Razor Thread Conundrum

Still see some folks outside the US referring to their weight in "stone",... why??? :rolleyes:

It's so that no-one knows how much they actually weigh. I had this conversation with my wife a few months back when we were weighing our daughter to find an appropriate car seat, I pointed out that "nearly three stone" not only didn't tell me anything meaningful, but that it also wasn't helpful when the seats were rated in kilos.

As an aside, a few years back we visited a cooperage and all the coopers worked by eye and experience with what little actual measuring they did typically being hand-breadths, thumbs etc. Practical application of the "rule of thumb". :)
 
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What's that gold saran wrap thing they keep using for lunar mission? Always looked weird to me.

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Why not gild the whole vessel? It looks like a Tabac puck with that foil loosely wrapped.

I suspect that the obvious reason is that gold is expensive so they only did the parts they really needed to. Also weight was absolutely critical, the ladder on the lunar module for example was so light-weight that on Earth it wouldn't hold the astronauts' weight, nor would the legs support the craft. In one-sixth gravity however it's fine.
 
My dad and i bought a series 3 Land over a few years ago and spent a happy couple of years restoring it. The thing had metric, imperial AND whitworth fastenings. Oh how we enjoyed the constant ordering of new spanners :p...

Educable moment here.

Sir Joseph Whitworth was a veritable genius and is the man to whom we essentially owe a huge debt for modern measurement.

...Determined to achieve high standards of accuracy he constructed a measuring machine, based on Henry Maudslay's measuring machine accurate to 0.0001" and another which could detect differences of less than one millionth of an inch. The standard method of measurement at that time was by using callipers and a graduated rule. Engineers were accustomed to working in 'bare' of 'full' measures until the late 1830's. An article published in the Manchester City News in 1865 commented that "Mr Whitworths foot rule, on which he had the thirty-second parts of an inch marked, was regarded as a curiosity, and many did not hesitate to affirm that to work to such a standard was an unnecessary refinement". He was one of the first to point out the advantages of decimalisation, the common fractional system was impossible for precision work...



In the U.S.A. he is remembered by historians as well for his rifle which was employed in small part by the Confederacy in a sniper capacity.

 
:D

Just a light jacket.

There's been talk of changing since the '70's, it just didn't happen. It is slowly changing on it's own because of imports and exports, and it is taught in schools.

What about the clock? It should be based on 10 also.

After the French revolution the revolutionaries did try to convert France to decimalised time and a few old time pieces of this do remain, didn't catch on though.
 
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