- Not to support or attack the rationale behind the css or html standards but these have exact real world SI unit meanings:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InchCSS | | Exact Size | Exact Size Unit | Name | (Inches) | (Millimeters) -------------------------------------------------------- cm | Centimeter | 50/127 | 10 mm | Millimeter | 5/127 | 1 Q | Quarter-millimeter | 5/508 | 1/4 in | Inch | 1 | 127/5 pc | Pica | 1/6 | 127/30 pt | Point | 1/72 | 127/360 px | Pixel | 1/96 | 127/480- Never heard of the Quarter-millimeter before. Strange mix of divisions by tens suddenly switching to divisions of twos
- I'd never heard of it either. A comment further down suggests it is Japanese.
Digging deeper, the kyu -- or Q for quarter millimeter -- is apparently a foundational distance measurement in Japanese typesetting, which is metric and operates on a millimeter grid.
- It's known as the _kyu_ in Japan and used for specifying type (font) sizes.
- Well that there is your problem, LaTeX is using imperial points, and Inkscape is using metric points.
You need to start using SI points that are defined using wavelengths of ground state emissions of a decaying Americium atom.
- EMUs always seemed weirder to me. Like an unnecessary compromise instead of just using metric outright.
https://startbigthinksmall.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/points-i...
- FWIW, early 1980s Epson dot-matrix printers vertically spaced the dots in the print head exactly 1/72" apart, though I don't remember them calling the distance a point.
- As someone from european continent. Those US measurements units look and feel so hard to work with.
Instead metric system is predictable and easy to work with.
Real question is why US just don't move to metric system?
- Because I don't want to deal with a hundred of anything, and I don't want to deal with decimal points. I want everything I measure to be near single digit numbers. Hence, inches for common dimensions like a "2x4". I can handle something being 5 1/4 inches. How the hell large is 133 mm? Humans are not good at intuiting numbers far from unity.
Miles are great. The typical highway speed limit is about a mile a minute. You can easily lower bound how long it will take to get somewhere if you know how far it is in miles.
In cooking, I often need to halve quantities in recipes, hence pounds and ounces. Watching cooking channels give metric quantities is absolutely baffling to me. You see things like 175 mL. That is 2 sigfigs too many.
- >> That is 2 sigfigs too many
Don’t take up baking then, where the difference between 175 mLs of water and 200 mLs of water can be the difference between unworkable dough and the perfect pie crust.
- In industry, we have. At home, most households have little or no use for US dimension tools such as wrenches. You can service a bike with all metric tools.
"Going metric" raises the question of whether we adopt metric measures for our existing standards (such as pipe threads) or actually adopt the ISO sizes. The latter would cause a brief but massive inventory management problem, that nobody's ever willing to put up with, even if there's a long term benefit.
I believe we made a mistake in how we tried to teach the metric system. I learned in first grade: Metric is easy because it's just math. Most people heard "math" and freaked out. Metric was taught as a bunch of conversions and units. Inches were taught as: Here's a ruler, go measure some things.
I remember talking to a machinist, and he said: "I hate the metric system because there's so much math." That was 30+ years ago. Today, machinists just read mm or inches from the same digital readout or CAD program.
My Canadian friends learned metric as: Here's a ruler, go measure some things.
- I'm fine with math, but that doesn't make it less annoying.
The real advantage of metric is that you only have to do math once to calculate something. A cc is a ml is a gram. A liter is a cubic decimeter is a kg. It's just easy. A deep lake over a few square km? O(1) GT. Understanding orders of magnitude is a useful trait in a democracy.
You hit the nail on the head here though:
> My Canadian friends learned metric as: Here's a ruler, go measure some things.
Like any language, as long as you're translating you're loosing. Post signs in km and report temperature as C and everyone will understand it in less than a decade. A few years after I had a metric thermometer in my car C seemed easy.
It's not like the US failed to think of this. In the 80s they were posting signs in km. But back then there was a real economic cost to conversion for factories and machines. Now that's mostly gone, what remains is cultural resistance.
- We have a saying in the US, "a pint's a pound, the world around." As the other post mentions, not everything has the same density, but a lot of stuff is pretty close to water.
The ironic thing is that an Imperial pint of water weighs more than a pound.
- > A cc is a ml is a gram. A liter is a cubic decimeter is a kg
Okay but what about the off chance you’re measuring something other than water?
- > "Going metric" raises the question of whether we adopt metric measures for our existing standards (such as pipe threads) or actually adopt the ISO sizes.
