Why is the Metric system so much better? Why not binary?
Seriously, why is some system based on 10's so much better? Because people can't do math?
"An engineer will call a horse a sphere if it makes the math easier."
"Assume a spherical cow is falling through a perfect vacuum..."
If you calculate something and it seems like it's off by some factor of 10, you probably just screwed up units somewhere.
If it's off by 26,928, who knows what kind of mistake you made. It could be units, or a calculation error on.....something, somewhere.
A lot of old contraptions I've seen use plenty of straight lines and nice 90° bends, particularly when high stresses were involved. They're also heavy on materials. New designs can see all kinds of complexity and curves, and limit material usage where stresses are determined to be minimal.
Straight lines and 90° bends are easy to calculate, especially if you don't have a computer handy. Or if something's curved, see if you can assume it's straight and get away with it. (Many times, not really.) Complex curvy things?....estimate, and then get a computer to slog through the really ugly math, then you do what you can to confirm what the computer came up with.
(The point of that paragraph is the first point I was making: If you can simplify the calculations and not break anything, do it. Wasting time on more circuitous methods is simply that: Wasting time.)
There's no point in maintaining an inefficient method simply because, "That's the way we used to do it, and dammit we'll never change, just because!"
People have been trying to simplify math for a very long time.
Pythagorean Theorem: Want to know ahead of time how long a leg of a specific kind of triangle will be? Here's a simpler way to do it.
Calculus: I want to figure out how much stuff is in this region, but dividing it up into tiny pieces takes a long time, and it's not very accurate.
Fine, I'll just divide it up into an infinite number of pieces, and use some nifty formulas to deal with that. Boom, done.
Fast Fourier Transform: Solving an infinite Fourier series is.....time consuming.
Hey! This FFT thing works very nicely,
and it's really quick!
For any of those things: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Damn right, I plan my triangles the way I used to plan them: With a collection of straight sticks. I don't need no damn fancy Pythagorean anythings!
There's a saying in the US that's stood us well since the American Revolution: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!". All you "America needs to go metric" fanboys need to go back to school and actually learn to do math in your head instead of on a computer or calculator, or move to Europe where you can bask in the "superiority" of the metric system because you were to lazy or stupid to learn the US Standard Units.
Or we can rephrase that: "If a superior method of doing something shows up, we'll choose to remain stagnant and continue using our archaic methods."
Businesses that fully embrace the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality can also find themselves saying "Our competition fixed their non-broken manufacturing processes, by which I mean that they developed a more efficient way of building their parts. Sales are down 60% from 3 years ago because we simply can't compete on price anymore."
Or how about this: The washboard was an effective method of cleaning clothes. Do you use that, or did you decide to fix what was not broken, and instead use a washing machine?
Oh, by the way, how many countries using the "superior" metric system have succesfully flown manned lunar missions? How many millions of tons of American manufactured war machines did it take to keep the metric countries of Europe from having to fly the Swastika, or the Hammer and Sickle?
And how many other countries decided to throw a huge amount of money at a lunar mission so they could show off to another military superpower? How many other countries push such a large portion of their federal budgets at their militaries?
Brute force does have a habit of being effective. It's just not always the most efficient method.
For example, the Chinese can brute-force some of their projects: Just throw more cheap labor at the problem. If it still doesn't work, triple the labor force. If it's expensive, pay them less.
We've been there already, here in the US - and we seem to prefer automation, as well as the higher standard of living that it brings.
As for the metric system not being based on an arbitrary unit... it doesn't get any more arbitrary than this, FFS!
They're
all arbitrary. All of them. There is no universal calibration thing that says "Hey, use ME! I'm consistent and repeatable!"
And the systems adapt as our need for precision changes. At one time, an inch was as accurate as you needed. Now we like to use technology which regularly deals with things that make human hairs look absurdly enormous, and where timings are measured in trillionths of a second. And we need things to be repeatable in various locations, to a high degree of precision, which is why they used light as a defining unit for the meter.
"Ok, the meter is
this long. We will live with that. Here's how long it takes light to travel in that time, and that's what a meter has to be."
Light's at least pretty consistent. Pieces of grain seed, or the power output of a horse, or the weight of some quantity of wool are not.
Temperature: Kelvin at least starts at zero. Absolute zero.
The divisions are the same that Celsius uses. Celsius: Also arbitrary. Freezing and boiling of water, at some arbitrary pressure, under some arbitrary mixture of gases.
Water just happens to be darn near everywhere, the pressure is pretty similar if you're reasonably close to sea level, and the mixture of gases is pretty consistent. So it's as repeatable as it needs to be, and that can be made more accurate as needed - if you really need to calibrate something, you can still use water. Reading around quick....ok, it looks like it's now defined by way of purified water at its triple point, where reaches equilibrium of solid, liquid, and gas, which can only occur at a specific pressure as well. So right there you've got temperature and pressure data points.
Yes, I'm glad that some people choose to fix what isn't broken. We often find ourselves calling the results of that behavior "progress."
Have you looked at the SI units that metric is "based" off of recently? Completely arbitrary crap. Something about cesium 133 comes into play. Yeah that is real easy to witness.
Hell they even messed up the core fundamentals based on water. Nope, now it is something no layman can possibly reproduce.
But it's defined, and it's reproducible. No, not by the layman. And the layman doesn't need most things accurate with within a few microns. The chip fab that manufactured the silicon dies in his cellphone does though. The test lab in California needs to be using the same "nanometer" that the chip fab plant in Malaysia is using. "Just use an ultraviolet emitter" isn't going to work out so well. Give a spec in nanometers, and a tolerance in nanometers.
Or we can look at the layman's GPS unit, which is receiving data from satellites. Those satellites need to know
very accurately what time it is, which is why they carry their own onboard atomic clocks, otherwise that layman's calculated position will be off by hundreds of feet.
So he personally doesn't care about those tight calibrations, but he certainly should appreciate that someone does, otherwise a lot of the things he likes to use couldn't exist, or if they could, they wouldn't be at a price or size that he'd like.
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