I was with him until that last part. What the hell's wrong with furlongs?

Original scientific definition of the metre as dictated by Napoleon to his Minister for Science:

"Give me a rationale for a measurement close enough to the yard as to make no real inconvenience for people but slightly bigger than the English one."

the linguini, double-decker bus, or brontosaurus....

Well, actually the Sun is losing mass ... but far more is lost via the solar wind than by the conversion of mass into energy. Still not very much in comparison with the total mass of the Sun, though.

I'm with the "testy boffin" on this one.

A conversion of "Testy boffin" from AUs to clicks, would come out something like "Testis boffer". Close but no Clinton.

...and should be known as "The Paris probability"

Then again, perhaps the AU is easier to remember.

Only 60 aircraft carriers mass equivalent consumed per second?

That's an unbelievably small loss compared to the thermal output we feel 1AU away (gotta use AU before it's banned).

Hurry up someone and get some fusion power plants working!

And just think of the chaos that'll be caused when the sun becomes a red giant and engulfs the earth and 1AU is -238547km

"He proposes using metres instead."

Even allowing for our US friends who can't spell properly...

That's presumably quite a lot of metres, then.

"...or 80-million-odd international adjusted Sarah Beenys completely annihilated."

Of course, even the international adjusted Satah Beeny mass is not a constant...

surely they should use the "football field" so "science" magazines and blogs can save time converting the units.

The length of a metre is no longer defined by a piece of French metal. Instead, it is taken to be the distanced travelled by light in a vacumm in 1/299,792,458 s.

You're thinking of the international standard kilogram, which IS still a piece of French metal whose mass appears to be diverging from its official copies stored elsewhere around the world.

You say 60 US Navy Aircraft carriers, however which class of carrier there are several with different displacements?

Since the orbital period of the Earth is changing, why not change that too? How about Days? Those are slowing as well!

all guess work, theory and speculation.

Gravity does not exist. Space is bent and bent space causes deviation from a straight path not gravity. Wind would not exist without air. Gravity would not exist without bendy space. Gravity is like the wind or a Sarah Beeny fart.

Dark matter and dark energy do not exist, all the virtual particles popping in and out of existence are causing the accelerating expansion of the Universe, a kind of reverse Casimir effect. The Universe expands into nothing, and that nothing cannot fight the pressure caused by the elusive virtual particles that survive the sucking into black holes that their partners that they would normally mutually self destruct with undergo. Because of the accelerating expansive nature of the Universe the metre is also meaningless and is varying over time.

Our brains work on a quantum level so not only is the Universe out there, it is part of our minds' inner function, this explains why logic is beyond the understanding of many individuals. Especially Tom Cruise and the superficially gorgeous Paris.

The best measure of spacial distances is the Dirac constant which is the length of a plank divided by 2 pies. As most of us, myself included are as thick as a plank when it comes to such things, this seems highly appropriate.

well anyone not using SI units for everything, is probably being payed by the hour, and thinks they will be employed again when it all goes tit's up.

and, there really are a lot of problems in the basic physics stuff on wikipedia, what i'm guessing is happening is that since the factual stuff and current events seem very good, is that the consensus mechanism used there, is self-reinforcing common misconceptions, and as a wild guess, this is concentrated in the physics sections because there are a lot of chemists in the US with time on their hands and who have developed the same high level of, unchecked, confidence in their physics understanding.

"Units are not supposed to change," [Noerdlinger] told New Scientist, describing the situation as "quite a nuisance".

...reported the author of the line "three millionths of a quadrillionth goes every second if we've got our sums right; or three billionths of a trillionth if you prefer"!!!

Well, it amused me.

(In deference to my appreciation that Lewis /is/ writing for an international audience, here a reference [for everyone else] to what he means by "prefer": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales)

The yard should be scrapped as it is based on the length of Henry VIII's arm, and that arm has now withered away;

the mile because it is 1000 double paces of a Roman Legionnaire, and there aren't too many of those marching around;

and the metre was originally based on 1/10,000,000th the distance from the pole to equator, and we all know the Earth is not a sphere so that is not a standard distance.

The point is, many units are (or were) based on things that are no longer available/accurate/realistic, so a new basis of measurement is agreed, e.g. the wavelength of light at a particular frequency, or a bar of Invar in a laboratory, and we carry on as usual - this "issue" is much ado about nothing.

(Of course frequency is based on time being constant, whereas time can be bent, so nothing is 100% accurate.)

btw, good to see MfM firing on all cylinders - straight to the point as usual.

i think all the old 'units' are now referenced to SI ones anyway, or have been forgotten, so Fahrenheit is 'measured' in Kelvin, Fahrenheit isn't a 'real' unit anymore, its just a different way to read the SI units.

BTW i heard that, zero Fahrenheit has something to do with all life stopping, and one hundred Fahrenheit was people/blood/core/life temperature, guess the guy might of been a biologist.

but does it really matter whats on your thermostat, i think hot and cold would probably do it for people still using that scale.

Hear, Hear,

I was bought up with Fahrenheit and have now managed to almost forget it.

Apparently Fahrenheit based zero degrees on the lowest temperature he could get - his equivalent of absolute zero - a salt and ice mixture, and 100 (Wikipedia says 96) was that universal constant, the temperature of the human body - he must have had a fever (or a chill). The freezing and boiling points of water were just extrapolated from there. (I was taught this at school, so it must be right!)

Anyway, 0 for freezing, 20 for a nice spring day and room temperature, 30 for a hot summer's day, 40 for a heat wave or a hot bath, and 100 for boiling water. What could be simpler?

things have to be in relative motion for time to run at different speeds, so unless your MI5 eavesdropper is in a van, he should be able to gauge the level of stress in your voice accurately.

The tool of the devil! My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it.

"The length of a metre is no longer defined by a piece of French metal. Instead, it is taken to be the distanced travelled by light in a vacumm in 1/299,792,458 s."

1/299,792,458?? Fahrenheit doesn't seem so odd after that!

My coat's the North American 'large' not the Made in China 'large'.

1.0 Astronomical Unit = 8.79057469 × 10^10 Smoots

Sorry, of course I meant fahrenheit and the rest of the IMPERIAL lot. I was distracted trying to use my 3.4 sided ElReg ruler.

The speed of sound in a vacuum is slightly slower than the speed of the valuable object you think you've just accidently hoovered and slightly faster than that sinking feeling when you search through the dust bag and find it was just a penny. It's certainly a lot slower than the speed of a mobile phone thrown by a super-model at a domestic servant after hoovering said valuable object.

Paris, coz there's no Naomi icon

Without the AU, I am never going to be able to play "Frontier Elite" ! This is a complete disaster. I often wondered if the AU was different in each solar system... and by the way I don't have a beard!

Farenheit is not an imperial measurement. Never was. The whole farenheit vs celcius thing is completely independent to metric vs imperial. I mean, at least imperial measures are based on things that matter (Elizabeth the first and her new miles notwithstanding) and have a logical progression of sorts. Farenheit is just *weird*.

CURRENTLY, yes. But with the expansion of the universe this isn't actually all that accurate either.

No we should measure the whole chummin bit in lengths of a Paris Hiltion Jail sentnece! Damn folks its called TIME SPACE for a reason!