Joules, BTUs, Quads—Let's Call the Whole Thing Off

Its amazing how something written "tongue-in cheek" (at least I hope it was). Yes its an interesting means of equivalence but a new unit? And sooooooooo large?

it is either a joke, or the author is an idiot.

Greg G and I don't always agree but I am with him on this one.

My 68 year old brain is conditioned to think in ft-lbs, btu's and degrees F. I think Napoleon is vastly over rated. After all he was humiliated by Nelson in Egypt, the Russians in Moscow and Wellington in Belgium.

As for MASU's comment:

What confusion of units? This could only come from one of the three countries left in the world that still use imperial weights and measure. When will the USA stop hanging about with a couple of delinquents like Burma and Liberia and join the rest of the world?

The USA is doing nicely with a mixed system for the moment. As machine tools wear out manufactures can choose, if they wish, to convert. The market place will determine when and if there is a change. Americans, for the most part, don't like the government to run their lives. Personally, I am happy to tolerate a little inefficiency for freedom of choice.

H. H. McDonald PE

Amen!

"The USA is doing nicely with a mixed system for the moment."

You can hardly call the loss of a billion dollar Mars Explorer spacecraft, due to somebody confusing the units of measurement, doing nicely.

Seriously though, converting to a different system of weights and measures is a big job and having two system in use throughout the world causes serious problems for countries that need to deal with the USA. It ends up with you having to double up on things like standard sized nuts and bolts because those used on equipment form the USA are different sizes to those used every where else.

The SI system is not just a system for measuring weights and distances that Napoleon started it is a standardized system across the board. For example it doesn't matter what you are doing, if you are measuring energy the units are Joules. Isn't that a whole lot simpler than the myriad of units used by the non standardized imperial system. By the way you already use bits of the metric system when you measure electricity so why not use the same units universally rather than just when you are talking about electricity?

Hello Masu, I'd second that, and add that US scientists seem to get by fine with SI units.

Cheers.......Codey

just a question:

BTU or Joule are clearly defined and measure a precise content.

The Cubic Mile of Oil is impressive and is a direct help to understand that to eat an egg we burn 3 litres of oil, but :

How is it defined the Energy content of CMO ?

what kind of oil ? Pensilvania, Libic or Brent from North Sea ?
How is it burnt ? or distilled ? are we allowed to take a little part of the hydrocarbons tyo make a bit of plastics ?

It's like stating a distance as a time e.g. Saskatoon and North Battleford are one and a half hours apart. (Of course, that changed to an hour and fifteen minutes when they increased the speed limit a while back.)

What confusion of units? This could only come from one of the three countries left in the world that still use imperial weights and measure. When will the USA stop hanging about with a couple of delinquents like Burma and Liberia and join the rest of the world?

The real question is: when will the rest of the world end their flirtation with the metric system (base ten?, repeating decimals? Please!!) and join the USA, Liberia, and Burma? Why can't we sell potatoes in units of stone/cubic furlong? Wouldn't the world be a more interesting place?

"The real question is: when will the rest of the world end their flirtation with the metric system (base ten?, repeating decimals? Please!!) and join the USA, Liberia, and Burma?"

The base ten counting system is the one thing that is used globally and understood by any educated person throughout the world. I would therefore ask why use several different based counting systems to count and measure different things?

To me it just seem logical to use the same base counting system universally and since everybody already understands base ten why not use it for everything? Perhaps you would prefer we used bas 12 and ask everybody to grow an extra finger on each hand?

Just out of curiosity how many pounds are then in a ton of potatoes ?

Not sure what units you mean by "ton." Short ton=2000 lb, Long Ton=2200 lb, Metric Tonne=2204 lb and change. Check out various conversion utilities on line for exact figures. I don't know for sure but I think potatoes are sold by the short ton in the US--how about Australia?

Base ten? counting fingers? Is this really the standard of "educated people" throughout the world? My four year old is still counting on fingers but (hopefully) will move on. Base twelve makes more sense (to me) if you can get beyond the finger counting stage. If it doesn't to you it's a big world with room for everyone's opinion and who knows, in a few thousand years the six finger problem might resolve itself!

Even though metric units make sense and seem logical to others, Americans like the imperial system and will probably continue to use it. If you want to package your potatoes in units of 2204 pounds or one metric tonne (more or less) or run 400 m instead of 440 yd, or buy milk in 3.8 liter jugs instead of gallons, its all the same and everyone can still get along. Both systems were taught in school and I have since worked in both systems including a mixture of the two (tonnes/ft^3--crazy)

American's are independent cusses who don't like being dictated to--even (especially) by our own government. We like our system and it works for us--why change just to please a bunch of foreigners (including but not limited to the French) who will just find something else to carp about? Change, if it comes, will come from the grass roots because it makes sense to Americans.

