Help with imperial measurements

[Screwdriver]

An interesting video which exposes the lie of metrology. It tells you nothing really, it's a scam. You can pick and choose your units so that they make some sense to you as an individual or to your CNC machine to produce something you are happy with.

The fundamental purpose of a universal so called coherent system of measurement is to describe the relationship between phenomena we observe. It is described in units we "understand", it says nothing about our shared reality and the elephant in the room is that it can never be accurate. Never. Close but not perfect.

Reason being that at some stage you're going to run into a fundamental constant. Something that is objectively real because those constants have been determined by the universe. They are all irrational numbers. What is an irrational number? Pi, e and root 2 are good examples. They are numbers which cannot be counted and if you can't count them, then your sums are never going to add up. So we use symbols to represent the numerical value, perform some algebra to remove as many pesky constants as possible so that at the end, we can calculate an answer to some arbitrary precision.

It's never going to be right though...

 

[Kayos]

Hasn't some prime minister just proposed the return of the imperial system ?

For nostalgic reasons, allegedly

Can't post my feelings on the matter or this thread will be locked

 

[eLuSiVeMiTe]

Hasn't some prime minister just proposed the return of the imperial system ?

Yeah but that's because he's an idiot and thinks it will get him votes

 

[Maker]

They are all irrational numbers.

No they're not. 1 metre is exactly the distance light travels in 1/299792458 of a second in a vacuum, a second is exactly 9192631770 of something to do with caesium, the Planck constant is defined as 6.62607015*10^−34 which can be combined with the previous two values to give an exact mass of a kilogram. All the SI base units are defined like this, they're exact, rational quantities of discrete things.

Of course any measurement you make of a continuous thing has an associated error or tolerance.

 

[Mick Annick]

I went to the builders merchants today for some plumbing fittings, they were all imperial!

 

[Kayos]

I went to the builders merchants today for some plumbing fittings, they were all imperial!

But they bear no resemblance to to imperial sizes. A half inch fitting is much bigger than half an inch

 

[Mick Annick]

But they bear no resemblance to to imperial sizes. A half inch fitting is much bigger than half an inch

I didn’t measure them, just did my usual and bought the wrong one

 

[Screwdriver]

No they're not. 1 metre is exactly the distance light travels in 1/299792458 of a second in a vacuum, a second is exactly 9192631770 of something to do with caesium, the Planck constant is defined as 6.62607015*10^−34 which can be combined with the previous two values to give an exact mass of a kilogram. All the SI base units are defined like this, they're exact, rational quantities of discrete things.

Of course any measurement you make of a continuous thing has an associated error or tolerance.

I think you are misunderstanding the thrust of my argument. Yes 1 inch is EXACTLY 25.4mm. Case closed. OK so "1 metre is exactly the distance light travels in 1/299792458 of a second" Is less obvious but is still an arbitrary decision on what to call a thing and therefore it is exactly what I say it is. That is to paraphrase the precise meaning of the video you posted which suggests we define the speed of light to be itself, i.e. "1"c.

The Planck unit is effectively a definition of our scientific resolution, anything smaller makes no sense to our attempts to analyse phenomena. It is not a discovered universal constant and it is "exact" only because it has been defined as such.

 

[Keith 66]

In the depths of my workshop is a steel rule that is graduated in 12ths of an inch, I always found it very handy if doing a scale drawing at 1" to the foot.

 

[Dr.Al]

And two, it occurred to me I made a mistake, not that anyone seemed to notice so I'll say it was a deliberate test, and everyone failed.

4 bits is a nibble, a word is 2 bytes, 16 bits.

Since you were clearly hoping for a bit of pedantry, a word isn't necessarily 16 bits. A word is the natural unit of data for a particular microprocessor. On a 16-bit micro, a word is 16 bits but on a 32 bit one it's 32 bits.

Word (computer architecture) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[eLuSiVeMiTe]

Since you were clearly hoping for a bit of pedantry, a word isn't necessarily 16 bits. A word is the natural unit of data for a particular microprocessor. On a 16-bit micro, a word is 16 bits but on a 32 bit one it's 32 bits.

Word (computer architecture) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

My 16bit 90s sampler shows ram amount on startup in mwords

32mb of ram is displayed as 16mwords.

I'd assume the m is megaword.

 

[bigegg]

Don’t 5 characters equal one word? Space bar included?

60wpm (with few errors) was regarded as a good typist speed back when it was important? That was before errors were easily corrected with a spell-checker and auto-correct.

That was before metrication.

 

[bigegg]

What do you regard as “metrication”?

Inches became centimetres.
Pints became litres.
Pounds became kilos.
Wpm became hexadecimal.

 

[daleyd]

Inches became centimetres.
Pints became litres.
Pounds became kilos.
Wpm became hexadecimal.

Marathon became Snickers…

 

[My Old Landy]

Marathon became Snickers…

.... that is one of the hardest to deal with

 

[eLuSiVeMiTe]

.... that is one of the hardest to deal with

Opal fruits mate. Still not got over it

 

[R Kraft]

People used to be able to cope with education in various subjects and conversions, without dying.: https://grandfather-economic-report.com/1895-test.htm

 

[prepman]

No they're not. 1 metre is exactly the distance light travels in 1/299792458 of a second in a vacuum, a second is exactly 9192631770 of something to do with caesium, the Planck constant is defined as 6.62607015*10^−34 which can be combined with the previous two values to give an exact mass of a kilogram. All the SI base units are defined like this, they're exact, rational quantities of discrete things.

Of course any measurement you make of a continuous thing has an associated error or tolerance.

Thought the metre was based on the circumference of the Earth, which they unfortunately miscalculated. The metric system was devised to move away from the royal hoof, thumbs, arm span etc...

What is the circumference of Earth in metres?

Answer (1 of 6): Very nearly 40 million. The metric system is set up so that a Meridian from the pole to the equator should be exactly 10 million meters. It's a bit more because the measurements weren't perfect back in the 1700s. So obviously therefore the circumference of the earth should be fou...

www.quora.com

 

[prepman]

Since you were clearly hoping for a bit of pedantry, a word isn't necessarily 16 bits. A word is the natural unit of data for a particular microprocessor. On a 16-bit micro, a word is 16 bits but on a 32 bit one it's 32 bits.

Word (computer architecture) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

That's known as a double word, which is what I was always used to.

 

[Ross365]

Being a man of a certain age, we just had imperial units when I was at primary school, then metric came along at secondary school and I'm reasonable happy with imperial or metric.

However, I seem to recall at some point in my life trying to work out some calculations for getting fluid flow through an orifice. Trying to do it with imperial units was really hard (all kinds of conversion factors needed), whereas doing it in metric was far easier. That was the point at which I decided imperial was OK for the allotment, but metric was needed at work.

For those of you who want Boris to bring back imperial, I hope that you do know, he also seriously believes that teaching Latin should be brought back in to schools. Pax vobiscum!