A Rant About the Metric System

How about 11/16cm or 18/32mm? It'd serve'em right Del, no?.(lol) S.M.

I E-mailed a picture of the sheets with a tape alongside.
The company has arranged replacements, very swiftly.
Del

Move to the US.

We use inches, and virtually everything has components that are metric. As if working on the newer cars wasn't enough of a pain in the arse, the nuts and bolts are a mismash of standard and metric.

Am I the only one to notice that Del has the same "Powers of 10 /decimal point location" problem I do?

10 cm is indeed 100 mm....but it is 0.1 m, not 0.01 m as Del claims. The problem, methinks. (1 cm = 10 mm = 0.01 m)

I have two solutions to this problem:

1. Write down the numbers as they appear on the tape...and then sit down with a nice glass of water (honest) and do any conversions necessary.
2. Measure the thing again in inches and convert to make sure it's at least close!

Now repeat with calculating the volume in litres of a cylinder 12" DIA x 305 mm long.

Now did you really want the 1195 mm width? Or will they be sending that and you actually want something else?

Is the a dust cover for your lamp shade or are you building/repairing a greenhouse?

Ah! The sheets of plastic are for tertiary glazing on the BIG double patio doors in our 'sun lounge' (single storey extension which runs along the back of the house, on which stand my solar panels).
It's a try out on the two fixed panes, the sheeting will be fixed with self ahesive steel tape on the window and self adhesive megnetic tape on the plastic sheet (or the other way round in the Southern Hemisphere).
Of course the weather will be lovely and warm now I'm doing this.
If it works, I could do the same on the outside of the sliding panes.
I'm also planning to add some insulation to the ceiling too, install new gas boiler, replace all old radiators and generally upgrade the CH for next winter. Also planning to run water and a foul water drain to the other extension room in preparation for adding shower & loo for when I get old and decrepit (hopefully a while yet)
Del

It works well. We had wooden framed single glazed french windows onto our veranda when I was a kid. Dad used to bring home the shrink wrap they wrapped the cigarette packets in and hairdryer it to the window frames. Kept the draughts out a treat (couldn't open the doors all winter though!)

Yeah centimeters seems a bit odd anymore, at least to me. Most 'engineering' metric units are in divisions of 10³ⁿ (... 10^-6, 10^-3, 10⁰, 10³, 10⁶...).

I recently bought a optical component, a grating, for measuring spectra. The software supplied is set up for angstroms. Ångstroms? (10^-10 m) Not nanometers (10^-09 m)? I didn't think anybody used angstroms anymore, but I guess there is still a pocket of astronomers who haven't abandoned this obsolete and ungainly unit. It might seem like a simple thing, since its a straightforward conversion by ÷10, but I have years of mathcad routines that accept data in nanometers, and unless I can fiddle with the software to give results in nanometers, I'll have to be careful to modify every mathcad routine to ensure it's calculating in nm and not spurious tens of nm.

See, now. That's the problem. And three is such a wonderful number base.

You have answered my puzzlement on the passing of angstroms, though. Thanks.

Astronomers using angstroms? They're more likely to use lightyears or parsecs. Angstroms are more for particle physicists, 1 Å is approx diameter of a hydrogen atom.

Stellar spectra. For years Astronomers have used Angstroms to describe the wavelengths of the spectra they measure, and I suppose there is an inertia there they haven't overcome.

Parsecs aren't used as much anymore since there aren't very many astronomers (as a percentage of all astronomers) doing positional astronomy.

OK fair enough. Now I come to think of it, when I was a student we had wavelengths of say 5000 angstroms (visible light) where now we'd say 500 nm.

I hate the Metric system, too.

Back in the 1970's, 0r 80's, someone, probably a tool supply company who had members of the US Congress on their payroll forced us to go to the metric system, sort of.

The out shoot of this brilliant idea caused every mechanic in the USA to go buy a complete set of wrenches for metric hardware. (Finding metric screwdrivers is always a hassle)

But wait, there's more. On American made vehicles, running changes were made so that you'd have to have both sets of tools at hand to work on any thing.

I don't work on cars any more, but I'll bet it is still a big metric/SAE cluster F.

Metric screwdrivers? Yeah, almost as hard to find as metric crescent wrenches.

In the UK we have some Imperial legacy stuff, needing imperial tools, UK metric standards (10 mm, 13 mm 17 mm, 25 mm generally) and European (German?) metric standards (10 mm, 11 mm 12 mm, 15 mm). Now the car companies put star drives on many bolts...changing the patterns as soon as the aftermarket catches up.

It's no wonder the lads have toolboxes taller than they are!

When you find the metric screwdrivers, can you grab me a left-handed one, please?