Yes, it’s from a book called “Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader” and that book was resting on a closed toilet seat in a nation that only kind of uses the metric system in certain situations… however, you’d be surprised how much you can learn after a single visit to any local fast-food joint!
Love me some uncle john’s! Those page numbers are iconic, though I could immediately tell it was UJBR from the asterisks and writing style. Is this from “plunges into history”?
I use centimeters for certain things, but I call them “inches”.
It’s so impressively thought out. I got my mind blown when the physics teacher told us that 1 calorie is the amount of energy it takes to heat 1cc by 1°C. Suddenly you realise that someone actually put some effort into this whole system
It’s incredibly funny to me that the two metric units that the US actually commonly uses (calories and Watt-hours), aren’t SI units. Those are both measured with Joules.
The one that blew my mind the most was finding out that calories are calculated by setting the food on fire, and then measuring how much it can heat water. Calories are literally just a measurement of how well something burns.
And iirc 1 Joule is the energy required to lift 100g by 1m
No. It is pushing by 1 metre with a force of 1 newton.
No. It is Newton pushing 1 litre of jewels.
No. It is J. Lo pushing a newt on 1 litre of water.
No. It is Jules Verne pushing a carton of fig newtons a distance of 1 litre.
And the fact that Inch is not precisly defined. “Three grains of …” or “King’s thumb” is not a precise definition.
One ten millionth of a quarter of the circumference of some random ass planet somewhere isn’t either.
Precise definition isn’t really practically necessary. It’s only useful if you need to independently recreate a system in isolation. It’s much easier to have a reference material and just copy it. You can even build a reference length if you have something with known measurements.
Nowadays, the inch is defined in metric units anyway.
Without metric inch is arbitrary unit, can be anything.
In what context do people use metric units of length larger than a kilometer? 🤨
When measuring my dick.
Well, in Sweden we typically use miles (the matric variant, ie. 10km) to describe distance by car.
Megameter, gigameter, and terameter are occasionally used in astronomy and Earth science, though units like AU and light-year are usually preferred.
Here’s an example of megameter being used. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abd0312
Multiple kilometers for example.
Woah
Why this year I drove 1.5 Megameter by car
Technically you can say that, I just don’t remember ever hearing it in any context, not even space travel.
Kilo just means 1,000, a kilo meter is just 1,000 meters. That last point is simply stupid conjecture by the author, and unlike the metric system, isn’t well thought out.
You could measure things in kilo miles if you want…
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The paragraph on the meter should mention that their measuring error from the pole to the equator was .02%, which, without using satellites or even electricity, is fucking impressive.
.0002 × 10,000,000 = 2,000 metersSo they were off by 2 kilometers? Not bad, honestly…
I reckon if took every turd I’d ever caused and laid them (both senses) end-to-end it would be more than 2km, for context.
That is impressive & a nice amendment on your part. Thank you for the added detail
So how the hell was it done? Long piece of rope? Hot air balloon? Or having a bird fly from one point to another and timing it?
Calculations. In 240 BCE, Eratosthenes used a stick. He basically found a place where the sun was directly overhead, and measured the shadow from a stick a known distance to the north of that location. He approximated the circumference of the earth to be 25,000 miles, which was off by 99 miles.
There’s a part in one of these Uncle John’s Bathroom Readers that has a paragraph about the dude with the shadow stick.
I don’t think he used miles.
‘Kid Named Miles’
How do we know the conversion of whatever length unit he was using, in modern units?
Uhh, educated guesses. The stadion wasn’t exactly standardized. Most of the conversions I see put 10 stadia at 1 mile so that’s what I went with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadion_(unit)
The main thing is his methodology was precise.
Lots of triangulation and extrapolation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_measurement_of_Delambre_and_Méchain
It bugs me so much that they used the decimeter to define the liter and kilogram instead of using a meter to define a liter and gram
Square-Cube law was gonna fuck with that one way or another. A meter is a very human-oriented unit of measure – but a cubic meter of water is a fuckton more than most people have to deal with in the normal course of business.
And we’re gonna call that one gram of water?
One liter of water being 1000cc or one kilogram keeps the scales much more useful, imo. And personally, being essentially a sentient bag of water with a handful of other elements gluing it together…I appreciate that.
Ultimately it’s all the same, anyways. It’s just a matter of the words we call them, the math works out the same, if we just give them different names. That’s the point. Math is the constant. Assuming a space alien can understand Base10, we can explain the metric system in terms of universal constants that make sense in Base10.
Unfortunately, all number systems are Base10…
If we were to make a meter today, I would think it would be a fraction of the speed of light.
And on that note, I honestly think a base 12 number system would be easier in the long run.
The meter is nowadays literally defined as the distance light travels in a certain amount of time, ie through the speed of light.
