this is copied from an obstreperous discussion at another board. It seems to state its position concisely:

Redneckystan is a multi-system society and uses a variety of units in an ad hoc pragmatic way. The government (while bad in several other respects) is not so anal and rigid that it forces society to use one uniform all-encompassing system. European governments, for reasons which elude me, seem to think it is their job to enforce units-uniformity on everybody.

Because of Redneck flexibility and ability to cope with variety, and because the government is not culturally dictatorial (so far at least) Redneckystan has at least a chance of adding a modern system of units to the mix. Possibly for educational use at the college physics level.

And example of a time-speed-action system:

time unit----54 millisecond
speed unit----E-9 c---one billionth of light
action unit----E30 hbar---a nonillion times the natural unit of action.

This is probably how the metric system will be redefined in the next decade except with ugly numbers---metric is moving towards the same time-speed-action form of defintion and in fact top people in NIST and CODATA have proposed exactly this. It would work out about like this:

metric time unit-----one second
metric speed unit----1/299792458 of the natural speed unit, c.
metric action unit----9.48252355 E33 of the natural unit of action, hbar.

the speed unit is meter per second and defining it (using c) establishes the meter---this is how the meter is already officially defined

the action unit is the joulesecond and defining (using the natural unit hbar) establishes what the joule is. (this has been proposed and a vote at the CGPM has paved the way for it, but it is not settled yet)
having a natural-unit definition of joule will make the metal kilogram superfluous. one will chuck out the metal kilo. because a kilo is by definition simply equal to one joule sq.(second/meter).

In the future the important thing will be to define the action unit (joulesecond in metric case) and from that the joule and the kilogram mass standard can be derived.

However the metric numbers, 299792458 and 9.48252355 x E33 are disgusting.

In Redneckland we can hope to use an exact billion (E9) in place of 299792458 and an
exact nonillion (E30) in place of that 9.48252...garbage.

In the sample system I just described (using billion and nonillion) the length unit turns out to be a fingerwidth---one hundredth of the type of pace that is a thousandth of a mile: so a mile is 100 thousand of them. Don't change the roadsigns!

And in that (billion + nonillion) sample system the mass unit comes out to be ounce-size (more exactly 22 grams or 20 to a pound, but roughly ounce-size). It is a lab-scale system analogous to the old centimeter-gram-second still found among working physicists.

Lots of alternative time-speed-action options are open, this is just one.

In this system the main natural constants turn out to be powers of ten (electron charge, avogadro number, gas constant, boltzmann constant, temperature to eV conversion, etc)

The natural unit of action is found in every quantum of light. the photon's energy multiplied by the angular period of its vibration. Always equal to hbar. It is all around you now and on your computer screen. Like the speed of light--which is also all around everywhere all the time.
So give yourself a break and tune your units to what is.

YES. But let us also define the metre as 1/300 000 000 c and the action unit as 9.5E33. This would entail an adjustment of but .000692286 in the case of the metre and an adjustment of but .001843017 in the case of the action unit-- MUCH less than 1% in either case. This would involve NO change to the Planck derived units, only to SI, which has come to sprout a number of ugly warts of late. I think of this trimming as quite analogous to a dermatological removal of these warts (together with god-awfully ugly hairs emanating therefrom), not even as plastic surgery.

this strikes me as quite reasonable
and a good simile too (the warts and the idea
of minor cosmetic snipping, not really surgery)
i wonder if they ever would?
maybe if they feel threatened by a more
beautiful system coming on the scene...

This is certainly a very shrewd surmise on your part. I think you are definitely on target (though whether on bullseye remains to be determined). I am certain that given the choice, the establishmentarian jugheads would prefer the niceties of trimmed metric manicures to the gore of prefrontal lobotomy by Planckian axe. Of course it is also true that given the choice, they would prefer to do nothing whatsoever until forced to do so from on high. I suppose it may be time to publish a paper (not a postEl) on the subject. Unfortunately i am unpublished (yes i know it is inexcusable) and don't know where to begin...

writing is very time-consuming
and working with an editor involves hard knocks
(unless you are very lucky and meet up with
a simpatico editor who is able to do the job
painlessly)
the editor's job is to discipline and be a kind
of voice-coach----singers have voice trainers,
almost all of them---it is a mystery to me why
a person can not just be themselves and naturally
turn out to be a good writer or singer. why should
we need an OTHER to listen objectively and prune
and train the output.

you may be too thin-skinned for it.

why do you want paper publication anyway?

what is wrong with posting essays on line?

there are two things you would need (to launch trimmed metric) which you have not yet shown:
1. ability to be concentrated and concise
2. ability to test the system by working problems or showing use-examples similar to working problems.

do you see any downside to formulating a concise description----plus examples----of trimmed metric and posting it here? do you think someone would steal it and you would lose copyright control? I guess this is possible but not likely.