You adopt ISO sizes FFS. They are international standards. You really want to invent a whole new set of incompatible 'standards'?
You think the US is the first to go through this? Australia, Canada, and the UK went metric in the 1970s (we also decimalised our currencies). Yes it was challenging for some adults but mostly pretty easy for kids. People adapted. Industries adapted. Now we hardly think about it except when dealing with Americans or in some historical contexts.
- For the piping example, you have all the installed infrastructure that's in the old "IPS" (straight) and "NPT" (tapered) sizes. So now a plumber needs to carry additional fittings or carry conversion fittings. Easier to just stay with what we have.
- Of course it's easier to stick with what you have in the short term. Change is difficult. You do it for the long term gain. If you had done it 50 years ago like the rest of the English-speaking world you wouldn't be in this mess.
- What's the long term gain? It's just a unit of measure, ultimately arbitrary. Standards bring efficiency, and we already have a standard.
- Exactly: the entire world has a standard, and the US is doing its own weird thing.
The long-term gain is being able to sell your stuff to the rest of the world, and being able to import stuff from the rest of the world without paying a Weird Format Tax.
Would you rather manufacture stuff for 8 billion people, or for 340 million?
- The UK continues to live on in a weird metric-imperial mash up. Beer is still measured in pints, lots of food (but not all!) is measured in pounds, distance and speed limits are sign-posted in miles, but the sizes of most things in life are in cm, mm and meters.
- Not to mention measuring people's weight in stone
- Imperial measurements do have the benefit of more even divisors than metric.
Pretty common to talk about measurements of 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 of an inch and find those graduated on a ruler. Or 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/8 of a cup for liquid measures, etc.
But then machinists generally work in thousandth or ten-thousandths of an inch.
- The problem is that fractions suck to do math with. Rather than doing basic addition you have to do a divisor conversion and then do an addition. Heck, the third-pounder burger failed because a significant fraction of the American consumers believed it was smaller than a quarter-pounder!
And most of the kitchen stuff is a chicken-and-egg problem: the US used 1/2 cup because that's what it is used to, the rest of the world has recipes calling for 50g of flour. If the US was used to weight-based measurements everyone would have a kitchen scale with 0.1g precision lying around, instead of a bunch of measuring cups.
- The only evidence we have for the “Americans were too stupid to understand that 1/3 was bigger than 1/4” story is from the memoirs of the A&W CEO at the time referencing some unnamed market research performed by some unnamed firm. A person who has a vested interest in explaining why their failure to turn around a sinking company was due to external factors beyond their control. It also implies that in a culture where every kitchen has at least one set of stackable measuring cups in 1/4, 1/3 and 1/2 sizes, and a culture where you would order meat from the deli counter at your grocery store in 1/4 or 1/2 lb increments was suddenly and completely incapable of remembering their basic fraction sizes when comparing the cost of a hamburger. Personally while it makes for a cute story, I really just don’t believe it.
- You sound like an 8th grader asking the teacher when will we ever use this in real life type question. Fractions aren't that bad when like anything in life you are practiced in using them. Let's see what's faster in a kitchen, scooping something by measuring cup or trying to get a specific weight by 0.1g precision? I'm home after working all day trying to feed myself and mine. I'm not trying to win a start for my restaurant by the Michelin man.
These incessant arguments of "why is someone doing something different than what I'm used to so stupid" are funny if not tiring. Why not ask why are there so many different spoken languages in the world instead of just speaking like me? We could go into if Rust is better than Go, or why Romulans are better than Klingons. The problem is that nobody wants to understand the differences and just want to rag on the person opposing their views. Yawn
- I'm a fairly experienced machinist, though it's not my occupation. At the present time, machinists have the least problem with metric. The unit conversions are built into all of the machines and measuring tools. You press the inch / mm button. The ruler has inches on one side and mm on the other.
Everything is standardized on IEEE floating point. ;-)
It's a headache to maintain collections of parts and tools such as taps and dies for both standards.
The biggest shift is simply the obsolescence of old stuff, and emergence of new stuff. And industries have adopted the practice of reducing the overall variety of parts needed. I work in the development of industrial measurement equipment, and where a design might once have had 30 different sizes of fasteners, now it's 5, all metric. Designs rarely need nuts and spacers any more. Washers are integrated into the screws. No more "philips" or flat head screws. And so forth.
- > Designs rarely need nuts and spacers any more.
What is the modern approach where nuts/bolts and spacers would have been used?
> No more "philips" or flat head screws.
Torx? Rivets? Something else?