"Not sure what units you mean by "ton." Short ton=2000 lb, Long Ton=2200 lb, Metric Tonne=2204 lb and change."

This is exactly my point you don't know. The whole thing is confusing and by the way a long ton is 2240 lb not 2200 lb.

"buy milk in 3.8 liter jugs instead of gallons"

Here is another classic point of confusion a US gallon might be 3.8 l but an imperial gallon is 4.546 l.

NASA have decided that anything to do with the Moon will use SI units so it is creeping in and you have used SI nits to measure electrical parameters for quiet some time. It just makes sense to use the same units to measure energy no matter if it is heat, chemical, electrical or mechanical.

You can keep using an antiquated system of measures it you like but you will find that you are going to loose more and more market share as countries that use the metric system prefer to trade with other countries that use it.

"You can keep using an antiquated system of measures it you like but you will find that you are going to loose more and more market share as countries that use the metric system prefer to trade with other countries that use it."

That's kind of the point--Americans will keep using the system we like and will switch when it makes sense and not just to be trendy.

Milk is sold in the UK in aliquots of 568ml. Many UK citizens still refer to this aliquot as a "pint"...

"Eire uses mile-per-hour as a vehicle speed unit, and refers to its distances in kilometres..."

Would you expect anything else from the Irish¹?

Milk is sold in the UK in aliquots of 568ml. Many UK citizens still refer to this aliquot as a "pint"...

In Australia we also used to buy milk in pints but when we converted to metric they rounded it up to 600ml. You can also buy milk in 1 and 2 liter containers as well.

Note 1 I know I am going to get shot at for a comment like this but there is no way such a dopey concept could go unanswered.

When they pry my 6-inch dial calipers from my cold dead hands!

Just kidding, I use a digital calipers now anyway and just toggle back and forth between mm and inches!

Hi: did somebody read the whole article? I think it´s a joke. We have an energy unit, Joule, and I felt very useful to use it instead of BTU, Calories, etc.

Is it not true that only Liberia, Burma and the USA are still using the Imperial mile as a standard of measurement? If so, why not use the SI system?

nope--we still use the mile in Canada, only we call it 1600 meters (more or less). It's just semantics!

Interesting! Do you mark Canadian highways with mileposts then, or meterposts?

Seriously, Interstate highways in the US have small markers at every mile point, counting down or up from state line to state line or beginning and end of highway if it lies within the state. In some states and/or cities, fractional markers are used as well, example, marker 173 would be followed by 173-1/4, then 173-1/2, 173-3/4, 174, etc. I guess they could have gone decimal 173.0, 173.1, 173.2, etc. but then there would have to be 2.5 times as many signs or 250% higher cost to implement and maintain.

How are intervals marked on Canadian highways? From what points are the distances measured?

Highway distances between Canadian cities are measured between respective city halls. However, not too many years ago, distances in Canada also used to be measured in beers. e.g.- Toronto to Montreal (or Calgary to Edmonton) was about six beers.

I wasn't asking about the distances beetween cities, but the intervals marked along the roadway, or don't you have those?

Just wondering.

Certainly not in my area, but I think they may still have them on some of the big highways in Southern Ontario.

STL Engineer you asked;

'Interesting! Do you mark Canadian highways with mileposts then, or meterposts?'

I don't know about Canada but in Australia they use markers every 5 Km counting down to the next major centre.

Eire uses mile-per-hour as a vehicle speed unit, and refers to its distances in kilometres...

Wait a minute, let me check my calendar......

Nope, its not April Fools Day, yet.

I'm not sure how practical this specific proposal might be in real-world terms (lots of zeroes to the right of the decimal for most human-scale uses of energy), but the effort seems to provide the same advantage of visualization that some of the weights and measures used in the Traditional (Imperial) System of measures do, when compared to their abstract analogues in the International System, namely that the measures can be directly experienced by ordinary humans without the use of instrumentation subject to calibration error. See Wikipedia's definition of the metre as a case in point. Close enough may not only be good enough, in this case, but it may be exactly what is needed to motivate large numbers of people.

And, lest we forget, engineers comfortably applied the Traditional System of units and slide rules (!) to send humans to the moon. Anyone who for some reason needs to use the International System already is.

"And, lest we forget, engineers comfortably applied the Traditional System of units and slide rules (!) to send humans to the moon. Anyone who for some reason needs to use the International System already is."

You may find it interesting that NASA have decided that when it comes to the Moon the imperial system has been relegated to history. All future developments and engineering will use SI units. I guess it only takes the loss of one billion dollar Mars Explorer spacecraft to convince NASA, what dose it take to convince everybody else?

1 CMO is difficult to picture. How many football stadiums would that fill up?

One Cubic Mile (CM, not cm) is a cube one mile on each side. Since a Mile is approximately 1.6 km, that would be about 4.1 cubic km. Sin a cubic km is 1000 meters per side, and then is 1,000,000,000 cubic meters, the CM is about 4.1 BILLION (Thousand Million for you Brits) m³.

