Castle Aching

[lanchester]

On 15/02/2020 at 01:44, St Enodoc said:

I learned at school that a typical apple weighs about one newton, which makes perfect sense when you think about it.

Oddly, I'm pretty sure we were on  2 apples to the Newton. Granted, the West Riding (as it was then) is not great orchard country - or was your school perhaps using the British Standard Cooker?

[Compound2632]

I've just weighed a couple of random Cox apples - 1.2 N, 1.4 N. So a 1 N apple is on the mall side, 2 N, biggish.

[Nearholmer]

I've always thought that the Newton is a 'too small' unit in that it doesn't seem to amount to a useful force, and that grams are too small too, they feel as if they ought to be tenths or hundredths of something, perhaps even thousandths. Metres and litres, on the other hand, feel about right. Not entirely sure why.

[Compound2632]

2 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

grams are too small too, they feel as if they ought to be tenths or hundredths of something, perhaps even thousandths. 

 

Well, yes, thousandths of a kilogram, the base unit (despite its name - an historical misfortune with which we are stuck). The kilogram is an convenient size. As to the newton being too small, that's a consequence of a unitary system, which has many other advantages. 

 

4 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

litres, 

 

The litre is another rogue unit consequent on the failure of the French savants to appreciate the advantages of a unitary system. To make matters worse, the kilogram was originally supposed to be the mass of one litre - one cubic decimetre - of pure water. Unfortunately the water couldn't be got pure enough for a reliable realisation within the uncertainty limits to which mass could be measured at the time, so until last year we were stuck with various lumps of alloy.

[Northroader]

4 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

Girl meets boy just can't compete with ship meets berg. 

 

How did it end?

[Compound2632]

18 minutes ago, Northroader said:

 

How did it end?

 

Not well for the berg, which eventually just melted away...

 

I did see a documentary a while back about Greenland icebergs, that compared the likely timeline from the Titanic berg from calving to being adrift in the North Atlantic, to the timeline of the Titanic's construction at Harland & Wolff. Both Greenland and Harland & Wolff are still in business though the webpage of the latter makes no mention of the Titanic.

[Nearholmer]

46 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

Well, yes, thousandths of a kilogram, the base unit (despite its name - an historical misfortune with which we are stuck). 

 

True. Perhaps we should just rename kilograms.

 

If they had been called Pounds, or even if Euros had been called Pounds, just different names, everything else as is, we might have felt sufficiently included not to have cast ourselves adrift. Think how happy people would have been to get roughly twice as many apples to the Pound as previously. Just a thought.

[robmcg]

I have always done conversions between metric and imperial or vice-versa with mental arithmetic and a qualifier, "give-or-take" as part of the result.

 

Works every time when one can visualize a foot, a yard, a metre, or a millimetre. Or a half-pound of butter...  just my to cents worth...  oh sorry, my ha'-penny worth.

 

edit;  give or take....

 

edit 2;  and 4 thousandths of an inch is where the rocker arm on the valve gear is snug with a detectable gap but no more. No metric equivalent for that exists.

 

here is a 1957 3.4 Jag next to Wellington Harbour about 9 months after I broke my back, inlet valves 0.004" exhaust 0.006"   but everyone knows that... 

 

just for context, you know...

 

 

rather summery as it was in January 1975

I rebuilt the car from top to bottom in subsequent years which was a great challenge from the wheelchair etc.  made my own hand controls etc.

 

Irrelevant fact 3,

 

Directly behind the car 's left-hand windscreen upright is where the Inter-Island 8,000-ton ship 'Wahine' went aground in a storm like Scotland may be having, or worse, on April 10 1968, 51 lives lost....  there had been a degree of bravado on the part of the captain, I think, 150-knot winds aren't best in 10+-metre following swells...   I was there in '68 and it was a bad storm.  Nobody blamed global warming.

 

Edited February 16, 2020 by robmcg

[Compound2632]

4 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

 

True. Perhaps we should just rename kilograms.

 

If they had been called Pounds, or even if Euros had been called Pounds, just different names, everything else as is, we might have felt sufficiently included not to have cast ourselves adrift. Think how happy people would have been to get roughly twice as many apples to the Pound as previously. Just a thought.

 

There's a lot in a name. The French enlightenment savants wanted to make a clean break with the past so coined completely new names for the metric units. When the Euro was introduced, a similar argument prevailed over the idea that the acronym ECU should morph into the old Fench currency name écu, which we could have called a crown. 

 

Decimal coinage uses a logarithmic scale of values: 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50... which cunningly enables any amount to me made up from the smallest number of coins. A friend of mine - a banker - thought that feature should be abandoned in favour of thirds, keeping the old names: a mark would be a third of a pound, a frank a third of a mark, etc., all the way down to lira. It worked out surprisingly vlose to the exchange rates at the time.

 

Back in the mid-19th century, there had been a currency union scheme between Great Britain, France, and, I think, Italy, that would have seen all three nations issuing gold coins of the same weight. This was scuppered by the Prussians, who brought out a gold coin that stood in no simple ratio to the others. (It was largely due to the Prussians that the metric system, originally conceived as a vehicle for the brotherhood of man, became militarised.)

