Monday, October 30, 2006
Metrics and Statute Measures 101
When I mentioned the metric system the other day I didn’t think to mention the curious relationship the US has with metrics. Not that many Americans, and I imagine even fewer foreigners, know of this odd situation. For example, one of the very first things the first Congress of the United States ever did was to legalize the metric system for trade in this country. That means that, believe it or not, the US of A was the first country outside of France to adopt what was then the brand new system of measurements. Obviously, we’ve never since done anything serious to eliminate the traditional system, but that’s not the curious part of our relationship with the SI, as it’s known.
The really curious fact about our system of weights and measures is that we are actually linked quite closely to the metric system. For example, why do we use “statute miles” as opposed to the old British “Imperial Miles?” Partly, just to show that we’re different from the old country, I suppose, but why is a statute mile the length that it is? If you’ve read Dan Brown’s book The DaVinci Code, then you know about something called the “Divine Ratio.” Amazingly, Mr. Brown didn’t make that part up. In the eighteenth century there were a number of people who subscribed to a system of belief called “rational deism.” That is, they believed that they could rationally deduce the nature of the creator of the universe, and they set about doing just that with, as JFK would have said, great vigor. The divine ratio, in case you missed the book, is the ratio of your total height to the height of your navel off of the ground. No kidding. That ratio does appear several places in nature, including the ratio between various segments of a five-pointed star (see any of those in the United States lately?) The meter has been redefined slightly since those days, but as originally written, the statute mile was almost exactly the divine ratio greater than the kilometer. Honest to Franklin, that’s why our mile is the length that it is. It’s not so perfect any more, because, as I said, the meter has undergone enough revision to throw it off slightly, but it’s still close to the divine ratio.
So that’s the way our distance measures connect to SI, but what about things like quarts and gallons? The answer lies in another “special” number for those rational framers of our country. That number is five. Five appears quite a bit in nature. There are, for example, five basic extensions to most animal bodies, certainly to humans (legs, arms, head.) If you think creatively about the number five you can relate it to absolutely anything, and those gentlemen were very creative in their thinking. So, five milliliters is declared by statute to equal one standard teaspoon. Yep, the English have teaspoons, as do we. But in England it’s a device to stir a hot beverage with. In the USA it’s five milliliters (ml), plus it can be just a spoon to stir tea, but a teaspoon does not necessarily hold a Teaspoon, if you see what I mean. There’s the special connection between our volume and weight and the SI. Three teaspoons makes a tablespoon, by law. That’s fifteen ml per tablespoon, then. Two tablespoons make one fluid ounce, or 30 ml per fluid ounce. Check it if you have any doubt; it’s true. Eight ounces make a cup, or 240 ml; 2 cups make a pint, or 480 ml, 2 pints make a quart, or 960 ml, and four quarts make a gallon, or 3840 ml, which you know, since SI is easy to convert, is 3.84 liters. And what about weight? One fluid ounce of pure water at 39 degrees Fahrenheit weighs one ounce. Sixteen ounces to the pound, two thousand pounds to the ton, but all based on the number five, as in five milliliters per teaspoon. That gives you something to think about the next time you bake a cake, doesn’t it?
I can’t speculate on the founders’ reasons for using these ratios. But, maybe there is something to it. After all, these special ratios, 5:1 and 1.618:1, are holding up long after everyone else on the planet has embraced meters, liters, and hectares. On the other hand, so is C=5/9(F-32), which is, I think, pretty much a coincidental ratio, and certainly one with which the founding fathers were unfamiliar. That fact makes it seem more likely that we just would rather not bother to figure out a new way of doing things. And from that, I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.
(That formula is the method for converting temperature in Fahrenheit to Celsius.)
The really curious fact about our system of weights and measures is that we are actually linked quite closely to the metric system. For example, why do we use “statute miles” as opposed to the old British “Imperial Miles?” Partly, just to show that we’re different from the old country, I suppose, but why is a statute mile the length that it is? If you’ve read Dan Brown’s book The DaVinci Code, then you know about something called the “Divine Ratio.” Amazingly, Mr. Brown didn’t make that part up. In the eighteenth century there were a number of people who subscribed to a system of belief called “rational deism.” That is, they believed that they could rationally deduce the nature of the creator of the universe, and they set about doing just that with, as JFK would have said, great vigor. The divine ratio, in case you missed the book, is the ratio of your total height to the height of your navel off of the ground. No kidding. That ratio does appear several places in nature, including the ratio between various segments of a five-pointed star (see any of those in the United States lately?) The meter has been redefined slightly since those days, but as originally written, the statute mile was almost exactly the divine ratio greater than the kilometer. Honest to Franklin, that’s why our mile is the length that it is. It’s not so perfect any more, because, as I said, the meter has undergone enough revision to throw it off slightly, but it’s still close to the divine ratio.
