Re: The amount of times...
Hmmm, 100C is where the vapor pressure of pure water is the standard atmospheric pressure at sea level. At 1 to 1.5km of elevation, the drop in temperature at where the vapor pressure of water is equal to the ambient pressure is enough to require adjustments to recipes when baking. The more natural point for 0C would be the triple point in water. Fahrenheit's scale was 0F being the coldest achievable temperature with water ice and NaCl, with 100F being core body temperature. A real SI scale fr temperature would be eV...
For doing thermodynamic calculations, the appropriate scales are Kelvin and Rankine, and there really isn't much difference in usability between K and R as all sorts of conversions need to be done to get answers in Joules or MWHr. Another "fun" problem is dealing with speed involves Joules being watt-seconds, while vehicle speeds are usually given in statute miles, nautical miles or kilometers per hour. A fun factoid is that 1 pound of force at one statute mile per hour is equal to 2.0W (1.99W is a closer approximation).
As for feet, a fair approximation is that light travels 1 ft/nsec, too bad the foot wasn't ~1.6% shorter as a light nano-second would be the ultimate SI unit of length. The current definition of an inch, 25.4mm, was chosen in the 1920's to allow machine tools to handle inches by having a 127 tooth gear instead of a 100 tooth gear.
FWIW, Jefferson wanted to base his unit of length on a "second's" rod, i.e. e pendulum whose length would have exactly one second period when measured at seal level and 45º latitude.
Don't get me started on kilograms of thrust.
Friday 27th January 2023 06:22 GMT
IvyKing
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Re: The amount of times...
From somewhere in the later half of the 19th century to ~1920, the US inch was defined as 39.37 inches equals 1m. According a ca 1920 issue of Railway Mechanical Engineer, the machine tool industry was making a push to defining the inch 25.4mm so that by using a 127 tooth gear to replace a 100 tooth gear a lathe could be set up to produce metric and imperial threads.
One problem with converting the US to pure metric is that almost all land titles use feet, not meters. The US legal definition of a foot was 1/66 of a chain, a mile was 80 chains (66x80=5280), a section of land under the Northwest Ordnance of 1787 (passed under the Articles of Confederation, NOT the Constitution), which was 6400 square chains and the acre being 10 square chains (640 acres per square mile). The surveys for the Townships (36 sections) didn't really start until ca 1796, so if the arrival of the metric standards had not been delayed by the storm and the English, the US might have re-written the 1787 law to use metric measurements.
Another problem with the US converting to metric was Herbert Hoover's success as Secretary of Commerce in setting national standards for pipes and other hardware.
One final note about metric versus imperial is that a nautical mile is defined as 1 minute of longitude at the equator, so works well with the degrees, minutes and seconds customarily used for angles. Metric navigation would favor a decimal system for expressing angles, i.e. the gradians.
doublelayerSilver badge
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Re: The amount of times...
"Fahrenheit's scale was 0F being the coldest achievable temperature with water ice and NaCl, with 100F being core body temperature."
Wrong on both counts. On Fahrenheit's original scale, 0 was the freezing point of a solution of ammonium chloride (NH4Cl), not table salt (NaCl). As neither compound is used directly on roads, the point at which it is not useful depends on which specific salt is being used in the area, and more importantly on where the compound has been applied and whether it has been moved or not. The temperature of the human body was not 100. It was 96. Of course, neither value is considered average for body temperature (and body temperature is incredibly variable in any case, whereas boiling points of things at a specific fixed pressure is stable). This is because the modern scale abandoned both limits by instead fixing 32 and 212 as the values for water freezing and boiling, moving both of the original bounds slightly and making use of the original scale inaccurate to modern users.
Wednesday 25th January 2023 01:55 GMT
-tim
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Coat
Re: The amount of times...
In 1700 it was much easier for a scientist to calibrate a home made thermometer using ammonium chloride cooling bath and a docile dog. The temperature of boiling water required a barometer at higher altitudes and calibration tables. The human armpit temperature of about 96 allows hand drawn hash marks in repeated halves. Many very early Fahrenheit thermometer are often marked every 3 degrees.
