SV Seeker
- Thread starter blunderfull
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Israel Hands
Super Anarchist
Which one 🧐
fukupananvil
Member
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V2 cutting board washers are a much improved artistic visual match to the white golf balls and grey pvc pipe.
Well, we have both US and Imperial liquid gallons to deal with in non-metric world. One Imperial gallon = 1.2 US gallons. I only know that because the fuel tank I had built in the UK for my last boats was 100 Imperial gallons in the UK, and magically turned into 120 US gallons by the time it arrived in the US.
And the bloody 1/2" stainless steel hairpin chainplates I had made in the UK arrived with Whitworth (BSW) threads! Finding nuts for those in the US was a pain. (I had those made in the UK and shipped over inside the hull, along with a bunch of other bits, because they had made chainplates for sisterships, and already had the design drawings.)
It's even worse that than - I sometimes hear people of the British species refer to two by fours as "four by twos" which means that they have some magic where by depth is halved but width is doubled. I can't pretend to understand it and it's a miracle the Spitfire turned out as beautifully as it did.
That is just the saddest most jacked up thing I think I've seen on that whole dumb boat, even counting the "Wall of Pex" fiasco with 15 unlabeled gate valves.
That's just mental illness, that's what that is - no more, no less. If was jury rigging after a dismasting I would make it within sight of land, then I would rip that crap down before the coast guard saw it.
justsomeguy!
Super Anarchist
Thank you, I think.
Latadjust
Super Anarchist
Well as long as we're engaged in multiple thread drift, I've never owned one, driven one, worked on one nor even seen one in person, but this car was pretty different for it's time, front wheel drive.
socalrider
Super Anarchist
Recently worked on a pilot green hydrogen project for a client. Talk about a unit conversion nightmare - offtaker was used to US natural gas units which are insane. Megawatt-hours to decatherms or mcf (thousand cubic feet)... imperial thermo units are the absolute worst.
Fractions are the first math that is taught in school, also over in Europe. So define 'native'?
I have a different theory as to why metric educated people prefer to use metric, it is called simplicity! I have lived in North America for 15 years now and have worked a lot with and for people that live here (duh). The incredible mind fucks that you have to go through to get from one measurement to another means that your brain is totally overthinking every single step of the way and the simplicity goes way over your head and is therefore lost on you. There is a reason that everything in the USA takes so much longer and is so much more expensive, it takes time convert everything and it causes mistakes
An example, not long ago I built a new dam in a stream to collect cold water to cool down the local hotsprings. The old dam (wood) was totally rotten out and would give way any moment. In the dry(er) summers the reservoir would run empty, so I decided to make it bigger. I had a part of my crew dig out all the debris along the edges and with the lumber we had we could build a dam that was about 2 feet higher.
After the project was completed I went back there with 2 retired engineers (Harvard and MIT degrees) that have been working on these kind of projects but on a much bigger scale for their entire career. On the boat ride back to town, they were trying to figure out how many gallons of extra water the reservoir was holding because the faucet at the bottom was giving X gallons an hour in water supply and they wanted to know how much longer it could provide water. After 20 minutes they concluded that they were not able to figure it out because neither of them remembered or could figure out the conversion factor of how many gallons there were in a cubic foot. I did not grow up with the SAE system, but know most conversion factors from metric to SAE and back because I refuse to design anything in archaic measurements. So I quickly calculated the volume in metric and changed the result back in gallons. Took me less than a minute to do that in my head, but I let them struggle to get the answer themselves, unsuccessfully.
BTW, in the rest of the world we NEVER use # or letter drills to pre-drill for tapping metric thread, we have metric drill bits for that....
Drunkonwatch
Village idiot
- 212
- 72
Until duug gets back to Unlernin me all my childhood learnin from being beat sea wise by a loving family.
Always wanted one so heavy front wheel drive high speed snowy road mover had a 76 eldo though silver with white leather had a spray painted moose antlers n the bow.
opcn
Member
Did you read the comment I was replying to?Fractions are the first math that is taught in school, also over in Europe. So define 'native'?
