Congratulations all. Hope this is a bit more productive than "that other site". However i find the pop-ups here to be extremely annoying. At any rate am looking forward to this site. I am a recent convert to the Planck system and advocate "folding into it" from a "trimmed metric system" for the very practical reason that it will provide a neater and easier vessel of transition to the Planck system thus rendering it more palatable to the scientific "establishment".

--p.d.

A right hearty welcome p.d., I know what you mean
about the pop-ups. I installed a free piece of
software called "pop-up stopper" which someone told
me where to download off the web. I works moderately
well but not 100 percent.

We need to work out that trimmed metric system
and see just what it can do.

[All these things are real long shots. this board
is itself a long shot, but for the moment seems to
be picking up readers.]

I agree that planck.com badly needs editing---to get rid of the old stuff that is confusingly similar to talent-mile but not quite the same. Planck.com is now a sort of "archive" of various systems that myself and others tried out from which the present talent-mile system emerged.

I do like dogs but it is just not acceptable as a name for a mass unit and I have to go through and change all the dogs to talents. Been putting this off.

Anyway we should kind of concisely outline trimmed-metric and just see how it looks.

More later,

L

A small cargo vessel idle for 6 months? The charterer
backs out? Signs that the economy is really bad, I guess, so what else is new?

*************

PARKING PLACE FOR ANOTHER THREAD. Ive been doing some editing and not sure what to do with the following material. Too long. Tries out a temperature scale that may not be the best. Has some ideas for physics examples. I am not ready to delete it but may want to edit it down some. Anyway, I break into this conversation with p.d. to store these old messages
where I can edit them or use the ideas.

************

Confucius and the Dogs
March 29 2003 at 12:53 AM
Leonard


Once upon a time there were two dogs each of which weighed 1000 ounces. These dogs wished to ascend into the sky by means of helium, so they journeyed to Confucius to inquire of him concerning balloons.

Dogs! said Confucius, under normal conditions E24 molecules of gas occupy ten gallons. That many molecules of air weigh 29/13 ounces and that number of molecules of helium weigh 4/13 ounces. Consider that it is 25/13 ounces less! Therefore ten gallons of helium can lift 25/13 ounces.

Do not forget, continued the Sage, that your combined mass is 2000 ounces! You will undoubtably need 2000 x 13/25 x 10 gallons of balloon volume. This is about 10 thousand gallons: ten cubic paces of balloon volume. Beyond that you must allow for the weight of the balloon and rig.

The dogs thanked the Sage and returned to their lodging where it transpired that the innkeeper had a helium balloon of the required size which he rented by the day. The next morning the dogs, provided with a picnic lunch, accomplished their aim of ascending into the heavens.


********************

Leonard
molar volume, food energy, and suchlike details
March 29 2003, 6:56 AM

apologies if you have heard about those dogs before
I continue trying "ounce"-system units in various contexts

it just happens that 1000 cubic centipace is a gallon, and that 1000 gallons make a cubic pace,
and also that the molar volume (very messy in metric) is exactly ten gallons.

The mole is E24 items (you may have seen mention that Avogadro number, also messy in metric, is exactly E24).
And a mole of the atomic mass unit, a twelfthmass of the common carbon atom and roughly the mass of one nucleon, is about 1/13 ounce.

Since the common helium atom has 4 nucleons (two protons and two neutrons) making up most of its mass, a mole or E24 helium atoms must weigh 4/13 ounce. Since the molecule is a single atom it doesnt matter whether we count atoms or molecules.

On the other hand a common nitrogen has 14 nucleons (the atomic number of N is 7) and the common oxygen has 16. So the molecules N2 and O2 in the air have 28 and 32. Since there is four times as much nitrogen the molecular weight averages to 29. A mole of air weighs 29/13 ounces.

The usual sealevel norm for air pressure translates into 219 dyne per square cp. Human body temperature is 2.19 grade absolute or as one might like to say (stealing a word from the metric scrapheap) 219 centigrade. Those conditions exemplify the standard conditions mentioned by Confucius under which a mole of ideal gas occupies ten gallons. Indeed any time the pressure in dyne/sq.cp equals the temperature in centigrade (which is most likely the case in your lungs or mine at this moment) the molar volume is 10 gallons.