Monday 23rd January 2023 15:59 GMT
Michael Wojcik
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Re: The amount of times...
More importantly, for Fahrenheit the reference temperatures aren't 0 and 212; they're 32 and 96. 96 minus 32 is 64. And 32 and 64 are ... stay with me here ... powers of 2.
Fahrenheit based his scale on powers of 2 so that thermometers could be graduated by successive bisection (and then reflected to extrapolate outside that range, on the assumption that the mechanism was sufficiently linear within the desired range). That's an actual engineering reason, unlike "duh humans like powers of 10". There really isn't much reason to favor Celsius.
Kelvin, of course, is the one that matters. (Yes, Rankine works too, but for some SI operations Kelvin is more convenient.)
Celsius is today as much flavor-of-the-month as Fahrenheit is. The original justifications for them are no longer relevant; they're just a matter of taste.
Re: Hooray for Avoirdupois and pounds, shillings and pence
Auvoirdepois has nothing to do with pounds, shillings and pence. Precious metals are measure using the Troy system that has 20 ounces to the pound. That is why a pound of gold weighs more than a pound of feathers. 1GBP was originally worth a pound of gold hence 20 shillings to the pound.
Try Deepl:
Reindeer length is an old unit of measurement of length used when moving reindeer. Reindeer length is the distance a reindeer can travel between (reindeer) urination breaks. Reindeer cannot urinate while running, and running too long can cause them to become paralysed. The maximum distance a reindeer can run is up to 7.5 kilometres.
Re: Try Deepl:
Nobody said they couldn't urinate while flying. That's why I stay inside on Christmas Eve.
In 1793, French scientist Joseph Dombey sailed for the newly formed United States at the request of Thomas Jefferson carrying two objects that could have changed America. He never made it, and now the US is stuck with a retro version of measurement that is unique in the modern world.
The first, a metal cylinder, was exactly one kilogram in mass. The second was a copper rod the length of a newly proposed distance measurement, the meter.
Jefferson was keen on the rationality of the metric system in the US and an avid Francophile. But Dombey's ship was blown off course, captured by English privateers (pirates with government sanction), and the scientist died on the island of Montserrat while waiting to be ransomed.
And so America is one of a handful of countries that maintains its own unique forms of weights and measures. //
When the UK settled in the Americas they brought with them a bastardized version of weights, measures and currencies. A Scottish pint, for example, was almost triple the size of an English equivalent until 1824, which speaks volumes about the drinking culture north of the border.
British measurements were initially standardized in the UK's colonies, but it was a curious system, taking in Roman, Frankish, and frankly bizarre additions. Until 1971, in the UK a pound consisted of 240 pence, with 12 pence to the shilling and 20 shillings to the pound. //
The French government felt that the newly formed nation wasn't being supportive enough in helping Gallic forces fight the British in the largely European War of the First Coalition. In something of a hissy fit, the French government declined to invite representatives from the US to the international gathering at Paris in 1798-99 that set the initial standards for the metric system.
Jefferson's plans were kicked into committee and while a form of standardization based on pounds and ounces was approved by the House, the Senate declined to rule on the matter.
Any gas can be converted into a liquid by simple compression, unless its temperature is below critical. Therefore, the division of substances into liquids and gases is largely conditional. The substances that we are used to considering as gases simply have very low critical temperatures and therefore cannot be in a liquid state at temperatures close to room temperature. On the contrary, the substances we classify as liquids have high critical temperatures (see table in §
).
All gases that make up the air (except carbon dioxide) have low critical temperatures. Their liquefaction therefore requires deep cooling.
There are many types of machines for producing liquid gases, in particular liquid air.
In modern industrial plants, significant cooling and liquefaction of gases is achieved by expansion under thermal insulation conditions.
simplify your workout
FreeSewing is open source software to generate bespoke sewing patterns, loved by home sewers and fashion entrepreneurs alike.
