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!
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.
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.
Love me some Uncle John’s. I’d recognize that page number decorator anywhere!
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.
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: 2So we only know a kilogram of water weighs a kilogram because of an arbitrary decision by the French? How much does it really weigh?
Ever since that dude translated the Rosetta stone they’ve been up their own asses.
I mean yeah, Metric scales.
Everything can be scaled. 1 can be two halves & 3 can be 12 .025’s. or we can all just agree that everything is based on various systems of measurement invented by humans who can hardly agree on their own origins and the purpose of their existence, or even the right to exist.
And the fact that Inch is not precisly defined. “Three grains of …” or “King’s thumb” is not a precise definition.
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.
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.
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.
The decimeter is certainly an overlooked unit, and it’s a shame it’s relegated to relative obscurity - I use it occasionally even if people give me weird looks. Ideally I think something in the range of 20-30cm would make for a nice base unit - about the length of a forearm. Deci-units around the length of a finger segment, and centi-units being a slightly larger millimetre-equivalent. A deca-unit would be about the height of a doorframe.
Facts to remember the next time some French guy on the internet makes fun of Freedom Units™. The Metric system is basically arbitrarily defined as well, since the thing they meant to base it on was incorrect.
Edit: I forgot the /sarcasm tag and pissed off some French guys on the internet.
Hey it’s me some French guy on the internet. I think the main argument for the metric system is how they all connect together in a simple way. 1km is 1000m, one cube meter of water is 1000L, etc. We don’t really care what the base unit is.
This sounds like something a sassy person might say whilst pushing up their glasses to view a document which is rolled up tightly into a scroll and shoved into their own anus after they realize the room is watching them try to read the outside of a butthole scroll.
Sacré bleu!!!
I will always defend mes amis français against le perfide albion d’outre mer
