Well-Actually War Trall Actaeon Posted April 27, 2012 Share Posted April 27, 2012 Rather than confine myself to an inane mailbox stuffing thread for my 1024th post, I'd rather take this opportunity to bring up the arbitrary nature of most numerical and measuring systems. The metric system, at least, is consistently base 10 and its units are interrelated (a cubic centimeter is a liter and a liter of water weighs one gram, for instance). In most cases (excluding temperature), however, there is no practical basis for the inherent unit. The meter was, in the first place, no more reasonable than the foot. My questions are these, but you need not confine your brilliant minds to them: Does base 10 afford any advantages other than the ability to easily count on our fingers? Does the way we've structured math and numbers narrow the way we see things? When, if ever, is the United States going to adopt the metric system? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hatchling Cockatrice Randomizer Posted April 27, 2012 Share Posted April 27, 2012 I think it was a Babylonian system that used a base 60 system for some things because of all those possible factorizations into smaller numbers. Binary is a pain for us to write out but computers seem to like it so we use octal and hexadecimal as a compromise with them. Numerical systems structure the way we think about things. Just look at the British system of weights and measures that is mostly used in the United States. If it hadn't been for Benjamin Franklin we would have used their currency system to with a smattering of Spain's pieces of eight coinage instead of a decimal currency. If you grow up on a system no matter how awkward you don't notice how it warps you. At least liquid measures are sort of binary related: 8 ounces = 1 cup 2 cups = 1 pint 2 pints = 1 quart 4 quarts = 1 gallon The United States is officially on the metric system, but packaging still has the older units because that's what customers are used to. Two liter soda containers are one of the few things that are metric replacing the older 32 ounce versions. I'm surprised that more companies don't switch to more metric sizes since the confusion would allow them to slip in price increases without the customers noticing. Congratulations on a nice binary milestone. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Magnificent Ornk Dikiyoba Posted April 27, 2012 Share Posted April 27, 2012 Quote: Rather than confine myself to an inane mailbox stuffing thread But those are the best. Congratulations, Actaeon! Dikiyoba. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Magnificent Ornk nikki. Posted April 27, 2012 Share Posted April 27, 2012 Congratulations. Here's to the next arbitrary number arriving much sooner than this one did. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rotghroth Rhapsody Kreador Posted April 27, 2012 Share Posted April 27, 2012 Originally Posted By: Actaeon a cubic centimeter is a liter and a liter of water weighs one gram Say what? I think you'd better check your conversions again. I believe you mean milliliter, not liter. Also, if we're being really specific about it, gram is a unit of mass, not a unit of weight. We do general conversions between pounds (weight) and kilograms (mass) in daily life because we're working with Earth normal gravity, but an object's mass does not vary with the gravitational field. Speaking of the logic of liquid measure, of course the term pint exists because it is the volume of water that weighs one pound. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Easygoing Eyebeast keira Posted April 27, 2012 Share Posted April 27, 2012 A pint is a pound the world around, a pint is sixteen ounces. Also congratulations and stuff Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Understated Ur-Drakon Callie Posted April 28, 2012 Share Posted April 28, 2012 I was a bit surprised when I saw your post count as 1000 and no corresponding thread. Now I know better. Congratulations! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Understated Ur-Drakon Tyranicus Posted April 28, 2012 Share Posted April 28, 2012 Congratulations. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Well-Actually War Trall Actaeon Posted April 28, 2012 Author Share Posted April 28, 2012 Originally Posted By: Excalibur I was a bit surprised when I saw your post count as 1000 and no corresponding thread. Now I know better. Congratulations! I made the decision to celebrate in binary way back at 256. It makes me feel like a rebel, and it provides decent spacing. There are quite a few users at 2^10, but 2^12 would put you in the top twenty, and only Alorael exceeds 2^14 (although Lilith will be there soon). