[lug] Fwd: Pi Day is coming

[Bear Giles]

As I get older I think the problem is that we're trying to shoehorn
everything into a single system. There's no reason why we can't use
different systems for different scales.

The best example is temperature. Fahrenheit didn't make any sense until
someone pointed out to me that in Germany the temperature was usually
between 0F and 100F. That's an easier range to work with than, um, call it
-15C to 40C.

Likewise it's easiest to work with factors of 2 or 3 when cooking - it's
easy to divide things into equal piles. It's a lot harder to do that with
10 since the only factors are 2 (easy) and 5 (hard).

Distance is similar. It's easy to factor 12" and integral multiples of it.

At the same time there's no question that when you're talking about things
outside of immediate human scale then you need to go metric. There's also a
lot of times when you can use either system and there's no cost in going
metric - 2 liter bottles of soda, metric nuts, etc.

BTW a mile is 1000 Roman paces. In fact that's the basis of the name mile.
(mil = 1000).

BTW 2 I don't know anyone who does the translations outside of elementary
school (or an engineering environment). You just know them. Quick, show a
cm between your finger and thumb. Do you just do it or do you start with an
inch and then try to guess 40% of it?

Bear


On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 12:27 PM, Stephen Queen <svqueen at gmail.com> wrote:

> When my wife bakes a pie (ref back to pie day), she just eyeballs all of
> the measurements anyhow. She never cooks or bakes the same thing twice. I
> usually only estimate things too. When I went for a walk, it was about 2
> miles. When I was in the service, the M16A1 rifle was about 39 inches long,
> so when I think of a meter, I think about the length of that rifle I had to
> carry. I can't really envision 1000 rifles lined up butt to barrel any more
> than I can envision 5280 of my feet toe to heel.
> I do enjoy asking someone raised outside of the US whether they think that
> nut is 1/2" or 9/16". ( I can't usually tell either, but I've met people
> who could see metric and US.)
> Now if you want to talk about things that confuse me, lets talk about all
> the different datams that my GPS allows me to select from. What is that all
> about?
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 11:41 AM, Davide Del Vento <
> davide.del.vento at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> > I've always preferred the US system of linear measurement over the
>> metric
>> > system. You can divde 10 by 1,2,5,and10. You can divide 12 by
>> > 1,2,3,4,6,and12. Also "1/3" is more accurate than "0.333...". I always
>> found
>> > it easy to think of a section of land, 640 acres to be 1 square mile.
>>
>> Ok so you like 640 better than 1000. You must have been involved with
>> the design of those PC's and their weird 640kB of memory (just trying
>> not to be too much off-topic :-)
>>
>> But how about these: How many square inches are in a acre? How many
>> cubic inches are in a gallon? How many cubic inches in a fluid ounce?
>> How much does a fluid ounce of water weight? I could go on forever and
>> it get worse when you have compound units such as PSI and the likes.
>> The equivalent questions in the metric systems are *all*
>> straightforward and all power of ten. I would be ok if all the
>> imperial units would have been consistent among themselves say with
>> *all* power or 2 or *all* power of 60 (like we do with time for the
>> very reason you mention), or whatever. Instead no, sometimes is power
>> of two, sometimes is 60, sometimes is 12 or whatnots. There is so much
>> to remember and so much to get wrong.
>>
>> In fact I learned all the metric equivalences in third grade and loved
>> these homeworks since then: they were super easy. And with a few
>> additional tricks they taught me in college with Physics 101, I could
>> do *any* metric computation without calculator nor paper nor pencil,
>> from astrophysics to particles. Impossible to do that with Imperial
>> units (and in fact Physicists in the USA use metric system too).
>>
>> > Just some idle thought,
>> Ditto :-)
>>
>> Have a nice weekend (I'll test all the suggestions about feed readers
>> and email program)
>> Davide
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