The 39th Root of 92
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The 39th Root of 92
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Re: The 39th Root of 92
#2[deleted]
Re: The 39th Root of 92
#3I continue to be baffled by the arcane units in the US.
This uses a measure on the completely wrong abstraction level.
An accidental production process now defines a wire unit instead the end result the consumer/engineer/technician wants to know (mm^2 or inch^2 oh no no it's pica^2 ?).
There must be some sociological phenomenon going on that keeps the US from adopting modern units. Maybe can't admit a shortcoming and fix it?
Re: The 39th Root of 92
#4I continue to be baffled by the arcane units in the US. This uses a measure on the completely wrong abstraction level. An accidental production process now defines a wire unit instead the end result the consumer/engineer/technician wants to know (mm^2 or inch^2 oh no no it's pica^2 ?). There must be some sociological phenomenon going on that keeps the US from adopting modern units. Maybe can't admit a shortcoming and…
Have you considered how much it would cost to change units, and how absolutely little would be gained?
Re: The 39th Root of 92
#5I continue to be baffled by the arcane units in the US. This uses a measure on the completely wrong abstraction level. An accidental production process now defines a wire unit instead the end result the consumer/engineer/technician wants to know (mm^2 or inch^2 oh no no it's pica^2 ?). There must be some sociological phenomenon going on that keeps the US from adopting modern units. Maybe can't admit a shortcoming and…
Have you considered how much it would cost to change units, and how absolutely little would be gained?
Maybe can be re-framed as how much has been lost?
If the change is performed, the time gained by absolutely everyone making use of more saner unit system could offset the cost? maybe just by avoiding errors?
This are ideas that has to be transformed in order to be shared with mostly everyone else.
Shameful confession, I do use pounds for weight.
Re: The 39th Root of 92
#6I continue to be baffled by the arcane units in the US. This uses a measure on the completely wrong abstraction level. An accidental production process now defines a wire unit instead the end result the consumer/engineer/technician wants to know (mm^2 or inch^2 oh no no it's pica^2 ?). There must be some sociological phenomenon going on that keeps the US from adopting modern units. Maybe can't admit a shortcoming and…
Have you considered how much it would cost to change units, and how absolutely little would be gained?
I would imagine the gains would be extraordinary - the deadweight cost of interacting with the metric world must be huge. The needlessly complicated calculations involved in dealing with things like fractions of inches impose their own subtle tax on productive effort. And let's not forget the avoidance of occasional catastrophes like space probes doomed by a conversion miscalculation or an airliner running out of gas in the middle of nowhere for a similar reason.
Having said all that, I'm not sure whether this is really on-topic. The original article is very interesting and an example of American measurement system that improved on an imperial precedent.
Re: The 39th Root of 92
#7I continue to be baffled by the arcane units in the US. This uses a measure on the completely wrong abstraction level. An accidental production process now defines a wire unit instead the end result the consumer/engineer/technician wants to know (mm^2 or inch^2 oh no no it's pica^2 ?). There must be some sociological phenomenon going on that keeps the US from adopting modern units. Maybe can't admit a shortcoming and…
The English system of measure is based on offsets to make retooling factories easily done in house. It's very similar to metric paper sizes.
Look into the history it's actually quite logical.
Re: The 39th Root of 92
#8I continue to be baffled by the arcane units in the US. This uses a measure on the completely wrong abstraction level. An accidental production process now defines a wire unit instead the end result the consumer/engineer/technician wants to know (mm^2 or inch^2 oh no no it's pica^2 ?). There must be some sociological phenomenon going on that keeps the US from adopting modern units. Maybe can't admit a shortcoming and…
The English system of measure is based on offsets to make retooling factories easily done in house. It's very similar to metric paper sizes. Look into the history it's actually quite logical.
Appelbaum: So the people blocking adoption of the metric system weren't backward-looking traditionalists, but cutting-edge industrialists?
Mihm: That's correct. While the anti-metric forces included outright cranks, including people who believed that the inch was a God-given unit of measurement, the most sophisticated and powerful opponents of the metric system were anything but cranks. They were engineers who built the industrial infrastructure of the United States. And their concerns, while self-interested, were not entirely off base. Whatever the drawbacks of the English units, the inch was divided in ways that made sense to the mechanics and machinists of the era: it was built around "2s" rather than "10s," with each inch subdivided in half and in half again—and so forth. This permitted various sizes of screw thread to have some logical correspondence to all the other increments. The same was true of the sizes of other small parts that were essential modern machinery.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/06/whos-a...
Re: The 39th Root of 92
#9I continue to be baffled by the arcane units in the US. This uses a measure on the completely wrong abstraction level. An accidental production process now defines a wire unit instead the end result the consumer/engineer/technician wants to know (mm^2 or inch^2 oh no no it's pica^2 ?). There must be some sociological phenomenon going on that keeps the US from adopting modern units. Maybe can't admit a shortcoming and…
Have you considered how much it would cost to change units, and how absolutely little would be gained?
>Have you considered how much it would cost to change units, and how absolutely little would be gained?
Nearly all of the world and most science and engineering measurements in the US have managed the conversion, so why not the rest of the United States?
Re: The 39th Root of 92
#10I continue to be baffled by the arcane units in the US. This uses a measure on the completely wrong abstraction level. An accidental production process now defines a wire unit instead the end result the consumer/engineer/technician wants to know (mm^2 or inch^2 oh no no it's pica^2 ?). There must be some sociological phenomenon going on that keeps the US from adopting modern units. Maybe can't admit a shortcoming and…
Have you considered how much it would cost to change units, and how absolutely little would be gained?
It's important to clarify whether you mean to change just the units used to describe the standard wire sizes, or changing the standard wire sizes themselves. No logarithmic scale is going to be easy to express precisely and concisely using a unit for diameter or cross-sectional area, but changing the standard sizes to something with convenient numbers in a new unit system would break compatibility with a massive amount of infrastructure.