US going metric?

alohacyberian wrote:


But, as I said, media weather reporting and forecasting is unlikely to
use
decimals. KM

What difference would it make? They aren't usually very accurate anyway.

I realize the weather forecasting isn't very accurate, but, didn't realize
the reporting was inaccurate. KM

The temperature reported is for a specific location, and there are a lot of
factors that can cause temperatures to vary, like elevation or proximity to a
large body of water. I check the weather online from a site that provides
reports from the closest city, which if 15 km from my house. During the
summer, it is usually a degree or 2 cooler than the temperature on my
thermometer at home, but during the winter they are usually that much warmer.

A few degrees difference in temperature does not make a while lot of
difference. If it is cold it's cold. If it is hot it is hot. One or two
degrees difference is barely perceptible.

As for the forecasts, it is usually a crap shoot. We have had two severe
winter storm warnings in the last month. They never happened. Last winter's
long range forecasts were pitiful We had a long cold winter with near record
low temperatures. While we are used to an occasional cold snap taking us down
to -20 or so, they are rare and short. Last year it stayed down there for more
than a month. Almost every day the long range forecast was for temperatures
about 10 degrees C warmer. But each day the temperature predicted that day was
revised downward. Maybe it was just someone trying to cheer us up with the
hope that it really would warm up.

This year the opposite has happened. We have had unseasonably warm
temperatures and predictions for colder days ahead, but it has not got as cold
as they said it would be. It was supposed to be clear and cold tonight, but
the temperature has remained constant and it is snowing.

It seems to me I heard somewhere that alohacyberian wrote in article
:

"Hatunen" wrote in message
.. .
On Thu, 08 Jan 2004 05:45:23 GMT, "alohacyberian"
wrote:
"Hatunen" wrote in message
.. .

Having originally worked in radio when the term was cycles/second
I have always felt the hertz to be something of a ******* unit,
but it did lead to the rather cute joke a few decades ago about
the "cycle" being an "Avis", or a Hertz-second.

Ah, not to go off on a tangent, but, that was back in the daze you had to
know about sine waves, vacuum tubes and superheterodyne receivers in order
to
get a first class ticket from the FCC. KM

Or even a General Class. If you mean amateur tickets.

73
Ex-W8LBU

No, I meant commercial radio-telephone tickets. Ex-WB6CAS - Advanced. KM

True for both. WV6ENG (Novice 1959) WA6ENG (General) N6IM Extra.
--
Don

It seems to me I heard somewhere that Gene Nygaard wrote in article
:

Don Kirkman wrote in message . ..

It seems to me I heard somewhere that Greg Johnson wrote in article
:

I learned both many years ago, and while I use fahrenheit, I can still
do the conversion in my head. My question, though, is why was the usage
of the explanatory "centigrade" changed to the astrological "celsius"?

It explains nothing. The prefix "centi-" in this case has a different
meaning from the prefix "centi-" for the SI units. There is no
"grade" in use of which this centigrade is the hundredth part.

Grade "a position in a scale of ranks or qualities." [Webster's New
Collegiate, 1973] Nothing to do with angular grads.

Furthermore, in many languages "grade" or something similar has the
same meaning as "degree" in English, so degree centigrade is confusing
and redundant.

My Spanish and French dictionaries don't define "grade" or "grado" in
angular units, but in steps or degrees. My German dictionary has only
"grad" for the degrees, not for the angular measure. Granted all these
are popular dictionaries, not scientific ones.

Not confusing and redundant if you are describing a scale of 100 levels,
degrees, steps, or grades.

Furthermore, it is ambiguous since a grade (or grad, or gon) is a unit
of angular measure. A centigrade is to a kilometer as a minute of arc
is to a nautical mile.

My Webster's dictionary doesn't have "grade" for the angular unit.

Why isn't "Fahrenheit" something like "duocentiduodecigrade"? :-)

ISTM there's been a strong movement to honor all the historical figures,
sometimes at the cost of clarity. Cycles per second Hertz, centigrade
Celsius. My gauss is that it's just a way of paying ohmage.

You are overlooking the most important factor. It is an
*International* System of Units.

The original question, which I took rather lightly, was why centigrade
was changed to Celsius.

Names are more portable between languages than other words. Basing
the names of units on names makes it easier to get uniform symbols for
the units worldwide.

