alone against the world for still using the imperial system… it did! :smack: That is weaponized stupidity.
Does that mean that the Coca Cola execs are traitors?*
- Or at least supporters of mickeys ;), check the end of that 80’s 3 liter Coke bottle ad for a now unfortunate cameo… :eek:
I don’t think that would fly in the US, on First Amendment grounds.* Which is why I think the government should start with things it can mandate (like highway signs) and let the private sector follow suit.
*I could very well be wrong though.
I suspect that the US will be using metric and ‘US customary’ units mixed together for a long time. The US units aren’t going away for a long time, and the metric units aren’t ever going away - metric really is the simpler, superior system. Hey, if we can keep up with the English spelling mess, a little confusion with measurement units ain’t gonna be much more of a big deal.
But little by little, the metric units will creep in. Automotive parts are mostly now in metric units and engine sizes are mostly (always?) now given in liters. No one bats an eye at buying shampoo in 500 ml bottles. As we get more world-wide news over the internet, we see news reported as mountain climbing accidents at 5,000 meter elevation, and similar things.
And maybe someday, we’ll figure out that if electrical power can be measured in kilowatts, there’s no good reason why mechanical power should be measured in horsepower. We’ll hear a weather report given in Celsius and will fail to riot in the streets on that account. It will likely come, little by little.
But there ain’t no way the British will give up on imperial pints of beer. Good on them.