- Threaded holes and rivnuts. Now a rivnut is a part, but the fabricator keeps it in stock instead of us. More shaped stampings and castings so that spacers aren't needed. Reducing parts also reduces handling of parts. Probably CAD makes it easier to design these things in.
At where I work, we use hex head (trying not to say Allen). I see lots more Torx in products as well.
- Because you have to ask what benefit will it serve in exchange for the effort? In places werwere it really matter we already do, and conversions are pretty simple otherwise. Sometimes fractional units are just slightly easier for a specific task, and having used them our whole lives they are second nature.
To me asking why we don't have a single measuring standard is similiar to asking why we don't all agree on a single language. Sometimes it would be easier, sometimes it wouldn't, but in the end it doesn't matter all that much.
- The U.S. uses metric pretty much everywhere that is important, in most science, engineering, and medicine. Specific trades and common household things remain imperial due to inertia and no one really caring. It is much more accurate to say the U.S. has a dual system. We learn metric in school like everyone else.
- Can't wait for us to adopt the metric Avogadro constant. I wonder what units they use for the Hubble constant in Europe (love me some megaparsecs).
- Points are not American, they are used for typography in Europe and everywhere else equally as much as in the US.
The metric system is poorly suited for font sizes. Most designs require a series of sizes within a small range: a typical book or poster might use 9pt for footnotes, 12pt for main text, 16pt for subtitles, and 24pt for titles.
Aesthetically speaking the most attractive ratios of sizes are small ratios like 3:2 and 4:3. Using points it is very easy to construct an attractive range of font sizes like my example above. It is difficult to imagine how this would look in a metric system that's not a mess.
- My countrymen are shockingly dumb. Presented with something rational like 24-hour time, they prefer to not learn and be confused all the time instead of adopting the better way. Unless it's mandatory, such as in military or aviation, then they are happy with it and feel like part of a special in-group.
- >something rational like 24-hour time
Shouldn't the real smarties be using 10-hour days using metric time? 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute.
- Clearly we should just use seconds, hectoseconds, kiloseconds and megaseconds, and stop worrying about whether our time lines up with the celestial movements.
- The books Fire Upon the Deep use seconds like that, no hours or days or weeks, just larger 10x multiples of seconds.
- And here I thought maybe time zero would be the big bang, but alas, that is too celestial, so I guess January 1st, 1970 it is. Or whatever that is in the metric calendar (10 months per year, 10 days/week, 100 days/month)
- It's a bit difficult to use the Big Bang as time zero when the current uncertainty of when it actually happened ±0.02 billion years, which is what, a thousand times longer than all of recorded human history.
We could use the birth date of that jewish prophet, except we'd still be off by a few years. Oh well, in a few centuries no one will care, and we'll just use Unix Epoch.
- My grandfather gave me a mechanical pocketwatch stopwatch that counts tenths of a minute. Every gradation on the dial is 6 seconds. It's bizarre.
- > My countrymen are shockingly dumb. Presented with something rational like 24-hour time
24-hour time is terrible. An analog clock doesn't have that written on it...
- French people did metric, meanwhile they prefer "four-twenty and fourteen" to "ninety-four."
- Reddit level post.
If Europeans are so smart, why didn't they commit to metric time which is soon much easier to understand?
- At least 24 hour time is monotonic through the day. Baby steps.
- Unless you're talking to someone in a different time zone.
Europe should just have one time zone on a one day clocks divided into decidays and centidays.
- > Real question is why US just don't move to metric system?
Because we live in a land of liberty!
- > Real question is why US just don't move to metric system?
The maga people are ready to die on this hill.
- > why US just don't move to metric system?
They've been trying for a long time, but apparently it's not an easy task.
You can read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_Stat...
- From the title I thought this was going to be about basis points, as used in finance. (A basis point is one hundredth of 1 percentage point).
- I thought it was going to be about story points.
- I thought it was going to be about story points and I was going to wholeheartedly agree with the premise
- what do story points measure?
- It’s an imperial measure of the number of sentences in a story. The metric version is the “Gilgamesh”, a reference to a prototype story maintained by ISO in Paris.
- * gigamesh
- Except if you're posting stories online, in which case it's most likely a gibimesh, though people use the terms interchangeably
- It's a relative abstract measure of case size that's the same across experience levels. A junior and a senior should both be able to agree that a given case is small/medium/large relative to the kind of cases their team usually handles, even if the case would take two hours for the senior and two weeks for the junior. Story points codify small/medium/large into numbers (Fibbonacci is a common choice, like 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, where 13 is often "too big for one sprint").
