Forum: Author Hangout

You mentioned base 12 and it reminded me of the Conrad Stargard series by Leo Frankowski. (Dead tree)
His modern day engineer transported to the 12 century (IIRC) decided to convert the Polish economy to base 12, because the farmers and such already used 'dozens' and 'gross' for goods

Yeah, I really enjoyed that series as a teen. rereading it as an adult was far less fun, but so it goes.

I was a math kid and while it's completely understandable why base 10 is the standard in so many cultures, from a mathematical standpoint base 12 makes a tonne of sense. There's also several historical civilizations who used it, most notably the ancient Egyptians, which makes it a lot easier to substantiate as a larger system.

Through in an ancient empire and you have a good excuse for everyone in a fantasy world to be using the same metric-style standardized base 12 system despite being a bunch warring states today.

Didn't the Babylonians use base 60? Yup, agrees with me so it must be right.

I remember David Drake, who sadly passed away a few months ago, using both imperial and metric measure in his RCN science fiction series. He actually explained it in one of his notes that it was not meant the people in this theoretical far future would use either of those measurement systems, but he wanted to give an impression that people from different planets would use *different* systems which would appear somewhat strange to each other.

The US, of course, is almost entirely on American Standard to the point that metric isn't even taught in schools for general understanding unless someone takes advanced science classes

Where did you get that idea? Every American school child is exposed to metric and numerous everyday items are measured in metric.
While people don't think in metric terms, distance and capacity are metric measurements everyone is at least somewhat familiar with.
Temperature? Except for scientific and engineering uses, nobody, including recent immigrants uses Celsius.

Ok, not nobody. But even my Belgian and English neighbors always use real temperatures when speaking, even in groups who are largely non-American.

Ok, not nobody. But even my Belgian and English neighbors always use real temperatures when speaking, even in groups who are largely non-American.

So they use Kelvin? ;)

Nope:

On fire
Really hot
Hot
Warm
Nice
Cool
Cold
Really cold
Artic

Neighbours of mine were up in the Arctic circle (I think it was Norway) just over a month ago.
The temperature was around 27 degrees (300 kelvin, 80F) day and night, although "night" did not really apply there at that time of year. If "Artic" was meant to be "Arctic", you might want to rethink where it lies on your scale.

If "Artic" was meant to be "Arctic", you might want to rethink where it lies on your scale.

Freezing?

The answer comes to me courtesy of JC: Subarctic.

I'm not a great fan of JC since both Biden and Trump claimed his dad's support for their election campaigns.

Hmm, Biden claimed he wouldn't bow out of the Presidential race without a sign from the Almighty, then he bowed out. I don't think he had as much support from that quarter as he claimed.

Most I got this impression from a host of American-born YouTubers living abroad commenting on how hard it was for them to adapt and how little metric education they had in school.

I'm not saying no one knows any metric, but there's large parts of in Europe that wouldn't make sense to the average American.

For example, if I told you that my favourite cafe is open 0730 to 2100, serves coffee in 120mL and 250mL cups at 70°C, and has a really cute server who's just a little shorter than my height of 1.77m ... how much of that do you understand without having to stop and think or look up conversions?

And it's not just obvious measurements. Instead of miles per gallon, cars are rated in litres per 100 km.

open 0730 to 2100

Few Americans would be at all confused by time expressed without a separator between hours and minutes or by a 24 hour clock, neither of which have anything in particular to do with the metric system.

serves coffee in 120mL and 250mL cups at 70°C

A lot of food packaging in the US today is either metric or has both standard and metric. Government mandated nutrition label information is in metric (grams and milligrams).

I buy soda in 16.9 ounce (500ml) bottles.

how much of that do you understand without having to stop and think or look up conversions?

All of it.

Ex army, so the clock times are easy. So was all the rest, although it took a moment to decide that that was a tall lady.

Around 2003 I was on a bus trip with some serving members of the US Army (possibly marines). One of them did not turn up at 14:00 as expected, the group waited for around 20 minutes but he was still missing and could not be reached so we drove off - the trip was 300 miles and was going to take 6 hours including the mandatory 45 minute break for the bus driver.
The missing link finally rang someone in the group at around 16:00 - he had confused 14:00 with 4 pm.
There was a decent train connection (also around 6 hours) and he turned up late that evening.
Since I remember it as having been dark when we arrived there - and it was summer - my guess is that it took us quite a bit longer than six hours, possibly because leaving late on a Friday meant we caught a lot more weekend traffic.

