Reorte

Oh gawd, not the metric debate again, which wasn't anything to do with the Sherlock Holmes example (yeah, it would if they were convenient fractions of a kilometer, but the same's true if they were convenient fractions of a mile, like the quarter mile posts are, no difference really). As for "simpler", it would be if we all had the same everything and all individuality was destroyed, but once things do the job well enough I'm satisfied and generally find "improvement" just make the world a less interesting place for what are really generally quite trivial gains masquerading as "so much more convenient" (a phrase I've come to loathe).

Some aspects help - one yard a second is very close to 2 mph, so a telegraph pole every 2 seconds would be 60 mph. So it's then down to how good you are at doing a single division mentally - the sort of thing that might be simple for Holmes but isn't for the likes of me who's been using calculators and computers for those sorts of numbers for a long time!

Hmm, try that to keep the kids quiet? Should take them a nice long time to find a telegraph post on the modern railway

If you slow a film down (by whatever the numbers work out to be) then, say, a wagon rolling down a gradient will appear to be accelerating at a more convincing speed (and the pendulum would swing slower, closer to how it would appear at full size). But to have your powered trains in the same scene appear to be going at the right speed in that film they'd need to be run faster.

If conditions are bad enough that trains have to be driven on sight (and you could well say that reports of landslides indicate conditions are that bad) then isn't it really a case of getting passengers to the nearest safe place where they can detrain, because conditions aren't safe then to run trains at all?

But hopefully your trains aren't falling off bridges! Those dynamic effects aren't relevant in a model moving under control. It's true you'd have to do that if you were modelling something like hump shunting, but in most model railways the motion is fully under control, and it doesn't therefore matter than things like the momentum aren't in scale.

Implying the delay to be a cause does feel like it's stretching things somewhat; a delay could just as easily result in a disaster being missed.

Yes, and I find it's another step towards a future that looks very bleak and depressing and I really wish I wasn't going to live to see. It may be a necessary evil but that doesn't stop it leaving me with no hope for a better future, it all just increases my depression. Although personally I'm not all that bothered about less international travel.

A lot of this is all very interesting but my idea of scale speed is - would a film of it look the same as a film of the real thing (realism of the modelling itself notwithstanding)? The fact that to the laws of physics it's a small train rather than a scale model of a large one means things like moving water and smoke and loose coupled wagons don't behave in a scaled down way and it'll be hard (or impossible) to ever make them do so (you could probably power every individual wagon, individually computer-controlled but realistic scale smoke will need a holodeck), but when it comes to the train itself moving past the scenery does that matter?

Down 10% in the last week. Two Mondays in a row now have been a jump up, which is a bit unusual (I'd had Monday as a low day, since it's probably really representing a Sunday), but yesterday was still a little lower than the previous Monday. There's always been an up-down pattern all through the decline, with midweek to Friday normally being high and weekends low; the usual pattern for a decline appears to be a weekend drop then an increase not to the previous week's levels. The day-to-day variations (the part where some days are consistently higher or lower than others) mean that it's only really meaningful to measure the change over 7-week periods, so those underlying daily patterns are smoothed out. So whilst I'm not persuaded that numbers are on the increase a stalling decrease again doesn't seem implausible.

My brother's had his first jab, first person I know to have had the Moderna one.

A mixture usually sounds irritating on the surface but if you want to model in metric it's not a bad idea when so much of the prototype was designed in imperial.

That's interesting in its own right, I'd never really perceived the significant difference in length of units!

14's a poor one but 160 I don't think's too bad, other than being somewhat on the large size. I'd be inclined to go base 12 if starting completely from scratch, i.e. could discard the effort of learning to count in a different system. With only three factors 1, 2 and 5, and fifths not being a particularly commonly encountered fraction base 10 is a little clunky, whereas base 12 has 2, 3, 4, and 6, giving convenient divisions of halves, quarters and thirds (and sixths and twelfths, not that they're all that handy).

