The dumification of humanity through internet

unknown wrote:

Actually Tommy is was an interesting thing you raised, I had no idea of the different spellings & such. I think being in Australia and being so far away from the rest of the world we know that things are different outside the context of out borders.
Another thing is being a colony of the British Empire, and getting our independence without a war (they were probably happy to be rid of us), we still kept cultural links to Great Britain and later on had "the USA influence". And we have no issues with metric imperial system. But cmon the metric system makes more sense, doesn't have different values based on arbitrary values, geesh base 17 would have made more sense.

Well, we didn't have to fight for our independence because the British sent us over in chains. Australia adopted metric in 1966 and is regarded to have been the most succesful metricification project in history. About 12 years later I did some engineering at College and they were very pedantic about SI units. But it helped me fully adopt to metric. I can't even visualise an imperial spanner anymore! I used to have all of these conversion factors in my head but I am a bit slower retrieving them now.

Yeah I thought imperial was a thing of the past, until I started to build my Myford ML7/Super 7 Franken Lathe. Turned out I had to invest in some weirdo Whitworth BA sockets & stuff.

Imperial spanners are easy to recognise, they are the ones bought when Sidchrome was actually good.

From memory there was some disparity between the English definition of billion and the US.
English was 12 zeros whilst the US was 9.

Look if NASA can have stuff ups with one team using imperial measurements and the other using metric any kind of stuff up and confusion is possible. Mars Climate Orbiter it was.

One thing I didn't know is that the definition of inch,foot,yard,chain,blah,blah is actually based on the inch being 25.4 mm. Tho once again different countries early in the 20th century had different ideas. From the doco I saw it was implied that the invention of slip gauges or "joe blocks" kind of pushed it to the front.
Carl Edvard Johansson the guy accredited with the invention of them modified his Wife's sewing machine to make the first set.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauge_block

Look under the bit titled history.

I think from memory very early in the piece, the US weights and measures or congress legislated that one inch was exactly 25.4mm
Its not really about a simple tape measure. SI units come into their own when doing any engineering calculations. eg power in HP (a page long calc) vs kW (a couple of lines). Now most engineering in the US is done in SI  I am told. I think to avoid loosing another space ship.

Shamelessly ripped from wiki

US inch was 25.4000508
UK inch was 25.399977

In 1930, the British Standards Institution adopted an inch of exactly 25.4 mm. The American Standards Association followed suit in 1933. By 1935, industry in 16 countries had adopted the "industrial inch" as it came to be known,[35][36] effectively endorsing Johansson's pragmatic choice of conversion ratio.[32]

In 1946, the Commonwealth Science Congress recommended a yard of exactly 0.9144 metres for adoption throughout the British Commonwealth. This was adopted by Canada in 1951;[37][38] the United States on 1 July 1959;[39][40][41] Australia in 1961,[42] effective 1 January 1964;[43] and the United Kingdom in 1963,[44] effective on 1 January 1964.[45] The new standards gave an inch of exactly 25.4 mm, 1.7 millionths of an inch longer than the old imperial inch and 2 millionths of an inch shorter than the old US inch.[46][47]

US survey inches

The United States retained the ⁠1/39.37⁠-metre definition for surveying, producing a 2 millionth part difference between standard and US survey inches.[47] This is approximately ⁠1/8⁠ inch per mile; 12.7 kilometres is exactly 500,000 standard inches and exactly 499,999 survey inches. This difference is substantial when doing calculations in State Plane Coordinate Systems with coordinate values in the hundreds of thousands or millions of feet.

In 2020, the National Institute of Standards and Technology announced that the U.S. survey foot would "be phased out" on 1 January 2023 and be superseded by the international foot (also known as the foot) equal to 0.3048 metres exactly, for all further applications.[48] This implies that the survey inch was replaced by the international inch.

What a mess.
Then the Scots & French (anything but the English way) had different ideas.

So what 44 gallon drum was the Leyland P76 designed around ?

oh hang on, we must call them "makers" now eh.

dear friends .... unfortunately I think this is our fault.... we played a rigged game.... someone taught me that you don't play rigged games .... for now we have to use what there is .... so let's use the "makers" as long as they are there .... I have doubts they will last a long time .... this kind of people, if we continue like this ... I don't know if they will be there in the near future ..... in my house they have already almost completely disappeared ..... too much effort .... think next step of that game is produce only "ia expert" ....

But is an hevy argument of discussion so prefer stop it here. I'm not able talk on these in correct languages.

So I'm not the only one who felt like this was a subject headed towards gate keeping. But hey
if the end goal is to chase off new people then congratulations that's the way to do it.