on a lighter note...

[ArmyGrunt]

Please can we have some monkey humor, or dumb blond, or old man humor. I can’t read all this intellect on the weekend. Just saying.

YES! This is "on a lighter note" not "how would you measure this thing"

Bring back the humor! Or humour, for those of you who need to add silent letters

 

[cpr0312]

Bring back the humor! Or humour, for those of you who need to add silent letters

 

[cpr0312]

Bring back the humor! Or humour, for those of you who need to add silent letters

 

[observe]

 

[observe]

 

[observe]

 

[observe]

 

[observe]

 

[observe]

 

[JimP]

 

[rookhawk]

Never thought of it that way, and truth be told, could not care less

I work indifferently with either, the same way I speak or write indifferently in French or English. No intolerance whatsoever on my part, and I am far from being driven insane by it. Rather bored actually by another round of "here we go again with the stereotype"

It just amuses me when folks talk about the "pointlessness of the system" without even understanding it, or discuss the "sheer intolerance of metric users" when they dare pointing out the misunderstanding. By the way, it is not the "metric" system, it is the "decimal" system, "meter" is the unit for length, the decimal system also applies to "liter" liquid volume, surface, power, temperature, etc. etc.)

Intolerance? Is the pot lecturing the kettle?
You are cracking me up!

Of course, no one says "I’m going on a 10000 meter drive" but everyone understand that there are 1,000 meter in a kilometer, or, more to the point, that 300 meters is 1/3 of a kilometer, etc. It is interesting by the way that you "traditional" gentlemen actually use the decimal system without apparently even knowing it: do you rate your bulbs in watts and buy your electricity in kilowatts. News for you: 1 kilowatt = 1,000 watts (just like 1 kilometer = 1,000 meters). And guess what the utilities measure their electrical production in? Megawatt (1 megawatt = 1,000 kilowatts = 1 million watts). And a 1 gigabyte computer hard drive is ... you guessed it: 1,000 megabyte. Etc.

Why would John Doe care? Because it is simple and applies easily to daily life. For example, what kind of power does a 3 megawatt wind turbine produce in "real life"? Any guess, anyone? Simple: the power to light 30,000 bulbs, assuming typical 100 watts bulbs: (3 MW = 3,000,000 W) / 100 W = 30,000 bulbs

And how much bigger is the 2 gigabyte disk drive on the new computer John is looking at, compared to the 500 megabyte drive on his current machine? Simple: 4 times bigger (2 GB = 2,000 MD) / 500 MB = 4

THAT, is the value of the decimal system: just one rule for ALL units. And by the way, that rule is fairly universal since the entire human world increments by 10 (ten, twenty (TWo x ten), thirty (THree x ten), fourty (FOUR x ten), etc. And of course, it all makes sense when one realizes that the prefix "deci" (as in decimal) comes from the Latin decimus, meaning "tenth."
And by the way, let me share a secret, could it have anything to do with the fact that human have 10 fingers? How is that for tradition?

You can keep your head, and think your way too, but it makes the discussion more interesting when we actually understand what we are talking about, right? So to summarize, the value of the decimal system is not really about shifting the decimal and using a prefix, although it is darn convenient in daily life (milli- 1/1,000; centi- 1/100; deci- 1/10; deca- 10; hecto- 100; kilo- 1,000; mega- 1,000,000 etc.); it is about the fact that everyone knows that there are 10 mm in 1 cm; 10 centiliter in a liter; 1,000 meter in a kilometer; 1,000 megabyte in a gigabyte, etc.

But hey, this is supposed to be a jokes thread, right? So enough logical thinking right? Why would we care about incrementing things by 10 (decimal) just because we happen to have had 10 fingers for a couple million years? It is much cooler to increment every unit by a different factor and have our kids give us the "deer in the headlight look" when we innocently ask: how many ounces in a pound? inches in a yard? yards in a mile? ounce in a gallon?
Why would they care, right? There is a converter app on the phone, right?

Parting joke: quick, answer on the spot, no cheating, is a 11/32 socket larger or smaller than a 10 mm socket?

Love you guys, have a great day

Everything was going fine on your rant until you brought up computers and got way over your skis.

How many bits to the byte? 10? (8)

A gigabyte isn’t 1000 megabytes. It’s 1024 mb.

Nothing in computers is decimal, it’s binary and hexadecimal.

