For the imperially challenged, that's a velocity of 1.6 km/s, weight of 150kg, height of 4m and 20cm diameter.
Because space.
Of course, in SI this is very straightforward: the unit of mass is the kilogram and the unit of force is the newton, which is the force acting on a mass of one kilogram experiencing an acceleration of one metre per second per second in an inertial frame of reference.
The pound a unit of force. It is also a unit of mass. Both units share the same name.
If I weigh 160lb on earth I'm told that I would weigh 26lb on the moon.
That makes sense if lb measures force because gravity affects force.
In short, this commonly shared "fact" is consistent with pounds being a unit of force, not of mass.
Or, I suppose, of lb at least sometimes being a unit of force.
I don’t know how to make the point any clearer that there are two units of measurement, both with the same name.
Also, 4 decimal points of precision is completely overkill. Maybe one decimal point at most would be more than enough, but most wouldn't even bother with that.
Even if 330 lb was exact, all those digits in 1467.9126 N aren't even correct. It should be 1467.9131 N using standard gravity. It looks like brudgers used 1 lbf = 4.44822 N which is what Google says but is only rounded to 6 s.f. so can't be used to generate an 8 s.f result.
It's very common to measure engine thrust in ton-force because it makes it easy to compare the thrust to the weight of the rocket, which is a critical metric.
And pressure in PSI and torque in foot-lbs because pounds are a unit of weight (i.e. force) not mass.
US customary units are a distinct system from imperial units (some of the individual units overlap, and several others have the same names but different definitions.)
And if so, I will upvote your pedantry
Many CIS countries and China use metre flight levels[1] and kilometres per hour for indicated speed reporting. Additionally, the ICAO has recommended transiting to metre flight levels since 1979[2]. More additionally, the Airbus A300 had flight levels initially set up to be metric (obviously, since it was an effort spearheaded by the French), but to appeal to American airlines the Airbus consortium switched to feet. Although I am positive that Airbus engineers work exclusively in SI.
METARs worldwide except in North America use SI units for reporting weather.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_level#Metre_flight_leve...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Civil_Aviation_O...
If you look at your display's EDID output, the diagonal doesn't even factor in; what you do have are vertical, horizontal, and per-pixel dimensions; all in millimetres. This is what all panel manufacturers (LG, AUO, Samsung, Innolux, BOE, TCL, and so on) do.
Compare to orbital rockets: (low earth) orbital velocity is 7.8 km/s, the ISS orbits at about 400 km, the lowest satellites are at about 200 km.
You mean everyone in the world expect for the Americans, Liberians and Burmese? :)
Deeply frustrating when you assume sizing matches description.
Americans love inventing field specific nomenclature. Like piping sizes, wire sizes, metal sheet thickness, plywood router bit size, construction wood size, furniture/raw wood size, etc
I have always thought it was just a side effect of capitalism. The more messy the units, the harder it is to enter a field without requiring the help of an expert sales.
You think you got the right size fitting, lol nope, it’s actually conical not straight…
Common 120V outlets are 15A max, with devices usually limited to 13A for some breathing room. That's 1.8kW and 1.5kW.
In France, the common 240V outlet is 16A. With devices at 13A max that's 3.8kW and 3.1kW.
So yes it sucks for tools. But cooking is just fine.
[1]: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2016/362/pdfs/uksi_20160...
Do people not weigh themselves in stones and pounds?
Older people, usually yes.
Younger people, more often that not, not. Even at 48 I use Kg for my own weight, but those only a half a decade older more routinely use stone/measurements.
Though there is a sizable range of people who use one unit system by default but have a reasonable intuition of the other.
Unlike some things, there are no legal mandates dictating which set of measures to use for this.
Another difference in weight scales: we don't tend to work with just pounds when we use imperial measurements. When a US TV show gives a weight as, for example, “172 pounds”, many will need to do a little mental arithmetic (this may be subconsciously, not actively calculating but the process delaying understanding) to convert to X stone & Y pounds rather than naturally having an intuition of the weight from the single number.
It was always pounds and ounces when they were babies though. Not sure when it switched to kg; probably when we switched from "baby specialist" to "standard pediatrician" so around toddler age.
But it seems to change when people are old enough to be talking about their own weight.
Adult heights are the other exception, those are often in feet and inches. My 14 year old knows she's 5'2" but her knowledge of imperial measurements doesn't go much further than that.
I’m in New Zealand and we use imperial for baby weights, tyre pressure and height. Baking uses some measure like cups (US or imperial?) and teaspoons/tablespoons which I dislike, grams is preferable.
Surely the dumbest though is UK shoe sizing. The increments are barley corns length, a unit of measure which is hilarious. This is for males and children, women’s shoe sizing is apparently US. What a shambles.
I’m sure there are more niche hangovers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barleycorn_(unit) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe_size
Wait, you can just use a unit-less value?
UK Govt Official Weight Form
Weight: well-nourishededit: also, every proper cookbook.
Useless trivia. If you dump salt into ice water, it reliably goes from 32 F to 0 F. Which makes it cold enough to make ice cream with.
The thing I love best about jokes like this is that it changes based on your perspective.
Americans reading this: “f—- yeah, we do!” Upvote!
Non-Americans reading this: “lmao perfect parody of an American!” Upvote!
