The actual text of the resolution, for those with low tolerance for dumbed-down PR releases:
https://marketcapcoin.blogspot.com/2018/11/tron-price-predic...
International System of Units overhauled in historic vote
181–190 of 589 posts
Re: International System of Units overhauled in historic vote
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
They aren't easier to work with for any reason other than that sizes of standard components (pipes, beams, etc) are sized conveniently in US units and have US units printed on the spec sheets. If you go overseas outside of North America, you find that the sizes of everyday objects are conveniently sized in metric, and building codes and standards and material strengths and densities are specified in SI units, and sud…
I don't deal with building envelope. Its not surprising or unexpected that there are differing opinions among various professions on which set of units are more convenient. In Canada, all our building code, material design codes, etc are in metric, and yet we are still using US units for day to day design.
What lengths and widths of wood can you buy from the lumberyard?
What is the common width and thickness of drywall sheet you can buy and the hardware store? What door sizes are available? What size of screws are cheaply available in Canada?
I think these factors are far more likely to affect what unit of measure is commonly used in construction, rather than any intrinsic merit of the measurement system. If you were shopping at a Japanese or German hardware store, you'd probably suddenly find all of those 12 foot dimensions quite frustrating and not be at all surprised to find the hard-hat-wearing locals happily using the metric system for the same tasks.
Re: International System of Units overhauled in historic vote
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US units are defined in terms of SI since the Mendenhall Order[0], so they also benefit from this change. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendenhall_Order
It wasn't until 1959 that the yard was metricized. This still affects precision machinery manufactured before the changeover.
It was metricized with all the rest before that. What happened in 59 was harmonization with other countries including Canada, who had a different agreement on the metric yard. The older american definition was 1 yard = 3600/3937 meter. The international metric yard is exactly 0.9144m. (A difference of 0.002mm)
Re: International System of Units overhauled in historic vote
#184Veritasium did a great video [0] on this leading up to the vote. [0] https://youtu.be/c_e1wITe_ig
I wish he would spend a bit more time exsplining were some of the constants come from, although that would probably make the video a bit weaker overall. Wasting time on such information.
He's probably done videos on many of them already.
Re: International System of Units overhauled in historic vote
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Presumably, the second was shorter, rather than the day was longer. EDIT: More specifically, if you take an average rotation of the Earth as 86164.1 seconds, and divide by 10, then 100, then 100, you get 0.861641, which would be the conversion from our seconds to the metric second in that scenario. Likewise, the metric minute would be 86.1641 of our seconds or about 1.43607 of our minutes, the metric hour would be 86…
You could just define the second to be a 1/100,000 of a day and go from there. Aside from screwing with literally everyones perception of time, it could work.
But which day? Such a second would probably work for everyday purposes (just like to most of us a second is 1/86400 of a day) but it would be woefully inadequate as a universal fundamental unit of time. And defining the second in terms of something like "the length of the solar day at Greenwich meridian on Jan 1 2020" prevents anyone from ever reproducing the exact value based on their own measurements, which is one of the big reasons for defining fundamental units in term of physical constants.
Re: International System of Units overhauled in historic vote
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
1/2 m = 50.00 cm, 1/2 ft = 6 in 1/3 m = 33.33 cm, 1/3 ft = 4 in 1/4 m = 25.00 cm, 1/4 ft = 3 in 1/6 m = 16.67 cm, 1/6 ft = 2 in This is why imperial makes more sense to me than metric. If we had a base-12 number system, metric would be perfect, but base-10 is terrible under division. For practical divisors like these, imperial shines. If you're doing science, metric makes more sense because units work out. But most a…
I won't disagree with you on this because you'll always feel more comfortable with something if you've been using your whole life. For example, I would never understand why you think 1/2ft = 6in is simpler when you have to know in advance that 1ft = 12in. It could be because I'm not used to it. Using the metric system you'll rarely write 1/2m, as fractions are not what a person used to metric would default to. That i…
> If the question were, for example, what is the mass of the water contained in a 1m x 1m x 1m box, then the answer is obvious which system is by far the most sane one.
You're not disagreeing, the GP said
> If you're doing science, metric makes more sense because units work out. But most all US science has already adopted metric.
Your question asks for mass of a cubic meter of water, presupposing a typically scientific quantity (mass, instead of weight) and presupposing that a cubic meter (why not a cubic foot?) of water is a useful collection of water for some purpose. Fine, use metric. But imperial units as a system are made for practical everyday utility, which your example doesn't presuppose. On the other hand if we imperial users run across a situation where metric seems more useful, fortunately we can precisely convert, so it doesn't really matter.
In other places of utility (such as engineering disciplines) adopting a unit agnostic approach is the best. Some fields don't use either imperial or metric units but their own domain specific things, and software can always present units in whatever preference someone has or whatever is the most useful for the moment.
Re: International System of Units overhauled in historic vote
#187So now packages relying on older values would have to be updated, right? In that case, wow, all those ancient - but usable FORTRAN/C code. Correct me if I am wrong.
Ideally the weight of a kilogram defined by the new definition should be identical to the weight of the old physical "the kilogram" object. The goal of this isn't to change how much a kilogram weighs, it's just to change how it's defined.
For a comparison, it used to be that we measured the speed of light as being 299,792,458 meters/second. Since then, we have defined the meter to be 1/299,792,458 of the distance that light travels in one second. An object that was 1 meter long before is still 1 meter long, but the way we communicate how long a meter is has gone from "it's how long this particular stick in France is" to a precise definition based on fundamental properties of the universe.
Re: International System of Units overhauled in historic vote
#188See, the US wasn't being stubborn in not adopting metric, it was just waiting patiently for it to progress from beta to 1.0. :)
(Fun fact: all the US customary units have been officially defined in terms of their metric counterparts since 1893: https://www.nist.gov/sites/default/files/documents/pml/wmd/m...)
Re: International System of Units overhauled in historic vote
#189The redefinition of the kilogram marks the end of artefacts used to define our measurement units.
Re: International System of Units overhauled in historic vote
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the GP is making the claim that Avogadro's constant should be 1 (effectively eliminating it), not that there's no need to count molecules.
An Avogadro's constant number of molecules is one mole. One mole of hydrogen has much less mass than one mole of iron. You have to choose an arbitrary mass of a single element as the base quantity. Hydrogen might be the best theoretically, it's just a proton and an electron, but it is tricky to work with because it's a gas at room temperature. So instead the mole has been defined as the number of molecules in a speci…
Carbon 12 is being used because that accounts for the nuclear forces which are absent for H-1.