Stick with sockets and watts.

 

[One Day...]

... And a 1 gigabyte computer hard drive is ... you guessed it: 1,000 megabyte. Etc. ...

Everything was going fine on your rant until you brought up computers and got way over your skis. How many bits to the byte? 10? (8) A gigabyte isn’t 1000 megabytes. It’s 1024 mb. Nothing in computers is decimal, it’s binary and hexadecimal. Stick with sockets and watts.

Well... it all depends if you choose to express yourself in base 2 (binary) or in base 10 (decimal, otherwise called SI: International System of Units), doesn't it?

https://www.gbmb.org/gb-to-mb

This being said, yes I understand that a bit can only have two values (1 or 0), hence the computer binary unit of data, but truth be told, for the example I was giving (John Do's hard drive), I did not think it was worth diving into that level of detail...

FYI my earlier post was not meant as a rant but as an explanation, but if you chose to take it as a rant, such is your right. To each their own

 

[WAB]

LOL, we are a long way off the “lighter note” track!

 

[One Day...]

Yep, we are, looks like rookhawk is even more a stickler for accuracy than I am, which is quite fine. From a pure technical computer engineering perspect

So, on a lighter note: a cop notices outside the immigration office at JFK New York that a freshly arrived pilgrim keeps putting a dollar in the coke machine and shouts in delight every time, when the can drops in the receiver. The cops asks him: what are you doing? The ecstatic guy replies: as long as I am winning I keep playing...

 

[rookhawk]

Well... it all depends if you choose to express yourself in base 2 (binary) or in base 10 (decimal, otherwise called SI: International System of Units), doesn't it?

View attachment 313160
https://www.gbmb.org/gb-to-mb

This being said, yes I understand that a bit can only have two values (1 or 0), hence the computer binary unit of data, but truth be told, for the example I was giving (John Do's hard drive), I did not think it was worth diving into that level of detail...

FYI my earlier post was not meant as a rant but as an explanation, but if you chose to take it as a rant, such is your right. To each their own

My point is, computers do not follow the metric system and are a logic all their own, just like imperial systems. The only time computers use the metric system is to overstate their power/capacity at the consumer's expense, using decimal definitions of capacities rather than actuals which would make everything smaller/slower.

Same with MIPS, FLOPS, GB/ps, etc.

In fact, the only thing I know of in tech that actually uses the metric system is data networking impedence reconciled against the speed of light in Kilometers per second. Everything else is funny systems using binary, hex, octal, or some other doesn't-divide-well-by-ten solution.

 

[AfricaHunting.com]

 

[One Day...]

You are, of course, absolutely correct from an engineering perspective, rookhawk. And the system actually makes sense because the basic building block of computer science is the fact that a bit can only have two values (1 or 0), hence the computer binary unit of data.

Let me provide another, much easier, example of the "doesn't-divide-well-by-ten" unit that imperial system aficionados can point out:
Time! 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 24 hours in a day. WTF !?!?!?

I guess than when France in 1799 replaced the existing system of measures, which had become impractical for trade, by a decimal system based on the kilogram and the meter, they did not see the need (or could not get it accepted (?), I do not know if this was advocated ?) for the replacement of the division of time in 24 hours, hour in 60 minutes that was established by the Sumerians as far back as 3,500 BC.

Interestingly, when technology made it possible to accurately measure time of less than 1 second, the decimal system came back with a vengeance. Races are won by hundredth or thousandths of a second, not sixtieth...

 

[1dirthawker]

guys.... drop the metric system discussion, its not funny and taking up valuable space on a funny venue!! plus, who cares??? its just having an argument over a 6.5 being better than a .264 cal

moving on

 

[JimP]

guys.... drop the metric system discussion, its not funny and taking up valuable space on a funny venue!! plus, who cares??? its just having an argument over a 6.5 being better than a .264 cal

moving on

Actually I think that it is quite funny. Grown men trying to convince the other one on which system is better and easier to use when neither group will budge any and the countries that are using one system or the other are not going to change either in the foreseeable future. It is bad enough that I had to purchase a second complete set of tools to work on newer vehicle and even then you need both sets of wrenches just because one supplier uses metric and the other uses SAE.

Now if I can just figure out what I did with my adjustable metric wrench.

 

[WAB]

Hey I know, how about we start a thread on systems of measurement and we can get back to jokes on this one!