Can't believe I forgot this..
The Jaquard Loom, which is arguably the foundational concept of modern CNC manufacturing.
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Can't believe I forgot this..
The Jaquard Loom, which is arguably the foundational concept of modern CNC manufacturing.
The 1751 machine is what became the modern lathe.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djB9oK6pkbA
Your contribution to this thread could easily be interpreted as an insult to the French people and culture. I'd like to think that it wasn't meant that way but you might want to think about offering some clarification of what you meant.
Anyway, on to a response to your request...
France has given us some of the most influential mathematicians who have provided much of the analytic framework on which modern developments are based. Here is a partial list...
Blaise Pascal - projective geometry, mechanical calculator, Pascal's law, Pascal's triangle
Pierre Fermat - difference quotient (precursor to differential calculus), Fermat's last theorem, Fermat's principle
Jean-Baptiste Fourier - Fourier series, Fourier transform, greenhouse effect
René Descartes - analytical geometry, Cartesian coordinates, rationalism
Pierre-Simon Laplace - Laplace's equation, Laplace transform
The work of many of these mathematicians extends into the scientific world. In addition, there are many key French scientists as this list shows...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_scientists
Remember it was not a metric country that put a man on the moon,but I have to admit the metric system makes sense.I will continue to use both.
Fun fact: US measurement standards are actually defined in metric units. 8:51 video from a visit to the National Institute of Standards and Technology:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmSJXC6_qQ8
Suggested reading:
Attachment 37585
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_(mass)#Current_use
just my 2 cents
Johan
And then you've this: The stone or stone weight (abbreviation: st.) is an English and imperial unit of mass now equal to 14 pounds (approximately 6.35 kg). The stone continues in customary use in Britain and Ireland for body weight, but was prohibited for commercial use in the United Kingdom by the Weights and Measures Act of 1985.
Social distancing chart, with distance specified in pizzas.
https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/h...nce_length.jpg
looks to me like the pizzas are coming from the guy on the left and attacking the guy on the right.
And in Florida...
Attachment 37646
Measuring distances in football fields, pizzas or alligators is fine but what do you do when you need to express a pure number out of range of the 1-2-many counting types? Walmart has solved that problem...
Attachment 37647
Asteroid bigger than the Statue of Liberty will fly past Earth on Christmas Day, NASA says...
Allow me to introduce you to the Walmartians, the species who shop there...
https://www.sadanduseless.com/people...lmart-gallery/
Scroll through that site; think those folks could count all the way up to fifteen?
This article...
https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/mass...arth-1.5244153
says in its very first sentence...
"TORONTO -- A massive asteroid that may be bigger than the length of two football fields is set to fly past Earth on Christmas Day, according to NASA."
so fortunately we need not convert odd dimensions like Statues-of-Liberty into the universal standard of football fields. I can't express how reassuring that is :-) Even the folks in the great white North measure in football fields.
HA!
Like many, I had chuckled at the "people of walmart" stuff that you see on the web. I always just figured these characters were distant outliers. Then 7 or 8 years ago my job had me working in Florida and the principle worksite just happened to be nextdoor to a large Walmart where we would go to stock up on groceries for the extended stay place I was staying at, or when we were desperate and hungry enough, a late night sandwich because nothing else was open.
I learned pretty quickly that it was quite effortless to find "People of Walmart" caliber people, most any time of the day or night. It was an eyeopener.
This reminds me of an article about those kids that were trapped in the underwater cave a couple of years back. I think it was in Thailand. One of the UK newspapers had an infographic showing a cross section of the rescue path to illustrate how difficult the rescue was going to be. They described the narrowest part of the passage as being "The width of four Mars candy bars"...
Quickly reading the article points out a much more CRITICAL deficiency in the understanding of measurement by MOST people, no matter what units you use.
The article clearly states, "....has a diameter between 92 and 210 metres. This means it could range from the size of the Statue of Liberty to the length of two NFL-size football fields..."
Even if you have no idea what a meter is, if you truly understand measurement, and simple math you can easily see the asteroid is from "this big" to over "twice this big". However when writers start to mix units, it becomes foolish. Why not simply say, "the size can be between one to two Statues of Liberty". Or between "one and two Football fields".
It is so unfortunate that we get so much of our information from Journalists who no longer study how to clearly communicate information. Instead they study how keep the consumers "attention" long enough to air the commercials. It does not matter if what they say is true or not, as no one will call them on it anyway.
One of my favorite lines came from a reporter covering the city's preparations for the upcoming winter season. She pointed to a single axle truck stating, "this truck is ready to go with 20,000 TONS of salt". It happens all the time.
Merry Christmas Walmart shoppers!!!
Which raises the question, what is the accepted length of a football field?
In Usonian football, the playing area is 100 yards (300 feet) long but there are two 10 yard endzones so the total field length is 120 yards (360 feet).
Then there's the matter of what "football" means. In many countries, it's soccer, and I believe the dimensions of soccer fields can vary.
Thankfully, I'm ignorant of all the other forms of the game played throughout the world. It seems that "football field" is as rubber a measurement as "barrel" or "bushel".
That's ironic; even a football field is not the standard measurement length of a football field.
This one was easy to make, even with my limited graphic skills:
https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/h...ution_sign.jpg
Even more ironic...