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hatchling Cockatrice Lilith Posted April 28, 2012 Share Posted April 28, 2012 Originally Posted By: Kreador Also, if we're being really specific about it, gram is a unit of mass, not a unit of weight. nobody who isn't actually a working physicist uses "mass" as a verb in that context though, and "it weighs one kilogram-weight" is a mouthful Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Well-Actually War Trall A less presumptuous name. Posted April 28, 2012 Share Posted April 28, 2012 Originally Posted By: Randomizer I think it was a Babylonian system that used a base 60 system for some things because of all those possible factorizations into smaller numbers. Look at your fingers. If you count on your right hand, using your thumb to point to each section of each finger: tip, middle, base. You count to twelve. That then goes to one finger on your left hand. 5 free fingers on your left and allows for 12*5 = 60. Originally Posted By: Sylae A pint is a pound the world around, a pint is sixteen ounces. That pretty much only works with stick butter, which has a density of 1 oz per fl oz. Alas, that leads to many people not realizing that a fluid ounce is not the same as a mass ounce. Originally Posted By: Lilith Originally Posted By: Kreador Also, if we're being really specific about it, gram is a unit of mass, not a unit of weight. nobody who isn't actually a working physicist uses "mass" as a verb in that context though, and "it weighs one kilogram-weight" is a mouthful A working physics student also "masses" objects. Also, with standard "little g" earth gravity, mass and weight are equal. Nice how that works, isn't it! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hatchling Cockatrice Alorael at Large Posted April 28, 2012 Share Posted April 28, 2012 Mass and weight are not equal; they don't use the same units. And we don't convert from kilogram masses to pound weights; the usual interconversion is pound-mass and pound-force or kilogram-mass and kilogram-force, and sometimes slugs to pound-force. In practice, the units have the same name because mass is measured by weight, not by inertia, on Earth. And who cares about weight but engineers? —Alorael, who also gives Actaeon congratulations and all that. Base 12 would be a superior unit: for just the creation of two more digits, you'd get a base factorable by 2, 3, 4, and 6 instead of just 2 and 10. That's twice as many factors! And thirds and quarters are slightly more common than fifths, so they're also better factors. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Well-Actually War Trall A less presumptuous name. Posted April 28, 2012 Share Posted April 28, 2012 You're right that they're not the same - that was a false piece of information that somehow came back up in my mind. However, we do use conversions from weight to mass whenever we go from pounds to kilograms. Pounds to newtons or slugs to kilograms stay within the same type of measure. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Easygoing Eyebeast Trenton. Posted April 28, 2012 Share Posted April 28, 2012 Puh, no one congratulated me at 100, 500, 1000, or 1500! Anywho, since we are talking about numbers, I might as well add my part. 3.14159265358979323846264338 3279502884197169399375105820 9749445923078164062862089986 280348253421170679 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Well-Actually War Trall Actaeon Posted April 28, 2012 Author Share Posted April 28, 2012 People don't generally seek you out for congratulations, Trenton. You have to throw yourself in front of the Spiderbus yelling "1500!". You were halfway there. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Easygoing Eyebeast Trenton. Posted April 28, 2012 Share Posted April 28, 2012 1557 POSTS! YAY ME! Yeah, doesn't have the same ring to it >.> I'll try again at 3000 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hatchling Cockatrice Alorael at Large Posted April 28, 2012 Share Posted April 28, 2012 Originally Posted By: Master1 You're right that they're not the same - that was a false piece of information that somehow came back up in my mind. However, we do use conversions from weight to mass whenever we go from pounds to kilograms. Pounds to newtons or slugs to kilograms stay within the same type of measure. Actually, the pound is also a unit of mass, and the kilogram, as an abbreviation of kilogram-force, can be a measure of force (1 kilo-force is 9.8 Newtons, obviously). Any time mass comes up, it's overwhelmingly likely to be in circumstances using metric units, so you're very unlikely to ever have cause to convert to or from slugs. —Alorael, who thinks it's fine for imperial units not to really distinguish between mass and weight. That's again only going to be an issue in applications where everyone's going to use metric. (NASA, take note.) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Magnificent Ornk Student of Trinity Posted April 28, 2012 Share Posted April 28, 2012 Bah to all this. The only real units are the so-called Planck units, though if they're really what they seem to be, it might be accurate to call them God's units. Alternatively we could take the sufficiency of the Planck units to imply that there are no units, really. Everything is really just pure, dimensionless numbers. The Planck units would then merely represent the fact that we humans have perversely chosen to think of length, duration, energy, and mass as qualitatively different things. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hatchling Cockatrice Mea Tulpa Posted April 28, 2012 Share Posted April 28, 2012 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Easygoing Eyebeast The Mystic Posted April 29, 2012 Share Posted April 29, 2012 Congrats, Actaeon! Originally Posted By: Actaeon Rather than confine myself to an inane mailbox stuffing thread for my 1024th post, I'd rather take this opportunity to bring up the arbitrary nature of most numerical and measuring systems. Good thinking, since I couldn't find any good images for "1024." Therefore, I will celebrate by pointing out that 1024 in binary is 1000000000. