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Re: Superman, was: Chicago P.D. TV series--computer usage [message #391263 is a reply to message #391238] Mon, 24 February 2020 17:39 Go to previous messageGo to previous message
Gerard Schildberger is currently offline  Gerard Schildberger
Messages: 163
Registered: September 2012
Karma:
Senior Member
On Monday, February 24, 2020 at 1:56:27 PM UTC-6, hanc wrote:
> On Monday, February 24, 2020 at 12:04:18 PM UTC-5, Scott wrote:
>
>>> Not really, when you’ve learned 186,000 miles/sec. Metric is overrated ;-)
>>
>> Metric has its uses, but there's nothing magical about it. Mostly
>> anyone who crows about its decimal nature just hasn't thought about it
>> enough (the Babylonians were right). I've spent my life in the USA so
>> I'm comfortable with Imperial, but my time has overlapped with the
>> time of internationalization, so I'm (nearly) equally comfortable with
>> metric. Both share the disadvantage of being invented by humans trying
>> to impose some kind of order on a natural world that simply refuses to
>> cooperate.
>
> I never understood why time wasn't converted to metric. Would've
> been so much easier to have a ten hour day than 24, as well
> as decimal sub units.

Time was converted to decimal (which might be thought as metric) during
(or just after) the French Revolution (in the start of 1792). A day was
divided into ten decimal hours, each decimal hour into one hundred
decimal minutes, and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds.

There were 100,000 decimal seconds per day. It was NOT very
popular with the citizens. I think it lasted about five years before
its use was dropped.

> Also, I never understood the point of centrigrade. Temperature
> doesn't get converted to different units, so what is the
> advantage of having freezing and boiling at 0 and 100?

Temperature gets converted all time time (to different scales).
Celsius <--> to Fahrenheit <--> Rankine <--> absolute <--> kelvin
and a host of others. Not all temperature scales are in degrees.

Celsius (old name was centigrade, but was renamed because centigrade
was used in measuring angles --- 1/100 of a grad, 400 grads (or
gradians to a unit circle), so the-powers-that-be rename degrees
centigrade to degrees Celsius. I learned degrees centigrade in grade
school and high school. By the time I got to college, it was degrees
Celsius. ... Yeah, I'm almost older than dirt.

I have written a computer program to convert all the different types
of temperature scales (that is, all those temperature scales that
I could find, who knows how many have been lost to history and disuse):

absolute
Amonton
Barnsdorf
Beaumuir
Benart
Bergen
Brissen
Celsius
Cimento
Cruquius
Dalence
Dalton
Daniell
de la Hire
de la Ville
Delisle
Delisle old
de Luc
de Lyon
de Revillas
Derham
Derham old
de Suede
De Villeneuve
Du Crest
Edinburgh
electron-volts
Fahrenheit
Fahrenheit old
Florentine large
Florentine magnum
Florentine small
Fowler
Frick
gasmark
Goubert
Hales
Hanow
Hauksbee
Jacobs-Holborn
kelvin
Leiden
Newton
Oertel
Planck
Rankine
Reaumur
Richter
Rinaldini
Romer Rømer Roemer
Rosenthal
Royal Society
Sagredo
Saint-Patrice
Stufe
Sulzer
thermostat
Wedgwood


Note that some of the above temperature scales can be spelt with
diacritical marks.) There are also alternative spellings for quite
a few temperature scales.


Note that Lord Kelvin's name is NOT capitalized when referring to degrees
kelvin. I am not certain about the various capitalizations (or not cap)
for some of the de and du names.
____________________________________________ Gerard Schildberger


> Our time clocks recorded the minutes in decimal which made it
> easier to calculate.
>
> Burroughs made adding machines which could use a variety of
> fractions.
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