Godamned 0603

The metric scales on most rulers here are in cm. I always convert to mm.

What do you use for tire pressure? We use PSI, ballpark 30.

The old english units are physically handy. Most common things work out to be 1 or 2-digit integers, probably because worker-guys have used them for centuries.

I ordered some cognac in Paris and the bartender asked me how many milliliters I wanted. I had no clue so I said "medium" and he grunted and poured.

In the US, whiskey is measured in "jiggers." A sensible bartender holds the jigger over the glass, pours until it's full, lets it overflow for a while, then dumps it in. Good for tips.

lørdag den 19. februar 2022 kl. 21.11.52 UTC+1 skrev snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com:

30ml or more common 3cl, for something like cognac about the same amount of alcohol as a beer or a glass of wine

jiggers are everywhere for making drinks, it's what's in recipes

the more "commercial" bars/clubs/pubs around here use electronics ones. They are mounted on the bottles with a tamper seal, to pour you stick on a gadget connect to the register that triggers it, out comes an exact amount

so at the end of the night the owner knows exactly how much what have been poured, and how much money should be in the register, so no cheating

Newton proved his gravity equation by calculating the motion of the moon in inches, so we can too.

But I and practically everyone with any technical inclination uses metric in all cases except when an object is involved which was cut in English units by someone else.

Yeah, we don't want no one telling us what units to measure in or to wear masks to keep from dying of a pandemic. Both have worked well for everyone in this country... except for 959,000.

John Larkin <jlarkin@highland_atwork_technology.com> wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Nope, machinists say "10 mils" or "10 thousandths" interchangeably, and when they are doing metric, they say the full mm number and divisor, as in 4 tenths of a millimeter, or 4 hundredths of a millimeter, because length representations in metric are usually based against the full meter or centimeters and we do not use deci or Deci very often here. In weights they (we) say tenths or hundredths of a gram, and then 'milligrams' for thousandths of a gram.

We rarely use prefixes like deca or Deca, or deci and Deci, but do use centi. For liquid it would be against the liter for the base.

Some of us, however know many of the prefixes and stating a measure using it is correct, but sometimes gets questioned to convey clarity. All it takes is experience, just like muscle memory for physical things like tossing a swish in in basketball.

John Larkin <jlarkin@highland_atwork_technology.com> wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

We had a DEC Writer at one company I was at, and they had a Burroughs mainframe too. We could not find a guy who could rewrite the mainframe applications in a language and app we could then use on a PC. This was back in the days of the XT and first 286 boxes. That was for the accounting and inventory system.

In the lab we used AutoCAD rev like 2.1 or such to do 4X PCB layouts, and plot them with a big HP pen plotter along with 4X tapes and rings, etc. Those were the days... circa '85 -'86. I was even pumping numbers into a very early Lotus 123 app on a monochrome XT and printing out dot matrix printed graphs.

That job triggered my desire to get into personal computers. And it has been all downhill since. :-)

John Larkin <jlarkin@highland_atwork_technology.com> wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Some pianists joke that playing some of the works of Rachmaninoff requires 6 fingered hands.

It was a testament to how difficult to play some of his stuff was.

I recall saying 2 years ago that everyone could keep going to work if they wore masks, and I recall you saying it would not be adequate.

Rick C snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

Yep... 60 degree threads are 60 degree threads. Same in both instances.

Maybe he has a 60 degree fever.

I do understand the term - and I do appreciate that it is obviously independent of the scale. But I have been making a bit of a dog's breakfast in what I wrote, so I'll stop there.

Yes. But it had to match up with the length of three barley corns. (The barleycorn is of course still used in shoe sizes.)

And it has not been adequate. What is your point? You did see the sarcasm in my statement, no?

The mistake I made was thinking there was ever a prayer of hope that people would actually do what was needed or that we could "get 'er done" around the world. As it turns out not only are masks not sufficient, vaccines are not sufficient. With new strains showing up every few months, we can expect this pandemic to be with us for a long time. It may turn out that there is selective pressure to be less virulent, in which case it may end up being no worse than the flu. At the moment the US is approaching 1 million dead which is far, far worse than any flu since I was born.

Barleycorns aside, it was more about matching the inch. The definition of the inch has a long and tortuous history, but in 1866 the US defined it as 39.37 to a meter, just off from 2.54 cm by about two ppm. Not many uses were impacted by two ppm, so 2.54 cm to the inch was later adopted largely because it had become commercial practice.

<snip>

It's exactly that, by definition.

We use hectares too. Also, hectogrammes ('hetti') are used as convenient measures for some foodstuffs in Italy at least.

[IMO the 'Are' should have been one square metre (and the 'Vol' one cubic meter), but hey ho.]

Still base 60 is handy, and there are 60 ohm-farads in a minute.

It's mainly used for measuring people, so clothing dimensions, describing how tall someone is. That sort of thing.

So we should have been out of work for 2 years.

The flu kills people who don't have 6 comorbidities. Or cancer like Powell.

Is there a meaning to what you posted? Or is it just some random thought you had and felt the need to share with us like some derelict on a street corner?

When doing high precision work, you might include tolerances or error margins - 10.20 mm ± 0.02 mm. But for more casual measurements, you rarely do so. People infer the accuracies from the context, the wording, the value range, and the units. Thus choice of units gives a different implication, even if the value is the same. Giving a length as "168 cm" is therefore slightly different from saying "1680 mm" (and from "five and a half feet").

In general, people find it easier to imagine sizes if the numbers involved are not too big. "1.2 m" is easier than "120 cm" which is easier than "1200 mm".

Centimetres are used all time, for all kinds of things - they are often a more convenient unit than mm or metres for hand-held or desktop size things. To me, a pcb board might by 10 cm by 16 cm - even though it would be given in standard mm in the actual design.

Sometimes unit choices are psychological. Sweets sold in lose weights are priced per hectogram (100 g), a unit that is seldom seen. But if the price were per gram, the price per gram would be meaninglessly small in Euro, pounds, or whatever. If it were given in price per kg, however, people would feel they are buying far too much when their sweets are measured in kg.

Yes, that's the point. (Three barleycorns was one of the first standardised definitions of the length of an inch.)