The replies are hilarious 
, so many blue checks saying “abandon big tech!” while they pay for Twitter from the richest fascist in the world.
The replies are hilarious , so many blue checks saying “abandon big tech!” while they pay for Twitter from the richest fascist in the world.
That must be why customary measurements are consistent across all cultures, since they are defined by use- hang on, I’m getting a call from the foot:
Boy I’m glad we use natural and not arbitrarily defined measurements!
Criticizing the metric system is not the same as criticizing standardization. Plenty of placed standardized their measurements before the metric system came along and replaced the original lengths of measure (that were based on useful lengths to work in, as determined by artisans through thousands of years of trial and error) with new ones (that were based on universal constants that were selected by an aristocrat to look nice on paper).
I’m so glad we use a system based on Big Clive from Camden’s shoe size on a gouty Tuesday in 1754 rather than a measure utterly unrelated to my life, like the speed of the thing I use to see literally everything I interact with.
Damn it must be so cool to use light and naturally understand its speed over distances similar to parts of your anatomy.
I struggle to comprehend the speed of light as a measure of distance over anything less than about 300 miles. You must just be built different.
Honestly I struggle to think of light traveling any distance shorter than from the sun to here, which I know is like 5 mins. I couldn’t possibly begin to tell you how far it travels in a second, or a tenth of a second, or whatever.
A second is around the equator about seven and a half times. A tenth of a second is three quarters of the equator. The moon is about one and a quarter seconds away from earth, you know, if you ever wanna use it for something.
E: this is all half remembered from radio operation and radio astronomy. I could be wrong.
Do you regularly experience time dilation? If not, then I suspect that the average size of a person’s foot is more intuitive to you than the speed of light.
are you doing an elaborate bit
No.
cringe.
okay fascist
fascism is when metric system.
Source. Also fuck you this is a stupid statement. Why in the goddamn fuck would a variable unit with multiple “standardisations” almost exclusively based on the whims of contemporary rulers have been determined by artisans, and some specific length that was useful to them? If they’re so specifically useful lengths and divisions to work with why are they variably divided into 9, 12, or 16 parts depending on where you are in the world and history, and why does the specifically useful length vary across standardisations? If the standardised size is so valuable to artists then why did it change twice in 200 years because different English kings wanted credit for it? You think their artisan friends were begging them to make the foot a little shorter?
Did you do any thinking at all before writing this? Can you not come up with a single possible reason why it might be advantageous to base measurements off an immutable aspects of the universe instead of "dave reckon’s this is a good length*? Is it really that hard to connect a desire for standardisation to something that actually is the same every time?
You seem to be operating under the assumption that the inch, foot, yard etc were pulled arbitrarily out of thin air by a king when he standardized the system. No, the system already existed, and it had been developed organically by working people for thousands of years. All the king did was come in and say “we’re going to use this specific version of the system for standard’s sake”, he didn’t make any meaningful changes to the lengths themselves.
You put far too much emphasis on the so-called “immutable aspects of the universe” that metric is supposedly based on. At one point in time the meter was based on a metal rod that they kept in Paris, they only stopped using that because they found that it was slowly shrinking over time. There’s no reason that you couldn’t determine what fraction of a light-second that a yard is and then retroactively define it as that, and then claim that the imperial system is “based on immutable aspects of the universe”. It’s all arbitrary at the end of the day.
Ah, not quite - I’m operating on the assumption that the people working for thousands of years arbitrarily pulled them from thin air. Because, you know… That’s literally how all definitions of measurement work. Try the cubit, somewhere between a foot and a half and 4 feet - what was so useful to people about those distances? At best ones like the foot and the chi came from using your forearm as a standard length, but once they’re standardised the choice of whose forearm to use is completely arbitrary. Russian units were based on different ways of stretching your body parts - stuff like a hand span or arm span. Choosing what to use as a measurement is completely arbitrary, which then is standardised over time by people using the same thing as a measurement and it eventually getting defined as a single distance. The kings arbitrary choices were just building on the arbitrary choices of the past. There wasn’t anything less arbitrary about the choice because lots of people used it.
Yes, they discovered the law as they understood it was mistaken, and so found more accurate ways to define it, which is why we’re now using a fraction of a light second. If we find more precise definitions in future we’ll define it by them.
Lastly, they already did that. The imperial and us customary measurement systems are both defined by metric distances now, specifically because metric distances, equally arbitrarily chosen as they are, shouldn’t change. And if they do, we’ll find something that doesn’t.