Leonard, I'm not entirely sure that 'serious' is all that good a name either... as a holding name or a poke-fun-of-unit-names-name.

Bryan that was good council you gave back
when I was beginning to use TalentMile units
and was calling them "Serious Units" partly
for want of a better and partly tongue-in-cheek.
Still have no name other than TalentMile.

They use the fewest unfamiliar terms of any
modern alternative to metric that I've looked at.
Pretty much stick to a few adapted traditional units
like minute and mile and talent and (of all things the Turkish) ocque.

I see someone rated your post a 5! It is hard to know who read here. Do you? Did you rate your own post a 5?

The log shows over 590 page reads in month of February alone, why do many reads---is it bots or lurkers or just people who like to read or what?

In case you see this, I've been editing old physics problems originally in Bryan units to see how they work in TalentMile. The originals are still at planck.com in the section on Bryan units.

Bryan Parry is a long-time units tinkerer whose current interest is in systems with pound and foot as
base units. He likes both the pound mass and the pound force units. It would be sad to have to sacrifice either on or the other---since pound mass does very well for quantities of cheese and meat while pound force is what is referred to in PSI pressure and footpounds of energy (pushing with pound force for foot distance.)

Bryan recently suggested digging up an old medieval unit of time that is smaller than a second. He may have hit on something.

Look up *atom* of time in Rowlett's great on-line dictionary of units and you see that a possible unit of that rougly traditional size would be an *atom* defined as 3/17 of a second--doesn't have to be exactly that but something right about there.

That is the size of time unit that, used as a technical means of defining the system, gets you both the presentday pound force and the presentday pound mass.

the reason is that squaring 17/3 gives 32.1111... (32 and a ninth.)

So one foot per atom per atom is the same as 32.111 feet per second per second.

Not atypical of sealevel gravity, which actually varies from place to place.

In any coherent system, unit force is by definition equal to that force which imparts unit acceleration to unit mass---in this case giving to the pound unit mass an acceleration of one foot per atom per atom.

That is, in oldfashioned second terms, it is the force which imparts to the pound mass an acceleration of 32.111 feet per second per second. But for all practical purposes, this is what the pound mass's own weight would do if you dropped it!

So in such a system the unit force turns out to be the weight of the unit mass in ordinary sealevel gravity.

With a fit like that to pound force and pound mass and the existing presentday foot, is anyone going to complain if the speed of light is not a round number? It's mundane stuff, but it works nicely. Good old medieval units.

BTW the acceleration 32.111 is the sealevel gravity my handbook table gives for latitude 22 degrees. so, like Hong Kong, Cairo, Havana. Latitude 22 is not Europe but plenty of people live there. And the gravity in europe is only a bit more, so no big deal. 3/17 second not a bad unit to work with foot.

I personally shall stick with planckian but he should really elaborate this pound+foot system.

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,9115,930844,00.html

Came across an interesting article in guardian by HP the author of "Empire State". Liked the references to Agricola's Scottish campaign. Makes me want to get the book.

Where to stash this for reading later? Maybe this no longer active thread will do.
***************
Henry Porter op-ed piece:
A very Roman lesson for today

Pro- and anti-war passions have been aroused over Iraq. It was much the same 2,000 years ago

Henry Porter
Sunday April 6, 2003
The Observer

When Agricola's legions stormed to the north of Britain to face the tribes of Caledonia nearly 2,000 years ago, the Roman governor of Britain used exactly the same strategy as the Pentagon in Iraq. He sent his fleet ahead to spread uncertainty and terror - for which read the aerial bombardment of Baghdad - and then marched north with a highly mobile and lightly equipped army.
His son-in-law, the historian Tacitus, recorded that the Scottish tribes greatly outnumbered the Romans yet when they saw Agricola's ability to regroup his army in battle they turned and ran. By the end of the engagement Agricola had lost just 360 men, against the enemy's 10,000 casualties.

The parallels between the Roman and American actions are striking, not just in the daring tactics, the relative losses and superior organisation but also in their motivation. Agricola undertook the campaign to prevent a 'general rising of the northern nations' - ie to provide security for the region and ultimately for Rome even though it lay 1,000 miles away.

At the time the reaction to the Romans was much the same as the passion and fear inspired by the Americans today. According to Tacitus, the leader of the Caledonian forces, Calgacus, described the Romans thus: 'Pillagers of the world, they have exhausted the land by their indiscriminate plunder ... The only people on Earth to whose covetousness both riches and poverty are equally tempting. To robbery, butchering, and rapine, they give the lying name of government; they create desolation and call it peace.'