They seem to have worked it out with a melange of schemes for the
periodic table(s). :-)
--
Don

Ohm I gosh, Watts up with that? They've had Amp-L time to pay homage till
it
Hertz and before you know it, the Resistance will be re-Volting. I can just
envision those little leprechauns whirling about in their Imp-e dance to
keep
Current. Who will erg them to Rectify the situation, Newton or Capacit ants
to their dyne day?

Groan...

Don Kirkman wrote in message . ..
It seems to me I heard somewhere that Gene Nygaard wrote in article
:

Don Kirkman wrote in message . ..

It seems to me I heard somewhere that Greg Johnson wrote in article
:

I learned both many years ago, and while I use fahrenheit, I can still
do the conversion in my head. My question, though, is why was the usage
of the explanatory "centigrade" changed to the astrological "celsius"?

It explains nothing. The prefix "centi-" in this case has a different
meaning from the prefix "centi-" for the SI units. There is no
"grade" in use of which this centigrade is the hundredth part.

Grade "a position in a scale of ranks or qualities." [Webster's New
Collegiate, 1973] Nothing to do with angular grads.

Furthermore, in many languages "grade" or something similar has the
same meaning as "degree" in English, so degree centigrade is confusing
and redundant.

My Spanish and French dictionaries don't define "grade" or "grado" in
angular units, but in steps or degrees. My German dictionary has only
"grad" for the degrees, not for the angular measure. Granted all these
are popular dictionaries, not scientific ones.

It's not surprising since those angular units equal to 1/100 of a
right angle have never seen widespread use. Even in France and Germany
where they were most used, they had pretty much died out before those
units were revived by their inclusion as an option for trig operations
on most scientific caculators, including the ones that come with
Windows.

But more important, it's the fact that those languages also use Grad
or grado and the like for 1/90 of a right angle that has led to "gon"
as the newer name for 1/100 of a right angle. It would be confusing
to use the same word for both different angular measures.

Not confusing and redundant if you are describing a scale of 100 levels,
degrees, steps, or grades.

Furthermore, it is ambiguous since a grade (or grad, or gon) is a unit
of angular measure. A centigrade is to a kilometer as a minute of arc
is to a nautical mile.

My Webster's dictionary doesn't have "grade" for the angular unit.

Webster's Third New International Dictionary does, as an "or" spelling
in the entry under grad (according to their rules spelled out in the
introductory material, this entry appears close enough to the entry
for "grade" that it isn't repeated under grade, unless I missed it).
It is also the original French spelling.

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary (Tenth Collegiate Dictionary) at
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary has
Main Entry: 2grad
Function: noun
Etymology: French grade degree, from Latin gradus
Date: 1898
: one hundredth of a right angle

This goofballs at Microsoft also mislabeled these units "gradients" on
some versions of the calculator that comes with Windows. It has now
been corrected to "grads" on newer versions.



Why isn't "Fahrenheit" something like "duocentiduodecigrade"? :-)

ISTM there's been a strong movement to honor all the historical figures,
sometimes at the cost of clarity. Cycles per second Hertz, centigrade
Celsius. My gauss is that it's just a way of paying ohmage.

You are overlooking the most important factor. It is an
*International* System of Units.

The original question, which I took rather lightly, was why centigrade
was changed to Celsius.

Names are more portable between languages than other words. Basing
the names of units on names makes it easier to get uniform symbols for
the units worldwide.

They seem to have worked it out with a melange of schemes for the
periodic table(s). :-)

They learned some lessons as well. Most of the recent additions are
derived from proper names of people or places.

It doesn't work that well for the older ones, unless you call your
elements wolfram and stannum and aurum and argentium and plumbum and
the like. The reason Latin was used for many of the symbols has the
same purpose of greater portability between languages.

Gene Nygaard

Don Kirkman wrote in message . ..
The original question, which I took rather lightly, was why centigrade
was changed to Celsius.

I forgot to mention one other bit on nonsense that remains with us in
SI. That is calling the unit for amount of substance the mole, a name
shared with a couple of other units: the pound mole and the kilogram
mole.

Apparently nobody has the guts to rename it the loschmitt!!!

Gene Nygaard

(me) wrote in message . com...
Mike@com (Mike Groves) wrote in message ...
What about paper sizes?

Are A4, A3 etc. catching on?

So much easier than US Letter size. A3 is half of A2, A4 is half of
A3, A5 is half of A4 etc., etc.

Mike

um, A sheet (letter) is half of B, two B's make a C etc.
An E sheet is 34 x 44, do the math.