Industry sizing is a bunch of lies. Join the slow fashion revolution and enjoy clothes that fit you.
- Pick Any Design
- Add a set of measurements
- Customize your pattern
Many applications create and manage directories containing cached information about content stored elsewhere, such as cached Web content or thumbnail-size versions of images or movies. For speed and storage efficiency we would often like to avoid backing up, archiving, or otherwise unnecessarily copying such directories around, but it is a pain to identify and individually exclude each such directory during data transfer operations. I propose an extremely simple convention by which applications can reliably "tag" any cache directories they create, for easy identification by backup systems and other data management utilities. Data management utilities can then heed or ignore these tags as the user sees fit.
It’s important to clean and sanitize your backcountry water filter or purifier before storing it away during the winter months. There’s a simple three-stage process for this that involves cleaning the filter to improve its flow rate, sanitizing the filter to kill any microorganisms inside it, and drying it before storing it until you’re ready to use it again. //
odd man out
Filters with a small pore size are susceptible to clogging due to hard water deposits. Most drinking water will have some divalent cations (Ca+2, Mg+2) that forms insoluble carbonate salts (from dissolved CO2) when it dries. The reason to rinse with vinegar is that the acid in vinegar (acetic acid) will dissolve the carbonates salts because carbonate is a base. It reacts with the acid to form soluble acetate salts and carbonic acid that decomposes to form CO2 again (mix baking soda and vinegar if you want to see the reaction). However the salts take some time to dissolve. So what I do is to run some vinegar through the filter, seal it, and let it set for a while (an hour or so), then flush that out and repeat until you get a good flow rate. Then run a large volume of tap water through it to get rid of all the vinegar.
On a chilly October evening in 1958, a group of MIT students shuffled onto the Harvard Bridge, which separates the university town of Cambridge from Boston proper. The shortest among them lay down on the sidewalk at the bridge's start, his friends marked his length, he got up, moved forward, and repeated the process.
The man in question was Oliver Smoot, then a freshman at the institution who was pledging to join the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity. As part of his initiation, he was tasked with measuring the Harvard Bridge using his own height. The resulting unit, the "smoot," remains visible on the bridge today, with its markings repainted annually.
Local police even use these markings to pinpoint locations of traffic incidents. Google Earth also includes it as a unit, measuring five feet seven inches (170.18 cm) - you can find it as the last item under "Settings," then "Distance units."
Smoot went on to a career in standards and policy within the technology sector. After holding various roles, he served as chairman of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) from 2001 to 2002 and later as president of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) from 2003 to 2005.
RTDs, utilized for their high accuracy and stability, are inherently more sensitive to vibration than thermocouples—especially traditional wire-wound designs.
Newly announced catalog collects pre-2022 sources untouched by ChatGPT and AI contamination. //
As it turns out, his pre-AI website isn't new, but it has languished unannounced until now. "I created it back in March 2023 as a clearinghouse for online resources that hadn't been contaminated with AI-generated content," he wrote on his blog.
The website points to several major archives of pre-AI content, including a Wikipedia dump from August 2022 (before ChatGPT's November 2022 release), Project Gutenberg's collection of public domain books, the Library of Congress photo archive, and GitHub's Arctic Code Vault—a snapshot of open source code buried in a former coal mine near the North Pole in February 2020. The wordfreq project appears on the list as well, flash-frozen from a time before AI contamination made its methodology untenable.
The site accepts submissions of other pre-AI content sources through its Tumblr page. Graham-Cumming emphasizes that the project aims to document human creativity from before the AI era, not to make a statement against AI itself. As atmospheric nuclear testing ended and background radiation returned to natural levels, low-background steel eventually became unnecessary for most uses. Whether pre-AI content will follow a similar trajectory remains a question.