FOOD ENERGY is rather awkward to talk about in SI because the food Calorie (about 4186.8 metric joules)
is not an SI unit. So in SI one should measure meals in "kilojoules". A food Calorie is around 4 kilojoules, and a thousand-food-Calorie meal is about 4000 kilojoules. We have something of the same awkwardness in the case of the ounce-system units.
The erg is a tiny amount of energy and a "mega-erg" or "megerg" is half a food Calorie. Megerg sounds a bit barbaric, and the same thousand-Calorie meal is, for us, 2000 meggers.

The food energy in an ounce of lean meat is typically about 100 megergs. The energy in fat, on the other hand, is 300 megergs per ounce. We shall have to retell the story of how the troll ate Ralf's leg in these units to see how it goes
*********
Leonard
speed of sound in air, molar mass, gas constant
March 29 2003, 7:47 AM

a question about the speed of sound in air came up recently in another thread

it was just mentioned here that the mass of a mole of air (E24 molecules) is 29/13 ounce, we can get the speed of sound from that and temperature.

in this system of units the gas constant R (as usual messy in metric) comes out to be quite neat---R is one million erg per grade per mole. This is the constant in the gas law PV=nRT, where n is the number of moles of a gas and P,V,T are pressure, volume, and temperature.

The square of the speed of sound is just 7/5 times RT divided by the molar mass, which we know is 29/13 ounce in this case.
So if T is 2 grade, so that RT is 2 million ergs, basically you just have to divide 2 million by 29/13 (and don't forget as Newton did to multiply by 7/5).
So the square of the speed is (7/5)(13/29)2E6, and that works out to 1.255E6---the square root is 1120 cp per trice.

The cp/t speed unit is very close to 2/3 mph and also rather close to one foot per second. It is after all a billionth of the speed of light by definition. So one can interpret the 1120 cp/t speed of sound as 1100-some feet per second, or (multiplying by 2/3) as around 750 miles per hour---you probably have seen 650 mph or so on the screen in the passenger cabins of commercial aircraft: this is familiar stuff.

Above the clouds in the non-convective part of the atmosphere a more typical temperature is 1.6 grade---that just means redoing the formula and getting a slightly lower speed.

The gas constant R is used for a lot of things. In metric it is 8.314472 joules per mole per kelvin (as usual its at the NIST site and as usual it's messy.) I really like having it an exact million in these units.
***************

Leonard
should be material for a physics problem or two here
March 29 2003, 8:56 AM

copied from the metricsucks board:
[Here is a nice picture of the Dixie Chicks in black evening dresses

http://www.wral.com/entertainment/2054189/detail.html

Here is the green 16 ton tractor rolling over Dixie Chick merchandise, souvenirs and paraphernalia

http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2003-03-18-chicks-side_x.htm

The mass of the tractor is 660 thousand ounces---in planckian units. The force it is exerting on the ground (and Chick paraphernalia) is 1.2 million dynes.]

Centipace ounce units are lab-scale---small masses and distances, delicate forces. The ounces BTW are about 20 to a conventional pound. So when they say it was a 33,000 pound tractor I just multiply by 20 and get 660 thousand ounces.

In conventional sealevel norm for earth gravity an ounce mass weighs 1.76 dyne----stealing the name dyne from the officially banned CGS force unit. So just multiply 660 thousand by 1.76 to get the force.

Paul Krugman in a 25March op-ed piece in the NYTimes says that one of Bush's friends controls a huge media company and that the phony "grass-roots" demos against what Natalie Maines said in London were rigged by countrymusic radio stations owned by this media empire, which BTW only exists because of friendly de-regulation. Krugman's piece was republished in the International Herald Tribune 28March:

http://www.iht.com/articles/90986.htm

Anyway the image of the green tractor is great and there should be stuff for a problem or two there.

Another bunch of data that might work:

M1 Abrams Main Battle Tank
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/m1.htm

Model____M1/IPM1___ M1A1 ___M1A2
Length: 32.04 FT___32.25 FT___32.25 FT
Width: 12.0 FT___12.0 FT___12.0 FT
Height: 7.79 FT___8.0 FT___8.0 FT
Top Speed: 45.0 MPH___41.5 MPH___41.5 MPH
Weight: 60 TONS___67.6 TONS___68.7 TONS
Armament: 105 MM___120 MM___120 MM
Power/weight(HP/ton) 25__23.8__21.6
Engine: 1500 HP gas turbine
Cruising range: 275 miles
Acceleration 0 to 20 MPH: 7 seconds



**************
Leonard
Summer temperatures in Baghdad
March 29 2003, 3:12 PM

My hunch is that "ounce" units are a really good system--they make c a billion, and hbar a nonillionth, and G a billionth, and a bunch of other major constants have power-of-thousand values, and they have good useful sizes.
The only way I can develop them is to try using them and the temperature scale is still unfinished. We are extremely sensitive to temperature---small percentagewise differences can have large effects on how we feel and cope. So this is a very conservative area of units. It is very hard for people to change temp scales. I want to try various things and see which works best.

grade is a natural scale, one grade step is E-30 of the Planck temperature----a nonillionth. And using it makes Boltzmann k come out E-18 (a quintillionth) and other good stuff. But grade steps are big: 141.45 kelvin steps.

