quick! the Imperial system is under attack. Only you can save it. Tell me, how many barleycorns in a chain?
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
1 points (100.0% liked)
196
18714 readers
227 users here now
Be sure to follow the rule before you head out.
Rule: You must post before you leave.
Other rules
Behavior rules:
- No bigotry (transphobia, racism, etc…)
- No genocide denial
- No support for authoritarian behaviour (incl. Tankies)
- No namecalling
- Accounts from lemmygrad.ml, threads.net, or hexbear.net are held to higher standards
- Other things seen as cleary bad
Posting rules:
- No AI generated content (DALL-E etc…)
- No advertisements
- No gore / violence
- Mutual aid posts are not allowed
NSFW: NSFW content is permitted but it must be tagged and have content warnings. Anything that doesn't adhere to this will be removed. Content warnings should be added like: [penis], [explicit description of sex]. Non-sexualized breasts of any gender are not considered inappropriate and therefore do not need to be blurred/tagged.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact us on our matrix channel or email.
Other 196's:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Wait until you discover what system they used for the Apollo missions
I’m waiting
Internal calculations were are all done in metric, but converted to traditional US units because many of the astronauts were pilots and more used to them
imperial system is based on metric(on wikipedia) so they calculed on metric, converted to imperial, that is basically metric but worse
Kinda sorta not really.
One problem with units is defining them precisely.
For example, a meter is ostensibly "one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle". That's not exactly precisely defined because the earth isn't a perfect sphere.
So currently, a meter is defined to be the distance light travels in a vacuum in 9192631770 / 299,792,458 hyperfine structure transitions of caesium-133.
Rather than doing the same sort of thing with updating the standard definition of a foot or pound, the US just piggybacked off the work precisely defining metric units and defined imperial in terms of metric.
So now a foot is officially the precise distance light travels in some number of hyperfine structure transitions of caesium-133, and the US government didn't need to do a thing.
Someone once told me it was 20 degrees Celsius out. I didn’t know if it was snowing, blazing, or if he was moving at 50 furlongs a minute.
This is exactly how I feel when my American colleagues discuss the weather in Fahrenheit.