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| Thread ID: 80343 | 2007-06-19 22:18:00 | I Don't DO Metric...Help A Little | SurferJoe46 (51) | PC World Chat |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 560725 | 2007-06-21 21:53:00 | Hi Joe. We have only used the Metric system for about 30 years. Re your:OK..after Kbits, which I assume is thousands of bits, the next step is Mbits..and is that Megabits or Milibits Maxibits or Minibits? And the Mbits is (what?) millions or ten-thousands of bits? I should imagine that most people would not have a clue how to answer your query. I was interested to read a US of A woodworkers' book recently and find that although the authors were using the old Imperial measurements as a base, they had bastardised it by creating decimalisation... such as three inches and seven-tenths of an inch. 3 7/10". Weird. You'll like Metric when it eventually arrives. This takes me back a bit - perhaps the Americans are hoping to copy what the British did years ago. I was on the design teams for the Canberra and Lightning aircraft and we always used decimal inches ie 3.15 etc. I have always been puzzled why some people regard this as weird or difficult to understand. We reckoned it would be a help when we went metric. It did but so many of our fitters got confused or we also made mistakes that for a while we had to have both imperial and metric measurements on drawings. I think that was the Jaguar or TSR2 When I came to New Zealand and worked for Fletchers we started using decimal inches but ran into tremendous opposition from our fitters who knew what 3/16ths were and wanted us to stay with that system. We switched to metric eventually. Tom |
Thomas01 (317) | ||
| 560726 | 2007-06-21 22:19:00 | I actually miss the Whitworth (www.ama-cycle.org) system. | SurferJoe46 (51) | ||
| 560727 | 2007-06-22 23:45:00 | Now if we could only metricate time (and nothing but convention stops us, though certain natural time scales are wilfully uncooperative) we would be on a roll . Urban legend has it that when the metric system was first introduced they tried to metricate time too but they found that horses, after ten thousand years of having the day off, horses wouldn't work on what had been Sunday, and so the stuck with the tried and true . I don't know how true it is . Also, didn't a space shuttle run into difficulty over a metric/imperial conversion? |
joemac (9739) | ||
| 560728 | 2007-06-23 02:14:00 | The principal barriers to the metrication of time are the cycles of the sun and moon, and although nothing stops the day being chopped into metric minutes/hours, those measures are also based on the rotation of the earth and cycles of sun & moon, so global conversion might just be just a little bit difficult to coordinate . I think the NASA metric confusion related to a probe that landed below the surface of the target plant (Mars?) which is not dissimilar to the faux pas that saw an early probe crash head on into the moon (as intended) with the lens cap still on its camera . Cheers Billy 8-{) |
Billy T (70) | ||
| 560729 | 2007-06-23 03:16:00 | One of NASA's contracters gave them an essential piece of information in the worng units. The navigation software was given the number (thrust of a steering/braking rocket). It didn't "know" it was several times too small. SPLAT. If there had been plenty of room, the feedback process would have eventually got the speed right. But this happened in the last few seconds of flight. | Graham L (2) | ||
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