Still, it feels reasonable to protect sources of human creativity now, including archival ones, because these repositories may become useful in ways that few appreciate at the moment. For example, in 2020, I proposed creating a so-called "cryptographic ark"—a timestamped archive of pre-AI media that future historians could verify as authentic, collected before my then-arbitrary cutoff date of January 1, 2022. AI slop pollutes more than the current discourse—it could cloud the historical record as well.
For now, lowbackgroundsteel.ai stands as a modest catalog of human expression from what may someday be seen as the last pre-AI era. It's a digital archaeology project marking the boundary between human-generated and hybrid human-AI cultures. In an age where distinguishing between human and machine output grows increasingly difficult, these archives may prove valuable for understanding how human communication evolved before AI entered the chat.
When using thermocouple sensors, the thermocouple wire used to carry the signal is just as important as the thermocouple sensor itself. Thermocouple wire is made from the same allow materials as the thermocouple sensor, and its primary role is to extend the thermocouple circuit from sensing junction (“hot junction”) to the measurement instrument (“cold junction”) without introducing additional errors.
Using thermocouple-grade wire or extension-grade wire helps ensure maximum temperature measurement accuracy - minimizing errors related to alloy composition or calibration mismatch.
Over the course of a job, you may notice a customer has an unsafe electrical installation or equipment.
An Electrical Danger Notification* certificate is designed to be used by NICEIC registered electricians to provide a formal record that the customer has been informed of such danger. Apart from helping identifying unsafe appliances, the certificate will specify any work done to make it safe, and any urgent work that needs to be done after the date.
Terminal Velocity Calculator
In typical applications, magnetic flow meters are sized so that the velocity at maximum flow is approximately 2-3 meters per second. Differential pressure constraints and/or process conditions may preclude application of this general guideline. //
For slurry service, be sure to size magnetic flow meters to operate above the velocity at which solids settle (typically 1 ft/sec), in order to avoid filling the pipe with solids that can affect the measurement and potentially stop flow. Magnetic flow meters for abrasive service are usually sized to operate at low velocity (typically below 3 ft/sec) to reduce wear. In abrasive slurry service, the flow meter should be operated above the velocity at which solids will settle, despite increased wear.
One MCM is equivalent to 1000 circular mils. For comparison, 1 MCM equates to 0.5067 square mm, so for many purposes , a ratio of 2MCM to 1mmsq can be used with a 1.3% (very small) error.
Immediately Dangerous to Life or Health Concentrations (IDLH)
CAS number: 124–38–9
NIOSH REL: 5,000 ppm (9,000 mg/m3) TWA,
30,000 ppm (54,000 mg/m3) STEL
Current OSHA PEL: 5,000 ppm (9,000 mg/m3) TWA
1989 OSHA PEL: 10,000 ppm (18,000 mg/m3) TWA,
30,000 ppm (54,000 mg/m3) STEL
Basis for original (SCP) IDLH: The chosen IDLH is based on the statements by ACGIH [1971] that a 30-minute exposure at 50,000 ppm produces signs of intoxication, and a few minutes of exposure at 70,000 ppm and 100,000 ppm produces unconsciousness [Flury and Zernik 1931]. AIHA [1971] reported that 100,000 ppm is the atmospheric concentration immediately dangerous to life. In addition, Hunter [1975] noted that exposure to 100,000 ppm for only a few minutes can cause loss of consciousness.
OSHA PEL
8-hour TWA
(ST) STEL
(C) Ceiling
Peak
NIOSH REL
Up to 10-hour TWA
(ST) STEL
(C) Ceiling
ACGIH TLV©
8-hour TWA
(ST) STEL
(C) Ceiling
CAL/OSHA PEL
8-hour TWA
(ST) STEL
(C) Ceiling
Peak
PEL-TWA
5000 ppm (9000 mg/m³)
This calculator determines the absolute pressure at the pump impeller. NPSHA must exceed the NPSHR (net positive suction head requirement specified by the pump manufacturer or caviation and/or loss of prime will occur.