Re: [lojban] (from lojban-beginners) pi'e

[pycyn@aol.com]

In a message dated 9/14/2001 3:46:00 PM Central Daylight Time, jimc@math.ucla.edu writes:

On Fri, 14 Sep 2001 pycyn@aol.com wrote:
> and feet and "thumbs at the root of the nail" vary considerably.  So, any
> unit you pick is bound to be arbitrary.  But some obscure multiple of the
> wavelength of an obscure line in the spectrum on an obscure element!  I
> prefer King David (of Scotland)'s thumb.

Awww...  The obscure multiple was picked so the "new" meter would be
backward compatible with the previous standard.  The obscure element was
picked because it's easily vaporized and has that obscure line, which has a
combination of long life, high oscillator strength, and isolation from
neighbors, so that the light can be produced in practical equipment and can
be measured accurately, more accurately than competing proposals.

So the new meter is the same as the old meter, with the added convenience that with a few thousand bucks' worth of equipment and a really good multiplier we can have a specimen right here in our lab, wihtout having to send off the Paris.  So we can be as close to accurate as we want with a totally arbitrary standard.  The point, recall, was that the standard was arbitrary.  They could just as well have made an even more readily accessible thing the standard and peed on the French Revolution (and 200 years of scientific literature -- but scientists don't use that, so one quick change in the reference books would cover things nicely.)

"Know-nothings" in the camp of Senators Proxmire and Dingell make fun and
political hay off of geeks, and their choices of what to do and how to do
it, which camp mmembers and their camp followers don't know the reason for.
I hate to be thin-skinned, but when you visibly place yourself in that
camp, you encourage unseen listeners to devalue the work of "geeks", which
you benefit from and I hope would not like to sacrifice.

Well, Senators, being politicians are sorta certified assholes, but the last time I checked on Proxmire (I've never followed Dingell) his point relevant to the present discussion is that constantly retooling to meet new standards is not only not justified economically but even has negative impact, since the retraining time usually is never made up.  As for geeks, I will not go into that one again, since it always seems to end with my getting hanged in effigy.  It is hard to distingusih in the short run between people who screw things up for pure pleasure and those who are actually being constructive in distracting ways, so I suppose, in the interest of the occasional construction we have to let the rest go on too.  

And the revolutionary French did a pretty good job of estimating 2.5e-8
times the polar circumference of the Earth, given the geodetic tools
available at that time, and their lack of access either to space or to
major areas of land and ocean.  Please give credit where credit is due;
don't sneer at them because they didn't have GPS receivers and laser
theodolites.

      
Well, given the infinite number of polar circumferences, it would be hard to miss by too much.  But note that they were off by little more than the width of the scratch marks on the bar from a 2000+ year old calculation that they went to some unnecessary length to disparage in the intro.  The comparison should have given them a modicum of humility.

BTW, is this the place to remind everyone that the US is a metric country and has been since, I think, the second Jefferson administration.  We just never followed the French into things like making it illegal to sell eggs by the dozen or raisins by the ounce (so-and so many grams -- 28.3?).  We have over the years moved in that direction in ways intended to minimize economic consequences -- but every time we do, some industry finds a way to rip us off in the process (a liter bottle of cola initially cost almost half again as much as a quart).