Next time it's good weather take a look at sun and notice you can tell how far it is and what mass it is just from there being 365 days in a year. Using talent-mile units.

Light goes 10^7 miles a minute and earth goes a tenthousandth of that so 10^3 or 1000 miles a minute. 365/2pi is 58 days and there are 1600 of our tech minutes to a day, so 93,000 minutes is the time it takes earth to travel the length of the radius of its orbit.

How far does earth go in 93 thousand minutes? It goes 93 million miles so the distance to sun is 93 million miles.

And light takes 9.3 minutes to get here from it.

And the mass of a body like the sun is the distance x orbitspeed squared divided by G.
93 million miles x (1000 miles/minute)^2 is 93 x 10^12 and dividing by G's value of 10^-15 gives 93 x 10^27. It comes out in talents. So 93 x 10^27 talents is the mass of the sun.

All you really need is the 93 you get from the calendar--the number of days in a year tells you the distance and mass of the sun.

The diameter of a black hole with same mass as sun would be 4 x 0.93 miles, which is 3.7 miles and that 3.7 miles is also the light-bending parameter for the sun. Technical things that ride in on the same 93 you get from the calendar.

And this is all a tedious mess in metric because of a bunch of ugly arbitrary conversion factors. It would be a headache to do the metric calculations of the same things for comparison.

A ray of light passes a million miles from center of sun, by what angle in radians is it bent?

Determine the angle from the fact that the sun's mass is 93 x 10^27 talents. (The 93 is connected to the 93 million mile distance. To get the mass in kilograms multiply the talents by 21.73 kg in a talent.)

THIS PROBLEM IS SIMPLE to work in talent-mile-minute.

1. G is 10^-15 cub.mile/sq.minute per talent. (in metric approx. 6.67 x 10^-11 cub.meter/sq.sec per kilo.)

2. GM is 93x10^12 cub.mile/sq.minute.

3. GM/c^2 = 0.93 mile. Here we divide by 10^14, the square of the speed of light, in metric square 299792458 and divide by that.

4. The bending angle in radians is 4GM/c^2 divided by the ray's closest approach, taken to be one million miles in this example.

That is 4 x 0.93 mile/10^6 miles, or 3.7 x 10^-6 radian.

So the angle is 3.7 millionths, or 3.7 "microradian" if you like.
This is the gist of Eddington's 1919 confirmation of General Relativity by observing the Pleiades during solar eclipse. The predicted bending angle was found.

In the alternative system proton mass is
1/13 x 10^-27 talent

so the proton rest energy is
1/13 x 10^10 electron volts

(natural units volt is 1.21 conventional)

**************************************
COMPARE WHAT YOU HAVE TO GO THROUGH IN METRIC
TO GET FROM PROTON MASS (kilograms) TO REST ENERGY (conventional electron volts)

proton mass (in kilograms)
1.67262 x 10^-27 kilogram

speed of light 299792458 meter per second
cee-squared 8.9876 x 10^16 sq.meter per sq.second

proton mass x cee-squared (in joules)
1.5033 x 10^-10 joules

one joule equals 6.2415097 x 10^18 metric electron volt

multiply 1.5033x6.2415097 x 10^8
to get 9.383 x 10^8 metric electron volts

or look it up in the handbook "938.3 MeV"
because tired of diddlyshit calculations with
metric garbage.

HOW ARE YOU GOING TO KEEP THE FRESHMEN DOWN ON METRIC FARM, when they realize that with clean (nature-based) units it is just one step from the mass to the rest energy:

1/13 x 10^-27 talent
translates directly into
1/13 x 10^10 eevee.

and it's exact since cee is exact and the unit charge is exactly 10^23 electrons. (in metric's 1990 electrical standards the 1990coulomb is an exact number of electrons but the number is very messy, we just take the same approach but make the number a nice power of ten)

metric is a failed attempt at a decimalized system

alternative units achieve full decimality
(using power-of-ten scaling of the natural units)

alternative units kick metric butt

Gilgamesh Epic (talent in book 2, Kovacs trns)

Proton mass is 1/13 x 10^-27 talent.

Calculating rest energy from that is a cinch,
it is just 1/13 x 10^10 eevee.

The rest energy is the energy invested in the thing's existence. You need it to find the kinetic energy of a particle moving at high speed.

Calculating it in metric is repulsive. The mass is 1.672...x10^-27 kilograms, you multiply by the square of the speed of light (which you approximate because 299792458 is no fun to square) and then you multiply by 6.241...x 10^18 because that is number of conventional electron volts in a joule. At every step you lose accuracy because you are approximating (the real numbers are too many digits long to bother putting in the calculator). Finally you get 9.38271..x 10^8 conventional electron volts. Yuk. much easier to go directly from 1/13 x 10^-27 to 1/13 x 10^10. and that correspondence is precise in the sense that the 1/13 doesn't change.

