Kosh's Shadow 9/10/2022 5:10:15 PM

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Kosh's Shadow 9/10/2022 5:45:35 PM

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Occasional Reader 9/10/2022 8:23:56 PM

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Life in the blue zones.

So I had a fairly pleasant evening with my son, some neighbors and their kids, and friends of these neighbors.

my neighbors have kids who are around my son‘s age, they’re very nice with him and so I have proof of that. I know these neighbors are significantly to the left of me, but OK, I can deal with that.

but then their friends showed up.  And they were just insufferably leftist paradigm United States of America is evil, racist, etc., but for some reason they have never seen fit to leave.

and then the guy at some point starts chattering away about the metric system, and how awful the United States is for not having adopted it. “It is superior, because it’s more scalable!“ Zhe exclaimed at one point I was trying to be nice, but this I just could not let go.

I asked “what do you mean by “more scalable“? Isn’t any system of measurement infinitely scalable, as long as you know the correct units of conversion? And then this country managed to put men on the moon, multiple times, and returned them safely to earth, using the English system? Didn’t the Mayans manage to work out a sophisticated astronomical observation scheme, using their own system, not a post-French revolution European system? 

he didn’t really have an answer for this. Needless to say.

Kosh's Shadow 9/10/2022 8:51:04 PM

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Reply to Occasional Reader in 3:

Well, as a physicist, it is easier to convert between different scales (mm, cm, m, km, etc, and so for other fundamental units) in the metric system, but I doubt that person really understands it.

And a system in which the speed of light=1; temperatures are measured in electron volts, and other units that work well for physics do not work so well in human scaled real life.

So, anyone supporting the metric system must support the French Revolution!

video

Occasional Reader 9/10/2022 9:04:13 PM

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Reply to Kosh's Shadow in 4:

Easier? Sure. “More scalable”? Total nonsense. Any system of measurement is infinitely scalable.

this guy was a total piece of work. America is horrible and racist, communism is wonderful, you name it.

Kosh's Shadow 9/10/2022 9:22:56 PM

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Reply to Occasional Reader in 5:

I also think if you had asked zhem to say how many centimeters are in a kilometer, zhey would not have been able to do it any better than if you asked how many feet there are in a furlong.
I'd have to look up a furlong, but cm is m-2 and km is m3 so there are 105 cm in a km

Comfirming that - 100 cm is 1 m; 1000 m is a km, so 100000 cm/km, and that has 5 0's so I am right.

What do I win, Don Pardo? And can you convert that to quatloos?