April 7 Open Thread - Metric System Day

Oh whoopee, mensuration. This is so sad. When I looked for the title photo I at one point searched Flickr for "Meter" and up came a lot of pictures of electric meters, water meters, voltage meters, decibel meters and whatever. Other searches turned up a protester with a sign saying "Metric Now - cooking with imperial units sucks!". I guess cooking and carpentry might be the last to change, but the US and its businesses have changed a lot without announcing it. But a little backstory is perhaps warranted, and, for starts, Imperial Units and Customary US Units overlap a lot, but aren't identical, at least historically. So let's start.

When I was a wee lad in coastal California there were 2 systems of measurement, feet, inches, yards, miles and miles per hour, or, alternatively, fathoms, nautical miles, and knots, but never knots per hour which is landlubber speak. By junior high (late fifties) they introduced those of us in science class to the metric system, which was cool, in that it scaled up by factors of ten, but lacked anything roughly the size of a foot. There was, at the time, some pressure to convert over, like the rest of the world, but mucho resistance. It was probably coming someday so one needed a rough idea of size, 2.54 centimeters per inch, 39.4 inches per meter. 1.6 kilometers per mile (.6 miles per kilometer), and 2.2 pounds per kilo(gram). By the mid sixties, of course, everybody knew a kilo was 2.2 pounds, but that wasn't really about science.

By high school, miles and all that was for carpentry, cars and track. We ran yards, 100, 440 (1/4 mile), and 880 (1/2 mile), and jumps and vaults and such was feet and inches. But science now had 2 systems. Chemistry was cgs (centimeter, gram, second), while physics was mks (meter, kilogram, seconds). Chemistry volumes were mililiters or cubic centimeters which conveniently enough were related in that a cc of water at standard temperature and pressure took up one mililiter. Never really messed with volumes much in physics, but presumably liters was the thing. Nobody, I mean nobody would try to do physics in pounds, feet, and inches because it was just too crazy, nobody except engineers. You see, there was the pound problem. A pound of butter weighed a pound, 5 pounds of flour weighed 5 pounds, and that was just completely wrong. WEIGHT IS A FORCE. Metric forces are in Newtons, a kilogram-meter per second squared. If a pound was a weight, then what the hell was the mass, the equivalent of the Kilogram? Well, it turns out that it was something called a slug that nobody had ever heard of until they ran into the pound problem. It is a mass, equal to the mass that would accelerate at 1 foot per second squared when a force of one pound acts on it . Whaaa? Can't visualize that at all, it has no real size. But, it gets better.

Starting in 1954 they began redefining everything, eventually leading to something called the SI units. This "International System of Units" is basically metric and is the international standard. For grins you should check out the Wiki on it, at least the charts and tables (you won't find the pound, yard or any of that there, btw).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units#:~:text=The%20SI%20comprises%20a%20coherent,candela%20(cd%2C%20luminous%20intensity)

That doesn't mean that pounds and ounces ceased to exist, however, but, they did get messed with. They didn't really tell everybody about it, or make it some kind of big deal, but since 1959, by treaty (International Yard and Pound Agreement), the pound has not been a unit of weight (force). Instead, it has been a unit of mass equal to 0.45359237 kilograms. Huh? This was passed into law in the UK in 1963. No law was required in the US since, though often violated, abrogated, or ignored, treaties are automatically the law of the land in the US. So why does a pound of butter still weigh a pound, you may ask? Well, concomitant with the above they invented something called the pound-force

Remember that weird-assed definition of the slug? Uh, huh, just the opposite. A pound-force (lbf) is a force equal to the weight of a one pound mass under standard gravity. Of course, that's no big deal because who cares about the pound, right? In fact, the US Metric Conversion Act of 1975 declared the metric system to be the "preferred system of weights and measures" within the US, but did not mandate it, so good old Imperial/Conventional US measurements are still the norm, or are they? For some time now, new US cars contain a lot of metric sized nuts and bolts, bicycles too, and engines are in liters. However, the US is still exceptional using mostly non-metric values for commercial transactions and products.

Our non-metric eccentricity exceptionalism is not without its risks and costs. In 1999, NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter did a faceplant on Mars instead of orbiting it. NASA, science oriented from the word go worked in SI (metric) units, as did JPL, a long-time major subcontractor which was in charge of navigating the thing. Lockheed-Martin, a long-time defense contractor who built the thing, worked principally in dollars US units and therefore provided the thrust data in "good ol merkin units". Needless to say, it did not go where it should have.

This is allegedly the anniversary of a possible date upon which a guy who allegedly never really died died. Given the lack of any known actual fixed date for the death of the non-dead I'm just gonna leave it at that.