[Andy Hayter]

2 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

I've always thought that the Newton is a 'too small' unit in that it doesn't seem to amount to a useful force, and that grams are too small too, they feel as if they ought to be tenths or hundredths of something, perhaps even thousandths. Metres and litres, on the other hand, feel about right. Not entirely sure why.

 

From a daily household or engineering point of view I agree that a gram seems a very small amount.  However consider that in the world of medicine, milligrams of an active ingredient is all that is needed and more can be detrimental.  In the world of atomic physics even smaller weights are important.

 

So overall by good luck rater than any judgement, I would say the gram is probably about the right size.

[Hroth]

Newton and Apples, eh?

 

We should ALL remember.....

 

Sir Isaac Newton told us why
An apple falls down from the sky,
And from this fact, it’s very plain,
All other objects do the same.
A brick, a bolt, a bar, a cup
Invariably fall down, not up...

 

Now, where's my hard hat?

[robmcg]

Regardless of units of measure, I am sure all civilised life would have ceased but for the Faber-Castelle slide-rule.  A priori truth and all that.

[St Enodoc]

16 hours ago, lanchester said:

Oddly, I'm pretty sure we were on  2 apples to the Newton. Granted, the West Riding (as it was then) is not great orchard country - or was your school perhaps using the British Standard Cooker?

 

15 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

I've just weighed a couple of random Cox apples - 1.2 N, 1.4 N. So a 1 N apple is on the mall side, 2 N, biggish.

Well, in the old days apples were definitely smaller - and tastier, I reckon. The only big apples I remember were the green cookers that Mum used for pies. We always had a pie, with custard, after the Sunday roast. I was the only one in the family who liked the skin on the custard, unless my aunt was with us...

[St Enodoc]

12 hours ago, robmcg said:

Nobody blamed global warming.

Of course not. In those days we were more worried about the nuclear winter.

[Compound2632]

40 minutes ago, St Enodoc said:

I was the only one in the family who liked the skin on the custard, unless my aunt was with us...

 

What was it about your aunt that made the custard skin unappetising?

[St Enodoc]

17 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

What was it about your aunt that made the custard skin unappetising?

There's always one, isn't there...

[wagonman]

14 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

I did see a documentary a while back about Greenland icebergs, that compared the likely timeline from the Titanic berg from calving to being adrift in the North Atlantic, to the timeline of the Titanic's construction at Harland & Wolff. Both Greenland and Harland & Wolff are still in business though the webpage of the latter makes no mention of the Titanic.

 

Errm, actually, if you scroll down to the bottom of the page...

[Regularity]

On 16/02/2020 at 10:25, Edwardian said:

In fact, just thinking about it gives me a sinking feeling.

A truly funny film.

 

[RedGemAlchemist]

41 minutes ago, Regularity said:

A truly funny film.

Indeed. Very underrated 

[Regularity]

Incidentally, M1 and 14BA are more or less interchangeable, but use some threadlock (nail varnish also works) as the thread form is slightly different.

[rocor]

3 hours ago, wagonman said:

 

Errm, actually, if you scroll down to the bottom of the page...

 

 

To give it a positive spin, they could have added, "and successfully launched".

[Compound2632]

16 minutes ago, rocor said:

To give it a positive spin, they could have added, "and successfully launched".

 

Harland & Wolff bore some culpability, both through the shortcomings of their design and through some use of sub-standard rivets, as revealed by studies of samples brought up from the wreck. The ship's hull design lagged behind that of the contemporary Cunarders in terms of manoeuvrability. On the other hand, it has been persuasively argued that had the ship hit the berg head on, the hull would have survived the impact with relatively little damage.

 

 

[James Harrison]

20 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

I've always thought that the Newton is a 'too small' unit in that it doesn't seem to amount to a useful force, and that grams are too small too, they feel as if they ought to be tenths or hundredths of something, perhaps even thousandths. Metres and litres, on the other hand, feel about right. Not entirely sure why.

 

Well, the next one up is a kiloNewton (kN), equivalent to 98.1kg mass (sometimes rounded up to 100kg for simplicity).  You get 10 of those to a metric tonne so probably too large a unit.

[Compound2632]

12 minutes ago, James Harrison said:

 

Well, the next one up is a kiloNewton (kN), equivalent to 98.1kg mass (sometimes rounded up to 100kg for simplicity).  

 

Depends where you are. A one kilonewton weight on the moon has a mass of around 625 kg.

 

Also, in the SI, units that are named after persons are always written with a lower case initial, although their symbol is upper case. Thus the SI unit of force, named in honour of Sir Isaac Newton, is the newton, symbol N. This avoids the solecism of a capital in the middle of a word when adding prefixes. See sections 5.2 and 5.3 of the SI Brochure, pp. 147-8.

[Northroader]

On a technicality, does a crab apple off a 20’ high tree offer the same amount of Newtons as a cooking apple off a 10’ high tree? Which was the old boy standing under? We need to know these things.

Edited February 17, 2020 by Northroader