Boffins mount campaign against France's official kilogramme International boffins are mounting a determined diplomatic push to end the practice of measuring mass by reference to a 130-year-old metal cylinder kept in France, saying that the French ingot is no longer up to the job. The Consultative Committee for Units, whose chairman is Blighty's Professor I M Mills FRS, and which counts …
the thing I found most fascinating about the article is wondering how these fumbling fucks get paid. you want to hold a kilo of platinum (if it were pure, you're looking at around 35 grand for a hunk that big) in several nested boxes polished by some geriatric frenchman who probably has no other job, in some specially constructed little room of wonder?
how much does this anachronistic bullshit cost us versus just defining it via non-corporeal means? hell, if you'd put the price points in and shown us how The British Taxpayer Pays for French billion-dollar paperweight, the Daily Fail woulda picked this shit up in a heartbeat.
mines the one with the quarter of bonfire toffee. mmmn. toffee.
"Although it was later determined that the first prototype metre bar was short by a fifth of a millimetre because of miscalculation of the flattening of the Earth, this length became the standard. The circumference of the Earth through the poles is therefore slightly more than forty million metres."
REF: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre
Can we just define the mole as exactly 6 x 10e23 and round off all those other nasty constants? Let's face it, does anyone really care if a mole is about 0.37% off it's old number? I thought not, daltons are still daltons and the kilogram has been defined in more absolute terms; at least until something ionizes but who cares as long as they keep their hands off our bulgarian airbags.
Kinda like the Mel Brooks "History of the World, Part 1", where Moses comes down from the mountain and says: "Here are the 15 [drops one tablet] ooops, 10 commandments". Changing kilogram, might happen so, if it changes, will my body mass index change as well, and the government charge me more for my medical insurance if it goes the wrong way?
As for the US being on the SI system. Yes, it has been for many years. All our units are defined in terms of metric units. Like an inch IS 2.54 cm.
As for Troy ounces, Linux's units command yields that they are 31.1... grams. So when you see the late night ads for "gold leaf coins" that have 31 milligrams of gold on them, that is 1/1000 of a troy ounce, or about $1.34 or so, or not very much!
I'd far rather 'they' spent money educated people about SI prefixes.
I'm fed up with people who whine because they 'only' have a 4MB/s internet connection.
Or people who boast because they have a 50mb/s connection.
There's also no such thing as a 1tb disk. If there were it wouldn't store much data.
A liter of water (at 277K and 1*10^6Pa) is indeed 1kg, but try varying the temperature or ambient pressure a bit and you'll be sufficiently off to throw any semblance of precision out the window. And precision counts in definitions. So anything that doesn't rely on other measurements is to be preferred: [large_number of stable_atoms] is quite a bit better than [amount of fluid that goes in a container of some size at this temperature and that pressure]
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