So one person who often gives good suggestions said to use MILLIGRADE and I guess that might mean milligrade above freezing (or below freezing for negatives).
Basically that means to use a relative scale where the milligrade number is always right about SEVEN TIMES the celsius number. Boiling is at 707 mG above freezing. You see nature does not treat water as special. The natural scale is the planck temp and the freezing and boiling points of water are just some temperatures no particularly nice distance apart---turns out to be 707 mG degrees apart. Maybe that is OK.

So for example here are SUMMER TEMPERATURES IN BAGHDAD

My National Geographic Atlas (fourth edn.1975) gives the average daily high for various months, measured at various places around the world. For Baghdad it lists:

May 97 -----65 x 3.9276 --- 255 milligrade degrees
June 105----73 x 3.9276 --- 287 milligrade
July 110----78 x----------- 306
August 110----------------- 306
September 104---72--------- 283
October 92------60--------- 236

these are all milligrade degrees above freezing.
So on this relative scale freezing is 0 and boiling is 707 and conventional room temperature of 68F is 141 and conventional (ear) bodytemp 98F is 259.

the range i would find comfortable, on this scale, is 100-200.
100 mG above freezing is 57.5 Fahrenheit
200 mG above freezing is 82.9 Fahrenheit.

I like to work and rest in that 100-200 range, but I don't like it to get above 200, which evidently it does in Baghdad quite a bit May thru October. On top of which there are the teenage kids shooting at you from behind the garbage cans and through cracks in the venetian blinds

Grade absolute is still a great scale---like to find the bugs of power something radiates at some absolute temp T you just square T twice and divide by 6: that's the power per sq.cp. It does not work with a relativized scale, nor does the formula for the speed of sound, or anything good.

but the relativized milligrade scale with its 100-200 degree comfort range certainly has a potential to let you know what working conditions are like.


**********

Leonard
What a geography website says---the Sharqi and Shamal Winds
March 29 2003, 4:00 PM

http://www.1uptravel.com/geography/kuwait.html
http://www.1uptravel.com/geography/iraq.html

[[The summer months are marked by two kinds of wind phenomena. The southern and southeasterly sharqi, a dry, dusty wind with occasional gusts of eighty kilometers an hour, occurs from April to early June and again from late September through November. It may last for a day at the beginning and end of the season but for several days at other times. This wind is often accompanied by violent duststorms that may rise to heights of several thousand meters and close airports for brief periods. From mid-June to mid-September the prevailing wind, called the shamal, is from the north and northwest. It is a steady wind, absent only occasionally during this period...]]

BTW one of the most entertaining books I know is Gilgamesh (orig. Sumerian then Babylonian epic) and it talks about various winds and gives them names. Men have been impressed by these winds for some time. And did you see ENGLISH PATIENT which has a remarkable conversation about the 6 winds one of which you have to fight off with a knife.

don't have URL for it but I saw a website devoted to the Shamal wind, with diagrams of the mechanism and accompanying inversion layer and other meteorology stuff like that.

the geography websites here give summer average daily highs which translate like this

Kuwait:
avg daily high 297-325 milligrade degrees above freezing
highest recorded 364

Iraq:
overall avg daily high 267-306 milligrade
selected locations 325 likely
recorded as high as 339.

These temperatures are in milligrade above freezing,
where grade absolute is the planckian degree I ordinarily use. To put them in context, think of 100-200 as the shirtsleeve comfort range.

Actually I believe I can relate to these milligrade temps better than I can to Celsius where everything always seems to be squeezed down to the range 10-40 Celsius. You have to kind of frown and squint to distinguish various commfort levels in that range. So this is kind of blowing up that scale 7X and getting something a bit easier to imagine feeling. Maybe. Have to try it some more and see.

