Metric vs Imperial poll

[masrapido]

Originally Posted by Fanie

I'm with Godzilla on this - size does count.

godzilla...?

darn, got nothing funny to reply...

Metres rule!
nah, not working...

darn...fanie, I owe you one!

[marshmat]

Now, just to see if we can really confuse anyone who's only fluent in imperial, or only fluent in metric:

What boat am I describing here?
LOA 0.20202 chains
LWL 1.2347x10^-7 nanoparsecs
Beam 225.7 jows
Displacement, in race trim, without crew 3.55x10^28 amu
Sail area in racing trim 7.06x10^28 barns
Speed record for the class 102.9 hands per microfortnight

No Google Converter, guys, you have to figure this out for yourselves to truly feel like you won the challenge!

The answer will be posted... let's say tomorrow or Thursday. Take yer guesses!

Chains - One chain is 66 feet, or 1/80 of a statute mile (in metric, that's 20.1168 m). Thus our little boat is 4.06 m, or 13'10", long.

Nanoparsecs - This is a bit of an absurd unit. A parsec, 3.0857x10^16 m, is the distance from our Sun at which a star has a parallax of one arc-second, viewed from Earth. Thus, a nanoparsec is 30,857 km, or about three-quarters of the circumference of the Earth. Our mystery boat, then, is 3.81 m (12'6") on the waterline.

Jows- this is an obsolete Indian unit of length, roughly equal to 6.3 mm or 1/4 inch. Our boat's beam, then, is 1.42 m or 4'7".

amu, or atomic mass units- one amu is defined as 1/12 the mass of an isolated Carbon-12 atom at rest in its ground state. That is to say, it is the approximate mass of a proton or neutron, 1.660x10^-27 kg. This puts our mystery boat's dry weight at about 59 kg.

Barns- A barn is 10^-28 square metres, roughly the cross-sectional area of a uranium nucleus. It's commonly used in nuclear medicine and high-energy physics to calculate collision probabilities. The name comes from a few American nuclear physicists joking during the Second World War that shooting things at uranium nuclei was like "hitting the broad side of a barn". (See also the harder-to-hit "shed", equal to 10^-24 barns). So our little boat has, you guessed it Chris, a 7.06 square metre (75 sq.ft) sail in its normal configuration.

Hands per microfortnight- Here I'm just messing with you A hand is 1/3 of a foot (or 4"), a fortnight is two weeks (1,209,600 seconds). Therefore a microfortnight is 1.21 seconds, and a hand per microfortnight is 0.275 feet per second. So our boat's "unofficial" speed is 16.8 knots, the current claimant being Mark Denzer of Honolulu. Interestingly, the microfortnight is a fairly common unit in computing science, dating from the VMS operating system; it is used to force users to really, really think before they mess around with settings.


The winning post was on Identify this boat: A Weird Units challenge for Metric/Imperial debaters . Chris Tucker, you win a free pint next time you're in Kingston, Ontario

It is, indeed, a Laser.

[yipster]

ugh, no without checking i would not have guessed "amu, or atomic mass units- one amu is defined as 1/12 the mass of an isolated Carbon-12 atom at rest in its ground state. That is to say, it is the approximate mass of a proton or neutron, 1.660x10^-27 kg. This puts our mystery boat's dry weight at about 59 kg." and the others, start wondering nowtho if its a good thing the poll is closed :-D

[masrapido]

Apparently even in the usa they use metric system. Look at the New Scientist page with puzzles:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...mber-1556.html

They are the peoples who published the work of some Australian biophysicist who, while working with NASA, discovered in 1990's that they couldn't have possibly sent humans to the Moon due to super ultra high levels of radiation. According to her experiments, such a technology even today (1990's) is not available. (Sept. issue 1998, if I recall correctly. The yellow front page). But to read that article you need to subscribe first. I ain't givn' you my username and a password.

But I digress...They do use metric however. It is a small step for humanity, but a big one for usanians. Ole'!

[Fanie]

Apparently even in the usa they use metric system.

Of course they do. They are just hiding it. It takes guts to admit when you're wrong

[rambo!]

Doesn´t matter if you use metrics or imperial, as soon as the boat gets in the hands of the sales/ad departments they have their own conversion factors that nobody understands anyway...;-)

Maybeone reason to stick to what you are used to is the calculations you do in your head, "raw estmates", to check if your spreadsheets are ok...that could be hard if you change system. Like when EU changed to Euros.

Rgds
Olle

[rambo!]

By the way, the worlds biggest wood chuch is located in Keirimäki, Finland it is said that that the drawings were in foot but it was built in meter....
They should have discovered the misstake when it was time to build the benches for the public.....
If it´s true...don´t know but its a small town with a very very big church...

regds
O

[tkk]

It is a big church indeed and the tale about inches and meters could be true.

Another secret I heard was about metric and the US: it is rumored that finally they are slowly going to metric, inch by inch.

[rxcomposite]

Originally Posted by tkk

Another secret I heard was about metric and the US: it is rumored that finally they are slowly going to metric, inch by inch.

They have. The cent is now 1/100 of a dollar.

Rx

[apex1]

Originally Posted by rxcomposite

They have. The cent is now 1/100 of a dollar.
Rx

Which at present means nothing! And nothing is´nt metric!.........

[ancient kayaker]

Aw, cumon! The only thing metric and Imperial can agree on is nothing!

[apex1]

Originally Posted by ancient kayaker

Aw, cumon! The only thing metric and Imperial can agree on is nothing!

Hmmm, ja..................from that viewpoint. I would say ten points! Decimal.......

[MikeJohns]

Originally Posted by rambo!

By the way, the worlds biggest wood chuch is located in Keirimäki, Finland it is said that that the drawings were in foot but it was built in meter..................

That sounds like an urban myth not worthy of a good boat forum

Structural requirements go up by the square of the span of a structural member. the structural side of things, floor joists beams lintels etc don't scale linearly. Iin otherwords if the dimensions were 3 times over the design then much of the structure would need to be be 9 times bigger for the same stresses. Otherwise it would have fallen down.

[ancient kayaker]

Don't agree: this is just the ideal thread for an urban myth! There are pictures of the church at http://www.globosapiens.net/davidx/p...rch-21482.html

-the pews in the inside photo look normal size but the bbuilding certainly has a chunky look!

[kmartyr]

Originally Posted by tkk

Another secret I heard was about metric and the US: it is rumored that finally they are slowly going to metric, inch by inch.

haha. I wish we would though. It would make my life so much easier. It would probably make everyones lives easier.