So that’s the way our distance measures connect to SI, but what about things like quarts and gallons? The answer lies in another “special” number for those rational framers of our country. That number is five. Five appears quite a bit in nature. There are, for example, five basic extensions to most animal bodies, certainly to humans (legs, arms, head.) If you think creatively about the number five you can relate it to absolutely anything, and those gentlemen were very creative in their thinking. So, five milliliters is declared by statute to equal one standard teaspoon. Yep, the English have teaspoons, as do we. But in England it’s a device to stir a hot beverage with. In the USA it’s five milliliters (ml), plus it can be just a spoon to stir tea, but a teaspoon does not necessarily hold a Teaspoon, if you see what I mean. There’s the special connection between our volume and weight and the SI. Three teaspoons makes a tablespoon, by law. That’s fifteen ml per tablespoon, then. Two tablespoons make one fluid ounce, or 30 ml per fluid ounce. Check it if you have any doubt; it’s true. Eight ounces make a cup, or 240 ml; 2 cups make a pint, or 480 ml, 2 pints make a quart, or 960 ml, and four quarts make a gallon, or 3840 ml, which you know, since SI is easy to convert, is 3.84 liters. And what about weight? One fluid ounce of pure water at 39 degrees Fahrenheit weighs one ounce. Sixteen ounces to the pound, two thousand pounds to the ton, but all based on the number five, as in five milliliters per teaspoon. That gives you something to think about the next time you bake a cake, doesn’t it?
I can’t speculate on the founders’ reasons for using these ratios. But, maybe there is something to it. After all, these special ratios, 5:1 and 1.618:1, are holding up long after everyone else on the planet has embraced meters, liters, and hectares. On the other hand, so is C=5/9(F-32), which is, I think, pretty much a coincidental ratio, and certainly one with which the founding fathers were unfamiliar. That fact makes it seem more likely that we just would rather not bother to figure out a new way of doing things. And from that, I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.
(That formula is the method for converting temperature in Fahrenheit to Celsius.)
Sunday, October 29, 2006
Back to the Marathon at Last
So, to recap the story so far: I started training to run the New Las Vegas Marathon last June 4th. We did a 3-mile “fun run” that almost killed me, I swear. Then a week or so later I discovered that my shoes were inadequate due to my pronation, so I limped for weeks, keeping to the right side of the road, as I ran, or tried to run, in my nice new correcting shoes but still had a very sore knee. Then I got over that, and actually started running better, but I wasn’t watching my shoes and their wear and what do you know, I limped for another four weeks while I recovered from the beating my body was taking after the midsoles wore out completely. It was the opposite side, so it wasn’t so bad, but I did get tired of riding an exercise bike when what I like to do is run. Since then everything’s been fine with running (I bought new shoes just the other day – I do learn eventually, because this time nothing is injured, I just checked the shoes.) I did have a “stupid related injury” (see my previous post) but running never really bothered it, although getting overheated did. Now that it’s fifty degrees Fahrenheit around here in the morning, that’s not an issue.