IN CASE YOU'RE INTERESTED HERE ARE SOME WINDS FROM
MANKIND'S FIRST WRITTEN-DOWN STORY THE epic of gilgamesh which took place in what is now southern iraq and Gilgamesh is having to struggle against the Demon Humbaba or Huwawa and

[...Shamash heard the prayer of Gilgamesh

and raised up thirteen storms against Huwawa;
the Wind of Simurru and the North Wind and the South

Wind and the West Wind and the East Wind and the Bone-
Cold Wind and the Great Storm Wind and the Great Snow Wind

and the Ice Wind and the Sand Wind and the Screaming
Wind and the Devil Wind and the Bad Wind;

he raised up thirteen storms to beat against
the face of the aura of the demon Huwawa...]

the translation is by David Ferry 1992, one of the
greatest translations into English in recent times

***********quotes from the site, in CELSIUS******
Kuwait
[...In summer, average daily high temperatures range from 42° C to 46° C; the highest recorded temperature is 51.5° C. The summers are relentlessly long, punctuated mainly by dramatic dust storms in June and July when northwesterly winds cover the cities in sand. In late summer, which is more humid, there are occasional sharp, brief thunderstorms. By November summer is over, and colder winter weather sets in, dropping temperatures to as low as 3° C at night; daytime temperature is in the upper 20s C range. Frost rarely occurs; rain is more common and falls mostly in the spring.


Iraq
[...In the summer mean minimum temperatures range from about 22.2° C to about 29° C and rise to maximums between roughly 37.7 and 43.3° C. Temperatures sometimes fall below freezing and have fallen as low as -14.4° C at Ar Rutbah in the western desert. They are more likely, however, to go over 46° C in the summer months, and several stations have records of over 48° C...]

**********
pintdrinker
Questions and answers
March 30 2003, 6:14 AM

This story about "Confucius and the Dogs" together with your last rendition of the Planckian system has left me at the point where i have essentially nothing to say. As you have no doubt noticed by now, i am much more adept at asking questions than at providing answers. I want to apologize for that and address three issues you have raised (and which it appears i have ignored) so as to get them on your board and off my conscience.
--1. First your planckian system is for all intents and purposes not only letter perfect but also number perfect. For this reason i am able to contribute essentially nothing in the way of improvement. The "trimmed metric" is therefore not so much a matter of all that i WANT to do as it is a matter of being all that i AM ABLE to do (at least as far as measurement is concerned). The very filth which i am admittedly trying only PARTIALLY to "clean up" in trimmed metric you have "virtually eliminated" in Planckian i.e. those hideous coefficents.
--2. In trimmed metric, the action unit is to be 9.5E33 h-bar, thereby rendering h-bar (per se) at 1.05263157894 (lovely, isn't it?). We can then use "1.05" for the "quick and dirty" calculations where needed at a cost of but a trace over 2 1/2 per mille of type I error. This calculational nicety of "1.05" would therefore be less of a departure from the old value than it was before. And the 9.5E33 (.95E34) enables two very nice things to happen: (A) it holds at least one of the recips of the h-bar/action unit entity to 2 signifigures plus (B) one can still use the beloved fraction 19/20 as he/she/it/whatsis wishes. Also we are VERY close to the original values-- much closer than i ever imagined we could be. One other aspect of the 9.5E33 h-bar is that it will not be provoke the metreweenies to jump at the chance to orchestrate escoriations of "obsolete fractions" among themselves. We would not provide them with that chance. So the metreweenies don't have any fractions to condemn? Then let them berate 9.5E33 h-bar!
--3. You asked a question on another thread that i do not believe that i directly answered. It concerned one of the versions of the trimmed metric volt and asked whether a new volt that .76 of the old volt would be an excessive departure from the old value. YES. But it appears that we have fixed all that now and all is well in Metreweenieville!

I have been wondering what happened to you the last few days and suspected something was incubating. Obviously that was correct.

As usual,
--p.d.

**********
Leonard
Re: Confucius and the Dogs
March 30 2003, 7:41 AM

Hi P.D. good to hear from you!
BTW thanks for the help over at the other board, much easier for me to respond when I had your support.

I just checked Google News which automatically gathers articles from English-language newspapers all over the world including S.Africa, Australia, UK, even India. I noticed this:

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/03/30/1048962641642.html

An Aussie paper reprinted an op-ed piece by Michael Moore that was originally published I think around 27March (?) in the LATimes. It is a reasoned discussion---whereas his remarks at the Oscar Ceremony were comparatively brief and impromptu.

