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What's the smallest country that can fit everyone standing six feet apart?

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Re: What's the smallest country that can fit everyone standing six feet apart?

#51

Post by Ntrails »

Symbiote wrote: post #30
ben_w wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More U.K. “fun” examples: • Beer served in pints by on-licenses, millilitres by off-licences • Even though distances are all in miles, and petrol/diesel sold in litres, fuel efficiency is in either g/km or miles-per-gallon

The metric fuel efficiency measure is litres per 100km. This way round makes more sense -- "how much will it cost to travel X km" is a more common question than "how far can I travel with Y litres or £Z".

_Personally_ the only time I care about mpg is when looking at how far I can travel on a tank of fuel. Or, when the fuel warning light comes on (you have 5L of fuel left, how far is that going to get you).

In essence I'd argue that most of the use of the any fuel efficiency metric is to simply rank cars, rather than to ever back out a genuinely useful cost/distance number. At which point furlongs per quart would be as effective as anything else...

Re: What's the smallest country that can fit everyone standing six feet apart?

#52

Post by BerislavLopac »

beojan wrote: post #36
Symbiote wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised an Indian person has used US units How long does it take immigrants in the US to "go native"?

India is a Commonwealth country, and I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people still think in imperial (not US customary) units. Also, here in the UK, for the purposes of identifying COVID-19 symptoms, a fever is being defined as 38.6 °C = 100.0 °F, so US recommendations are clearly having an influence in other countries.

100 F is 37.8 (more precisely 37.77777...) C.

Re: What's the smallest country that can fit everyone standing six feet apart?

#53

Post by beojan »

BerislavLopac wrote: post #52
beojan wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

India is a Commonwealth country, and I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people still think in imperial (not US customary) units. Also, here in the UK, for the purposes of identifying COVID-19 symptoms, a fever is being defined as 38.6 °C = 100.0 °F, so US recommendations are clearly having an influence in other countries.

100 F is 37.8 (more precisely 37.77777...) C.

Indeed. It's the Celsius figure that I misquoted.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid...

Re: What's the smallest country that can fit everyone standing six feet apart?

#54

Post by tonyarkles »

goodcanadian wrote: post #28
scraft wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, over here in the UK, we have MPH for roads, stones and pounds for peoples weight (kilograms are becoming more popular, in particular for the under 25s), feet and inches for peoples height (meters becoming more popular for under 25s). So we have a bit of a hybrid really, I am 36 so get a bit of both, but my parents need everything converted to "old money" as they call it, they can't imagine what 25cm lengt…

Canada has gone mostly metric, now, but growing up on a farm a few decades ago, I definitely got a hybrid. People's heights and weights were imperial, other things were mostly metric. Gravel roads were miles, highways kilometres. Oven temperatures were Fahrenheit, human temperatures Celsius. The really perverse one is that when referring to gallons, we had to specify US or imperial.

Heh, it’s funny you use the past tense when listing those.

- People’s heights are, I guess, officially metric. My drivers’s license lists me as 173cm. But at the exit from most convenience stores, there’s a measuring stick on the wall (for the security cameras to have a height reference), and they’re exclusively in feet-inches.

- Peoples’ weights on home scales are still pretty much exclusively in pounds. Doctors may have switched to kilograms, but I’m pretty sure asking someone how much they weigh in kg would result in a blank stare while they try dividing by 2.2 in their head.

- The entire official highway system has moved to kilometres, and you’ll pretty much never see a sign in miles. But... the grid system for gravel roads (from the Dominion Land Survey) is in miles and obviously we can’t go around changing everyone’s property boundaries, so they’ll stay in miles forever. Most rural folks know the 1 mile x 2 mile grid, and directions from one farm to another will almost always be (2 miles east, 3 miles south)

- I think oven temperatures remain in Fahrenheit because of our collective shared culture with the US. Most recipes you’re going to find have cooking temperatures in F. More things have shifted towards C though; growing up I recall house temperatures to generally being in F, and now they’re frequently in C.

- Fuck gallons.

(Source: Saskatchewan resident)

Re: What's the smallest country that can fit everyone standing six feet apart?

#55

Post by tonyarkles »

kd5bjo wrote: post #39
yodsanklai wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, it seems odd in a "maths" context with nice formatted formulas. Do US kids in science class use the metric system?

> Do US kids in science class use the metric system? In general, yes. Though like everything else in the US education system, it’s really up to the local school boards. When I went through a couple of decades ago, we did almost everything in SI units with the occasional oddball problem in traditional units to make sure we knew how to do the conversions.