THEN if you are an accelerator physicist and you want to know the total (rest plus motion) energy of a proton going 0.99 speed of light you just go one over sqrt (1 - 0.99^2) is 7.09 and so it's
7/13 x 10^10 eevee.

Our volt is a power-of-ten scaledown of the natural --- Planck --- voltage unit. It is 1.21 ordinary volts, the scale was chosen to make it ordinary-size.

Using that volt, one macroscopic energy unit (that goes with mile, minute, and talent mass) is exactly 10^23 eevee.

By contrast in metric one joule (the macroscopic energy unit) is a garbage number 6.2415097...x 10^18 of conventional electron volts. I hate it when I have to give those metric numbers but must for comparison's sake.

10^23 items serves in this system as the MOLE.
A mole of electrons ---10^23 of them---is one unit of charge.

QUESTION HOW MANY PHOTONS ARE IN A CUBIC MILE OF SUNLIGHT AT THIS DISTANCE FROM THE SUN? And what's the total sunlight energy in that cubic mile of space---if you were able to add up the energy of each one? It related to the brightness you see when you walk outdoors (but meterheads find it hard to get from one thing to the other.)

The natural---Planck---units are all over the web. Google with keywords [natural units] or [planck units] and you find thousands of sites.

I've worked with several other people to develop a version of the natural units that's especially easy to learn and use. The design has gone through a few iterations and has now been stable for some months (except for indecision as to a name for the 2.7 pound force unit). It turns out that the base units in this version are TRADITIONAL sizes, so they've been given traditional names. We get superior decimality and ease of use compared to metric. I'll sketch the system here.

The metric system is a moving target which is constantly engaged in self-revision (sanctioned by CGPM but proceeding unofficially by the world's top metrologists, whose proposals must then be formally ratified by the CGPM). Metrology is currently having problems with the metal kilogram and seeking some way dispensing with it---probably by adopting an exact value for planck's constant, as was done in 1983 for the speed of light.

OUR UNITS ARE DEFINED AS METRIC UNITS CAN BE EXPECTED TO BE DEFINED, say by 2010, when the CGPM has finally ratified proposals already put forward by leading scientists. The intention is to get the jump on metric as to the manner in which the units are defined and in several other ways as well.

In this system the main constants of nature have power-of-ten values, which makes the system amazingly easy to work with. In all cases but one (the approximate 1.00 for the gravity constant) the values in this list are EXACT, by the definition of the units themselves.

speed of light, c --- 10 million miles a minute
planck's constant, hbar --- 10^-40 talent sq.mile per minute
gravitation constant, G --- 1.00 x 10^-15 cub.mile/sq.minute per talent
elementary charge, e --- 10^-23 chargeunit (not yet named)
boltzmann temp coeff, k --- 10^-2 eevee per grade

To get these (mostly exact rather than approximate) power-of-ten values for the constants, the units are defined using a SPECIAL REDUCED MINUTE. This is 54 seconds, ten percent less than the ordinary, and 1/1600 of a day instead of the ordinary 1/1440. It is for technical use only, as in solving physics problems, and should not impinge on everday life.

The fact is that the time unit which Planck found in nature, the "Planck time", is 54 x 10^-45 seconds---so a 54 second interval is in the hand nature deals us if we're scaling by powers of ten. Our system responds to this by having a special auxilliary time unit for science use only, not wanting to interfere with customary time-telling.

Here are the definitions, and emerging metric ones for comparison:

minute --- 54 atomic clock seconds, 1/1600 day
mile --- exactly one tenmillionth of a lightminute
talent mass unit --- exactly 10^40 hbar minute per sq.mile
chargeunit (not yet named) --- exactly 10^23 elementary charge (i.e. 10^23 electron charges)

metric second --- 1 atomic clock second, 1/86400 day
meter --- exactly 1/299792458 of a lightsecond
kilogram --- exactly 2pi/662606878 x 10^42 hbar second per sq.meter
coulomb --- exactly 624150974 x 10^10 elementary charge

THESE DEFINITIONS GIVE US EXACT CONVERTIBILITY WITH METRIC so that all data can be converted between systems without loss of accuracy BUT THEY ALSO PUT METRIC IN A BAD LIGHT because our definitions are clean and our values of the constants are decimal (powers of ten) while the metric definitions are messy, though exact, and their values of the constants are both difficult to remember and clumsy to use. Indeed the system is an insult to nature and humans deserve better.


The formerly greco-roman units many of which survive in the British and American systems are crucial to winning acceptance for the natural or Planck system because of the remarkable coincidences that have shown up. The talent mass (a billion times the natural mass unit) is essentially 48 pounds, and the Planck mile is hardly any different from the one already in use.
So I would encourage considering the pound as a convenient (1/48) subdivision of the talent mass unit in those societies which are still fortunate enough to have the pound as a living unit, and wherever possible restoring the mile to use. I suspect the metric system will eventually become obsolete because of its ugly mismatch with the universal constants and tendency to alienate people from nature.