Coincidentally we accidentally got really close to 1/300 000 000th the speed of light in a vacuum. 299 792 458 m/s.
Which makes a nanolightsecond almost one foot (with less than a 2% margin of error)
Honestly, humans are pretty damn lucky when it comes to cosmic coincidences.
Thinking about you, moon and Jupiter.
I think this snippet misrepresents the accuracy of the former definition of the metre. Sure, it’s no longer the distance from the equator to the pole (the modern definition uses the speed of light and the period of transition for a particular atom), but the difference is quite small. The circumference of the Earth around the poles (so 4 times the distance from equator to pole) is 40007.863 km. In Napoleonic times scientists had a pretty good idea what the shape of the Earth was.
Earth squeezes and stretches and wobbles & rotates. Time as we know it changes in length because it is the common nature of “time” to become chaos which then becomes order. Hylomorphism or Impermanence is to Entropy as measurement is to the fundamentals of size. Who is to say that the distance between two points should be constrained to the barriers of human existence & understanding. All we have is pictures & words, maybe a few trinkets that will become dust that becomes something else that attempts to quantify reality.
Earth squeezes and stretches and wobbles & rotates.
Sort of, yeah, Earth is a bit wider around the equatorial axis than around the polar one.
Time as we know it changes in length because it is the common nature of “time” to become chaos which then becomes order. Hylomorphism or Impermanence is to Entropy as measurement is to the fundamentals of size. Who is to say that the distance between two points should be constrained to the barriers of human existence & understanding. All we have is pictures & words, maybe a few trinkets that will become dust that becomes something else that attempts to quantify reality.
This reads like an unfortunate confluence of psychosis, psychoactive substances and LLMs.
While I can’t speak for my chemical imbalances, I can certainly assure you I am %100 not a fucking algorithm or some lame ass excuse for manufactured digital intelligence…
Sort of, yeah, Earth is a bit wider around the equatorial axis than around the polar one.
Thanks for explaining that a fucking ball is easier to squeeze at it’s widest part, genius.
What are you talking about? That isn’t what they said, and a ball doesn’t have a widest point. That’s more or less the definition of a ball.
The distance between the two poles is smaller than the distance from one side to the other following the equator. The earth isn’t quite a ball, it’s a bit squashed because of way it spins
Okay, a ball is equally wide but sometimes it gets squeezed and becomes tallish
Since it seems like you’re confused about the precise deformation of earth: the earth is wider around the equator. It’s not being squished but, rather, being flung apart by its spinning on its axis, like spinning pizza dough. Gravity just keeps it the same shape.
If you’re interested, look up “geodesy”
To agree on a unified measurement system for things like engineering, science and commerce across nations and cultures is a question of practicability though, not pseudophilosophical ramblings.
I say we measure everything with how angry it makes the French.
Earth squeezes and stretches and wobbles & rotates.
Don’t we all, Earth, don’t we all…
The metric prefix system is a fantastic invention, akin to the arabic number system. Honestly it’s surprising no one came up with it sooner… but (and I’m sure I’ll catch some flak for this) the metre is an awkward length - it’s too big for human scale measurements. The decimetre is not as bad but still not very good, and it’s also not commonly used. The centimetre has the opposite problem - it’s too small for the human scale but too big for precision work.
Don’t get me wrong, the horrible conversions between imperial units make the system unusable for me, but the unit lengths themselves are scaled to humans because they weren’t initially defined arbitrarily by some committee (why should the distance from the pole to the equator be used as the baseline for a measurement used by humans?). I think the inch and foot are great lengths to use on a daily basis, they feel quite natural.
What annoys me the most is that we could have had the best of both, since the foot and inch are only a factor of 12 apart, so we could have had a metre measuring about one foot and a decimetre measuring about an inch.
What? The whole idea of the prefix system is that it’s granular enough that you can describe any size as up to 100s (or 10s of common sizes) of any prefix.
Think of it as scales: Metres is the unit for things people sized (including kids), decimeters for things hand sized, centimeters for grit sized, etc.
Other scales are mostly an extension of the system: Kilometers is “away” sized, millimeters are tiny sized, and following the convention of 10s makes for easy to remember and translate conversions, although I’ll admit that they aren’t inherently more convenient than other measures.
Similarily: foot is stick sized, an inch is pebble sized, but the imperial system then doesn’t easily convert between other common human experiences. Talking of things seed sized becomes weird fractional math, figuring out how many steps it is to the next town (miles I’d argue is “trip” sized) gets weird. And when you need higher precision you end up in fractions of a larger unit rather than convenient ones.
The size of an atom is about 100 pikometers (10e-12 metres) and a molecule about a nanometer (10x the size). In US customary an atom is about 1/262144 (2^18) thou of an inch, and molecules about 1/2048 (2^11) thou of an inch. And if we want it compared to miles or feet, we’ll have to redo the calculations from scratch with loads of danger of messing up conversion numbers.