Yesterday I ran a 10K, or 6.2 miles. I got a humor article out of it, called Metricks, which you can read by clicking on the name. Actually, I sort of wish my fellow Americans would just get over it and adopt the metric system, since the whole world outside our borders has already done that. I mean, we’re behind Canada? Yoiks! Anyway, I don’t want mail due to the humor article. It’s a joke, okay, an exaggeration, an attempt to make people smile. I like meters, I really do. (The trouble is, I’ve got feet, not meters, but that’s another post entirely.) The 10K was sort of fun, but I took off at the blistering pace (for me) of 10:31 per mile. That is, when I passed the 1 mile marker, my watch said 10:31. I knew I was dead where I ran if I didn’t slow down, and my final pace, of 11:14, makes it possible to calculate my pace for the 5.2 miles after that first mile, which it turns out is 12:06, or just about my normal pace in my old age, which is what I was trying to do, so that’s good. It does make me think that perhaps I can start working on speed, after I finish my first marathon I mean, and maybe get down to 11:30 or maybe even less. We’ll see, but the 10K was sort of funny. Five miles along, there were people shouting encouragement like “you’re almost there, you can make it!” I ran eighteen miles last Sunday, so while I waved and thanked them, I was thinking that I was pretty sure I was going to finish the measly six-point-two miles okay, thank you. I did, too, even sprinting across the finish line. I plan to sprint across the finish line at the marathon, too. I always sprint across the finish line. Today we did a leisurely sixteen miles, and I really felt that 10K. I ran slow on purpose, but still it was a great relief to get back to a banana and big old Gator Ade (my favorite beverage now.) Next week twenty miles. They’re going to have massage therapists at the end. That may be what keeps me going.
So, that’s the story, but I thought I might ramble a bit and explain what I like about running. I started running when I was 31, mostly so I could lose some extra weight I’d put on in graduate school. It worked, too, as I started running 10Ks competitively, and the training dropped about fifty pounds off of me, rendering me skinny as a rail, frankly, at as little as 170 pounds at one point. I couldn’t eat enough food, so I eased up on my training. It’s a good thing, as it turns out, that I didn’t try marathoning, because endurance training is not a good way to lose weight. I’ve redistributed quite a bit of weight this year, although not all of it, and lost about ten pounds. I’m a quite health 220 or so. If my doctor is crass enough to say I’m too heavy, I’ll just kick his wall down, which I’m pretty sure I could do. Still, I can wear standard jeans, and I don’t need those “extra inch” things from Dockers. I can wear all of my clothes without strain, so that’s an improvement, but weight loss per se isn’t in the cards. What I’ve noticed, running around the town, is that life is a lot more of a marathon than a sprint. When my doctor threatened me with another half-century, I realized that there was a long way to go yet, so a marathon seems a fitting way to train for the rest of my life. I may not be skinny, but I’ve lost a lot of grey hair (it reverted to dark brown, except for about half of my beard.) Also I really don’t start breathing hard for, well, anything any more. Apparently my vital capacity has ramped up a bit. I’d like to find out how my cholesterol is doing these days, as well. So that’s one reason I like to run: it keeps me younger, almost literally.
But more than that, running, like riding a motorcycle, puts you out into the world. It’s not like looking at the world as you go by, it’s being in it, a part of it, hearing the birds and insects, watching the sun rise, watching the mists above the lake in the early morning (yes, we have a lake, a great-big lake, if you must know), listening to the sounds of footfall (mine and other peoples’) and also just experiencing the breeze and the rush of blood through my veins. It’s also a good time to think. Also I like to try to run better: to swing my arms straighter, not to slide into my steps (most people do, but I keep trying to break myself of the habit), to practice good breathing, good balance, and to climb and descend hills safely and easily. Mostly it all works.
Some things I don’t do, and don’t even understand include running with headphones on blocking out the experience of the run. I’ve never been bored running, so I just don’t see any need to distract myself with music. I have music playing now, and it’s good to have, but if I played it in my ears while I was running I’d miss the experience I describe above. Also, if you’re in traffic, it seems to me you’re a lot better off hearing the cars coming. Call me crazy if you will, but I just don’t think a confrontation between me and even the smallest mini car would come out in my favor. Also I see people running on sidewalks and charging across concrete plazas and such. I run across concrete very slowly and gingerly. That’s because the stuff is very hard, as in durable, with no give to it at all. Most natural rock could take lessons in being unyielding from concrete. Running on concrete is asking for spiral fractures in your tibiae, or worse. No music, no concrete, just me and a reasonably soft path, as long as I can keep running. And, needless to say any more, I make sure I’ve got good shoes on when I step out.
Well, that’s why I like to run, and there’s plenty of opportunity. I found out today that our club president likes to keep the club together for the San Diego marathon in early June. That’s great for me, because I really like a reason to visit San Diego. (If you’ve never been there, think of near perfect weather 24/7/365, with a beach. That’s San Diego.) Since I like to run, and since it seems to be good for me, I think I’ll just run a couple of marathons per year for a while. What the heck, there are worse habits.
