91–100 of 206 posts
Paperless office, checking in here. Our printer is only used for people screwing around doing non-work related projects, printing school essays for themselves or their kids, real estate MLS records, car insurance forms, stuff like that.
Why did Americans simplify and streamline the English Language, but they didn't bother with all of the systems of measurement?
Anecdote: the office management/finance/HR people in the european office where I work really, really hate US Letter formats, because they don't really fit in "normal" binders. They're the ones who really suffer from this, because they're the only people who deal with paper format documents these days, I guess.
I enjoy working with paper. My favorite notebooks are ISO A4 size because they give me a bit more vertical room and still fit well in my backpacks. The issues that come up with regard to US Letter size paper seem to be: 1) It's not metric -- yes that's true, but A4 is 210mm x 297mm. These numbers seem completely arbitrary and don't take advantage of the metric system. I wish the US was on the metric system, but it's…
Why did Americans simplify and streamline the English Language, but they didn't bother with all of the systems of measurement?
When someone claims uncritically that the ratio of any two integers is √2, I get a little edgy. I'm also having a hard time following this simplification: A / √A = A × A / A = A Huh? This only holds if √A = A = 1. I haven't checked the rest, but this doesn't give me much confidence. Of course, knowing those Europeans, these sizes do probably make tons of sense on paper (see what I did there?), even if this isn't the…
(I can't load the page to check what it's doing with this simplification).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. talideon wrote two unrelated sentences next to each other, Turing_Machine thought they were related, and the two of them started talking about different things. (This is my impression, at least. I can't seem to bring myself to properly read the whole thread, it's too frustrating.) talideon, you do not come across well from that exchange. You may or may not have been talking to a brick wall, but you weren't liste…
Look, I repeated told him that the units didn't matter, and that it was the ratio that mattered. Other than disengaging sooner (which I would've done if I'd any cop-on myself), what could I have said differently? I'm truly at a loss. I straight-up wrote this: > _The units are irrelevant._ That's what you're not getting. What is relevant is that the same page width/height ratio is maintained between the different page…
Why did Americans simplify and streamline the English Language, but they didn't bother with all of the systems of measurement?
If we were going to do something as big as change UoM, why not go with the engineering estimate of 1 ft is now the time light takes to travel 1 nanosecond in a vacuum (about 11.8 inches)? It is sure better than "the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second". We could even base the new units of volume and weight off of the new cubic foot instead of 1/10 the unit of length. While we are at it, a national standard that all units of memory will be sold in base 2 would be a nice touch.
// apply sarcasm as needed
I can't seem to find an English-language version of his A series rant (found in Erfreuliche Drucksachen, p. 111), but for anyone interested in traditional book layout, this (English-language) essay is a goldmine: http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/faculty/reese/classes/artistsbooks/... (pp. 39 f. touch on the A series).