Why I’ll never embrace the metric system.
(media.greatawakening.win)
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Would have been a powerful meme if it weren’t for the Van Allen Radiation Belt 😅
https://youtu.be/TKGCJ1N-WfQ
There have been straight answers for the past 55 years, for anyone who wants an answer. There are no problems for human beings passing through the Van Allen Belts, as we did it repeatedly on Apollo. But the onboard electronics have changed greatly. For Apollo it was all transistors, printed circuits, and lighted buttons...and not even as much computer power as a cellphone. Transistors were pretty sturdy compared to today's micro-lithographic integrated circuits. They may not be as radiation tolerant, so it makes sense to make sure the avioncs won't be upset by passage through the Van Allen Belts. Or would you prefer to make the first trip without having checked that out?
The astronaut comments were forward-looking, not historic-looking.
They have been moving the US toward the metric system for years, and judging by how many things are now listed in metric measurements they have been fairly successful.
I can see only reason for the move. They wanted everyone under their NWO government on the same system.
I remember when we were supposed to be fully metric by the end of 1986. Reagan put a stop to it and no succeeding president ever pursued it again.
You know, I never see anyone talk about how the French Revolution really resembled a proto-Communist takeover, some 50 years pre-Marx.
Because it was something akin to Proto communism, and was the birthplace of the left/right political system we have today
The move was so we could sell goods to the rest of the world, and integrate foreign-produced subsystems into our systems. Don't be blind to the necessities of the marketplace.
And also because science is international and must be disseminated in common units of reference.
When looking at this remember that the Mars Climate Orbiter crashed due to mismatched metric/imperial units.
But that was not a problem with the unit systems involved. That was a problem with technical management oversight. I was on a program that built metric parts on English-measured machine tools, well within tolerances. Our parts were to a higher standard than European-produced parts.
Totally agree. Sensors all give raw units that must be converted anyhow. Any mismatch shoulda been caught in unit testing or integration test.
Perhaps AI will fix the management problem.
AI cannot think. It is hard enough to manage something when thinking.
True, but AI can dig and spot patterns. Could it be trained to spot failure patterns that humans tend to miss?
How would it know that any pattern is a "failure"? What you are describing is "template matching." Can't happen without a template first being identified by a human being. In the case of the MCAS software, blatant problems went by without notice because of tunnel thinking.
Outside of "But everyone else uses it!", there's really no real reason to switch systems.
Fundamentally, SI prefixes are not incompatible with the imperial system (You can measure things in kilofeet and decipounds if you really hate 5280 feet to a mile or 16 oz to a lb).
The units themselves are just as arbitrary, for example a meter is specifically "one ten-millionth of the shortest distance from the North Pole to the equator passing through Paris". Measured through different cities yield a different meter. Other units like grams use volumetric measurement of substances like water as definitions, thereby inheriting the arbitrary nature of the meter by default, too.
Lastly, you'd have to re-educate an entire nation on the meanings of all these measurements and all the 2nd order units like kilometers per liter, all for a tiny benefit for immigrants, tourists, and the scientific community.
Can you imagine changing every speed limit sign in the USA? That along would be expensive. Would people be more comfortable with 65 mph or 100 kph which is slower?
BTW, as I was typing this, my spell check changed kph to mph. That should end the debate right there.
Hell, just imagine the amount of speed trapping you could do by just quietly changing the mph to kmph.
"Officer I swear I was going the speed limit!"
"You were yesterday, but today that sign's in kilometers, sonny!"
I had something kind of like that happen to me once. Not metric, but the same result. When I worked at NORAD the speed limit going up the mountain was 40mph. One week - midweek at that - the Security Police (Air Force Military Police) changed the speed limit to 30mph with no warning. They then wrote dozens of speeding tickets that morning (including one for me).
That pissed me off enough, but when I got to the top and joined the line of people trying to park (the spaces were the diagonal ones you see in some of the one-way parking lots) I pulled thru a space with an open space on the other side. It was on the end - not in the middle of the lane. Another of the SPs came over and wrote me another ticket - for facing the wrong way in traffic. I flipped.
Once I went inside I went to my boss and told him I was going to the First Sergeant, and explained why. He laughed and said to not hold my breath. Luckily the First Sergeant also got a speeding ticket and he was pissed. Long story short - after he went and yelled at the SP commander all of the tickets were killed and the speed limit was put back. The person that authorized the speed limit change was reassigned to the main base (Peterson AFB, now SFB). Dozens of people were needlessly made to be late to work at our nation's premier air and space joint defense base. Oops.
LOL... Now, kph is kilopoundhour? or kiloperhour? dizzy here...
Kilometers per hour.
I know, but that would be KMH or KMPH not kph grin
Everywhere I've seen, it is kph.
I see... its a regional thing. ( Outside of the US and Great Britain, speed limits are almost universally displayed and measured in kilometers per hour (km/h), often abbreviated as km/h or sometimes kph. ) In my 67 years I never saw kph, thats why I thought it was funny.
Yes, I can imagine. The Canadians did it decades ago. No big deal. Our speedometers have both mph and kph scales. I've seen places that have "bilingual" signage (metric and English).
