22 Replies to “Honey, I Finished The Internet”

  3. The cheese-eating surrender monkeys always have to take off their shoes if they have to count past 10.

  4. skill testing Q wtf use is a f’ing millimeter or centimeter in daily life? especially back in early 1800? why not make a cm same as an inch? or a foot? or in order to not lend ‘credence’ to the ‘old ways’ pick something SENSIBLE.

    but nah, leaving it up to the ‘ex-spurts’ agin !!

    1. If you’ve ever tried to use complex physics equations to find something out, then the mks system is great.
      For regular joes who just want to fill a tire with air or follow a recipe or build a shed, I’ll take Imperial any day of the week.

      1. For navigation the imperial system is better. 1 minute of longitude is 1 nautical mile and the distance you cover per hour at 1 knot.

        1. I didn’t know that.
          A parsec (around 3.26 light years) is defined as distance the to the far corner of a right triangle where the base is 1 AU (distance from Earth to Sun), and subtends an angle of 1 arc second.

      1. Yeah.
        I’d like to see someone figure out the equivalent temperature of the dark energy density by trying to use troy pounds per cubic yard and get his answer in degrees Fahrenheit.
        With the meter-kilogram-second system, you can just plug measured values into the appropriate equations and it’ll spit out answers in known units, like Kelvins, in this case.

        There is also the centimeter-gram-second system, more obscure, but also handy in some cases.

        1. uhuh. and how often do we need those numbers calculating the necessary qty grass seed to redo a lawn?

          etc etc

      1. Don’t forget that it was a Swede who defined what an inch is, i.e. exactly 2.54 centimeters. Apparently it was too difficult for the Brits and the Americans..

        1. ” In the 1910s, the U.S. and U.K. definitions of the inch differed, with the U.S. inch being defined as 25.4000508 mm (with a reference temperature of 68 °F (20 °C)) and the U.K. inch at 25.399977 mm (with a reference temperature of 62 °F (17 °C)). When he started manufacturing gauge blocks in inch sizes in 1912, Johansson’s compromise was to manufacture gauge blocks with a nominal size of 25.4 mm, with a reference temperature of 20 degrees Celsius, accurate to within a few parts per million of both official definitions. Because Johansson’s blocks were so popular, his blocks became the de facto standard for manufacturers in both countries, leading industry associations to adopt 25.4 mm as the standard “industrial inch” in both the U.K. (1930) and the U.S. (1933).[4] When the English-speaking nations jointly signed the International Yard and Pound Agreement of 1959, the inch was fixed at 25.4 mm worldwide, effectively endorsing what had already become common practice.”

  5. So, each new hour was 2.4 old hours long.

    And you thought time dragged by slowly watching the clock while sitting at your desk in the office. And don’t even think about how sucky your hourly wage would be. “What?!? I still only get 2 centimes per hour? Take this job and shove it!”

    Eh, they probably ditched the idea because hourglasses would become unwieldy at the required new, larger size and it was going to cost a fortune to rework all the clocktowers.

    Just another Bad Idea®

  6. Our system of time is pretty odd:
    For periods less than a second, or more than a year, we pretty much use the metric system, ie decades, centuries, millennia, or milliseconds, microseconds, etc.
    between 1 second and a day, its the sexadecimal system. the same system we sometimes use for measuring angles, over a day its pretty much based on lunar and solar cycles.
    A real mish-mash, but it works better than any “rational” base 10 system does.

  7. Shows that just you had one winning idea it doesn’t mean the next one will be a winner.

  10. In struck by how this 200+ year old story and Brian’s C-59 story are the same in essence and nearly in substance too. Talk about a “what time is it?” wake up call to the severity of this madness.

  12. in 1793, the French smashed the old clock in favor of French Revolutionary Time: a 10-hour day, with 100 minutes per hour, and 100 seconds per minute. This thoroughly modern system had a few practical benefits, chief among them being a simplified way to do time-related math: if we want to know when a day is 70 percent complete, decimal time simply says “at the end of the seventh hour,” whereas standard time requires us to say “at 16 hours, 48 minutes.” French Revolutionary Time was a more elegant solution to that math problem. The trick was that every living person already had a well-established way to tell time, and old habits die hard.
    Noon is at Five in Decimal Time
    French Revolutionary Time officially began on November 24, 1793, although conceptual work around the system had been going on since the 1750s. The French manufactured clocks and watches showing both decimal time and standard time on their faces (allowing for conversion and confusion).
    The system proved unpopular. People were unfamiliar with switching systems of time, and there were few practical reasons for non-mathematicians to change how they told time. (The same could not be said of the metric system of weights and measurements, which helped to standardize commerce; weights and measurements often differed in neighboring countries, but clocks generally did not.)
    https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/32127/decimal-time-how-french-made-10-hour-day

  13. Well remember when ze gov decided all cooking should be done in metric measurements. Didn’t last, despite one cup being about 250 ml. Do remember phoning in to a talk show about this and pointing out that – in baking – the essential measurement was un oeuf, preferably grand. When asked why, I said that all recipes required certain amounts of flour, sugar, fat, etc., to produce the proper results and that the measurement of said ingredients had to produce the same amount no matter whether Imperial or metric.

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