Consider celebrating #Metric Day on September 23 this year. It'll be the 25 anniversary of the NASA Mars Climate Orbiter slamming into the planet because one contractor (Lockheed Martin) disregarded NASA spec and calibrated a sensor in lbf instead of N.
This was a US $327.6 million project. This is the only image of Mars that the probe produced, taken at over 4 million kilometres away from the planet. The 576 non-zero pixels effectively cost $568,750 each.
Someone pointed out on a podcast recently that in the metric system, there are units — metres, grams, litres, etc. — and that all multi-unit prefixes are Greek (deca, kilo, mega) while all sub-unit prefixes (deci, centi, milli) are Latin. (Yes, since 1935 there have been exceptions… still.)
I’ve been using the metric system since I was 6 and never noticed this.
So I bought an LED shop light yesterday and I was just looking at the installation instructions and it says to install two ceiling hooks 44.08 inches apart. There are no #metric instructions. That bugged me, and I assumed it had been manufactured overseas in metric and would translated to a round metric number. It translates to... 111.963cm. WTF?! Even if you assume rounding errors, why 112cm? Not 100 or 120 or even 115? WHYISTHIS! #measurments#imperial#rulers#wft
Paid a visit to Place-des-Arts yesterday, and it strikes me how whilst the surrounding area is now looking super modern giving me Tokyo vibes, the arts venue itself has some brutalist design going on. It reminds me a lot of a mini version of the Barbican Centre in London. #Montreal#architecture
@jfmezei@heliomass
In Canadian #construction, masonry, wood and structural steel are all according to old Imperial/US sizes, with #metric names; concrete and reinforcing are actually metric sizes (e.g. a 15M bar has a 200 mm^2 cross-section and a minimum yield strength of 400 MPa).
Highway plans are done in metric. Building plans for the private sector are in Imperial; I don't know if the government requires metric for their buildings or not.
1l of (4°C) water weighs 1kg.
1kg (of anything) is 1000g.
1g of water is 1cm³.
Stack 1000 1cm³ blocks to get a 10m high column.
This column exerts a pressure of 1 bar at its base.*
To heat it by 1°C, you would need 1kcal.
And 1N would accelerate it by 1m/s every second.
I had to google how many inches are in 7 feet.
And I think that's stupid.
We all know that the US is stuck using US customary units. Except, in the movies, major criminals always use "kilos" or "Ks" when discussing large quantities of cocaine or heroin. It's good to know that the drug dealers are helping to bring the US towards using the metric system.
I'm thinking about Mastodon in a wide view, in the world of social media, this feels a little outsider, while at the same time it also feels like it might be the future. So, let's talk about it!
What do you get out of Mastodon?
Why are you here?
How has it compared with your other social media experiences?
What do you see for the future of Mastodon?
What do you want to see?
And basically anything else about it you want to say about Mastodon.
LET'S TALK!
Sigh. The history of measurement is actually quite interesting and explains how nature and early agriculture trade drove much of the imperial measurement system.
"In 1836, the United States Department of the Treasury formally adopted the Winchester bushel as the standard for dealing in grain and, defined as 2,150.42 cubic inches, it remains so today."
As the knives sharpen around the #Luna25 crash I am reminded of the time #NASA crashed into Mars because the #metric system was too much for American subcontractors to deal with.
@amberage using 4th tier #deprecated units that have been normed as shitty abbreviations of the #metric system is not the kind of flex people think it is.
There's a reason only #Burma, #Liberia and the #USA have not fully metrified.