You do the math.

That's only half the story, and it only works for those of you who use
plotters that can handle big sheets, not the things we use on our
normal home printers. Doesn't apply to 3x5 and 4x6 and 5x8 index
cards, for example.

But suppose you try to scale up from one of your A sheets to a B
sheet? What happens? Doesn't fit very well, does it.

Ratio of the sides for plotter paper

A sheet 11/8.5 1.294
B sheet 17/11 1.545
C sheet 22/17 1.294
etc.

Going all the way from A to C will work fine, but going from A to B
doesn't work so good.

However, for the metric A series (and for ISO B series, not that
goofball Japanese B series) you have the ratio between the sides as a
constant 1.414, or the square root of 2.

Or try to figure out how many sheets of D plotter paper will cover 200
square feet. Then figure out how many sheets of A1 paper will cover
20 square meters. I can do the latter in my head pretty easily.

Gene Nygaard

Henry wrote:

In the early '70s, there were some Joint Resolutions which said,
basically, that the US should begin thinking about getting ready to
prepare for the possibility of considering a change to the metric
system. In the mid '70s I worked a job in a place that had international
sales and in light of the supposed atmosphere of metrification that was
spreading across the land I made a remark one day about the firm's units
of measurement. The foreman just about jumped down my throat. 'Why
should WE change?!?' he demanded. 'We're number one! Let the rest of
those countries [sic] change to OUR way!'

And in my firm, as in America generally, that was that.

That about sums it up. When SIM was being pushed the US was supposed to go along
with it, but like many other international issues, they backed out. The fact is
that there were a number of different systems of measurement being used around
the world. While Americans may consider themselves as number one, they are a
minority in the world stage, and for a country with relatively high standards it
reflects poorly on them that they are unable to adapt to a change that everyone
else in the developed world has managed to do quite easily.

Dave Smith wrote:
Henry wrote:

In the early '70s, there were some Joint Resolutions which said,
basically, that the US should begin thinking about getting ready to
prepare for the possibility of considering a change to the metric
system. In the mid '70s I worked a job in a place that had international
sales and in light of the supposed atmosphere of metrification that was
spreading across the land I made a remark one day about the firm's units
of measurement. The foreman just about jumped down my throat. 'Why
should WE change?!?' he demanded. 'We're number one! Let the rest of
those countries [sic] change to OUR way!'

And in my firm, as in America generally, that was that.

That about sums it up. When SIM was being pushed the US was supposed to go along
with it, but like many other international issues, they backed out. The fact is
that there were a number of different systems of measurement being used around
the world. While Americans may consider themselves as number one, they are a
minority in the world stage, and for a country with relatively high standards it
reflects poorly on them that they are unable to adapt to a change that everyone
else in the developed world has managed to do quite easily.


Haughty stuff, Dave.

If the US uses metric when in contact with other nations for import/export
purposes, who cares what they use internally? None of anyone's business. And
even were they to use avoirdupois (for instance) in international dealings,
market forces would quickly force the US to use metric anyway.

So where's the beef? Oh right. It reflects poorly and all that.

That and a quarter will get you a paper. Nex

"Dave Smith" wrote in message
...
Henry wrote:
In the early '70s, there were some Joint Resolutions which said,
basically, that the US should begin thinking about getting ready to
prepare for the possibility of considering a change to the metric
system. In the mid '70s I worked a job in a place that had international
sales and in light of the supposed atmosphere of metrification that was
spreading across the land I made a remark one day about the firm's units
of measurement. The foreman just about jumped down my throat. 'Why
should WE change?!?' he demanded. 'We're number one! Let the rest of
those countries [sic] change to OUR way!'

And in my firm, as in America generally, that was that.

That about sums it up. When SIM was being pushed the US was supposed to go
along
with it, but like many other international issues, they backed out. The
fact is
that there were a number of different systems of measurement being used
around
the world. While Americans may consider themselves as number one, they are
a
minority in the world stage, and for a country with relatively high
standards it
reflects poorly on them that they are unable to adapt to a change that
everyone
else in the developed world has managed to do quite easily.


It isn't just America that has that mentality. Many countries have declined
to go along with world standards that have supposedly been set. Way back when
it was determined that automobiles should drive on the right hand side of the
road, much of the British Empire declined to go along and to this day the
U.K., India, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, etc. decline to drive on the
right side of the road. What do you suppose that costs the automotive
industry? KM
--
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