On the Apollo program, all the calculations were done in metric (obviously). The computers all worked in metric internally and then converted to imperial for display. They actually had to waste some of their very limited cpu cycles on converting to imperial because the US astronauts couldn’t handle the metric system.
So Werner built the rockets and all the subsystems too or was just the technical fellow/consultant?
Sure, the US was in a better position post WW2. But Werner has been dead for years and the US still dominates space 10x or even 100x times. Engineering in the US is top notch.
As far as your other assertion- what’s your source?
NASA primarily used the imperial system (feet, pounds, and seconds) for the Apollo program. The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) and other systems were designed using imperial units because the entire spacecraft and mission control infrastructure were built around the U.S. customary system.
There was no wasting of CPU cycles. We even have the source code on GitHub to go look at:
https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11
Look in this assembly code. It is imperial.
https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11/blob/master/Luminar...
Then, there are design documents and other engineering standards that tell us everything was in imperial units.
I am not buying what you are saying.
https://ukma.org.uk/why-metric/myths/metric-internationally/...
There is a direct lineage from the Nazi German V2 rockets to Saturn V. Wernher von Braun and his rocketry friends were involved at all levels of American rocketry and ballistic missile programs, and I am happy to say the latter wouldn't have gotten off the ground as early as they did without von Braun's guidance at all levels. At least until the end of WW2, British (and even German) aerospace was considerably further along than American equivalents. And even afterwards, the Europeans, Canadians, Brazilians and the Soviets have remained very productive in terms of civilian and military aerospace. This legacy continues today.
> the US still dominates space 10x or even 100x times. Engineering in the US is top notch
Good for the USA, but this has very little at all to do with unit systems and much more to do with just how much capital there is in the USA. And as everyone else has said, NASA uses SI. I bet these college students did, too.
Keep in mind that the metre is barely younger than the US itself, having been formalised in the 1790s.
Prior to losing WW2 for example Germany dominated the space and they were latecomers in imperialism with very little control over anything outside their own territory. In fact getting pushed around by more powerful colonial nations, and the economic sanctions that were put on them, were the main reason leading to the fascist takeover and ultimately the war.
How is that not arguably imperialism related?
Its empire was never on the scale of the major European Powers. But by that point in time, it still maintained explicit colonial control over the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii (still fairly recently subjugated) and numerous Pacific islands. Along with the Panama Canal Zone (which had its own postcal code, CZ).
It also exerted considerable influence over the affairs of many nominally independent countries in the hemisphere (Cuba quite notably), and engaged in several major military interventions up until 1933 (Mexico, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua). It also intervened substantially in the Russian Civil War, up until 1925, and was still engaged in wars of suppression against its indigenous population through the middle of that decade as well.
One could say its imperial project took a breather of sorts in the mid-1930s, and decided to rest on its laurels for a bit.
But "decidedly un-imperalist" it was not.
Same story as computing, really.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_orbital_launcher...
I disagree with the premise that it was lack of bombing of US infrastructure related though. Space programs are very simply the public output of ICBM programs. Most of the modern day is simply a direct descendant of ICBM programs. You like distributed and reliable communication networks like the internet? Built so ICBM silos could command each other even if certain hubs were nuked. You like the miniaturization of solid state electronics? That capability was paid for entirely by the US Air Force who wanted powerful computers under 100 pounds for advanced planes and precision ICBMs. Satellite navigation was also explicitly invented for nuclear missiles fired out of submarines to have an accurate fix for guidance purposes.
Basically the entirety of the modern world exists because the US of the cold war pumped trillions of dollars into producing ICBMs and planes that were genuinely "next gen" while every single private business takes the credit for stuff they never paid for. Computer and telecommunications companies would never have built this stuff on their own: They were fine with computers taking up an entire facility that they could rent out (cf modern clouds) and fully switched networks that were reliant on a big company to manage. None of them needed to sell you a "personal computer". None of them wanted a distributed, uncontrolled network like the Internet.
Those are moribund programs that were being kept alive solely by the government because it wanted to ensure the US had launch capabilities for NRO and other classified missions. There was absolutely no innovation coming out of them to drive down costs or increase payloads.
The sector was dead from an innovation perspective and a failure from a competitive perspective.
Your screed about businesses taking credit for stuff is mostly unfounded. The internet’s foundation in DARPA is very well understood and acknowledged. However, all of the advancements to scale up to the scale of the internet today were pushed by Silicon Valley and academia.
DARPA and the military never cared about scale and still doesn’t because it’s not a goal.
I used to have a handy chart of the mapping of "prefix" to power-of-two, for 2^-7 to 2^7.
Also, the US foot was supposed to be exactly 30cm, but the French couldn't get their shit together, in time.
Not that you're very likely to encounter British fluid ounces any more, the smallest imperial unit of volume I generally run into is the half-pint.
gallon 2^0
half-gallon 2^-1
quart 2^-2
pint 2^-3
cup 2^-4
gill 2^-5
jill 2^-6 -- invented half-gill
ounce 2^-7
tbsp 2^-8
half-tbsp 2^-9
dram 2^-10
peck 2^1
half-bushel 2^2
bushel 2^3
half-barrel 2^4
barrel 2^5
hogshead 2^6
??? 2^7
??? 2^8