John Baez has the stuff at his website (his paedagogical physics writings) labeled copyright 200x.
A lot of good people put essays on web. I do not know if the loss of control is really a serious issue.

this site gets around 1400 page reads a month. I consider trimmed metric to be competition. But I am not unalterably opposed to competition. So I invite you to start a thread defining, and test-driving, the system.

However don't let it take up so much time that you
don't take care of business in the real world! Trying to create anything is very time-consuming as you probably know but consider....

BTW my ISP gives me a website free. No extra charge. There is some space limit but I am nowhere near filling it. Would your ISP give you a website?

We could advertise it here and at planck.com. People would go to it. And you could copyright everything you put there. (whereas here at network54 the material posted is not copyrightable, as I understand).

My advice: don't worry about copyright. just post.
A year from now you will want to say it all differently and you can copyright the revised edition.
Stuff goes thru such changes! Your first attempts will
mean almost nothing in a year or two!

Anyway you are certainly welcome.

Certainly i am not worried about YOU IN PARTICULAR stealing this, stealing that, or anyone else in particular doing same. It is a matter of boosting a habit-- in a manner not at all unlike counting your change. It is when you make an exception to the counting of it that they "get you". BTW i am member of USMA (how do you like THEM thar' apples?). Also i have not yet published and believe that it is way past time to do so. And you know EXACTLY what i mean by that and EXACTLY why i say that!

Incidently-- a propos of that very subject: During comps, i was asked how birds know where North and South were during migrations. It was intended as a "thought question". I mentioned that it could be done by means of the iron in their blood, iron being highly magnetic. I was told that was "irrelavent". Now they talk about that very idea in Scientific American-- not because of me, but rather because of the jugheaded bozo (who is very "well heeled", by the way) who called it "irrelavent" in the first place!

thesis advisors and research supervisors are
proverbial predators. Who knows
maybe as much idea-filching goes on in grad school
as in the world at large or on the web

I am trying to think how this applies to an hypothetical project like your "trimmed metric".
I do not see how it could be parlayed into either
money or institutional position (maybe you do see)
but it might be attended with some "place in history"
acknowledgement as thinker-upper.
So paper publication could have a function of date-anchor perhaps.

You must do as you think best. I still think that if the only issue is to establish a "place in history" credit as thinker-upper then a bulletin board like this one or some other (USMetricAssn?, or establish your own here at network54? other possibilities?) is a quick easy way of getting a dated post out in public and on record.

Network54 boards are free and no trouble at all to establish. You as editor would have ability to erase other people's posts if you didn't like them and keep your own dated submissions intact (unedited later by you) if you so wished.

Having your own website is cheap but having your own network54 message board as a way of dating the web publication of your ideas as they accumulate is even cheaper and absolutely trouble free as far as I can determine.

since I do not care so much about the record function I go back and edit my previous posts whenever I feel like it, and then the board mechanism adds some indicator tag about that, which I am not able to erase.
So the real date on any post is the date of most recent editing.

I really like this system. But you have to find what is right for you.

But hey, come to think of it, why not set up your own trimmed metric board!!!!! A place for me to post any calculations I do in that area without creating cognitive dissonance (internal conflict in the message I'm putting out). I like the idea. It might never have more than a half-dozen threads or it might have hundreds---that part does not matter. What matters is that it puts the stuff out in public and simultaneously dates it (if you avoid subsequent editing).

hot damn, pint drinker, I just checked'
the log and for month of march page-reads
just passed the 900 mark. is something wrong
with the counting system? alternatives to
metric is supposed to be this extremely obscure
area of interest--just barely outside the margins
of crankdom i.e. crackpottery. what cosmic joke
is being played here. why does the log keep going
up and yet just you and I are posting here?