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On this day in history:

451 – Attila the Hun captured Metz in what is now France 529 – The first Corpus Juris Civilis, a fundamental work in jurisprudence, was issued by Justinian Uno 1348 – Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV chartered Prague University 1724 – The premiere performance of Bach's St John Passion 1795 – The French First Republic adopted the kilogram and gram as its primary units of mass 1798 – The Mississippi Territory was organized from disputed territory claimed by both the United States and the Spanish Empire neither of which had any remotely legitimate claim to it 1805 – German composer Ludwig van Beethoven premiered his Third Symphony 1824 – The Mechanics' Institution was established in Manchester, England 1906 – Mount Vesuvius erupted and devastated Naples. 1906 – The Algeciras Conference gave France and Spain control over Morocco. 1927 – AT&T engineer Herbert Ives transmitted the first long-distance public television broadcast (from Washington, D.C., to New York City 1933 – Prohibition in the United States was repealed for beer of no more than 3.2% alcohol by weight 1943 – In Terebovlia, Germans ordered 1,100 Jews to undress and march through the city to the nearby village of Plebanivka, where they were shot and buried in ditches. 1945 – The Imperial Japanese Navy battleship Yamato was sunk by United States Navy aircraft 1946 – The Soviet Union annexed East Prussia as the Kaliningrad Oblast 1948 – The World Health Organization was established by the United Nations. 1954 – United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his "domino theory" speech 1956 – Francoist Spain agreed to surrender its protectorate in Morocco 1964 – IBM announced the System/360. 1969 – The Internet's symbolic birth date: Publication of RFC 1. 1978 – Development of the neutron bomb was canceled by President Jimmy Carter 1983 – During STS-6, astronauts Story Musgrave and Don Peterson performed the first Space Shuttle spacewalk. 1988 – Soviet Defense Minister Dmitry Yazov ordered the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan 1990 – John Poindexter was convicted for his role in the Iran–Contra affair. In 1991 the convictions were reversed on appeal. 1994 – Massacres of Tutsis begin in Kigali, Rwanda. The US did not intervene because no minerals or strategic value 2003 - US troops captured Baghdad 2009 – President Alberto Fujimori was sentenced to 25 years in prison for ordering killings and kidnappings 2009 – Mass protests begin across Moldova due to belief that election results were fraudulent. 2017 – U.S. President Donald Trump ordered the 2017 Shayrat missile strike against Syria 2022 – Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed for the Supreme Court of the United States

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Some people who were born on this day:

Social progress and changes of historical period take place in proportion to the advance of women toward liberty, and social decline occurs as a result of the diminution of the liberty of women.

~~ Charles Fourier

1770 – William Wordsworth, poet 1772 – Charles Fourier, philosopher 1803 – Flora Tristan, author and activist 1811 – Hasan Tahsini, astronomer, mathematician, and philosopher 1817 – Francesco Selmi, chemist and patriot 1870 – Gustav Landauer, theorist and activist 1889 – Gabriela Mistral, poet and educator 1890 – Marjory Stoneman Douglas, journalist and activist 1897 – Walter Winchell, journalist and radio host 1908 – Percy Faith, composer, conductor, and bandleader 1915 – Billie Holiday, singer, songwriter, and actress 1920 – Ravi Shankar, sitar player and composer 1922 – Mongo Santamaría, drummer 1927 – Babatunde Olatunji, drummer, educator, and activist 1929 – Joe Gallo, businessman, see below 1931 – Donald Barthelme, short story writer and novelist 1931 – Daniel Ellsberg, activist and author 1932 – Cal Smith, singer and guitarist 1935 – Bobby Bare, singer, songwriter, and guitarist 1937 – Charlie Thomas, singer 1938 – Spencer Dryden, drummer 1938 – Freddie Hubbard, trumpet player and composer

1943 – Mick Abrahams, singer, songwriter, and guitarist

1945 – Megas, singer, songwriter

1947 – Patricia Bennett, singer

1947 – Florian Schneider, singer and drummer

1947 – Michèle Torr, singer and author

1948 – John Oates, singer, songwriter guitarist, and producer

1951 – Bruce Gary, drummer

1951 – Janis Ian, singer, songwriter and guitarist

1958 – Brian Haner, singer, songwriter, and guitarist

1975 – Karin Dreijer Andersson, singer, songwriter, and producer

1975 – John Cooper, singer, songwriter, and bass player

1981 – Vanessa Olivarez, singer, songwriter, and actress 1

982 – Kelli Young, singer

1983 – Hamish Davidson, musician

1986 – Andi Fraggs, singer, songwriter, and producer

1991 – Anne-Marie, singer and songwriter

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Some people who died on this day:

There's a sucker born every minute

~~ P.T. Barnum This has been attributed to him throughout most of his life and ever since, but there is no proof he ever said it. It does, however, capture the spirit of the man, the US political circus and the US economic model.

1614 – El Greco, painter and sculptor 1761 – Thomas Bayes, minister and mathematician 1767 – Franz Sparry, composer and director 1789 – Petrus Camper, physician, anatomist, and physiologist 1804 – Toussaint Louverture, general and revolutionary 1836 – William Godwin, journalist and author 1885 – Karl Theodor Ernst von Siebold, physiologist and zoologist 1891 – P. T. Barnum, archetypal US politician, role model for all who followed 1918 – George E. Ohr, potter 1928 – Alexander Bogdanov, physician, philosopher, and author 1938 – Suzanne Valadon, painter 1968 – Edwin Baker, co-founder of the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB) 1972 – Joe Gallo, businessman, see above 1981 – Kit Lambert, record producer and manager 1994 – Lee Brilleaux, singer, songwriter, and guitarist 2009 – Dave Arneson, game designer, co-created Dungeons & Dragons 2012 – Mike Wallace, television news journalist 2013 – Les Blank, director and producer 2013 – Andy Johns, record producer 2020 – John Prine, country folk singer, songwriter

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Some Holidays, Holy Days, Festivals, Feast Days, Days of Recognition, and such: International Beaver Day Metric System Day World Health Day National Beer Day (US) National Fun Day (US) Empowered Women Entrepreneurs Day Genocide Memorial Day (Rwanda)

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