Mapping story points to time doesn't really work for individual cases because of those different experience levels, it's going to heavily depend on who does the case. Instead, you track story points competed in total for the team for the entire sprint - the different experience levels average out into something consistent, like 30-35 story points per sprint.
"Velocity" is related scrum terminology, and is the mapping of that whole-team measure back to time. A previous team that understood how this worked and stuck to it had those story points per two-week sprints, so we could estimate things months out with reasonable accuracy despite the different skill levels.
I also thought this post was going to be about story points because it's a common complaint from people who don't understand the "different experience levels" part. If everyone on the team reliably took the same amount of time for a given case, then yeah, you could cut it out and just estimate in time. But it's not for that.
- Nothing, except a story's size relative to other stories estimated by the same team.
- Alternately, it captures a bit of so many things (tech-debt in codebase, mental health of team, task risks) that it's best to avoid trying to link it to any one thing.
The past X weeks of point-estimates is what you use to forecast which things fit in the next Y weeks, and you can't have both stability and forecast accuracy. Any attempt to permanently "peg" a point to a certain number of man-hours is going to interfere with that accuracy.
- I had a manager institute PERT estimations for every task/sticky, which was interesting but not necessarily worth it.
In the end, the work takes the time it takes, and nobody knows how long that will be ahead of time. Fiddling around with estimates helps with ranking but not prediction.
- If the work takes the time it takes and nobody knows how long with that, why not track and iterate on the predictions versus outcomes creating experience and data that would enable prediction and prediction refinement?
Over time the estimates should be trending closer to outcome, as the process improves in breaking down and specifying the details that impact prediction & work, and the statistical gap from previous estimates gets baked into future estimates. The process, capabilities, ability to identify diverging factors, and correction of initial estimates should all be maturing concurrently.
The entire point of using fuzzy numbers is to enable fuzzy yet usable predictions. Similar work in a similar situation, armed with specific statistics and outcome, should be highly predictable at the team and individual level over time.
- That's why my favorite unit is the px, a.k.a., 1 centiinch.
- CSS pixels are weirder:
- I thought px was an abbreviation of pixel which doesn't have a dimension?
- I don't know what happened in my brain but i expected a piece about points as in keeping scores. Maybe about how we evolved from binary results (alive/dead in early human competitions) to more complex systems. I'd say humans played games long before being able to count. Of course competition is inherent to human nature. But i'd say, without getting into any philosophical debate, a certain amount of compassion and empathy is as well. Which must have resulted in early ideas of fairness. Especially when respect and status seem to be crucial to society.
So, how and when did points come into play? ...
Well, ok. I stop procrastinating for now (i hope). I hate my brain.
- Not sure, but typefacing/fonts is absolutely cursed with this stuff. I'd be shocked if there isn't a true type font that runs DOOM. There's a reason Microsoft pushed font rendering out of the kernel in Vista. (Technically, they started the work on it)
- Here was me thinking it was about getting points on HN
- taht`s perfect 4 europeans
- TLDR; folks should just use PostScript (Big) Points.
The mention of
is kind of interesting --- hadn't heard of it before --- may need to revisit the "ProportionBar" tool which I made ages ago....
- > TLDR; folks should just use PostScript (Big) Points.
The distinction ends up being important if you need compatibility with some document format, or with common typesetting expectations. But if there weren't a concern of surprising people with certain expectations of font-picking widgets, I'd argue that the better choice would be millimeters.
4mm is a great default font size, and going up by one integer mm at a time is a reasonable step size (it's just under 3pt).
- In Japan, a common measurement of font size is _kyu_ (q) one-fourth of a millimeter (0.25mm).
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- Just posted the following poorly-fleshed-out comment there:
So disappointed that this document, as much as it obsesses over obscure physical quantities no one cares about, makes no mention of THE FUCK.
1 fuck is equal to the amount of concern you have about something below which you cannot achieve without having no concern at all, as which giving "zero fucks" is defined. "Absolute zero fucks" would be the formal terminology.
For preliminary purposes, we can assume 1 fuck = 1 shit = 1 damn, but must account for the possible existence of a big-point-vs-printers-point style situation. Also they could be drastically different, like if 1 shit given about global warming would be equivalent to 299_792_458 fucks or something like that.
I have very little knowledge about the *real* machinations behind the standardization of measures (a tinfoil conspiracy kook would call it an Agenda 21, or 21 Agendas One, but I'm not going there), I want this to be discussed.
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