Not to worry that the "ounce" system of units is finished and perfect!!! No such luck. Cultural artifact like that---a part of language---only gradually gets right as the mind flows over it day after day: till all the stones are smooth.
Probably the sizes of some things and the names of some things will need to change as one gradually gets used to how it works.

Also the "ounce" system with that fingerwidth cp distance unit is very lab-scale. Talent mile, the larger scale sibling of it, wasn't bad and I don't want to lose touch with it.

Still mulling over what you said about grade (too large) and temperature scales. Still thinking about energy---especially the unit of food energy.

Also still mulling the idea of some kind of synergy between trimmed conventional systems and planckian. Both work to destabilize metric complacency and plant seeds of uncertainty, perhaps. Also people like to exercise choice and compare options. sometimes better to hand someone two or three possible solutions and let them decide.

the unexplained rise in readership continues here
March hits now exceed 2200. up from February's 1400 or so. must keep at this. a physics teacher or two might take it up as one of several systems (including standard metric) to be used on a trial basis in course work---something you said about working the same problem several ways comes to mind.

we will go sit on the beach today. have to leave soon.
friends in Santa Cruz and a friend's birthday. We are giving him two guidebooks to the Greek islands. ever been to Greece? I love going to the coast but actually today I will miss this board and being at the computer.

be well,

L

********
pint drinker

Greece
March 30 2003, 8:31 AM

No i have never been to Greece. But some of my best friends are Greek. No kidding! Got to go. My wife is holding my coat, tapping her foot, and complaining.

***********
Two messages saved from another thread that
I've scrapped at least for now:

What's the story with Planck units?
April 1 2003 at 11:15 AM
Leonard

Planck units are increasingly used in basic physics and cosmology (there are some web references I'll fetch and add later).

And it also happens that when you try constructing a modern system of units (with the main natural constants being powers of ten) the sizes of the units always turn out to be power-of-ten multiples of the Planck units.

In other words, you bump into Planck units from two directions. You meet them if you read about the latest developments in physics and cosmology AND also if you simply try to define a convenient fully-decimal replacement for metric. So what's the deal with Planck units?

You might say that they build on the notion of the speed of light as a natural unit---generalizing and extending that idea. What are other quantities like the speed of light? What quantities of force or area or energy are permanent and universal---definite amounts that nature is always showing us?

I'll post this question unanswered, in case anyone wants to reply. Then reply later as time permits. Here's a hint as to one universal quantity: there are quanta of light of all different energies and all different vacuum wavelengths but the COMBINATION of a photon's energy with its wavelength (gotten by multiplying the two together) is the same for every photon in the universe. This "energylength" combination is the same quantity in all light at every time and place. And there are other things like that---there is the natural unit of force, for example, a constant quantity of force present in all of gravity (first appeared in a 1916 paper of Einstein and still going strong.) It is mostly just a matter of noticing these definite quantities built into nature---they turn out to be the Planck units.

**********
Leonard
the universal constant force
April 1 2003, 4:00 PM

The Planck force---roughly E40 tons---is the central constant in the best model we have of gravity. This force constant connects spacetime curvature to the energy density producing it. Alternatively, it connects the energy density at a point with the contraction of a ball of freely falling test particles around that point. UC Physicist John Baez has an intuitive discussion of this at his website. Here's a Baez page that shows the Force Constant explicitly as
c^4/G.

http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/einstein/node6.html

This page gives a version of the Einstein equation showing the central role played by the force and also gives links to neighboring pages providing more explanation.

In Baez' discussion, time is treated as ct, so that any time interval is measured by distance light would travel in that interval---this is commonly done for the sake of uniformity, so that time and distance share the same unit. The second derivative of a test volume (rate of change in the change) divided by the volume itself---i.e. the lefthand side of the equation---is therefore a number per unit area. Multiplying that term by the force gives a force per unit area, or equivalently an energy per unit volume, which is the sum of pressures and energy density that you see on the righthand side.

The force constant is something anyone who has access to the basic constants c and G can calculate for themselves. Usually c and G are listed in metric units so if you calculate c^4/G you get the force expressed in newtons, the metric unit. It comes to 1.2E44 newtons. Since 1.2E4 newtons is *roughly* a ton of force, the constant can also be thought of as about E40 tons.

In a certain sense the rest of the Planck units can be seen as arising from the speed of light and the Force Constant. I'll add a post about this later---the explanation brings in something mentioned earlier, namely the universal constant quantity combining energy and length that is present in light.