I've got news for you. Immigrants, tourists, and scientific community already work in metric units by preference, and in order to be intelligible to the rest of the world. This was fait accompli when I was in university, half a century ago. My first engineering assignment involved technology transfer of the ROLAND 2 anti-aircraft missile, a German-French design all in millimeters and kilograms. Conversion to English units for machining operations was a snap, mere arithmetic.
This has moved to commerce, where auto engine displacement and bottles of drinking water are measured in liters and camera specifications in millimeters. Medicine is measured in milliliters, grams, milligrams, and micrograms. Eyeglass prescriptions are given in diopters, a metric unit. Nobody blinks an eye. And why? So we can sell our goods to an otherwise metric world, using metric tools and measurements. When we are the odd man out, we have no competitive edge. Metric units are no more arbitrary than English units, and just as simple for daily use. A meter is ~40 inches, close to a yard. An inch is ~25 millimeters. A kilogram is ~2.2 pounds. A kilometer is ~0.6 mile.
The usual objections to the metric systems comes from people who have no experience working in dimensional units in any technical sense. But try to equate kinetic energy in English units to chemical energy in English units, and go through Conversion Hell as you try to equate foot-pounds with calories. That is the overriding virtue of the metric system: if you stay within the language of one or the other version (there are two: mks and cgs), if you start out with anything measured in the system units, you can arrive at common units for energy and momentum, etc. When in university, I early learned that it was easier to convert a problem statement from English units to metric units and then work the problem in metric. English is not that simple. If the unit of force is a "pound" then the unit of mass is a "slug." But if the unit of mass is a "pound" then the unit of force is a "poundal." I bet you didn't know that. Don't defend a system when you don't know its disadvantages.
Can you divide metric by half, 3rds, 4ths? No need to get all high and mighty. Number systems are just number systems. A mm is arbitrary. It's just a base 10 counting system with markers on the 10s whereas imperial was about about a relationship between body dimensions and real world application. Metric wouldn't have worked for most of our history due to an inability to reproduce those small measurements consistently on any medium we were able to work with. Sigh.... the left wing mind set is always "That's old, it's useless" instead of understanding its just different systems for different times and applications. I've never seen someone be able to show me a mm or cm or M estimate with their arms or hands and not have it be off by a large magnitude if repeated even just 10 times.
The rest of the world gets along with metric just fine, traveling through space, flying, building bridges, etc. All the usual units are easily expressed in metric. A foot is about a third of a meter. An inch is 2.5 centimeters. Etc. How is it that we fought armies who were using the metric system and they gave us a lot of grief? The metric system is old, dating from 1799. Don't elevate stick-in-the-mud-ism to a virtue. As for estimates, you are talking to people who don't know their units of measure. It is why we have rulers and tape measures. I wouldn't dream of measuring in sixteenths of an inch by guessing between my fingers. But the intraocular lens implants that are inserted into your eyes to replace cataracted lenses are jolly well specified in metric units.
Hence, a tiny benefit.
With a big benefit of being able to sell to a world market that uses metric units. And be compatible with science that is dominantly conducted in metric units.
You are missing the fact that energy units are easily obtained by using metric units. The English system has foot-pounds, calories, British Thermal Units. How many calories in a foot-pound? You cannot easily convert English energy units across physical domains of application. And all of our electrical technology is metric, without any English counterpart.
Do I really have to point out that the world doesn't buy our stuff anyways, and it's not because of the wrong unit of measurement?
Really? Boeing is one of the nation's largest exporters. You can be sure that we have dual dimensioning, at least. We have to compete head-to-head with the metric world and be interoperable with all the ground equipment. The market does not care about an enclave of a special system of units.
Also: a "foot" makes sense because it's roughly the length of a . . . foot.
A Classic! Love this BWC! 🚀🌕👨🚀
And most of them don’t even pronounce kilometer correctly.
KILL ah meter
Not
kill OM eter
It isn’t mill AH meter it’s MILL ah meter.
CEN to meter,
Etc etc
Idiots.
Who are "them"? I've worked in American aeronautic industry all my adult life and we have no problem with kilOMeter and KILogram. These differences in pronunciation are called "anglicisms." The Brits have their funny pronunciations, too.
If you really want to get into the weeds of measurements, there are actually two different "feet" used for measurements. Although the difference is VERY small, if used to measure long distances, the difference becomes VERY significant. The two different foot lengths used for measuring distance are the U.S. survey foot and the international foot. The U.S. survey foot is defined as 1200/3937 (0.30480061) meters, while the international foot is defined as exactly 0.3048 meters. While both are used in the United States, the U.S. survey foot is being phased out in favor of the international foot. If you have 100 miles of railroad track, you better make sure you are using the right foot :)
What has this to do with Q?
The purpose of every country have an identical system of measurement was a minor goal in the globalist agenda. Someone above you put this in a comment.
This made me laugh. Thanks for sharing!
Love it
Of course the USA has adopted metric, how much is a 200 gram bag of weed?
Free with every case (24ct of 591 ml bottles) of baby oil. Diddy math/ROI conversion. probably.
Wait the ONLY countries not using the metric system is Liberia and Myanmar. The USA has legally adopted the metric system but still uses the original measurement of foot,Inch, pound based on body measurements of ancient times Romans Greek Saxons etc would appear that it’s still people.