Yes, but as you said, he was a Marine. There is direct evidence that they are all brain damaged. i.e. they all VOLUNTEERED to join the Marines.

😁

Yeah, I should have said "US armed forces".
A court martial would have been utterly inappropriate in this case, he was on this trip in his own free time in a private capacity. I am not - and have never been - a member of any armed forces and I was there as well.

This is ridiculous, I WAS THERE.
It was a weekend trip to a hilly/mountainous area to go hiking, rock climbing, cycling, whatever. It was organised by a private club, although it was affiliated with the US (possibly the military) for tax purposes.
How can you want to determine whether this was an "official" trip when all you have to go on is that he was in the military?

I have worked for an airline, they used UTC for times and we were all capable of working out the offset "on the fly". This was in the days before Outlook or the internet were invented, although it may have helped that the mainframe ran on UTC.

Anecdotally, I'd say this is incorrect. Several places I've worked I instructed members of my global team to specify meeting times in twenty-four-hour time, based on UTC

I'd say that the problem was primarily the insistence on UTC. As someone else already mentioned, time-zone offsets are non-trivial, especially when you have to deal with daylight savings time.
Converting 24 hour time to AM/PM, while annoying, without adding the complication of dealing with time-zone offsets, is fairly simple.

On the other Hand, the calendars in Outlook and other email programs will handle time-zone issues automatically.

So unless you are scheduling meetings on paper there's no good reason to insist on a 24hour clock based on UTC.

neither of which have anything in particular to do with the metric system.

Actually, they have everything to do with the "metric system" and this is the fundamental point that a lot of Americans fail to fully understand. The term "metric system" is linguistic shorthand for the International System of Units (formerly Système international d'unités) an international system that defines standards for everything needed for communication in a multilingual world.

Why does Europe use a 24-hour clock instead of 12 hours? Because that's the international standard under SI.

Why does the US not generally use the 24-hour clock?
Because SI, ie "the metric system" isn't in common usage in mainstream US society.

Why does the US military use the 24-hour clock?
Because it is more clear, a feature which is vitally important in the military, and the reason why SI has been adopted internationally in the first place.

This is the whole point. SI isn't just sizes of milk bottles and what temperature it is outside. SI covers the clock used, and the numeric system (because not all cultures do mathematics the same way), and standard marine communication phrases, and UniCode (a key component of digital text), and the functionality of the internet, and barcodes, and geotagging, and hazard symbols, and medical classifications, and so on and so forth.

SI is the international standard. That's what it means.

I'm not saying that no one in the US uses any of this, I'm just saying that it's not the default. And because it's not the default you can never be entirely sure, without checking, which system is being used. It's not enough to teach something in school; if people aren't using it every day they will be at least a little confused when they have to rely on it.

A perfect example of this is the 1999 Mars Climate Orbiter disaster when NASA lost a $327 million ($617m today) probe because Lockheed Martin was not using SI units, despite the fact that they had been standard in scientific pursuits in the US since 1975 and were specified in the contract. If more of those engineers were conversant in metric someone might have noticed that calculations of pound-force seconds and newton-seconds produce wildly different results.

There are also a number of lesser known incidents, both in the US and Canada, with some of the newer Canadian ones resulting from products coming from the US with American packaging that has not been properly converted* to metric. These include passenger aircraft receiving insufficient fuel or being overloaded, incorrect doses of medication (grains vs grams), and incorrect/ banned radio frequencies being used.

*[Note: Canadian law requires that imported products have metric bilingual packaging, although including US standard is allowed as an addition. If a company is operating in Canada, as most of the big ones do, they have to do this themselves before the product leaves the importing warehouse. There is no (legal) excuse for an American product reaching a Canadian user without proper labelling.]

Why does Europe use a 24-hour clock instead of 12 hours? Because that's the international standard under SI.

The fact that SI adopted a 24hour clock as its standard doesn't mean that the idea of a 24hour clock comes from SI.