Few Arabs would have any difficulty with that if it was applied to the Americans; indeed it is precisely the kind of thing heard in mosques all over the Middle East. Most Europeans would not go that far yet this war has provoked extraordinary passions.

Pro- and anti-war sentiments stir from the depths of each personality in a way that cannot always be explained by an individual's age, class, gender or ethnic background. And those that have found certainty have not easily relinquished their conviction as events unfold. For example, the peace party has been unwilling to concede the following: the ecological disaster in the southern oil fields has not materialised; up to this point casualties have been far fewer on both sides than expected; the Arab street has not risen to threaten regimes all over the Middle East; the rapid advance across has not proved the military catastrophe so many predicted.

Equally unyielding is the enthusiasm of the hawks who have generally dismissed the destruction and loss of life as being a regrettable but necessary sacrifice on the way to a number of geostrategic goals - a new world order, greater security for Israel and America and democratic reform in the Arab world.

They have a passion for the design and execution of a plan, whatever its risks, and they tend to inflate the benefits that will accrue. For their part they do not concede these points: the plan was a gamble; no substantial evidence of the production and retention of weapons of mass destruction has yet come to light; success in Afghanistan and Iraq may lead US hawks to plan a series of ever more perilous campaigns; the long-term damage to Arab pride and the likelihood of increased terrorist attacks.

The level of feeling is unlikely to be dampened by a victory in Baghdad. For example Matthew Parris in the Spectator talked of 'his cold anger at the stupidity of it all, the awful miscalculations being made and the damage being done and feelings of useless despair of a quite personal sort'.

Last week Parris was joined by the novelists Arundhati Roy and Rachel Cusk, who wrote in the Guardian of the suffering and shame involved in the Iraq war. Roy observed: 'Operation Iraqi Freedom? I don't think so It's more like Operation Let's Run a Race, but First Let Me Break Your Knees.' Taken to its logical conclusion this means Roy objects to the war because more men from the coalition forces aren't being killed, a position which suggests more than just simple pacifism, I would suggest. Jemima Khan announced in the Independent that she was ashamed of being British, which is odd in at least one regard since British forces seem to have behaved with good judgment and impeccable restraint.

Again we should agree that neither the authenticity of these feelings nor the motives of the two principal anti-war newspapers, the Daily Mirror and the Independent , should be questioned. However, there is a hysterical note to some of the commentary and writers have paraded a moral rectitude that has never at any stage absorbed the true darkness of Saddam's regime.

This war has many more antecedents apart from Agricola's campaign on the Forth. One is particularly reminded of the daring and speed of the Israeli military in June 1967 and in October 1973, after it recovered from a surprise attack during Yom Kippur. But in other respects what we are seeing is totally new and this may account for the levels of shock and dread being voiced.

American power, restrained for so long by hesitant generals and cautious politicians, has now been welded to a strategic culture that is prepared to contemplate the loss of American lives on the way to certain goals. The unapologetically proactive approach is new and its is clear from the performance of the US military that the deadliness, organisation and speed of its forces are all considerably greater than they were in the 1991 Gulf war.

The alliance of might and ideas represent a new kind of dominance which causes equal anxiety in the Middle East and Europe, but for different reasons. The Arab states have suffered a blow to their self-esteem equivalent to that of 1967, but this time it is not Israeli tanks outflanking and outgunning Arab forces, but American armour.

The fear and helplessness that the last few weeks engender in Arabs will not die away when order is restored to Iraq. Their leaders are worried that democratic reform in Iraq will cause turmoil in neighbouring states - which, by the way, it should - while the general populations believe a victory in Iraq will make resolution of the Palestine-Israel conflict less rather than more likely.

In Europe the peace party has been inspired by some genuine pacifism but also by the offence caused to the liberal consensus and its faith in liberal institutions such as the UN. A few American hawks and a President who has almost no experience of Europe or the Middle East have brushed aside the United Nations, the prudent counsels of European leaders and the motivated qualms of the Chinese and Russians with very little obvious soul searching.

Where this leads is difficult to say, which in itself is one of causes of the unprecedented anti-American mood. At base the peace movement is fuelled by a thoroughly human fear of the unknown and it is perhaps up to the hawks to acknowledge this reality with slightly more tact than has been displayed so far. What none of us needs is the triumphalist parades of US military and diplomatic supremacy. When Agricola returned to Rome after his successful campaign in the Britain, he stole into the city by night to avoid his friends and supporters.

