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Comment by pie314isi | Hacker News Reader

If they don’t have a vernier scale they’re just calipers

I mean, from reading this the way they work is by detecting the relative offset of two slightly differently pitched scales by measuring a series of capacitances.

Honestly it’s a much more ‘vernier’-like mechanism than I’d given it credit for.

I've run into several older engineers that call all calipers "verniers." It used to bug me but I guess it's okay for language to be a bit flexible like that. I still call the shelf in front of me in my car the "dashboard" even though it's not blocking the rocks kicked up by a dashing horse anymore.

The reason this is annoying is that there are other measuring devices that can have a vernier scale though. For example, in my shop I have a cheap micrometer that only measures to thousandths of an inch, and a more expensive one with a vernier scale that measures to ten-thousandths. Offhand, height gauges also commonly have a vernier scale.

The reason this is annoying in a shop environment is that there are likely other tools around with a vernier scale. That being said, I've also been around older machinists & engineers who exclusively refer to gauge blocks as "jo blocks", even when there wasn't a single set manufactured by the Johansson company in the building. This is common enough that searching for "jo blocks" returns a dedicated page on mc-master: https://www.mcmaster.com/products/jo-blocks

Do you blow your nose with tissue or Kleenex?

It's funny how this comes up often. Even though Kleenex is by and far the most popular brand here in Australia, I don't ever recall anyone ever saying something like "pass me a Kleenex". Maybe it's our penchant for either shortening things (afternoon becomes arvo) or adding synthesising suffixes for name (David is always Davo, McDonald's are Maccas) that Kleenex doesn't work for us.

There are regions that refer to any carbonated beverage as “coke”. As in “Hi, can I get a bottle of sprite coke”

"There are only two people I take my hat off to. One is the president of the United States and the other is Mr. Johansson from Sweden."

--Henry M. Leland, Founder of Cadillac and Lincoln automobile companies

From Machine Thinking video "Origins of Precision": https://youtu.be/gNRnrn5DE58?t=652

Many years ago I did a stint at a big American car company. The engineers there were adamant that the shelf you speak of is properly called the "instrument panel." The "dashboard" is a sheet of steel that separates the passenger compartment from the engine compartment, and it's only accessible under the hood.

I guess this is a car engineer's version of "that thing you call the Internet is actually the web."

I'd have called that the "firewall" rather than the "dashboard".

I think the problem is the dashboard was originally an optional panel seperating a buggy driver from the horse pulling it; preventing dirt from getting dash-ed on to them (from hooves; or horse-farts, I imagine). The part on a tram, between the driver and road, was also called a dashboard -- so it might have come to cars [automobiles] via trams or omnibuses?

Dashboards were kept, and as gauges fell into use the gauges were mounted on or about the dashboard. So the dashboard is the ancestor to the gauge display holder, and to the firewall.

Patent US652940 (1900) shows a water-level gauge mounted to a dashboard in a "Whitney motor wagon".

A few years ago, I found myself needing ready access to disposable latex gloves in my car and was so happy to finally be able to use the "glove compartment" for its nominal purpose.

This must be a regionalism; I've never heard of them called "verniers" before.

Was going to make the same comment, but was uncertain, so I read the article, it does look like it uses a vernier sort of mechanism to get much higher precision than a plain measurement would.

Thank you.

That was driving me nuts.

No, that's what a socket set is used for.

Reminds me of the time I went into a pub right on the docks of a fishing port. An old seafarer came in and sat next to me. When I asked him about the ships steering wheel shoved down the front of his pants he just looked at me and said "Yar, it's drivin' me nuts!"

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