Your neighbours to the north do it the same way. In school (elementary, high school), all of the science classes are going to be in SI units, minus maybe a lesson or two in unit conversion. It wasn’t really until engineering school where they started really forcing us to be comfortable with problems that had a bunch of unit conversions; the engineers were really happy to give us problems with grams, pounds, miles, and litres, and expect us to get the right answers.

Re: What's the smallest country that can fit everyone standing six feet apart?

#56

Post by kd5bjo »

tonyarkles wrote: post #55
kd5bjo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do US kids in science class use the metric system? In general, yes. Though like everything else in the US education system, it’s really up to the local school boards. When I went through a couple of decades ago, we did almost everything in SI units with the occasional oddball problem in traditional units to make sure we knew how to do the conversions.

Your neighbours to the north do it the same way. In school (elementary, high school), all of the science classes are going to be in SI units, minus maybe a lesson or two in unit conversion. It wasn’t really until engineering school where they started really forcing us to be comfortable with problems that had a bunch of unit conversions; the engineers were really happy to give us problems with grams, pounds, miles, an…

That sounds about right. I (vaguely) remember having to do some thermodynamics problems in BTUs and Rankine temperatures without converting to SI, but that was certainly the exception.

Once I got into the engineering curriculum, we were also expected to be able to do simple torque and force problems in pounds (force or mass, depending on context), feet (distance), foot-pounds (energy), and pound-feet (torque). Mostly it was to show that all the concepts work in both systems, I think. In case you found yourself working in an industry that hadn’t switched to metric.

Re: What's the smallest country that can fit everyone standing six feet apart?

#57

Post by goodcanadian »

tonyarkles wrote: post #54
goodcanadian wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada has gone mostly metric, now, but growing up on a farm a few decades ago, I definitely got a hybrid. People's heights and weights were imperial, other things were mostly metric. Gravel roads were miles, highways kilometres. Oven temperatures were Fahrenheit, human temperatures Celsius. The really perverse one is that when referring to gallons, we had to specify US or imperial.

Heh, it’s funny you use the past tense when listing those. - People’s heights are, I guess, officially metric. My drivers’s license lists me as 173cm. But at the exit from most convenience stores, there’s a measuring stick on the wall (for the security cameras to have a height reference), and they’re exclusively in feet-inches. - Peoples’ weights on home scales are still pretty much exclusively in pounds. Doctors may…

Well, I've found most people younger than me do seem to know their height/weight in metric whereas I don't have a clue even though I use metric for just about everything else. There may still be a bit of an urban/rural divide to it as well as age and perhaps, province or region.

Re: What's the smallest country that can fit everyone standing six feet apart?

#58

Post by m11a »

This seems to be a dramatic simplification, to the point where the results aren't helpful at all, unless I'm missing something.

A lot of this is private property. Offices, people's houses, a farmer's farmland. We can't go inside, or trample on the crops of farmers. Then you need to subtract roads - because you can't walk on a road and definitely not a motorway.

So really, shouldn't the land area used be the publicly accessible pedestrian area?

And I dunno about others, but my footpaths are less than a metre long in width in my residential area. In the commercial areas, they tend to be less than 6 metres.

Re: What's the smallest country that can fit everyone standing six feet apart?

#59

Post by colechristensen »

tenant wrote: post #44
colechristensen wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the most-developed countries in the world are reproducing below the replacement rate already, populations only growing because of immigration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...

I was thinking globally since the discussion was about the global population.

There seems to be a generational lag between infant mortality (or mortality before reproduction) and fertility rate.

Many places still have very high mortality-before-reproduction rates and correspondingly high birthrates, or at least generational recent ones.

It seems, simply, that overpopulation is a problem which solves itself. High standard of living seems to come with high costs and emphasis on investing in children far more combined with delaying children until proper resources can be had. The result? Fewer children.

The doom and gloom about overpopulation was overblown and doesn't look to be a problem. We have enough food production capability (especially with new lands to open up with global warming), hunger comes from dysfunctional economies, not lack of food.

It doesn't make much sense to think about global population as a whole when there is such variability. You can't compare Manhattan to sub-Saharan Africa at all, they are totally different worlds (or perhaps a hundred or two years apart developmentally).

Re: What's the smallest country that can fit everyone standing six feet apart?

#60

Post by Symbiote »

ben_w wrote: post #34
Symbiote wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The metric fuel efficiency measure is litres per 100km. This way round makes more sense -- "how much will it cost to travel X km" is a more common question than "how far can I travel with Y litres or £Z".

Huh, I’ve never seen that used. Yes it is better.

I think it's almost always in the small print, such as on page 15 (or 27 if you look at the document's numbers) of this Ford brochure.

MPG (l/100km) Combined: 52.3 (5.4)

https://indd.adobe.com/view/5e31eb47-fa8c-4be9-b739-b19d58c8...

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