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

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 14 Sep 2001 20:20:27 EDT

In a message dated 9/14/2001 3:46:00 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> On Fri, 14 Sep 2001 [email-masked] 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
> 

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).