On the large no of readers together with few no of posters, i am beginning to suspect that the count may not just refer to "forum 214108" but possibly to the domain that is one or two levels above this one. Nothing in the way of proof-- just a hunch...

that would be a bug in the system because
when I go to the log it refers specifically to
my board

also the pagereads in january were like 6.
but in feb, when I first advertised the things
existence on metricsucks and gave out a link,
it jumped to over 1400.

so it is PLAUSIBLE that some kind of word-of-mouth process started around first feb.

Also that was when I dragged a bunch of funny physics
stories over here.

So one could write to network54 and ask if there could be some glitch in some counting program which produced the odd jump around 1Feb. But my working assumption is that the log is what it says it is and that we just do not know for sure why so many readers started coming about then (although there are some possible explanations)

My hunch was evidently wrong. Only trying to explain the data. I suspect that the timbre of posting here is NOT of the genre in which the typical hit-and-run artists at metricsucks would feel at home. Does the counter refer to the MESSAGE BOARD viz. "this thing" or does it refer to planck.com in general? That might also explain the divergence between no. of visits vs. no. of postings.

the page-read count I refer to here is just for
"Junk Metric" board

it was virtually zero last year

(at a time when Planck.com was getting 17 thousand hits a month)

there are two logs
Planck.com I rarely talk about. I get detailed logs for that and it has been much hit and well read for some time. The logs show where people come from (what search engines, seeking with what keywords) and what pages they spend time on and one can see if they come back the next day and read a continuation or what.
The last time I looked in any detail was last august. It is just a roughly constant feature of the background.

the Message Board log is a newer thing and I am interested in it. I also have available no detail
(by contrast with the Planck.com log) I only have the number that it was a handful in each month up thru January and then jumped to over 1400 for the month of Feb. A much smaller number than Planck.com but it piques my curiosity.

P.D. I'm considering deleting portions of the thread
"May I question the whole thing"---most of the thread is no longer current conversation and part of it sound like a private conversation between the two of us discussing third parties. It might appear courteous of me to edit out personal references or simply delete what is water under the bridge and of no further intrest.
Could you look thru and save at your own computer
anything from that thread you would like to keep.
I don't want my erasing stuff to inconvenience you.

Very courteous of you to ask about deleting a lot of the items from the thread of "May i question the whole thing?" I would ask that you keep 3 items therefrom:

1. "getting trimmed metric sketched out" February 26, 2003 5h53 PM

2. "Boltzman & Réaumur" February 27, 2003 1h14 AM

3. "replies in part" February 27, 2003 8h40 AM.

Although i am sure you would keep these as they are so germaine to the chracter of this board , i want you to know that i have copied them yet would appreciate it if you would keep these particular items available for ready reference at least until i can get some of this stuff in one publ or another.

TNX Leonard. You are a prince of a guy.

But of course! We are both virtual demigods, joking aside I edited rather much along the lines you just suggested but leaving in some other related stuff as well and some things like the dimensions of that ship which just seemed interesting. There were some inspired epithets and other choice language that went---glad you saved the posts. Don't want to be too focused or on the other hand too scattered, try to strike a balance. Actually very free wide-ranging conversation is something that brings up ideas that contribute to our central interests. Trying to be too focused would strangle the golden goose or something.
Enough about editing.

Here is what you said most recently about trimmed metric, I think. It changes the sizes of several of the units just slightly. And I think it is an improvement actually. But it means recalculating. We should recalculate and post a list of the trimmed sizes.

Your post: [...But let us also define the metre as 1/300 000 000 c and the action unit as 9.5E33. This would entail an adjustment of but .000692286 in the case of the metre and an adjustment of but .001843017 in the case of the action unit-- MUCH less than 1% in either case. This would involve NO change to the Planck derived units, only to SI, which has come to sprout a number of ugly warts of late. I think of this trimming as quite analogous to a dermatological removal of these warts (together with god-awfully ugly hairs emanating therefrom), not even as plastic surgery.]

In the relevant part of my recent post I just took the usual CODATA hbar value 1.0545...etc and inverted it to get 9.48252....etc: [...This is probably how the metric system will be redefined in the next decade except with ugly numbers---metric is moving towards the same time-speed-action form of defintion and in fact top people in NIST and CODATA have proposed exactly this. It would work out about like this:

metric time unit-----one second
metric speed unit----1/299792458 of the natural speed unit, c.
metric action unit----9.48252355 E33 of the natural unit of action, hbar.]