I’m going to try to finish a novel in November (see below) but I’ll try to post something every weekend as well. What the heck, once you start writing, you just don’t stop. It’s sort of like running a marathon, come to think of it.
Labels: Marathon
Late, but Still Alive
So, sorry about my silence lately. What happened is that I started a class from Denver University, the last in a series leading to a certificate in Project Management. That’s great for me, but not for doing anything else. It will end in a few weeks, which will help, but also I had trouble at the beginning when the registrar messed up my registration process and I was a week behind out of the gate. Okay, that’s over. I’m going to post a real post right now. Thanks for reading.
Steve
Steve
National Novel Writing Month
Did you know that November is National Novel Writing Month? Neither did I until a few days ago. (This is a writing blog, amongst other things, remember?) I’ve joined the effort, as I’ve got a screenplay half novelized and I figure this is a good way to get it all novelized. It’s got a good hook: a group of people are actually paid to go out into rush hour traffic and make life miserable for the rest of us. Paid, that is, by the brewers, distilleries, pharmaceutical makers, and psychologists. There’s a love story in it, too.
But, my real point is to encourage anyone who has always wanted to write to check out National Novel Writing Month, perhaps by clicking here. You never know, there’s a new novel sold every day, and maybe it could be yours. Then someday schools will force students to memorize your words of wisdom. You could do worse . . .
But, my real point is to encourage anyone who has always wanted to write to check out National Novel Writing Month, perhaps by clicking here. You never know, there’s a new novel sold every day, and maybe it could be yours. Then someday schools will force students to memorize your words of wisdom. You could do worse . . .
Labels: Writing
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Scandal, Anyone?
Sometimes I just love a good scandal. Like now, for instance. It isn’t the nature of the original crimes really, because there are poor benighted creeps all over, but the nature of those caught up in the trouble that the scandal brings that gives me the grins. First things first:
The scandal isn’t that Foley solicited sex with young pages, and this is not equivalent to what Clinton and Monica did even if it were. Monica was an adult at the time, and she went after Willie not the other way around. What goes on between consenting adults is the business of those consenting adults, and if Hillary is willing to forgive him, I can’t do less. In fact, I never cared in the first place. Foley was soliciting sex with minors, and the illegality of that act has nothing to do with it being homosexual solicitation, or even just that it’s SEX, which for all the fuss some people make you’d think was some horrid perversion in and of itself. Heck, anyone who’s being honest will tell you that sex is enjoyable. I have no idea what anyone sees in a religious notion that sex per se is evil, but quite a few people seem to subscribe to that notion. I don’t recall any biblical injunctions to that effect, and I’m told the Koran doesn’t condemn sexual activity either, but plenty of people seem to think one or the other or both of those books do just that. Okay, they’re wrong, but as I said, that’s not the cause of the scandal anyway.
The scandal is the alleged cover-up of the solicitous e-mails by members of the House of Representatives. These are members who belong to, or have been supported by, a group of people claiming high moral authority based on their interpretation of biblical text, claiming that the problems of America are mostly caused by moral failings within our society. Okay, Bill Clinton, the evilest of evil Liberals according to his detractors, had sex with an adult woman in his office. He was married to a different woman at the time, so that’s sort of reprehensible. However, Foley solicited sex with minor males using Government owned computer equipment. Is that better or worse? You’ve got solicitation, homosexuality (not a sin to me, but to those to whom I’m referring it is), and theft by unauthorized use of Government property. Okay, that’s the news, so you decide.
I’m grinning because the holier-than-thou crowd has been caught with its pants around its ankles, so to speak, and now their party, the former Republicans lately turned lackeys to their backers, is in real danger of losing control of congress. Both houses. It isn’t the potential for Democrat victory, honest it isn’t. I just like seeing the self-righteous reaping the rewards of their blindness to their own faults. It gives me a sort of warm, fuzzy feeling, maybe like the one Foley gets thinking about young male pages.
Or, maybe not. I wouldn’t know, really.
Labels: Politics
Monday, October 02, 2006
Marathon Man Part, uh, Whichever
Yes, I’m still running most days. Not today, because it was Monday and besides I caught a cold, but tomorrow I plan to be out on the streets at 5AM tripping fantastically around the neighborhood under the stars. Summer ends in the Mojave, and mornings are now in the sixties or even cooler, which is great running weather. The only bad thing this week was that Sunday morning was warm and humid and I started out fast, thus causing my stupid related injury (see below) to cramp up so badly that I bummed a ride back to the starting point, which is where my car was parked. It hurt until I got it under a cold shower (they do have multiple uses after all) since when it isn’t much achier than all of me is, owing to a head cold.