Besides, most of the benefit of the metric system is that the standardised scale prefixes makes it very easy to correlate all other physical constants. Speed of light is just under 300 km/s, which is about 300 m/ms or 300 mm/ns, or 200 miles/second which is about 1000 ft/ms or 10 in/ns (not to mention that rounding errors are larger in customary)
EtA: I do wish we had a base 12 math system though
Don’t misunderstand me, imperial sucks. I just wish the metric system had defined the metre to be smaller, that’s all.
See my other comments in this thread. I think most people would prefer if the common measurements they made with common units landed in the number range of about 0.2-10-ish. The human brain is good at visually estimating small groups so any unit system should try to lean into that and put the scale of commonly measured values in that range. Obviously as things get bigger you end up with tens or hundreds of units which start to lose semantic meaning, especially for quick estimations or relative comparisons, so you should start thinking of switching units at this point. Likewise when values get below about 0.1 they get hard to visualise, so most people switch units here.
My point being - I think the base unit of one metre is too large for most daily tasks - most things that are around a human scale end up being less than one metre, and I think the centimetre is too small - most things on the human scale end up being dozens of centimetres at least. Both fall outside that ideal range of ‘a small handful’ which the brain is good intuitively and subconsciously working with.
Why don’t you use the decimeter then? It’s 10 cm and sounds like it solves all your issues.
Are you American by any chance? I ask because in the UK we primarily used yards before metricification which are almost the same length as metres and there wasn’t any sort of long rumbling “ohhh yards are an awkward length” they were just used. I think you feeling that feet are more suitable is probably just familiarity.
No, I’m not. I live in a commonwealth country that transitioned to metric well before I was born. Recently I’ve had to work with American companies as part of my job.
Don’t get me wrong, the imperial system is horrible, I just wish the metric system had a unit closer in length to feet or inches. Yards would be an annoying unit for human-scale measurements too. Even the name implies it’s usage - it’s for measuring (small) areas of land, which are usually much bigger than humans after all. That’s not a problem in imperial though since no-one would say ‘my pen is 0.1 yards long’, they’d measure in inches instead because it comes out as a nice, human brain-friendly small number like 4 or 6.
All measurements are arbitrary. This feels like that Fahrenheit debate where “60 feels natural for room temperature” as if anyone has any idea what number a room should be. A meter is just a chunk of distance about this size (holds hands apart). There’s nothing a foot can add to a measurement that a meter can’t. You’ll need fractions and smaller or bigger units in all real world cases anyway, so having easy conversions is much more useful than a “natural” base unit.
All measurements are arbitrary
Perhaps in a perfectly rational world, but humans are silly creatures. The human brain evolved to deal with small numbers. Distinguishing one vs two lions is important, but distinguishing 14 vs 15 lions is not, so our brain immediately recognises numbers up to about six and has to rely on conscious counting for anything larger. If I told you that “This dog is two ducks tall” you’d have a pretty good idea of how big the dog is, but if I said it was “20 mice tall” you might have trouble visualising, or worse “450 ants tall” at which point I would have no idea. Our brains don’t innately have the ability to accurately conceptualise large numbers, which is why the metric prefix system works so well - it keeps numbers relatively small. I think the same logic applies to decimals and fractions. Simple fractions like halves through to perhaps fifths can be visually conceptualised at a glance, but beyond that it requires calculation.
What that means to me is that ideally your measurement unit should be big enough to be able to measure most things you deal with on a daily basis using no more than say 10 units (arbitrary, I could be persuaded down to 6 or up to 20), and still measuring most things without going smaller than about 0.2 units. As an example, consider human height (after all, what could be more a more human measurement?). The average person is between 1.5 and 1.9m tall, which is not a great start since we’re riding close to the 0.2 ‘lower resolution’ just describing the whole range. You could use centimetres but then you’re looking at 150 or 190 which is much too large to visualise nicely. Decimetres is better but not great. Feet is a pretty good fit for this, since that’d be about 4.9 to 6.2 ft. We haven’t violated either the max or minimum requirements and we still have a decent resolution within the range too.
having easy conversions is much more useful than a “natural” base unit.
I agree, but my whole point is that we didn’t have to choose!
about 4.9 to 6.2 ft
Hey! Didn’t you just violate your own rule of “0.2 lower resolution”?
You’re right about big numbers losing relevance in our minds, but I don’t think that’s even true for units of measurement. Since all units are arbitrary, they are inherently linked to a mental model with simple maths, quick conversions and rules of thumb. 450 ants is too large to visualize, but 450cm is simply the height where an old chestnut tree’s branches start. There are no 450 distinct centimeters involved in any of that, so you don’t have to keep them in your mind.