· Empire State, a novel by Henry Porter about a US/UK counter-terrorist operation, is published by Orion in September.

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/04/02_forum_weber.shtml

Steven Webber is a smart faculty at UC. Fresh insights here. Historical perspective on international relations, in particular the "Containment Policy" developed by George Kennan in 1947 and committed to around 1950 by the Truman administration. Now looking at a pre-emption policy----signing up to play half a dozen or more games of chicken at once. I heard Webber deliver these remarks at a UC forum on the war and was impressed by his ability to analyse without necessarily taking sides.

********transcript*******
These are the prepared remarks delivered by Steven Weber at a forum of UC Berkeley faculty experts convened at Zellerbach Hall on April 1, 2003, to discuss the war with Iraq. Weber is a political science professor and the director of the MacArthur Program on Multilateral Governance at Berkeley's Institute of International Studies. He has held academic fellowships with the Council on Foreign Relations, served as special consultant to the president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London, and worked with the U.S. State Department and other government agencies on foreign policy issues, risk analysis, and forecasting.

START OF WEBBERS REMARKS:
Thanks to the chancellor and Dean Leonard and Harry Kreisler from the Institute of International Studies for organizing this forum. I want to make a couple of very simple points.

I am not going to take an explicit position for or against this particular war. But I am going to tell you that the stakes are higher, much higher, than anything that happens in Iraq in the next six months. In my view Iraq is just a sideshow to the main event. It’s important mainly because for the moment it is the most visible piece and the leading edge of a much more radical foreign policy and world order project that the U.S. is now just beginning to engage.

That project has three big components: the development of interstate cooperation to defeat transnational threats; second; implementing pre-emptive military doctrines that redefine the role of force in world politics, and third, remaking in a fundamental way the configuration of international and global institutions that we have been living with and reforming only at the margins since the end of World War II.

In a very real sense the attack on Iraq signals the end of what we called “the post-Cold War era”, which was really a kind of interregnum between the Cold War and something else that we didn’t know how to name. Now we are at the cusp of some new ordering principles for global politics. Ten years from now we will be able to give it a name. But I don’t think Iraq will figure prominently in that conceptualization. How we handle North Korea, and what we do with the detritus of NATO and the United Nations Security Council, will. Let me tell you why I think these things.

First Iraq. Let us say it out loud: this is a war about oil, and about the mistakes we made in 1991. We went to war in 1991 to make sure that 40% of the world’s proven oil reserves do not end up in the hands of a hostile state power. We are going to war in 2003 for exactly the same reason, combined with two failures: because we didn’t go all the way to regime change and get rid of that hostile state power when we risked a half million American troops and killed an unknown number of Iraqis in ‘91, and having made that mistake, we have done nothing substantial since to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

In my view we could have and should have solved this problem in several ways during the 1990s, but instead we ignored it for all practical purposes. We soothed ourselves by implementing a set of sanctions against Iraq, sanctions that did nothing to weaken Saddam, probably strengthened him in fact, and caused extraordinary amounts of suffering, truly unnecessary suffering, to innocent Iraqi civilians. When things got a little out of control we launched a few cruise missiles at Baghdad which similarly made us feel like we were doing something but in fact were a waste of money and lives. The Clinton administration left this mess for the Bush people to clean up.

And so I confess to feeling a great deal of sympathy with their view that the status quo was unacceptable – Saddam still in power, useless sanctions punishing exactly the wrong people, an ongoing risk of weapons of mass destruction proliferation in the region, and a sustained military threat to oil supplies that the U.S. was MORE dependent on in 2000 than it had been since before the first OPEC oil embargo in 1973. Whether or not you like what the Bush administration has chosen to do about this situation, you can understand why it is that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were able to get a sympathetic ear in the White House when they made the argument that things simply could not be allowed to go on as they were.

That argument was in place long before the attack on the World Trade Center. In one sense nothing changed on Sept. 11, 2001; there is simply no substantial evidence (at least no public evidence) that the regime in Iraq had anything to do with that event. But September 11 completely changed the domestic politics here in the U.S..


