thirdusername

Curious: I'm supposed to do a six month placement with an open source project next semester (I'm a bachelors student on my second year), so I've been trying to figure out what to work on. I'd love to find something that is both interesting and not to terribly scary at the same time if anyone has suggestions.

@jlees - That's an excellent idea, thanks! :)

I really don't see what the difference between not having a mark for 1/10th of an inch and not having 1/16th of a cm either, so that issue goes both ways and I'm sure you don't suffer particularly whenever you need to calculate some awkward unit that's doesn't have a mark on an imperial ruler.

I agree fractions are more useful in many cases, which is why if I could relate to your previous mention of splitting a cm into eight, I would've calculated with 1/8cm fractions until I was forced to use decimals.

I have a ruler with 1/16th of an inch on it as well. Many rulers come with both but I've never had to use an inch for anything in my life and I'm going to try to remember asking some engineering friends if they've ever if I can remember. (http://cdn-write.demandstudios.com/upload//5000/300/40/8/353...)

I agree. But the average person doesn't need to. We're not all traveling the world buying things in different measures or collaborating on space shuttles. Most of us are popping down the shop to buy a pint of milk.

I'm sure they don't, I hardly think all that many peoples around the world were happy to move to the metric system from whatever they were on before when that was introduced including my own countrymen but you have to realize that it's an issue that everyone has dealt with and after a few years it should stop being an issue entirely. The average person buys a pint of milk but somewhere someone is calculating pints from liters because the UK is nowhere near self-sufficient in food and I'm sure that includes milk, so it's not unreasonable to think that the cost of conversion does affect the average person in some small unnoticeable way.

And lastly, these are the things that make countries unique! Different! Interesting! Culture! Anything to keep those differences is good.

Sure but you could qualify anything with that. I like culture as much as the next guy and I would enjoy ordering a pint ( and then hand it of to whoever is closest and actually drink beer ) but keeping a unit system that's different from everyone else is like showing up to a party and telling people they need to say the words backwards and not use any vowels, it's doable but frustrating. Then again it's in my culture to be conformist, maybe others think culture is enough of a reason to never change.

My country (Sweden) has used the metric system by law since 1888 so there's nobody left that remembers the good old days, it's something even the oldest of our grandparents were taught in school.

Metric is worse in almost every way for day to day tasks. Not everyone is a scientist doing complex calculations. For science, maths, engineering, sure use metric.

Considering that every day people in my country and every other country that uses the metric system (almost the whole world mind you) is as normal and ordinary as every other place on earth I really don't see the point of what you are arguing. Even the most incompetent people I meet seem to be perfecly able to do extremely trivial calculations like they are second nature.

Imperial measurements are based on convenience. Why do we buy a dozen rolls from the baker and not 10? So we can divide them between 2,3,4,6 people.

We still say dozen and buy eggs in the dozen (or two dozen). The system for measurment you use do not force you to stop buying in convenient amounts. The only time I notice problems with dividing edibles is when there's children around or someone is trying to figure out how to slice a cake into an odd number of pieces.

Weights are similarly based on what is useful. Look at a recipe for cakes and you might see 1Lb of this, 1/2Lb of this. The metric equivalent? 100g of this, 200g of that. How is that more useful to me?

It's not more or less useful, it's exactly the same level of usefulness.

Why do we ask for some 2 by 4 timber? Because it's easier than asking for some 48mm by 96mm timber.

I would write your question exactly the same way but with 5 by 10cm instead of 2 by 4 though I honestly have no idea whatsoever what unit you are using to make the decimal equivalent. nevermind I figured it out it's probably " which means inches except it gives me slighter larger numbers when I put in "2 inches in cm" into Google it's 5,08cm. You would also probably ask for a slightly larger piece of timber for the same reason as you wouldn't ask for 1.9 by 3.9 of timber. Then again I'm not an arts and crafts type of guy, maybe there's a convention here I'm missing that's used even in countries that have the metric system.

If you're doing finer work, measuring things in divisions of an inch makes perfect sense. 16ths of an inch means you can subdivide with ease. Try dividing a cm into 8 equal parts sometime and tell me how you get on

Do you somehow manage to get cut things with infinite precisions? You do realize you can use decimal points in the metric system, calculators and that it's no different than the scenario where you split an inch into 7 which I'm sure isn't a problem for you, right? Also since an inch seem to be defined to be exactly 2.54 cm 1/8th of that would be exactly 0,3175cm the scenario you paint up first doesn't become impossible to do with a finite number of decimal points and your argument about splitting a cm has no bearing on that.

In the UK, we also use stone to measure our weight. I'm 9 stone and a bit. Why is it more useful to be able to say I'm, 60kg. That's more precision than I want to tell someone my weight.

Don't people assume you are rounding when you give them whole numbers over there when you give them nice well formed number like 60? If you tell ordinary people you weigh 60kg I'm fairly certain everyone would assume you weight roughly 60kg or you could always say "roughly 60kg", I really don't see the difference. If it's a convention everyone uses you would presumably think telling someone you weigh 60,3kg is more precision than you want to tell someone.

I know this is an unpopular view with geeks, but if someone could please explain what problem metric solves, I'm all ears (And please don't trot out the space shuttle imperial vs metric mix up FUD).

The point of standardization is that it costs society is less when it doesn't have to convert or adapt all the time and I don't mean your country in particular, I mean for the whole of earth. It would also remove a fair bit of confusion not only from trying to understand what a yard, furlong or pint is but worse things like there being more than one mile unit. If you can convert almost the entire earth into using an Imperial system I'll be happy to jump on that instead, it sure would be simpler if everyone used the same system. That FUD as you called it is called confusion and I don't see why you should ignore a perfectly valid point when we are just a few countries short of eliminating those types of mistakes forever.

I'd like to know how they came up with those numbers, care to reference?

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_liberation_movement

Richard Dawkins recently put up an interview he had with Peter Singer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYYNY2oKVWU in 2008 about it which convinced me they are right but I still eat meat as I can't stand nearly all the vegan food I've tasted.

You'll get my full attention when you pay me for 16 hours of work, what I do in my spare time isn't for you to decide. There also aren't a whole lot of programmers to pick if you disqualify all the ones that work on side projects (open or closed), just because you can see that hes working on something else on his own time doesn't mean hes not doing his job.

* "Post ending in x"

* Gay porn

* People seeking attention but not "putting out"

Refence but keep in mind the common sense thing is to not click encyclopedia dramatica links if are at work or want to avoid knowing useless things: http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Bring_Back_Snacks

For the record I don't actually visit 4chan, I just happen to know this out of sheer morbid fascination.

I too would love to see research.

Personally I find twittering too short to express much of anything worth reading creating an extremely high noise to signal ratio. I'm sure it's great for people who are truly interested in what their idol is doing throughout the day but I find it verry difficult to idolize.

Twitter to me feels like a reading IRC but you only get to read one line at a time and even though there's millions of people in the room almost everyone is engaged in broadcasting instead of conversations.

Although I must say I've enjoyed using the twitter search to see what people are engaged in. It's like sitting at a cafe and just observing people, blissful entertainment.

I use Facebook though.