Compress down, guesstimate a piece of physical distance, continue with your day. Whether that mental model started as 15 foot or 450 centimeter isn’t really relevant, as long as you have developed a sense for the size of various things in your chosen units, and the units map nicely to other common units you might encounter. If you need any more precision, you take out your tools.
True, I converted metric to imperial with minimal rounding, as I didn’t want to give either an unfair advantage. You could round up again to 5-6.2 or down for 4.8-6.2 but my point stands. I think most people would prefer if the units they used most often were in the range of 0.2-10-ish. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.
You can memorise that a person is 10 billion nanoangstroms tall if you like, but surely you can’t be saying that it’s more convenient than using a scale that’s the same order of magnitude as the thing itself. That’s why we use the metric system after all, to give many units as close to the scale of what we’re trying to measure as possible in a standardised way.
You clearly haven’t been a kid measuring a 7m penalty kick on some random field. It works perfectly fine.
I would rather walk-measure the side of a field than tiptoe-measure it.
If you want to be more precise, you need to know your body’s measures. Like the span of my hand from thumb to middle finger is 21cm. 20 if I’m not that concerned about accuracy. I can measure quite a lot with that. Or 170cm for my arms spread apart (wingspan).
You’re right, I have no interest in sports. Though in that case under this modified metric a decametre would be approximately on the same scale as the previous metre.
Don’t get me wrong, imperial sucks, but the scale of the typical measurements with typical units lands nicely in what the human brain is good at visualising - small groups of up to about 10 (see my comments to other people in this thread). I think most people would prefer when the common measurements they make with common units end up in the range of 0.2 to 10-ish. Centimetres are too small for that and you measure using dozens or hundreds of them, which starts to lose semantic meaning, which makes visual estimation a bit trickier, especially with comparative distances. You start thinking in terms of tens or hundreds of cm visually to keep it under control which is just another layer of cognitive load. I think the perfect unit system would avoid this as much as practical. The existing metric metre is fine for outdoor activities, but I would argue most people aren’t out measuring fields all day, they’re looking at things on the same scale as their own body for the most part. Metres are a bit big for that.
I think the inch and foot are great lengths to use on a daily basis, they feel quite natural.
Well that would be because you use them on a daily basis. I find meters and centimeters perfectly natural too, and would be hard pressed to think of a situation where the scale of inches and feet would be strictly better.
Nice try! I live in a metric country and use exclusively metric units.
How do you know how it feels to use imperial if you exclusively use metric? And daily!
Because I have had to work with American companies as part of my job for the past couple years. For the entirety of my personal life and the rest of my professional life I use metric. I’ll grant you I should have said ‘almost exclusively’ in my previous comment, but I think that’s just splitting hairs.
why should the distance from the pole to the equator be used as the baseline for a measurement used by humans?
For both philosophical and scientific reasons, they wanted a definition that could be recreated any where in the world, certainly not the thumb or foot of any one man. With the “distance from pole to equator” definition, you just need to measure a long north-south axis (say a few hundreds km), and knowledge about the figure of the Earth helps you scale that to the full definition. You can do that anywhere on Earth.
Another considered definition was the length of a pendulum whose half period is 1s, but even at the time the effect of local gravity was deemed to be too much
That’s not the point I’m trying to make. You can derive a length from any number of physical constants to make it reproducible, but considering the divisor of exactly ten million suggests the metric committee were far more interested in making something ‘clean’ than something human-friendly. They could have basically done what they do with the modern redefinitions of the metre - the distance travelled by light in 1/299792458 ths of a second. Obviously they chose that number to keep the definition in line with the original, but they could have done that with the original definition to make the metre basically any length they wanted, but they didn’t.
Also, unlike the imperialist system it is not utter horseshite.
Uncle John’s bathroom reader!
I know this has nothing to do with the metric system, but I saw the toilet paper roll around the page number and got a surge of happy brain sauce due to the happy memories of all the copies I owned through the years: 2Literally because it scaled
Love me some Uncle John’s. I’d recognize that page number decorator anywhere!
My god, I commented almost this exact thing, word for word.
Looks at comment history
Oh wow, yeah you did! Great minds think alike, I guess!
Uncle John knows the correct way to mount toilet paper.
I have two bathrooms and do both.
The real question is; which do I use for my personal lou or WC or wash closet or bathroom or powder room or shitter?
If you don’t want to offend anyone, just leave the spool sitting upright on the lid
Or an apology note and a bucket full of water
Or three seashells
Someone so consistently responding to themselves is pretty entertaining.
So we only know a kilogram of water weighs a kilogram because of an arbitrary decision by the French? How much does it really weigh?
It doesn’t even weigh a kilogram. It masses one kilogram. It’s weight will be something like 9.8 Newtons.
Ever since that dude translated the Rosetta stone they’ve been up their own asses.
