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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2213 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 22, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Related to @DuplexFields below, if you could create a system of weights and measures that would be used worldwide, what would you do?

The SI system is pretty good (and a vast improvement over the mishmash of units that they replaced), but IMO there's still room for improvement. The "kilo"gram is the most obvious failure with its extraneous prefix, a change of one Kelvin is too small to detect unaided unlike one second, meter, or kilogram, and the ampere and mole are just weird numbers.

My proposed system would keep water as the informal reference material, as well as the second. Everything else would change to match the new discoveries in the last ~150 years: I would keep the rotation of the Earth, the mass of an atom, and the density and freezing point of water, but replace the circumference of the earth, the force produced by electromagnetism, and the boiling point of water with absolute zero and the elementary charge as follows:

Dimension Value Original Metric Derivation
 New Derivation
Time 1 s 1/(24 * 60 * 60) day No change
Length 2.71 cm 1/(40000000) circumference of Earth A 1x1x1 cube of water masses 1
Mass 19.93 g Water has density 1000 kg/m^3 10^24 carbon-12 atoms has mass of 12
Electric Current 160.3 mA Magnetic force between wires 10^18 elementary charges per second
Temperature 2.7316 K 100 degrees freezing-boiling
 0 is 0, freezing is 100
Amount 1 Atoms per gram None
luminous intensity ?? Whatever.

Do you have any improvements to the metric system you can think of? Any other changes you'd like made?

Use metric for making vaccines and building jumbo jets. Use it when extremely precision is necessary.

Use base 12 for every day human stuff like buying stuff from the drugstore or measuring a table leg. I like dealing with 1/2, 1/3, 1/4. I don't like dealing with 0.3333 or 0.25. You get used to it but it's unnecessary and slower.

I'd love using base 12 for everything. Unfortunately, imperial is stuck with mixed base 10-12-2n instead. Dividing one foot into thirds is easy. Dividing 28' 3 5/16" into thirds is a nightmare. Also, decimals are better for offsets: I'd rather deal with 0.51 than 33/64.

(also, there's nothing wrong with thousandths of an inch. Lots of machining is done to very high precision using the imperial system.)

I've generally heard it described as "imperial units are superior for human-scale measurement; metric is superior for much larger or much smaller scales."

base 12

*base 6

I would also accept this.

base 6

*base 60

I was recently wondering why the orders of magnitude for units of length, volume, and mass don't line up. 0.001m^3 = 1L = 1,000g, for water at 4°C. Why aren't they defined such that 1m^3 = 1L = 1g? If we leave the liter as is, this would require redefining the meter to be equal to a current decimeter, and gram to a current kilogram.

Do you have any improvements to the metric system you can think of?

Well, its base unit of measurement is fucking stupid. There's a very good reason that every pre-SI system of measurement, including the Chinese one (which was metric before the imposition of SI), has its two dominant units of length at 30cm (1 foot) and 3cm (~1 inch)- because it's meant to be human-scale.

Going off of something not relevant to the way most humans use measurement, like the size of the Earth, is a deficiency.

Nobody copies the French, and the French copy nobody- because the things they come up are weird and kind of batshit. Let them impose their standards at gunpoint (which is ultimately how SI spread across the Continent) and you're going to have a bad time- at least decimal time was too weird even for them.

Luminous intensity: perhaps based on the brightness of the full moon on a cloudless night, or the sun at noon. Centi-suns but named metrically?

Also, you said "freezing is 100", you mean absolute zero to the freezing (melting?) point of water should be exactly 100 units?

I like that idea for luminous intensity. The other option would be a number of photons, but I'm not sure how well that would work out.

For temperature, absolute zero (-273.15 C) is 0, freezing (0 C) is 100, room temperature (20 C) is about 107, and boiling (100 C) is about 136 (depending on elevation).

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