This Thursday I’ve got to do seventeen miles without a group for support, and that all because I’m planning to travel to Ft. Worth over the weekend to visit my brother and his wife on their 50th anniversary. The bad thing about that is that I remember their wedding, although I’m sure it’s acquired memories, right?
Other news is that I paid somebody for notes on one of my scripts. I haven’t had the nerve to read them yet. It’s hell to find out what you’ve done wrong, you know. But, maybe I can use them, fix the thing, and make a milli . . . few thousand dollars selling it. Good luck to me, eh?
This Thursday I’ve got to do seventeen miles without a group for support, and that all because I’m planning to travel to Ft. Worth over the weekend to visit my brother and his wife on their 50th anniversary. The bad thing about that is that I remember their wedding, although I’m sure it’s acquired memories, right?
Other news is that I paid somebody for notes on one of my scripts. I haven’t had the nerve to read them yet. It’s hell to find out what you’ve done wrong, you know. But, maybe I can use them, fix the thing, and make a milli . . . few thousand dollars selling it. Good luck to me, eh?
Labels: Marathon
The Old Evil
Thanks to the diligence of our Conservative Commentator Corps, or CCC, we now know exactly why the World Trade Center was attacked on 9/11/01. It’s the same reason, and no surprise, that the Internet bubble burst, a terrible tsunami wiped out so much shoreline of Southeast Asia, and of course why the entirely justified “curse of the Bambino” finally failed for the Red Sox. In a simple phrase, it is all Clinton’s fault. As I said, this is clearly no surprise, as everyone knows that Clinton is responsible for most of the woes of the twentieth century, oops, I mean the twenty-first century of course. The Corps clearly has done an excellent job of educating us in the many ways Mr. Clinton let us down.
For example, under Clinton the price of gasoline hit, in real money, the lowest point it will in all likelihood ever see again. In the currency of the time, that was about 89 cents per gallon. In the currency of 1920, that was about four cents per gallon, which when you consider the 34 cents tax is really quite an accomplishment. This, clearly, was an untenable situation wherein Ken Lay could barely afford extra caviar with the small profits he was receiving from his ample supply of stocks. Now, as the CCC points out, profits are up, and things are rosy again for the oil magnates of the Ewe Ess Aey.
Another thing Clinton did was somehow prevent us from knowing just how dangerous a world we’re living in. Yes, some yahoo tried to blow up the World Trade Center, but he failed, and he’s still in jail for his trouble. Clinton, not realizing the great potential of an Iraq invasion, was stupidly content to merely throw a few missiles at Saddam, scarcely putting any American in harms way at all. So, when disaster did hit, we were all shocked, shocked to find that sort of thing going on here of all places. The result of all this security and prosperity was, of course, a national obsession with the president’s sex life, including details that the average porn star would just as soon keep to himself. That travesty was all caused, of course, by Clinton’s simple-minded insistence on not screwing up his courage and charging forth like the man he isn’t to overwhelm the middle east with the manly and virile strength of this, the only country in the world with God truly, firmly, on its side.
Now, of course, we are reminded every day of just how dangerous the world really is. Did you know that, every single night, thousands and thousands of people meet their death right in the supposed safety of their own beds? No, I’ll bet you didn’t, and that, too, is all the fault of Mr. Clinton. But this important daily reminder of just how unsafe we are without our benevolent leaders to protect us is in grave danger as I write. Across the country the evil party, the one whose very symbol is an ass, is mobilizing to overthrow the coalition of good guys who have brought us to this blissful state of corporate profit and personal unease. Remember, these people are those same ones who nominated Clinton in the first place, and the same ones who have manipulated two elections and countless polls that, after their evil ministrations, have shown Clinton not only a clear election winner, but popular with about two-thirds of the people. Clearly, that can not be the truth, because we all know that the CCC would never deceive us. Why, those evil ones are so clever that the next thing you know they’ll be claiming that Al Gore never said he invented the Internet, that Reagan wasn’t the one responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union, and even that the Pope isn’t really infallible.
I mean, really, have you ever heard such tripe?
Labels: Politics