This is a ridiculously large amount to measure everyday things in. Picture a building 160 meters (about 530 ft. high, almost as high as the Washington Monument at 555 ft.) and 160 meters wide (0.1 miles) alongside a straightline highway. You start at one end and drive 1600 km (1000 miles) to the other end, at 160 km/hr. (100mph) for 10 hrs. Get the picture?

How many football stadiums would fit inside that building, stacking them up to fill the space if need be (how tall is a stadium?).

A WHOLE BUNCH!

A stadium is approximately 122 strings high. (Next question--how long is a piece of string?

One of my favorite old jokes to play on someone, although not politically correct, is:

Joker: "How Long is a Chinaman?"

Jokee: "Huh?" or "What?" is usually the first response, may be even, "Dunno, maybe 5 feet?"

Joker: "How Long is a String?"

Jokee: Again, "Huh?" or "What?" or maybe, "How long do you want it to be?"

Joker: "NO, How Long is a Chinaman."

Jokee: Now baffled, "I don't get it" is a usual response.

Joker: "How Long is a Chinaman?.....YES! How Long is a String?.....NO!", now laughing.

Jokee: "Still don't get it"

Joker: "How Long is a Chinaman. How long IS NOT a String, How Long IS a Chinaman!"

Keep repeating, with some variation, and much laughter until he gets it and laughs too, or walks away mad!

"One Cubic Mile (CM, not cm) is a cube one mile on each side. Since a Mile is approximately 1.6 km, that would be about 4.1 cubic km. Sin a cubic km is 1000 meters per side, and then is 1,000,000,000 cubic meters, the CM is about 4.1 BILLION (Thousand Million for you Brits) m³."

No its 4.168 Tl, that's four decimal one six eight terra liters, where's the hassle, all you need to know is the multipliers and it all fits together so well that you will wonder why you didn't switch to SI units years ago.

Dear Nitpicker,

4.1....4.168....OK, so I truncated instead of rounding. So sue me!

BFD!

Sorry STL_Engineer, the last post wasn't having a go at you or your calculations. The idea was to point out that the already existing SI unit of a Tl was in fact similar to a CM. I just put the 3 decimal places in because that's the norm I work to and it fits with the SI multipliers. Please forgive me it was absolutely not directed at nor meant to criticize you.

For anybody that is unfamiliar with the SI_multipliers multipliers they go from a

yocto = 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 001 abbreviation y

to a

yotta = 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 abbreviation Y

If you can't find a unit in there that suits your purposes between those extremes then I would suggest you are in another universe.

Cool!

I did not know the prefixes beyond tera-.

Does it stop at yotta- (10²⁴)? How about a wholotta- for 10²⁷ ?

Please, use only ISO units. Its are really part of an international language.

i was grown up in ISO environment with SI units,
they are very comfortable and theoretically coherent;
sometimes Unita are to large or to little
so currently we use a multiple insted than the unit
Kilograms insted of grams

Then i had to learn the Americal and the British Imperial Sistem,
very intuitive, easy and with comfortable numbers (not too big
or too little) with plenty of fantasy variations (who did, met the slug ?)

Measure are just tools, so we can use at their best for our comfort . .

But were have we left the Cubic Mile of Oil ? i'm starting to love it !

Esperanto is an international language...

Esperanto is also a synthetic, yet obsolete, language. It was artificially constructed using elements of many languages, yet obsolete, as it never really caught on and has been supplanted by English as the number one second language of non-English speaking countries. One good example is that English is the language of International Air Traffic Control (ATC). Use of non-English language by cockpit crews has actually led to misunderstanding between aircraft and ATC, which led to disasters or near-miss incidents.

Many years ago, French was thought to be "the" international language, as so many non-French educated people would learn it as part of a college education or "finishing school" (an old alternative for young "ladies" of social position). In fact, this notion led to the use of the Latin (itself an international language because of its extensive use by the Catholic Church) term "lingua franca" (literally "French Language") to mean any form of international or widespread communication or understanding. Therefore, the Metric System is best described as the "lingua franca" of measurements and of Science and Engineering.

The use of synthetic language and synthetic units would appear in some quarters to go hand in hand...

In comparing the International System of measures with the Imperial one

may be we are loosing the theme of CUBIC MILE OF OIL and the correspondence of life to energy expenditure.

Oil has a different energy content depending on its source, its components i.e. its state of refinement and its spot temperature; given the size of the volume it is probably unreasonable to assume the properties are identical everywhere in the cubic mile.

Given that the international standard of time is based upon the vibrations of caesium atoms, because of the variables due to the peturbations in the rates of astronomical clocks, is there really any point in introducing the CMO as an energy unit?

How many CMOs of oil have been expended in generating all the hot air released to the environment on this topic?...