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Funny, to me "sub-zero" just means below freezing. I have to really try and remember what temperature, Fahrenheit, water freezes at!

Anybody know of any other countries than the USA that habitually use Fahrenheit? I'm just curious. The UK used to, and no doubt there are many "older" UK people who still use it - but all weather reports etc give temp. in centigrade.

Reply to
Jim Jackson
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Reply to
Brett

I picked the cheapest PicoScope that seemed to match the HP capabilities. It is not the most expensive PicoScope. That seems to be the PicoScope

9400 at $19,495, but it does 2.5TSa/sec sampling with 16GHz bandwidth (looks like it's for PCIe-type signals). It's called SXRTO, and I'm not really familiar with how they work (it's strongly implied they are "cheating" at the sampling rate).

The HP scope bandwidth is 500MHz, and that's out of the range of cheap scopes. PicoScope does give you 5GSa/sec (compared to HP 2GSa/sec), but that's just because they don't have a 2GSa/sec scope. But you can't look at fast edges (say 1ns) on a scope with 100MHz bandwidth since it filtered all the signal of interest away. It's probably passable on a scope with 300MHz of bandwidth (PicoScope says the rise time of signals can be < 1.3ns for

300MHz bandwidth, and < 850ps for 500MHz. That feels about right). That moves the PicoScope price down to $4556. I also didn't include the scope probe price, which is $300-$389 for two.

This HP equipment is heavy, but it can be carried by one person. It's basically the size of a full-size PC tower with about 30% more depth. It runs off 110V with a "normal" plug, so it's not that bad power-wise. Running it for an hour even if it drew a continous 15Amp (and it does not) would only be 1.6kWhours = 40 cents. I generally only need a scope for a few hours at a time.

If you need a more portable scope, with fewer features, old legacy versions of these also are available, I just don't know anything about them.

Kent

Reply to
Kent Dickey

It is still used colloquially in the UK for warm weather (like saying "it's in the nineties" to mean it is hot), and probably by some older people for oven temperatures. At least it's a step up from gas marks...

A few tiny countries (typically ex-British colonies in the Caribbean) still have weather reports in Fahrenheit, as they get them all from the USA. And I guess older folks there occasionally use it, like in the UK.

But AFAIK only the USA has Fahrenheit (and other non-metric units) as standard.

Reply to
David Brown

The US Congress decided in 1866 to go metric - a little sluggish implementation.

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Reply to
Tauno Voipio

We don't use Fahrenheit in the US, we abuse it.

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  Rick C. 

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Reply to
Rick C

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You aren't getting it. A box the size of a sewing machine and twice as hea vy is not in any way comparable to a device about the size of a good book. Not interested in sewing machine light either. But I appreciate the attem pt to help. So far I've gone a few years now without actually needing to b uy a scope. Working on FPGAs where the code is 99.9% debugged in simulatio n is a big help. The other 0.1% can be debugged on the customer's bench wh ere they have some really nice tools.

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Reply to
Rick C

...

Sometimes described by saying that the "US is inching its way towards the metric system."

Reply to
Niklas Holsti

Automotive speed limits in every country I've visited are posted in miles per hour or kilometers per hour. Metric units would of course be meters per second (100 km/hour is about 28 m/sec).

Me, I support switching to the FFF (Furlong-Firkin-Fortnight) system. For example, the speed of light is about 1.8e12 furlongs per fortnight.

;-)

Reply to
Paul Rubin

Am 18.11.2020 um 13:51 schrieb Niklas Holsti:

The term "inching" may no longer really doing it justice. Let's do some (metric) math on this. The total of the borders and coastlines of the mainland USA is roughly twenty thousand miles, or 32 thousand kilometers. And it has been 154 years since that decision.

So to travel around the entire mainland US since then, the average speed would have been, roughly:

208 km per year, 570 meters per day, or 24 meters per hour

For comparison a turtle is reported to be going 330 m/h. It could thus have run circles around the mainland U.S. Like: literally 15 times around.

Or, speaking of "sluggish": an actual slug (i.e. a garden-variety snail) can clock in at around 3 m/h. That's fast enough for it to have "run" the entire U.S.-Mexico border in that time faster than the U.S.A. took to cross from the silly to the sane side of same.

It's a paradox: a country that was founded on the very principle of abolishing, with prejudice, everything British is now just about the last one on earth still sticking to these fundamentally British Imperial(!) units --- except Great Britain itself. Who in turn just won't agree with the French on anything if they can possibly help it.

Reply to
Hans-Bernhard Bröker

I rather like pi seconds = 1 nanocentury, to about 0.4%.

"I'll just be a few nanocenturies, dear".

Reply to
Tom Gardner

And one attoparsec equals one decifoot to engineering accuracy, proving once again (if any more were needed) that God is an Englishman.

The original definition of the metre was 10**-7 of the distance from the Equator to North Pole measured along the meridian of Paris. Both ends of that line are at sea, of course, like so many other French initiatives. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Reply to
Phil Hobbs

That's not /quite/ accurate. Amongst the things that the Americans disagreed on was spelling - but it wasn't the Americans that changed words like "colour" and "neighbour". It was the British who changed them - by adding some unnecessary extra vowels to make the words look more French-like.

And the UK has long ago given up on imperial units for anything where accuracy is relevant.

Reply to
David Brown

Am 18.11.2020 um 22:08 schrieb Tom Gardner:

And the speed of about one nano-lightyear per month is what you need to complete a 3-hour Marathon.

Reply to
Hans-Bernhard Bröker

I c.

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Rick C. 

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Reply to
Rick C

I'm sorry, the number you have dialed is an imaginary number. If you think you have received this recording in error, please rotate your phone by 90 degrees and try your call again.

Reply to
Paul Rubin

Actually not true. Kilometres are metric. Perhaps you are getting confused with the measurements in MKS system?

Reply to
Jim Jackson

Hours are not metric, or at least are not SI. I can go with kilometers per second but those numbers would inconveniently small. MKS and CGS have been obsolete for decades.

Reply to
Paul Rubin

As we do not use Kiloseconds or Megaseconds, Hours as the accepted and understood multiple of seconds is a suitable standin, if not SI. Kilometres / Hour is the metric equivalent of Miles / Hour. Or are just being a pretty boring pedant, and probably wrong at that? Or am I missing a joke?

Reply to
Jim Jackson

It's partly a joke and partly pointing out the silliness of those who ridicule the US for not using metric. Kiloseconds and megaseconds are metric units of time, hours are not. Yet people (even in supposedly metric countries) use hours because they are comfortable human units. Those countries use meters and hours, so they are only partially metric.

In the US we do the same thing, but even further. We also use hours (3.6 kiloseconds), but it also uses feet and inches (inch = 2.54 centimeters). People from other countries who act superior about this should get their own house in order (i.e. switch from hours, days, years to kiloseconds, megaseconds, etc.) before complaining about ours. 1 year = 31.5 megaseconds, 1 century = 3.15 gigaseconds. Let me know when you have updated all your history books to use those units.

Reply to
Paul Rubin

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