kravietz 🦇 @kravietz@social.privacytools.io

@epic @cjd

It's only because Mastodon doesn't allow me to post more than 500 characters.

> isolated environment though

I didn't mean the US, I meant specific sectors of economy such as plumbing or car mechanics...

> Tell a carpenter

...or carpentry.

I don't do wood work, but I do 3D cases or PCB occasionally and can't imagine doing that in fractional inches.

> 3/16” and 11/16”

Then maybe it's optimised for human memory operations.

@LienRag@miaou.drycat.fr @bortzmeyer

Very interesting. I think the very concept of crime in many cases is generally a way of establishing equilibrium between two groups, one of which is entrenched in their status quo and believe that the rules they built to ensure that status quo are there for everyone.

I see a significant presence of postmodernism in discussions with relatives and friends:

- But they have their own arguments, you can't argue with them!
- They are wrong, objectively
- But there's no objective truth!
- Let's say he's racing at 160 km/h across the town and hits a building, he's dead, objectively
- But what if he doesn't care?
- If he doesn't care, he's still objectively dead

#NFT Each generation comes up with a novel technique for money laundering, which is then categorically condemned as immoral by those who already laundered their fortunes through physical art works and restaurants 🤫

@epic @cjd

So at the end of the day, while some people in the UK do use imperial units just as some of them use separate taps for cold and hot water, and come with various more or less consistent excuses for that, they rarely realize the "traditional" units is also a result of one king's decision to scrap all previously used "traditional" units and declare a single "standard" one..

@epic @cjd

At the same time, from reference point of view, imperial units have two major issues:

1) they are completely arbitrary, defined out of nowhere

2) they are defined differently at different times and places - there's a whole lot of "miles", "ounces" etc

The latter was a terrible mess even in the UK alone where each industry was using a different standard of ounce and there were like 20 of them, and that status quo was maintained primarily in order to screw confused customers 😂

@epic @cjd

As soon as various engineering and scientific disciplines started to get interconnected, it became critical to develop a common frame of reference. SI units are such frame, as they are defined based on specific physical constants rather and this would explain why the scientific world uniformly converted to SI.

You probably *could* build an atomic clock based on the notion that Cs-133 wavelength is 1" and 268/1000" but that's not very practical nor portable.

@epic @cjd

For that reason, the imperial units can probably still function in daily usage in isolated environments - for example among car mechanics or plumbers. There you don't *design* a ½" pipe, you just go and buy it, so the dimension really functions as a label and you could just as easily got and acquire the right pipe using a hypothetical "P12" symbol or whatever else.

@epic @cjd

I don't have any religious or emotional attachment to any of these unit systems. F

rom purely practical point of view I find scalars such as "30 feet 7¼ inches" impractical for calculations as you need yet another layer of conversion to decode these fractions.

I have just tested, and even wolframalpha.com is unable to decode this as a valid distance. It can convert 30' 7" but gets lost at that fractional part.

@epic @cjd

It's a rather bizarre mix of units here - the transportation systems interchangeably uses kilometers and miles, some shop owners by principle refuse to use kilograms and insist on "pounds" (without realising a "pound" is defined in law using grams and that there was like a dozen of "pounds"), fuel efficiency is measures in miles per gallon, but it's a different gallon from the one used in the US. In general, the whole units situation is nothing but a confusing dick contest.,,

14 March 1936 | A Jewish boy, Pal Szenes, was born in Subotica (Szabadka).

In June 1944 he was deported to #Auschwitz and murdered in a gas chamber.

These photos and biographical details are published on daily basis by Auschwitz Memorial Museum in Oświęcim, Poland.

http://lekcja.auschwitz.org/en_1/

@cjd

In England we measure speed with furlongs per fortnight.

> Despite Tesla claiming that the Tesla Powerwall cost would drop by half in the next three years, we’ve seen the price of the Powerwall increase twice to its current price, $12,000, since that announcement in September 2020

https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/is-the-tesla-powerwall-the-best-solar-battery-available

(it came with 11 to 14 kWh increase in capacity but it's merely 27%)

#renewablenergy

@epic I haven't been to any royal palace but I have been to many bazaars and can testify there's certainly a lot of life happening there!

It's actually available here https://translate.panlex.org/?langDe=pol-000&langAl=eng-000&txt=dzie%C5%84+dobry

"The PanLex Database (Kamholz et al. 2014) is a lexical infrastructure tool: it can translate any word in any language into any other language. This practical and useful tool is available now, and can be improved quickly at low cost. It provides an immediate benefit to linguistic communities and helps enable future language technology, such as machine translation."

https://lt4all.elra.info/proceedings/lt4all2019/pdf/2019.lt4all-1.36.pdf