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Well-Actually War Trall Actaeon Posted April 29, 2012 Author Share Posted April 29, 2012 I had the same trouble. Google Images couldn't seem to understand I wasn't specifying the pixel dimensions. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Easygoing Eyebeast The Mystic Posted April 29, 2012 Share Posted April 29, 2012 Yeah, that's the trouble I had. Nearly all the images that came up measured either 1024x786 or 1280x1024. On a hunch, I did the same search on 2048 and 4096, in case you were planning another such thread when you hit those milestones; the results were basically the same, just with different image dimensions. EDIT: I tried again, this time searching for "number 1024." Not much, but it's better than nothing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Well-Actually War Trall Harehunter Posted May 2, 2012 Share Posted May 2, 2012 I have always been partial to Avogadro's number for some reason. What's in a mole anyway? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Well-Actually War Trall Actaeon Posted May 2, 2012 Author Share Posted May 2, 2012 It's obviously time to build a new system using e, pi, and the golden ratio. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Well-Actually War Trall Harehunter Posted May 2, 2012 Share Posted May 2, 2012 I smell the bait, but this bunny ain't biting, as much as he is tempted. But thanks anyway. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rotghroth Rhapsody Kreador Posted May 2, 2012 Share Posted May 2, 2012 Originally Posted By: Harehunter I have always been partial to Avogadro's number for some reason. What's in a mole anyway? A WHOOOOOOLE lotta lumps. Oh, wait, that'd be a puma. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rotghroth Rhapsody Soul of Wit Posted May 3, 2012 Share Posted May 3, 2012 Two thoughts on numbers: 1. The US has not officially adopted SI (the metric system.) 2. Time is generally not measured using SI. The second has been standardized, but there's not a whole lot of kiloseconds being referenced (outside the field of astrophysics.) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hatchling Cockatrice Alorael at Large Posted May 3, 2012 Share Posted May 3, 2012 1. No, but all scientific work is carried out in SI units, and all non-metric units are now defined in terms of SI units. 2. While they don't use standard base-10 prefixes, the minute, hour, and day are officially accepted SI units. They're whole number multiples, and everyone's far more familiar with those than with kiloseconds, so it works out. —Alorael, who can't tell you what's in a mole. He can only tell you that there's a lot of it. Alternately, the usual mammalian viscera, probably including what it recently ate. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Easygoing Eyebeast Dantius Posted May 3, 2012 Share Posted May 3, 2012 Originally Posted By: Iconoplasia —Alorael, who can't tell you what's in a mole. He can only tell you that there's a lot of it. Alternately, the usual mammalian viscera, probably including what it recently ate. SIX POINT OH TWO TWO TIMES TEN TO THE TWENTY THIRD! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Well-Actually War Trall Harehunter Posted May 3, 2012 Share Posted May 3, 2012 I love that number! What is it's significance? How many molecules of O2 occupy 22.41 Liters at STP? How many molecules of H2? CO2? And not only gases, but solids and liquids. How many Carbon atoms in a 12gram chunk of graphite? Well, it's a mole on hand or 6.02x10*23 on the other. It's eC as Pi. (Actaeon, this one's for you.) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hatchling Cockatrice Lilith Posted May 3, 2012 Share Posted May 3, 2012 Originally Posted By: Harehunter How many Carbon atoms in a 12gram chunk of graphite? it's the isotope that matters, not the allotrope Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Well-Actually War Trall Harehunter Posted May 3, 2012 Share Posted May 3, 2012 Whether it is a less dense, more voluminous mass of graphite or a more dense, less voluminous gem of diamond, 12grams is still 1 mole. This is of course if you have removed all the Carbon 14 out of the sample. But the proportion of C14 to ordinary C12, it is not significant for most practical purposes. Remember, diamonds are forever, but graphite is slippery stuff. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hatchling Cockatrice Lilith Posted May 3, 2012 Share Posted May 3, 2012 Originally Posted By: Harehunter Whether it is a less dense, more voluminous mass of graphite or a more dense, less voluminous gem of diamond, 12grams is still 1 mole. This is of course if you have removed all the Carbon 14 out of the sample. that's what i said Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Well-Actually War Trall Harehunter Posted May 3, 2012 Share Posted May 3, 2012 Just call me Diamond Head. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Magnificent Ornk Student of Trinity Posted May 3, 2012 Share Posted May 3, 2012 It's a little known fact that Albert Einstein's doctoral thesis was about Avogadro's number. He found several different ways of determining it, based on radically different phenomena, and thereby supported the theory that matter was really made out of molecules. At the time of his writing, this was actually in some doubt; it was fairly widely considered that molecules were simply theoretical fictions that made certain calculations easier. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Garrulous Glaahk ShieTar Posted May 3, 2012 Share Posted May 3, 2012 Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity At the time of his writing, this was actually in some doubt; it was fairly widely considered that molecules were simply theoretical fictions that made certain calculations easier. Are you sure about "fairly widely"? I always thought that the atomic theory was already mostly accepted due to the experimental works of Brown (on molecular motions) and Loschmidt (specifically his measurements on the size of molecules of air). Maybe some biograph mixed up the atomic theory with the quantum theory of electromagnetic energy, as photons were indeed considered theoretical constructs for a while, even by Planck and Einstein themselves. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hatchling Cockatrice Randomizer Posted May 3, 2012 Share Posted May 3, 2012 How atoms and molecules were structured was still in developement at the time. Just determining that electrons were in a cloud around a very small nucleus was only recently proven by Rutherford. Bohr's atomic theory was still years away. Chemistry gave ratios and formulas for molecules, but what they really were would take a bit longer. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Magnificent Ornk Student of Trinity Posted May 3, 2012 Share Posted May 3, 2012 Nah, it's shocking but true. My source is the acclaimed biography of Einstein by Abraham Pais, "Subtle is the Lord ...“, chapter 5 ("The Reality of Molecules"), which is about Einstein's doctoral work. Pais's biography stands out because Pais both knew Einstein personally for many years and was himself a fine theoretical physicist. So the book is full of equations and detailed references. At the end of the 19th century, a substantial fraction of physicists and chemists thought molecules were artificial notions. Molecular theory was ascendant, but had not yet clinched the argument. The continuous field theories of electrodynamics, hydrodynamics, thermodynamics and gravity seemed pretty persuasive, in that they were tremendously effective without making any reference to particles at all. Ironically, it is the same continuous picture that persists today within Einstein's greatest achievement, the general theory of relativity. In particular, the fact that Brownian motion has directly to do with molecules was one of Einstein's contributions. It's not as simple as it seems, since the individual zigs and zags of the pollen grains are not simply individual molecule impacts, but rather statistical excursions in the steady storm of many constant impacts. How atoms and molecules are structured was then indeed a further chapter. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Well-Actually War Trall Harehunter Posted May 4, 2012 Share Posted May 4, 2012 Good stuff SoT. You are one my most favorite reads. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rotghroth Rhapsody Kreador Posted May 4, 2012 Share Posted May 4, 2012 One of my favorite old book discoveries was an 1898 college physics text, the last third of which was on "ether dynamics". Physicist and historians of science will clearly know the irony of the date of publication. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Well-Actually War Trall Actaeon Posted May 4, 2012 Author Share Posted May 4, 2012 Perhaps you can enlighten those (few) of us who lean more toward the natural sciences? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rotghroth Rhapsody Kreador Posted May 4, 2012 Share Posted May 4, 2012 Originally Posted By: Actaeon Perhaps you can enlighten those (few) of us who lean more toward the natural sciences? Actually, looking back to find links it appears my brain, many years ago, conflated a number of things together. I thought 1898 was the year that the results of the Michelson-Morley experiments to show the effects of the Ether on the speed of light were published--experiments which actually showed there was no such effect thus disproving the theory of ether dynamics. It was actually some years before that, but as nothing had yet replaced it, that's what was still being taught. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Well-Actually War Trall Harehunter Posted May 4, 2012 Share Posted May 4, 2012 Here is another favorite number of mine: C16H10 There is a tale to tell regarding this number which may explain a little bit of how my brain got twisted around into the sad state it is. Identify the compound and provide two proofs. Enjoy And for those who enjoy them, I was given a present that I would like to share with you. Beware the horrid habit held high in HareHunter's Hideaway. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Well-Actually War Trall Harehunter Posted May 6, 2012 Share Posted May 6, 2012 The chemical formula of a compound known as Pyrene. It is a brown crystalline substance that melts at some temperature I don't remember, burns with a smoky flame, and is basically non-reactive. So what is it's significance to this chemistry major? This was an assignment in Organic Qualitative Analysis. It was my ?"reward"? for having done so exceedingly well with the previous unknown, methyl-salicylate. I identified the substance immediately when I opened the bottle. (You probably know why.) I completed the analysis, with the requisite two proofs in about an hour, and handed in my paper. MISTAKE! I should have taken more time. Now I get this next sample. I get the melting point, but there are other compounds with similar melting points. I need to test for a functional group; amine, alcohol, acid, ... something. LOOK AT THIS PIECE OF JUNK! There's nothing there! And try, just try, to make a derivative of it; NOTHING. I finally got an InfraRed spectrograph of this crappy compound, using up half the sample just in order to get that (the KBr mix had to be just so, not too little not too much, not too thick but thick enough so it hold together). Got a book of spectrographs, found an exact match, voila I have one proof. But I need another proof. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance produced no singlets, no doublets, no triplets, just one big craplet. Useless. With no way to make a derivative, WHAT NOW?. After about a week with this stupid stuff, it finally hit me, how to arrive at a second proof. I would start with theory that the IR was right, and if so, then all other tests should prove negative. If one test proved positive, then the compound was not pyrene, but if all tests proved negative, then that would be the expected behavior of pyrene. Of course every test proved negative, therefore the sum of the negatives was proof positive of the nature of the compound. Moral of the story, oftentimes the proof can be easily found by what you can see, but sometimes it is not what you see, but what you don't see. Proving a negative is more difficult, because you have to test every possibility in order to eliminate it. But when you are done, what you have left, after all else is dis-proved, must be the proof of your theory. I got a B, but only because I had to use the whole sample to arrive at this conclusion. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hatchling Cockatrice Lilith Posted May 6, 2012 Share Posted May 6, 2012 incidentally there's an isomer of pyrene known as fluoranthene that also has no interesting functional groups, although it has a significantly lower melting point Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Well-Actually War Trall Harehunter Posted May 6, 2012 Share Posted May 6, 2012 Now THAT is what I call a cute compound. Lilith, you have just made my day. Thanks. Edit: Too bad that it, as well a most aromatics, are carcinogens. Bad compound. Edit2: That cyclopentane in the middle doesn't look very happy. It could easily destabilize the whole arrangement, couldn't it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rotghroth Rhapsody Soul of Wit Posted May 6, 2012 Share Posted May 6, 2012 Originally Posted By: Dispatches from the Back 1. No, but all scientific work is carried out in SI units, and all non-metric units are now defined in terms of SI units. 2. While they don't use standard base-10 prefixes, the minute, hour, and day are officially accepted SI units. They're whole number multiples, and everyone's far more familiar with those than with kiloseconds, so it works out. —Alorael, who can't tell you what's in a mole. He can only tell you that there's a lot of it. Alternately, the usual mammalian viscera, probably including what it recently ate. I want a kilosecond clock, I tell you. And none of this either. As for what's in a mole, everybody knows that it's this. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Well-Actually War Trall Harehunter Posted May 6, 2012 Share Posted May 6, 2012 I was wondering if anyone would catch that one. FOTFLOL My sides hurt. Nice retort, but I usually prefer erlenmeyers. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Magnificent Ornk Student of Trinity Posted May 6, 2012 Share Posted May 6, 2012 Ether dynamics survived Michelson-Morley, and even survives to this day among crackpots. People figured that we just needed to figure some way for the ether to be dragged along with the earth as it moves. After a while it became clear that there was no simple way to make an ether theory that would really be consistent with all observations, but then there were still people willing to fuss over complicated ether theories. The way it seems to me now, the issue about the ether was really just that electromagnetism is awfully weird. In particular, electromagnetic induction kind of freaks me out whenever I have to teach about it. I can never help thinking that it's an engine bug that slipped through the universe's beta testing, and that God might put out a patch to nerf electric motors any day now. I think all those 19th century ether theorists were really just trying to make sense of weird electrodynamics by relating it to something more familiar, namely stress and strain and sound waves in rigid materials. There were always doubts voiced about taking the ether really seriously, since there was never a shred of direct evidence for it, and its role as a mental crutch was always all too clear. With Einstein's relativity, now, electromagnetic induction fits into an elegant geometrical pattern in four dimensions. Seeing that pattern seems to sooth our confusion about electromagnetic induction. At least it reassures me that the patch to nerf motors may not be imminent after all. So the crutch has been discarded. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Well-Actually War Trall Harehunter Posted May 13, 2012 Share Posted May 13, 2012 Here's one for you. ASCII 07x. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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