Since its length is unspecified, it's logical to average 100 yards and 120 yards to get 110 yards, which is almost exactly 100 METERS.
[I secretly enjoy manufacturing these fictitious joins between the two systems to confound the stupid. In college, I had a liberal arts major gal convinced that the frequent use of the dozen in the inferial system was due to widespread polydactylism among the Quaker colonists.]
Had to look up Polydactyly or polydactylism ... (from Greek πολύς (polys) 'many', and δάκτυλος (daktylos) 'finger'), also known as hyperdactyly, is an anomaly in humans and animals resulting in supernumerary fingers and/or toes. Polydactyly is the opposite of oligodactyly (fewer fingers or toes).
I can go back to bed now I learned my "something new" for today!!!
When I taught Physics years ago we used metric - almost exclusively. Occasionally I needed to explain a concept using the "other" system to help a few students understand what was happening. I enjoyed challenging my students and once- tongue-in-cheek told them America was going to shift to "metric TIME" they didn't know what to do after that suggestion....
Or even decimal time!Quote:
metric TIME" they didn't know what to do after that suggestion....
"Metric Time" is a misnomer. The unit of time in the metric system of measurement has always been the conventional second - 1/86400 of the rotational period of the earth.
However, during the French revolution, the French. in excessive eagerness to rid themselves of everything associated with the monarchy, introduced the concept of "Decimal Time". The day was to be divided into ten hours, each hour into 100 minutes and each minute into 100 seconds. This scheme was popularized briefly at the time of the revolution but never caught on outside France. Later, other schemes were tried including dividing the day into 100 hours with decimal divisions into minutes and seconds.
A more detailed description can be found in Wikipedia...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time
Decimal Time did last long enough for the clockmakers to make clocks that displayed it. This image from the above article shows one...
Attachment 37664
If you ever run across one in a garage sale, buy it no matter the price; they're worth a small fortune in the antique market due to their extreme rarity.
Let us not forget about the gradian, also known as the gon. 1/400 of a turn, 9/10 of a degree, or pi/200.
The Canadian "government", such as it is, actually distributed a metric clock to each household in Canada at one point, presumably so collectors would have something to ignore at flea markets.
I have an app on my phone that sounds bells according to ship's clock time. Really annoys my wife when she asks me what time I want to have dinner I tell her about midway through Second Dog Watch.
She smartened up, though. She went online and learned it so she could play back at me. "We have to leave the house no later than seven bells into Forenoon Watch."
Fortunately, it never became part of SI though. I've never seen it used here in the USA.
Worse are the machinists who term a thousandth of an inch a "mil".
One has to be careful with "mil" since it's one of the common terms for milliradians. an SI unit...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milliradian
Also the artillery setters use it as an angular measure. However, to maintain the spirit of inferial confusion, they've "rounded" the 6283... milliradians in a circle to 6400. I suppose the (admittedly slight) error so induced is compensated with more explosive shells.
Nice Simpsons bit on metric time.
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Why is it that we cling to such an awful system of time? I guess it doesn't help that a year is not an integer number of days and a day is a variable number of hours, minutes, and seconds. We have been stuck with grouping 7 days together and calling it a week for many millennium. When we have colonies living outside of the earth, this system is going to make even less sense.
I have heard discussion of doing away with time zones. Now, wouldn't that be interesting.
I bought this watch a few years ago:
Attachment 37680
I was surprised how quickly I got used to it. However, switching between having one hand and two drove me nuts.
Rick
Scored one of these odd looking things in a flea market in Moscow 1992:
Attachment 37682
Raketa #2623 , 24h "Submariner's watch" with major time zone cities marked on a rotatable inner ring.
Haven't used it since the nineties, as the glass cracked and I've not yet gotten around switching it...
Guess Marv would call it a "Tetravigesimal" watch? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaugel_language:)
Always fun to show people asking for the time... It is 9:41:33 a.m.
Why do we cling to outdated, over-complicated systems?
The major reason seems to be the Old-Fart Factor (OFF). OFFs are resistant to any change, often mysteriously claiming it's an intrusion on their freedom. This coupled with the old-stuff-is-always-better-than-new-stuff idea that is a product of change resistance seems to develop with age so society never loses its collection of OFFs. There will always be a cadre of OFFs shaking their fingers at any suggested change.
Sometimes the OFFs can be overcome. When Sweden switched from driving on the left to driving on the right in the 60s, some 80% of the people voted to not do it, yet it was accomplished in one day - a mind-boggling logistical effort. The British finally decimalized their impossibly complicated currency (though, despite pretending to be metric, they continue to measure distances in miles and beer in pints).
Beyond the OFFs, there is the dumbing-down factor (DDF ?). A population that can't read a ruler to better than inch precision is going to go into neural paralysis if faced with a 24 hour clock. Even time zones are a mystery to many people. When a large segment of the population believes in angels, devils, ghosts, aliens and a flat earth, convincing them to make logical changes doesn't stand a chance.
Tetravigesimal doesn't have quite the ring I'd like.
I'd love to see a redneck trying to get his mouth around Octoquadragesimal. (Sounds like a eight-armed alien.)
OTOH, Quinquagesimal reminds me of Queequeg, Ahab's harpooner.
Heck, if you're going to pick a dumb base, it might as well sound cool. ;-)