[Info-vax] Where is EISNER:: and who funds it?

[alanfe...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, December 22, 2021 at 7:55:40 AM UTC-5, Phillip Helbig (undress to reply) wrote:
> In article <00B6DA8D... at SendSpamHere.ORG>, VAXman-
> @SendSpamHere.ORG writes: 
> 
> > >> As is inches, feet, yards, miles, pounds, quarts, gallons, etc ... 
> > >> 
> > >> :-) 
> > > 
> > >Right, I have heard about that. While the rest of the world has moved on. 
> > 
> > Dynes or newtons?

Excellent point.

> Both are metric, but newton is the SI, and hence preferred, unit. Same 
> with tesla over gauss.

Depends on the purpose. Use the right too for the job. And to my European freinds: How many Newtons do you weigh?

Dynes and Newtons are pretty much limited to the realm of physicists and perhaps some engineers. 

Both Telsas and Gausses are in use. Different purpose? Different units.

Would you use Coulombs when dealing with the charges of subatomic particles? No! Physicists use the positron as the unit of charge. And energy? Nuclear and particle physicists use electron volts, usually as keV, MeV, GeV, and now TeV, not ergs or BTU's or joules. Electron volts are not SI units! You've also got the very useful atomic mass unit. Cross sections are measured in barns. 1 barn = 10^{-28} m^2. Not an SI unit, but based on the meter. Actually, millibarns is used a lot, and microbarns in neutrino physics, IIRC. 

Astronomers use all sorts of non-SI units: astronomical unit, light-year, parsec, stellar magnitude (which is not only not even linear, it's logarithmic. But also higher numbers mean dimmer stars!), solar masses, Schwarzschild radius, and probably more I can't think of at the moment.

Theoretical physicists often set natural constants like c (speed of light), \hbar (the reduced Planck constant), and e (charge of a positron) to 1.

America uses both English/Imperial/US customary units or WTFTC _and_ metric units. We can handle it (well, except for the Mars Observer probe!)! OK, many Americans can't. But we have metric in lots of things: beverages, liquor, drugs (both legal and illegal), engine displacement, film width, gun calibers (both systems), focal length, lens or mirror size (both systems, at least in astronomy), and probably more. But you get the idea. We have not eschewed the metric system. We just haven't adopted it for everything. Oh, there's tools! They come in both metric and non-metric units (I'm talking wrenches and the like). Apple brags that the thickness of their new 24" M1 macs is only 11.5 mm, IIRC. 

Back to Fahrenheit: It has its advantages. When the temperature is in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s -- each range conjures up a different feeling. The Celsius degree is too big for that. "But is based on 0 and 100 for water!" So F what [pun not intended!]. How often do you even think of those when you are involved with the temperature. You've got two numbers: 32 and 212. Is this too hard to memorize? And when you hear those numbers you know it's temperature-related. 0 and 100 could be 'most anything.

Again, the reason Americans don't adopt Celsius is the same reason you haven't switched from the QWERTY to the Dvorak keyboard.