On 3 Jan 2004 08:16:12 -0800, jim rozen brought forth from the murky depths:
Well, I wish they had back when it was inexpensive to do so. Y'know, before Political Correctness, Mandated Self-Esteem, Diversity, Attorneys-as-Gods, and all that other good stuff.
True. I can't imagine hearing a horse race called out in metres. "And Citizen's Wrath is ahead by 2.17935 meters..." (Spelled both ways for diversity.)
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I'm a private pilot and I don't know what you guys are talking about! I fly using nautical miles, my altitude is in feet and my barometric pressure is in mm. And I'm still OK, still OK, still OK, .......
Not unless the specifications were set up for increased horsepower. Allowances are the designed differences in part size, tolerances are how much you are allowed to deviate from the designed size. Desing tells you the size you want, tolerance tells you how close you came to that size.
"7:23 And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about."
And I for one have no intention of doing that for as long as possible! I use metric and imperial, and hate the former and love the latter, which I use in decimal form in many ways. When once a surveyor, we worked in feet and decimals - no need for the french "metric"
As a retired person now keen on model engineering, I use inches and decimals - no need for "metric" except to repair bastard devices made and broken in that system!
And there are so many so-called "standards" in the so-called standardised "metric" - enough to outnumber any imperial set of units. In some thread sizes, there are up to six different pitches available off the shelf in the "metric" ones! At least in Imp we only had 2 - BS Whitworth and BS Fine. Ditto the American UNC and UNF. For really fine work there is BA and the Model Engineer series of fine pitches. Many "metric" bolts and nuts have heads which are far too large for scale purposes, so the Imp ones are more suitable. Dave (GB)
ps. if guys can spell "metric" right, how come they can't spell metre and litre? :)
There's no such thing as a "liter", and a "meter" is an instrument that measures. The measure itself may be a metre or a yard or even a litre..........
Re: Metrication advocates are at it again A. Gent wrote: ....First Book of Kings: "7:23 And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: =A0 =A0 =A0 it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: =A0 =A0 =A0 and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about." dia =3D 10 circ =3D 30 i.e. ? =3D 3 Well... its in the bible. ...
I convinced! Opens up a new world of finger counting for me. Now, to find a one of those cubit sticks....
Coca Cola, a definite multinational company, exports Coke in 355 ml cans. It also sells Coke in the US in 12 fl oz cans. This is not a cost issue for them, because it is just a matter of labeling. Vending machines built in any country don't care, because they're handling the *same size* cans.
In other words, it doesn't matter how you label the can, once Coke established the global standard size for vending machine soft drink cans, every other soft drink manufacturer followed, if they wanted their cans to work in the most common vending machines.
The same holds for most products. There's no rule in metric or imperial which requires that product dimensions must be expressed in simple round numbers. In fact, lots of things aren't even the size they're marked, for example the lowly 2x4 isn't actually 2x4 inches (or 50x100 mm either).
In chemistry, chemists have had to adapt to the fact that a gram mole of hydrogen doesn't actually mass 2 grams (it is really 2.01594 grams). Chemists working in imperial simply use pound moles, and get the same numbers in that system. They both really only care about ratios anyway, and the same ratios hold regardless of which system they use.
BTW Harbor Freight sells metric and inch *adjustable* wrenches as two separate items in their catalog. But there's no practical difference between the two except labeling. For most products, it is a matter of indifference to the consumer whether the products' dimensions are expressed in imperial or metric units. For most manufacturing, the same is true. The only place it really matters is for threaded fasteners and pipe. And there, imperial is easier than metric because the ratios work out to small whole numbers, which are easier to implement with gears on a lathe.
No problem. The 10 cubits is the *outside* diameter of the wall holding in the sea, the 30 cubits measures around the *inside* of the wall. Q.E.D. the wall thickness is (dia - (3*dia) / pi) / 2 or approximately .225 cubit.
The feds mandated metric signage on roadways some years back. Georgia looked at the cost of changing all the signs and said "forget it". Apparently many other states did too. The feds quietly withdrew the regulation.
Do you have a source for this? Because it'd have to be a pretty dumb law that would mandate *changing* the signs. Better would be to have a replacement policy that said new signs must display both metric and English and then X years later have them be just metric.
The US officially recognized metric measure in 1866. The US signed the convention of the Meter in 1875, and all legal US units have been metric based (ie defined in terms of the meter, kilogram, and second) since then. So the US has legally been a metric country for over a century. That we commonly use different *names* for distances like 25.4 millimeters and
1.66666666666... kilometers is just a social convenience.
In other words, we find it more convenient to say, "Give a man an inch and he'll take a mile" rather than "Give a man 25.4 mm and he'll take
In Canada they just put good quality adhesive retro-relective stickers over the signs. IIRC, they did it very quickly and converted cold turkey directly from one system to the other, no dual markings. It's a great advantage, BTW, km go by MUCH faster than miles on a long drive.
"Milestone" works nicely for the metaphorical usage (or perhaps km marker if you want to refer to the actual markers on highways and be irritating about it). How do you "dial" your telephone?
Here in Tennessee, it seems kind of spotty. Most of the highway signs are English units. However, near many of the large towns (Knoxville, Nashville, Memphis, Chattanooga), the signs giving distances to the town will have a second line giving the distance in kilometers. I don't really have a dog in the fight (I use M$ OS, Linux and MacOS interchangeably, for example) but I just wish folks would pick one and stick to it. It would be somewhat painful, but, we could live through it without too much trouble if it was set that on a given date - say - January 1, 2005, we would start working to switch over to metric measurements. The good news is that the continuing rush of manufacturing out of America will make that process a LOT easier! After all, if nothing is manufactured here, all we have to do is change road signs! Regards Dave Mundt
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