To be devil's advocate if you were doing it from scratch in metric wouldn't your layout more likely to be planned to be 5 m long, and some random-seeming number of feet? Agree that the inch and foot is a useful size though, and that's one of the key reasons imperial has lingered on (it's telling that Farenheit has dropped out of favour faster than most others). The interval of 1000 in metric is rather on the large side for many applications, and the centi- prefixes rarely used, the deci- ones even less often (can't think of any other than decibels, even though quite often the decimetre might be handy). Intervals of 100 might've been a better standard, keeping most figures encountered in two digits.

Probably more just a reluctance to change something that the majority of people using it don't have much of a problem with. And what's wrong with having bits of national character and individuality? Doesn't necessarily have to mean "foreign is bad" (although often gets painted as such). Personally speaking I find that often those little details and variations are what makes the world an interesting place, and I happen to value that more than an increase in functionality once I'm happy with the level of functionality (just my personal view of course). It's subjective to say ID cards are sensible and rational... Not that being subjective is a problem in itself of course - you can rationally say objectively what is but when you start talking about value, good or bad, it starts becoming subjective. And subjective, intangible things often get dismissed out of hand yet are absolutely crucial about how we view the world and our relationship with it. That is, I think, why we end up with clashing entrenched opinions, because of the way it all boils down to subjectivity - neither side can offer the other something it'll regard as an improvement, because to that other side it isn't.

How's that different from the imperial length measures? Come to think of it, the grad never caught on either, leaving us with 360 degrees in a circle, or 2 pi radians (mathematically very convenient but hard for mental arithmetic and visualisation, and certainly not a metric-type approach).

The more I hear of people saying "imperial should've been abandoned years ago" the less convinced I am As for the "why not make the inch 25 mm?" question, that would deviate quite quickly from everything done in inches beforehand, whereas the difference in 25.4 mm are insignificant in most cases. Sometimes definitions change for whatever reason, but the goal is to usually avoid deviating too much from the previous size, e.g. why the metre is defined in terms of the speed of light and a rather arbitrary-seeming fraction of a second. The most recent redefinition was the kilogram in 2019, to move it away from being defined by the mass of an arbitrary lump of metal to being defined by fundamental physical constants. In virtually all practical considerations the difference in definition made no noticeable change; the definition was chosen to fit the previous size (presumably to within a certain degree of error - when the old measure is a particular physical object there will always be limits to which the accuracy of anything else can be compared with it).

For all the supposed complexity of the Imperial system most people who seem to complain strongly about it appear simply to not be used to it. It's generally easy working with whatever you're used to; quite often you don't change which set of Imperial units you use (e.g. inches to miles) so it doesn't really matter how many of one go in to the other. Funny how metric's advocates never seem to get worked up about 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, differing number of days in a month... So I continue to regard any push to metric as change for the sake of change, but just use whatever's convenient at the time. Oh, and if you're going to get worked up about changing a definition of an inch in terms of metres it should be pointed out that the definition of metric and SI units has changed over time (most recently the kilogram - come to think of it, if we're being "logical" about it then the base unit wouldn't have the kilo- prefix).

The Ingenuity helicopter has successfully flown on Mars! https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-56799755

The problem is that looking at it from a purely financial impact doesn't encompass all the elements that should be considered. It's a necessary consideration but too often it's been the only one. The problem is that it's perceived as being non-subjective (which isn't really the case) and can in some cases positively encourage inefficiencies elsewhere (it really ends up working towards maximum production and consumption, which may not be the best path - where it increases efficiency it'll always make sense to produce more with the same resources used, rather than produce the same with fewer resources used).

Yes and no. Tackling easy targets is a waste of time if they're never going to make a difference - it's really just treading on peoples' toes then. They might change at their own pace anyway. The case for them is increased if it's a useful learning exercise for the big contributors.

But that'll have delayed the ones behind them, they won't be able to cram more ships through to make up the backlog I wouldn't have thought. A little perhaps but hasn't the canal been operating at close to capacity for a while now (hence the doubling of the northern section)?

Wasn't that a story published on the 1st April? There was certainly one along those lines, the spokesman "Mo Sez" being one giveaway

I suppose the effort to decide who really needs them would be rather intrusive, poking around in to peoples' affairs, and may cost more than it would save by being a bit more general in their distribution.