Mastodawn

Dave Wise 1d ago

Devine Lu Linvega

We've had this long furling tape from Japan for the longest time, for years!! thinking it was in inches. Causing us lots of mistakes and fuck ups, the whole time we thought it was our own miscalculations, that we must have messed up in converting it to metric or something.

1) The unit on the tape is in tenth of a foot.
2) That's almost exactly 3cm, BUT NOT QUITE.
3) The ruler says FEET, but then breaks it down in 3cm segments each divided in tenth of a tenth of foot.

WHAT THE FUCK RULER

@neauoire what a chaotic thing to put into the world

rostiger Apr 20

@neauoire One ruler to mess with them all.

Andy Alderwick Apr 20

@neauoire Perfectly cromulent semi-SI units. Decifeet, centifeet, kilofeet

Devine Lu Linvega Apr 20

@alderwick here I was hating on the fact that the word "hexadecimal" mixes up latin and greek roots.

Tobias 🌒🌕🌘Apr 20

@neauoire @alderwick ponder the irony of the word 'polyamory' for a brief moment.

@catdad @neauoire @alderwick Should be polyphilia.

@woe2you @catdad @neauoire @alderwick "Automobile" could have been a cute "ipsokinete".

mirabilos🐈‍⬛Apr 21

@alderwick @neauoire @woe2you @catdad but -phil has a different connotation (attraction, such as water or fat) than amour (romantic love)

Taz the pika Apr 21

@woe2you @catdad @neauoire @alderwick I'd prefer multiamory.

@OchotonidKnight @catdad @neauoire @alderwick Good shout. I think "multicule" is the only way of rescuing that one, so Latin all the way.

Steve Deutsch 20h ago

@neauoire @alderwick There’s a lot, e.g. heterosexual, homosexual, and automobile.

Sami Lehtinen Apr 21

@alderwick @neauoire Yeah, usually when I get annoyed by units, I start to use hectobits with them. So, 100 hbits, enjoy!

Y⃒̸̷̝̜̙ͥͥͥngmar Apr 20

@neauoire Lol, successful sabotage, well done Japan! 👍

Those are metric inches. Obviously.

cerement Apr 20

100 mm = 1 M (module)
1 metric inch = 25 mm = 0.25 M
1 metric foot = 300 mm = 3 M

used in building one of the BBC studios and in Soviet copies of US electronics

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] is that real? oh my god it is! Incredibly cursed!

Third spruce tree on the left Apr 20

If you start talking in deca-feet and milli-inches Ima bout to get angry and start throwing things.

@tezoatlipoca @ori @neauoire milli-inches is already a thing, called a "thou" and used in engineering and machining.

@tezoatlipoca @ori @neauoire 1/1000th of an inch is also sometimes called a "mil" which is a smidge confusing if you're used to a "millimeter" being called a "mil".
1/10000th of an inch is sometimes called a "tenth".
Also there's an angular unit called a "milliradian" which is 1/1000th of a radian and is also called a "mil".

@nickzoic @tezoatlipoca @ori @neauoire you'll be happy to know that passive SMD package names are often specified in hundredths of an inch

Third spruce tree on the left 1d ago

@phooky @nickzoic @ori @neauoire

"happy" - don't you have a clean room to... clean?

@phooky @tezoatlipoca @ori @neauoire yeah, although anything less than 0805 might as well be cracked pepper for all I can tell.
Are the Germans still doing beer in centiliters?

@phooky @nickzoic @tezoatlipoca @ori @neauoire Also that 0201 (inch) is 0603 (metric) and 0402 (metric) is 01005 (inch). And for extra fun 1005 (metric) is 0402 (inch).

@AMS @nickzoic @tezoatlipoca @ori @neauoire and 0603 is a common package name in both metric and imperial. THAT HAS NOT LED TO ANY PROBLEMS IN MY LIFE, WHY DO YOU ASK

Ah, yeah, 'thou', which is short for 'thou lilly-livered excuse for a unit of measurement'.

CC: @[email protected] @[email protected]

UserName Aged Badly Apr 21

@tezoatlipoca @ori @neauoire
Gah, it's obvious you're looking for the term millimiles

Bwelkington Apr 20

@neauoire wow I love it lol

Enys (Yao)Apr 20

@neauoire shaku-sun-bu approximator based on international feet, I guess? unless zhat's slightly off and actually 0.9942x ze measurement on your tri-blade ruler, which'd mean it's literally just shaku-sun-bu

Devine Lu Linvega Apr 20

@yaodema it's a german triblade, so I think that's probably actual feet. If not, our measurements have been fucked on meta levels.