Why don't Europeans use the SI standard for dates?

What was even the logic of doing it that way?

Not sure, but it's old and has history and inertia. Dates in the declaration of independence are in month(name) day, year format (July 4th, 1776).

Possibly because of contextual significance. In speech we often drop the year, and give a date as just month and day (August 25th). And if we were to give just one, just month (August) is more common than just day of month (25th). This makes the month the most significant and the year the least significant.

I wonder what the prevalent date format was in England in the 17th and 18th centuries? Or in Europe?

And why haven't they changed it to something more logical?

As I said above, history and inertia. It's what we are used to.

That said, some of us are changing.

The IT industry in the US is migrating towards YYYY/MM/DD as this sorts better as text and has become my personal preference.

The US military uses four date formats, three of which are variations on d/m/y.

And why haven't they changed it to something more logical?

More on why Americans don't change to a more logical date format.

On top of history and just plain inertia, it likely contains elements of:
Not Invented Here Syndrome
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. We understand m/d/y just fine.
We hate Europe

Hey we have both metric and standard on our car gauges.... I vaguely recall 55 MPH = 88 KPH.... we can do metric (poorly). You just need to get with our program as clearly our way is better than the rest of the world (Note: folks using SI reside largely in on country so read this as sarcasm....'merica and yes I am a citizen).

Some of the newer vehicles with digital dashboards switch automatically when you cross the border, which is good for clarity but bad for training purposes.

In a generation if the US doesn't push metrification more I'd expect most younger drivers will forget the conversions since they aren't constantly looking at them.

One professional writer who I greatly respect, though he is now past, is/was Terry Goodkind writing in his Sword of Truth world. He frequently breaks into High D'Haran in italics and if you don't remember the translations be damned with you.

It is done as a mixed trope. 'new' wordings to show that the reader/hearer doesn't know the translation. The other is to show the 'age' of the source as it is a 'dead' language even in the ancient setting of the lore and stories.

So yes it can work in serious literature but it needs to be done very carefully and selectively keeping your audience in mind. Sword of Truth has a dedicated fan base and covers some 20 books or so and over 3,000 years of time.

So I say it can be 'done' but most often it is not done well or not done in the correct manner to make proper use of the tactic.

My guess would be https://storiesonline.net/series/1586/the-cure and it does take a bit of getting used to, although not to the extent that REP sees things.

Editing this: REP was complaining about two things:
- use of "foreign" units of measurement, QM does this in the above example.
- use of foreign words, I ignored that part in my reply. I think Wes Boyd did that a bit in https://storiesonline.net/s/73266/susan but his command of the (German) language was not the best. Argon also did that in one (or two) of his "historical Germany" stories and his command of the language is . . . commanding.

ah ok... haven't read it yet though it is on my list to read from recent recos.

SunSeeker

(F-32) × 5/9 =C
(C×9/5) +32 = F

Yay! I remembered!

yeah I looked it up when I did my post...but remember it...no way! lol

yeah I looked it up when I did my post...but remember it...no way! lol

A 'good enough' rule for C to F is to double and add 30; converting the other way you subtract 30 then halve.

Obviously not completely accurate, 0 C becomes 30 not 32, but works well enough for most purposes.

Re converting distances, I vaguely remember a story here where the author gave rounded distances in miles or yards, and then gave an exact translation into metric. Something like 'after 5 miles (8.046 kilometres) I stopped for a rest'. Spurious accuracy!

The way I usually describe it for day-to-day temperatures is:

Below zero bundle up, the colder it is the more layers you want.
0 - 10, have a light jacket handy.
10 - 20, wear long sleeves/ slacks but skip the jacket.
20 - 30, wear shorts and short sleeves.
30+ wear as little as you can.

Of course, many Canadians will start wearing shorts as soon as the snow melts, regardless of temperature, but that's another story.

Well recognizing that 9/5 ths the same as 1.8, so
for Celsius to Fahrenheit - (degrees C) x 2) then subtract 2 tenths and add 32 to yield the Fahrenheit
For Fahrenheit just do the reverse.

It seems easier when I do it mentally as opposed to writing it out.

(0°C × 9/5) + 32 = 32°F - its simple math.

I didn't say it wasn't simple math, I said I have never remembered it.