More than anything, September 11 wiped away an embarrassing complacency about the global political environment, a complacency which had been facilitated by silly arguments like the end of history and the notion of a LONG BOOM that would bring never-ending prosperity to the entire world through technology… all of this was the naïve end of Cold War triumphalism, and on Sept. 12, the Bush administration saw itself with more than just a serious terrorist problem, it saw essentially a blank check to write an American foreign policy for the new era.

Paul Wolfowitz and the people around him, no more short on ambition and energy than George Kennan and the people around him were in 1947, jumped on that opportunity. Make no mistake about it: these people are Wilsonian idealists at heart, they have an activist and revolutionary vision for the world that would make George Kennan blush; they believe deeply in the efficacy and sustainability of overwhelming U.S. power; and they fear that if they don’t grasp the opportunity in front of them, the world will be a much less desirable place for America in 2010 than it is today.

As I said there are three major parts to this project.

The first is to build a collaboration of nation states to defeat a transnational force called terrorism. This is a familiar configuration in world politics, it’s basically an updated version of the early 1800s Concert of Europe, which was essentially a deal between the five great powers of the time to defend the ancien regime against different transnational forces, liberalism and later Marxism. Substitute Bin Laden for Rousseau in this equation and you can see why the logic of this collaboration is in fact quite strong for nation states, which would very much like to preserve the government–to–government bargaining games which they know how to play as the stuff of international relations.

Even as the French and the Americans spat at each other in the Security Council over Iraq, at the operational level cooperation between intelligence services and security forces on the terrorist issue is excellent and will remain excellent.

The risk here is not really a near-term breakup of the coalition against terrorism, it lies in the magnitude of the task that these states have taken on. Al-Qaida may be a few thousand extremists, but al-Qaida is just the beginning. The dirty little secret of world politics today is that there are 3 or perhaps 4 billion people on this planet who believe, rightly or wrongly, that they have absolutely nothing to lose from the decline of the state system. The outcome of this battle IS uncertain; there is no rule that says states have to win.

The second piece of the Bush world order project is a shift to pre-emptive military strategies that redefine the role of force in world politics. This signals the end of the intellectual apparatus behind the containment doctrine. The National Security Strategy Document of September 2002 (which you must read, if you have not done so) says explicitly that the U.S. will act IN ANTICIPATION of the emergence of a threat, or of a center of power that could challenge U.S. predominance.

We could talk for a long time about the roots behind this shift; in fact there is a cottage industry in my field of IR that does this, but let me just point out quickly why states are historically pulled to these kinds of doctrines like iron filings to a magnet. The fact is, pre-emption shifts the initiative back to our side and lets us shape the battlefield of world politics, rather than respond to it. This works sometimes. The beauty of the Bush administration’s policy toward Iraq over the last year is that it has created a consensus that Saddam is history. No one defends his regime, no one thinks he should remain in power; the arguments are over how to get rid of him, not whether he should go. That is a serious diplomatic achievement.

But it comes with huge risks as well. The pre-emption doctrine always is at risk of breaking the number one rule of diplomacy: which is don’t back the other guy into a corner from which he has no escape. When you combine this with the axis of evil rhetoric, you can hardly blame countries like Iran and Syria for coming to believe that they are next on the list and that war is likely or inevitable. At the moment they believe this, as we learned so vividly in 1914 and again at Pearl Harbor, the supposed target has every incentive to pre-empt pre-emption and find a way to strike first. In practice the U.S. is signing up to play games of chicken – everyone know what this game is? – but 10 or 12 games of chicken at once, which is a very tricky proposition.

By the way, anybody know how you win at chicken? Thomas Schelling got it right in 1961: the way to win at chicken is to throw your steering wheel out the window, so the other guy has to swerve. The question then becomes who can throw their steering wheel out the window first: Iran, Syria, North Korea, or the U.S..

I think this is EXACTLY what the North Koreans are engaged in right now. And there is a deep historical irony in this. The containment doctrine was built up intellectually over the last half of the 1940s, but it wasn’t actually implemented as the core logic of American Cold War foreign policy until after it was explicitly challenged – not in Europe principally, but in Korea in 1950. It then became the touchstone of U.S. strategy for at least 25 years.

Here we are more than a half century later; we’re focused on a conflict in Iraq; while the real challenge to the pre-emption doctrine is taking shape once again – in Korea.