I have a different theory as to why metric educated people prefer to use metric, it is called simplicity! I have lived in North America for 15 years now and have worked a lot with and for people that live here (duh). The incredible mind fucks that you have to go through to get from one measurement to another means that your brain is totally overthinking every single step of the way and the simplicity goes way over your head and is therefore lost on you. There is a reason that everything in the USA takes so much longer and is so much more expensive, it takes time convert everything and it causes mistakes
An example, not long ago I built a new dam in a stream to collect cold water to cool down the local hotsprings. The old dam (wood) was totally rotten out and would give way any moment. In the dry(er) summers the reservoir would run empty, so I decided to make it bigger. I had a part of my crew dig out all the debris along the edges and with the lumber we had we could build a dam that was about 2 feet higher.
After the project was completed I went back there with 2 retired engineers (Harvard and MIT degrees) that have been working on these kind of projects but on a much bigger scale for their entire career. On the boat ride back to town, they were trying to figure out how many gallons of extra water the reservoir was holding because the faucet at the bottom was giving X gallons an hour in water supply and they wanted to know how much longer it could provide water. After 20 minutes they concluded that they were not able to figure it out because neither of them remembered or could figure out the conversion factor of how many gallons there were in a cubic foot. I did not grow up with the SAE system, but know most conversion factors from metric to SAE and back because I refuse to design anything in archaic measurements. So I quickly calculated the volume in metric and changed the result back in gallons. Took me less than a minute to do that in my head, but I let them struggle to get the answer themselves, unsuccessfully.
BTW, in the rest of the world we NEVER use # or letter drills to pre-drill for tapping metric thread, we have metric drill bits for that....
Zonker said that knowing which fraction was bigger was hard, (like knowing that 5/32nds is not bigger than 3/16ths). It cannot be both that this system is too confusing for humans in general, and that non-americans understand it just as well as americans and that american crafts people don't find it confusing. We have decimal inches, those are a thing, and every machinist in the US is fully versed in using them, but fractions still work faster for many tasks (that's why they still teach them to European school children).
I never said it was confusing (nor did Zonker), I (we) said it is stupid and adds unnecessary complications.
Foiling Optimist
Super Anarchist
Ha Ha the metric/imperial debate has played out just as I predicted. It always does. NB if you're American and want to see, as it were, day to day, blue collar metric usage, check out the Cutting Edge Engineering YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@CuttingEdgeEngineering You will find it makes remarkable sense.
I think there are two reasons people like a given measurement system. First, the vast majority very rarely have to convert anything to anything and only use measurement system to compare like for like, so you can have meat in pounds, milk in liters, and people in stone if your British. This is why the metric/imperial mishmash in Canada doesn't seem to matter much. The other factor is implied tolerance. Feet and inches and fractions seem to work well in construction because you can imply different tolerance levels with how you express the measurement. People who move here from all-metric countries and get jobs in construction pick up imperial remarkably quickly. This should be also true of metric where you can do it with sig figs, but it seems less intuitive for a lot of people.
I'm fond of stone (1 St = 14lbs) for weighing humans, because really we want to know other people's body weight so we can make moral judgements about them, as opposed to say, launching them with cannons. Thus a low resolution unit is quite fine. Seriously though, I do engineering design as a big part of my professional practice and we absolutely use both systems all the time and I know my 16th times tables by heart. But my team and our machine shop has switched more and more to metric as once you get a gut feel for the tolerances, it really is way better for engineering, design, construction and manufacturing. The comment above about imperial conversion challenges being a hidden tax on the US economy is really true.
