I sincerely hope you didn't take my comment as a defense of Customary units. I
agree metric is easier and preferable in all cases. Unfortunately some
professions and employers insist on using the damned things. (I was fortunate
to work in automotive, which metricated in the 70's.) My post was about using
obsolete, ill-defined, traditional units that aren't even part of US Customary
(or SI). Apparently a llath is or was a Welsh synonym for a rod or pole, not
the rod or pole(16.5 ft | 5.0292 m), so it doesn't have a real definition, and
a cigarette is worse, being the distance a man with variable walking speed can
walk while smoking a variable length cigarette of variable burn rate, caused by
variable inhalation rates. Male bovine droppings. It can't even be used
indoors anymore. Hard to convert ill-defined units to anything meaningful. As
bad as it is to work with the mixed-base math, all Customary units at least
have strict SI definitions.
In your two examples, do I have to pay for the saw kerf too (~1/8"), or just
the cutoff piece.
On Monday, May 11, 2020, 8:25:10 AM EDT, Mark Henschel
<[email protected]> wrote:
Pretend you walk into a lumber yard to buy a piece of wood, and the workers
offer to cut a piece the length you need. The original piece of lumber is 12
feet, four and 5/16 ths of an inch long. You need a piece 8 feet, seven and 3/4
of an inch long. How long is the waste piece (that you still have to pay
for)?Now you are transported to a metric universe. The lumber in the lumber
yard is now 2.6 meters long, and you need a piece 1.83 meters long. How long is
the waste piece now?Note these problems are not conversions in any sense, I
just made up the numbers to illustrate a point. To subtract fractions using the
inch-pound system one needs to do three or four steps, including borrowing
twice, once from a whole inch and once from feet, turning it into 12 inches.
Plus one needs a common denominator to do the problem.The inch problem takes
much more time than just subtracting the decimal numbers.MArk Henschel
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On Mon, May 11, 2020 at 5:28 AM John Steele <[email protected]> wrote:
Seriously, I hope this is just a bad joke. Students should be learning two
things:*To think*Material that will be useful in the profession the course
relates to.
It is bad enough students need to convert between metric and the Customary
units still prevalent in some professions in the US. Teaching (and examining
them) on units too obscure to even be defined in Rowlett's Units of Measure,
moreless actually used in the US is torture, not teaching. As a potential
employer, students who have wasted class time learning nonsense like this would
be less useful to me than students who have learned more useful material.
I think this needs to be rethought.
While being pedantic, I need to point out that the kilogram is a unit of mass,
not force (the concept of kilogram-force being entirely deprecated in the SI)
so kg/bc² can not be a unit of pressure. You need to multiply by local gravity
(as the building likely is designed to stay put) and use N/bc². Also, we use
Customary, derived from more obsolete British units, not Imperial. We were
independent when Imperial was conceived and adopted none of its changes. Only
units which did not change in 1824 are common.
I have to ask. In Texas, is a cigarette the length of the tobacco product or
the boat?
On Sunday, May 10, 2020, 4:46:41 PM EDT, John Nichols <[email protected]>
wrote:
It is very easy to demonstrate to a class of Freshman the stupidity of the
Imperial System used in the USA.
- Teach then about a cigarette – a legal length in Texas
- Tell them about stones once in class and the use it in the exam
- Use barley corns
- A llath is a great UK unit – it is legal in the UK so I tell me students
it is acceptable here
- Do all board work in feet and change to inches in the exam --
Then set a math problem –
A building weighs 4000000 stone, what is the ground pressure if the building
is 2/3 of a cigarette by 200 llaths in kg/ squared bc.
Who said you cannot fix stupid.
John Nichols
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