How the U.S. responds to the North Korean challenge is going to define the reality of the preemption doctrine and that is likely to set the tone for U.S. foreign policy for some time. You might not want the U.S. to pre-empt North Korea’s nuclear program and there are very good reasons to NOT want that, but don’t think that the alternatives are necessarily and clearly preferable. In other words, I’m telling you to worry about what happens if the U.S. foreign policy doctrine collapses in front of its first big challenge less than a year after it was proclaimed.

The third piece of the world order project is the reconfiguration of global institutions. Don’t get too nostalgic about this. The Security Council, with its permanent five and unit veto power, we all know to be the legacy of a post-World War II balance of power system that has faded into history. NATO carries the legacy of an institution designed, as people used to say, to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.

Each of these institutions was on a gradual reform path over the course of the 1990s. Whether or not gradual reform would have eventually worked, that part of the story is now over.

The Security Council as we know it came to an end when the French broke the deal they had made with the U.S. over a second resolution – strange in some ways, because the French have the most to lose from a reshuffling of power at the UN. NATO as we know it came to an end when the French and Germans said no to the deployment of NATO-assigned Patriot missile units to NATO member Turkey.

Don’t jump to the conclusion that this is a bad thing. These institutions played useful roles, but the world is now very different and there may very well be better ways to fulfill some of the important functions of international institutions. You have to admit, there is a certain awkwardness to the idea that the major constraints on the exercise of U.S. power in the world are the votes of Cameroon, Angola, and New Guinea at the Security Council. And the idea of keeping 50,000 U.S. troops in Europe to prevent the growth of German power and war with France is a little anachronistic.

The interesting question now is, what are we going to put in place of these institutions? The natural allies for the United States in the next phase of globalization are probably countries like Poland, Brazil, Slovakia, Kazakhstan, Singapore, and perhaps a postwar Iraq. If that sounds bizarre to you, ask yourself if it sounds any more bizarre than it must have sounded to people in 1949, to talk about a North Atlantic Treaty Organization with France and Germany as our core allies and as each other’s allies.

What we have not done yet, is to make explicit the norms and principles that will be the foundation of this new set of institutions. The glue that holds the countries I just named together is made up of security and economic development, very much like the post-World War II glue for the ‘West’. But security has to mean more than a world that looks a lot like 1995, just without al-Qaida in it. And economic development has to mean more than IMF structural adjustment programs and massive World Bank infrastructure projects which, with very few exceptions, have delivered nothing like successful economic development to the majority of the world’s population.

So - in my view – the sooner we get done with Iraq and move on to defining the principles that will hold together a coalition for the new world order, the better. The downside risk of not doing that is very, very large

I have just thought up an interesting [?] metric/english hybrid. It is thus:

Ounce
2^5oz = 1 ki
2^10oz = thousandweight
2^15oz = 1 ton

1 ki is approx 0.9kg
„h In Britain there are two broad metric packaging schemes, it would seem- hectogramme (25g, 50, 100, 200, 400, 800) and kilogramme (1000g, 500, 250, 125), and I suggest a nine hundred gramme intermediate unit as a reasonable compromise.

Foot is length and is divided into 16 digits. A cubit digit of water weighs and ounce and a cubic foot, a thousandweight.

I have even come up with a completely binary time unit etc, but I left that elsewhere.
Perhaps this is of interest.

Hello Bryan, you prodigious thinker-up of units.
***
You say:
Foot is length and is divided into 16 digits. A cubit digit of water weighs and ounce and a cubic foot, a thousandweight.

I think perhaps that you may have dropped a factor of 4 and that:
A cubit digit of water weighs FOUR ounces and a cubic foot, FOUR thousandweight.

Unless I am misunderstanding something.
***

Otherwise everything is straightforward and in good order I think. the binary approach can produce very nice results, as you demonstrate.
I remain, as you know very well, a devoted ten-ster, decimal thru and thru. but I can appreciate your flings with two and on occasion twelve.

Your digit or fingerwidth comes out around 1.9 cm I think and that strikes me as a very handy unit of length.

In completely decimal planckian systems the corresponding unit that always comes up is about 1.6 cm---a *little* finger's width, as I judge it.

check out google [loth german weight]
also see Rowlett's dictionary entry for LOT

My Webster's mentions this unit which was used at least up until 1914 as meaning 1/32 of the local pound
and gives equivalents for German, Austrian, Polish, Russian, Dutch, Danish ( and other scandinavian) versions.

Various people spelled it lot, loth, lod, lood, lut.
I believe I prefer lod. Thought perhaps it might interest you.

Daktylos- the greek finger was 1.9cms