I think there are two reasons people like a given measurement system. First, the vast majority very rarely have to convert anything to anything and only use measurement system to compare like for like, so you can have meat in pounds, milk in liters, and people in stone if your British. This is why the metric/imperial mishmash in Canada doesn't seem to matter much. The other factor is implied tolerance. Feet and inches and fractions seem to work well in construction because you can imply different tolerance levels with how you express the measurement. People who move here from all-metric countries and get jobs in construction pick up imperial remarkably quickly. This should be also true of metric where you can do it with sig figs, but it seems less intuitive for a lot of people.
I'm fond of stone (1 St = 14lbs) for weighing humans, because really we want to know other people's body weight so we can make moral judgements about them, as opposed to say, launching them with cannons. Thus a low resolution unit is quite fine. Seriously though, I do engineering design as a big part of my professional practice and we absolutely use both systems all the time and I know my 16th times tables by heart. But my team and our machine shop has switched more and more to metric as once you get a gut feel for the tolerances, it really is way better for engineering, design, construction and manufacturing. The comment above about imperial conversion challenges being a hidden tax on the US economy is really true.
Foiling Optimist
Super Anarchist
Speaking of the Toronado, a name GM should bring back, I have only ever heard the word "tornado" as in dangerous weather system, pronounced tor-nay-doh. However a sailing friend with roots in the Canadian Maritimes, recently referred to the old Olympic catamaran as a Tor-NAH-do, like we pronounce Toro-nah-do as we imagine it to be in Spanish. Has anyone else heard this? It seems like a tremendous affectation.
Rasputin22
Rasputin22
- 14,571
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Tornado, Toronado...
Tomato, Tomato
Tomato, Tomato
Pepito
New member
Why couldn't they have made a metre equal a yard? Then you could use the one that makes you happy and we could all get along. I'm okay with making the yard bigger. That's my main problem with metric, my eyes are bad and my pencil is dull. I don't need tighter tolerances than a 1/2 an 1/8th.
dfw_sailor
Super Anarchist
0.62 gallons per inch height, per square foot.Fractions are the first math that is taught in school, also over in Europe. So define 'native'?
I have a different theory as to why metric educated people prefer to use metric, it is called simplicity! I have lived in North America for 15 years now and have worked a lot with and for people that live here (duh). The incredible mind fucks that you have to go through to get from one measurement to another means that your brain is totally overthinking every single step of the way and the simplicity goes way over your head and is therefore lost on you. There is a reason that everything in the USA takes so much longer and is so much more expensive, it takes time convert everything and it causes mistakes
An example, not long ago I built a new dam in a stream to collect cold water to cool down the local hotsprings. The old dam (wood) was totally rotten out and would give way any moment. In the dry(er) summers the reservoir would run empty, so I decided to make it bigger. I had a part of my crew dig out all the debris along the edges and with the lumber we had we could build a dam that was about 2 feet higher.
After the project was completed I went back there with 2 retired engineers (Harvard and MIT degrees) that have been working on these kind of projects but on a much bigger scale for their entire career. On the boat ride back to town, they were trying to figure out how many gallons of extra water the reservoir was holding because the faucet at the bottom was giving X gallons an hour in water supply and they wanted to know how much longer it could provide water. After 20 minutes they concluded that they were not able to figure it out because neither of them remembered or could figure out the conversion factor of how many gallons there were in a cubic foot. I did not grow up with the SAE system, but know most conversion factors from metric to SAE and back because I refuse to design anything in archaic measurements. So I quickly calculated the volume in metric and changed the result back in gallons. Took me less than a minute to do that in my head, but I let them struggle to get the answer themselves, unsuccessfully.
BTW, in the rest of the world we NEVER use # or letter drills to pre-drill for tapping metric thread, we have metric drill bits for that....
Yes it is ridiculous. The number has been burnt into my brain. Only because my speciality is irrigation controlled by flow meters.
Daily gallons required = (monthly evapotranspiration rate (inches) / days in month) * canopy square feet * 0.62 * plant crop coefficient / irrigation efficiency.
Run of the mill irrigators just say, f it... 10 minutes irrigation should be about right. They generally don't like math. They also waste a lot of water.
