a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by mike
mike  ·  4563 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Most ridiculous Mars landing ever
WHOA!

At 4:20 he says, "20 meters about the surface we have to lower the rover on a tether that's 21 feet long." Ummm... remember the last time NASA mixed up metric and English units? That probe never slowed down and smashed into Mars.

Suddenly, I'm very nervous for this mission. ("Why isn't the tether long enough? We made it 21 feet long and the skycrane is only 20 meters from the surface!")





mk  ·  4563 days ago  ·  link  ·  
If I was President, I'd issue an executive order to get us on the damned metric system.
mike  ·  4563 days ago  ·  link  ·  
I've been in Europe for 4 years now, and totally loving the metric system. Amazing how quickly one can get used to it. Especially good for building things, folks slip between meters, decimeters, centimeters, and millimeters often without giving units. "We need that 310 long... no, better make it 3105." No confusion.
user-inactivated  ·  4560 days ago  ·  link  ·  
While we are at it, I'd love to switch to a decimal daytime measurement as well, instead of that stupid 24x60x60 thing
mike  ·  4560 days ago  ·  link  ·  
Heck yeah! We need a 10 hour day with 100 minutes in an hour and 100 seconds in a minute. Each second would be slightly shorter, there would be about 7 new seconds in 6 old seconds.

A 30 old minute TV program would run about 25 new minutes, which in the new system is a quarter hour. One new hour would be 2:24 old hours, so a standard movie with commercials would have a run-time of about one new hour.

Metric time was proposed when France was putting the metric system in place, but it was rejected because people did not want to give up their timepieces which were often the most valuable thing people owned.

And how about a 13-month calendar while we're at it?

user-inactivated  ·  4560 days ago  ·  link  ·  
Reducing the second would wreck havoc in UNIX timestamps!