Enys (Yao)Apr 20

@neauoire oh I mean your tri-blade being *actual feet* and zhis weird ruler being off by a tiny amount you can't see wizhout calipers, here. shaku are defined as 30.3cm to a foot's 30.48, after all

Devine Lu Linvega Apr 20

@yaodema I'm just here questioning everything now, I don't have enough rulers on the boat to be doubly sure of anything.

cerement Apr 20

@yaodema @neauoire

agreed, tape being from Japan and those lengths, almost definitely shaku-sun-bu

1 shaku = 0.303 m
1 shaku = 0.9942 ft = 11.9 in
1 shaku = 10 sun
1 sun = 1.193 in

(Japanese renovation videos, main unit is nominally 91 cm (3 shaku))

smells of bikes Apr 20

@cerement @yaodema @neauoire TIL "sale and verification of devices marked with non metric units... were criminalized after 1961" throughout Japan.

Gorgeous na Shock!2d ago

@smellsofbikes @cerement @yaodema @neauoire Obviously necessary to avoid Hasshaku-sama. 😔

Drew 🇵🇭2d ago

@smellsofbikes @cerement @yaodema @neauoire
As they should be.

DavidM_yeg Apr 21

That’s fascinating, but don’t leave me hanging: how long is a bu?

@neauoire @yaodema

cerement Apr 21

@DavidM_yeg @neauoire @yaodema

1 shaku = 10 sun = 100 bu

🇨🇦🇩🇪🇨🇳张殿李🇨🇳🇩🇪🇨🇦Apr 22

@cerement @yaodema @neauoire I was about to answer this myself, but decided to check first.

Perfect answer.

So I'll add that you can have similar mishaps in China with chi-cun-fen measures (often still used in tailoring). Indeed the Imperial inch is referred to in China as literally "English cun".

The shaku-sun-bu measurements were almost certainly derived from older chi-cun-fen measurements, but have diverged over time. The Mainland chi today is 33+1/3cm, IIRC, to the shaku's 30.3cm.

Josh Justice Apr 20

@neauoire that's like almost AI-generated levels of insane

Elena ``of Valhalla''Apr 20

@neauoire and is it marked 100 m?

that's either something that fits a culturally relevant niche, or *pure evil*

Elena ``of Valhalla''Apr 20

@neauoire I see that there is a Japanese foot that is 10/33 m long, could it be *that* foot, rather than the US one?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaku_(u…

and according to that page it's 0.9942 ft , so probably it's hard to distinguish it at a glance

Shaku (unit) - Wikipedia

@valhalla @neauoire i agree, that’s more likely a cursed translation instead of a cursed tape measure. (or rather, a translation with a lot of potential for bamboozling in countries that use imperial. which is obviously their problem and the tape measure is innocent. :3)

@neauoire i got more cursed units where that came from

Devine Lu Linvega Apr 20

@angelwood "It takes roughly 100 picoseconds for light to travel one-tenth of a foot."

John Timaeus 2d ago

@neauoire @angelwood

Go to 1 foot is roughly a nanosecond and you get Grace Hopper's standard lecture from the 1980s.

pfriedma 2d ago

@johntimaeus
And a fantastic lecture they were

https://youtu.be/ZR0ujwlvbkQ

Shorter one from nsa
https://youtu.be/si9iqF5uTFk

@neauoire @angelwood

Grace Hopper Lecture

YouTube

John Timaeus 2d ago

@pfriedma @angelwood @neauoire

I was 14 or 15. Lost the 11.5 inch piece of wire somewhere along the way.

Still start there when teaching performance tuning for VMs (caches, proc pinning, NUMA, etc)

@angelwood is that the vsauce one?!

@fkinoshita yes!!!

@angelwood @neauoire through air or through fiber? 🤔

@psistarpsiii @neauoire vaccum iirc

@angelwood @neauoire eh, air’s close enough

Blake Coverett Apr 20

@neauoire Apparently it is not a rare thing in oilfield work? I recently watched this https://youtu.be/sdWEGzWFcCc?t=276 which has lots of other fascinating horrible units, but that's the bit that talks about "decimal feet".

Oilfield Units: a Measurement System so Cursed it made me Change Career

YouTube

Devine Lu Linvega Apr 20

@blakecoverett holy crap, you can't return to working in the normal world after that

Blake Coverett Apr 20

@neauoire I was amused that both you and he chose the same, self-evidently accurate, description - cursed. Someone certainly needs to think about their life choices after creating such things.

it's not just in oilfields. surveyors use decimal feet (and decimal "US survey feet" which are different) and that's almost certainly a surveyor's tape.

decimal feet used to be somewhat common in all kinds of engineering, but it seems to have stuck around longest in civil engineering.

CC: @[email protected]

Blake Coverett Apr 20

@khm @neauoire Fascinating. Thank you. That does track. I was vaguely aware of the "US survey feet" thing and clearly have a new Wikipedia rabbit hole to explore now.

I find decimal feet easy to work with — squaring up a plot using Pythagoras’ theorem, etc —

BUT

the only un-cursed way to make those tapes is to print a decimal point before *every* tenth of a foot.

1 .1 .2 .3 .4 .5 .6 .7 .8 .9 2

So when you read it off or copy it down, you naturally include the “point 3”, etc.

@khm @blakecoverett @neauoire

@khm @blakecoverett @neauoire yeah I was about to say it's a decimal feet tape measure for like, surveying purposes.

That's pretty hilarious though.