You say make speed unit 1/3E8 of the natural unit---this makes the trimmed meter equal to
0.999308...old meter.

You say make the action unit (trimmed joule second) an exact 9.5E33 of the natural unit hbar---and this has the effect of making the trimmed joule equal to
1.001843...old joule.

Please confirm.
Since the kilogram must always be equal to the joule divided by the square of the speed unit it seems that
this definition of trimmed makes the
trimmed kilo equal to 1.003231... old kilo.

I have taken 1.001843...and divided it by square of 0.999308.... Unless I have made an error of logic or algebra the trimmed kilo is this 1.00323....

We can always get more precision but I don't like looking at those long strings of digits so just say dotdotdot.

Seems interesting, what happens with this number 9.5

Over at metricsucks.com, Wally and doo-dah are having at it! Check it out.

Yes Leonard. There is no question but that we should be very pleased with ourselves. The new kilogramme is adjusted from the old by a factor of 1.00321..., the new joule is 1.001843... of the old and the new metre is adjusted as .999308... of the old. Now we have done away with a metre based on but one quadrant of the Earth (must be at the longitude of Paris, "Le Méridien Vert") and a kilogramme based on one metal artifact in particular-- and metamorphosed them to a higher plane of existence by basing them on known natual physical constants-- all at a modest cost of well under 1% for the adjustments. So far so good!! Of course there will be those who oppose, but they will always be there...(all the drooling dots certainly NOT being coincidental)...:-)...
--p.d.

Hello p.d.

just checked log here---the unexplained read-only trend continues. you remember it was almost nothing in jan, and then over 1400 for month of feb, and now is over 1200 for march.

strange. but it means that if you want to post a concise description of trimmed metric here, and maybe eventually demonstrate the system with some sample calculations, you would have a chance of some people reading it.

but also there was that idea that you could preserve copyright control by launching the system at a website of your own. I really can't advise. There may be no point to copyrighting a description of a units system and you might do just as well to describe it here or at a board you set up (gratis) for that purpose.

have you seen Ned Wright's Cosmic Calculator?

It's a way of getting used to the cosmos with hubble "71" and flat and with 73% of density attributed to the vacuum. You have been thru the de Sitter model I seem to recall---is that right? Anyway this model has a slightly different feel.

What redshift would you associate with a billion light years (comoving--hubble-law) distance, or, since it is about the same in this case, with a billion year travel time? I mean, repeating myself, if you look out and see some billion year old light what is the redshift z apt to be?

Wright's calculator toy is a way of accustoming one's mind to quickly judging z by distance or distance by z.
Also can use it to explore various different flat and non flat models, if one wants. But the default model he programmed in is the very latest (based on the famous MAPS data reported this year). I will post a link later in case you haven't seen Wright's site.
A great bunch of cosmology FAQ, very accessible.

I have been going around with Conrad, John, and Ralf at metricksucks. I can now see why you often take leave of that board. They revel in cavil. It is annoying. But what is more annoying is that i get sucked into all that shit.

I just glanced over at metricsucks and saw

[I did not know that 100 grad = pi/2. I thought 100 grad was equal to 90 degrees.]

People sometimes drop the word "radians" when they say "pi/2 radians" to mean 90 degrees.

It sounds like this happened to you. someone must have said 100 grad = pi/2 and you thought that was something different from saying 100 grad = 90 degrees.
but it is the same statement.

too many discussions going on at once for me to kibbitz.

http://www.eeel.nist.gov/811/elec-kilo.html
http://www.npl.co.uk/quantum/qtm/fund.html
http://ep.llnl.gov/msds/Chem120/Kilogram.html

It might be wiser of me to focus on just one favorite alternative to metric but it was suggested that there was actually a menu or spectrum of alternatives and maybe at some point they all help each other in getting across the message that metric is outdated and unsatisfactory and improvement possible. So I want to collect my thoughts about that.

Someone was asking about the SI metric timetable for redefinition, which appears to mean moving to an exact value of Planck's constant (keywords "electronic kilogram", the "force measurers'" approach, the "watt balance", "intrinsic" definitions of units, i.e. those based on constants of nature instead of artifacts.)

The time table is vague. Significant steps are slated for 2004 and 2005, see this NIST site
http://www.eeel.nist.gov/811/elec-kilo.html

Corroboration is found in this UK (NPL) site
http://www.npl.co.uk/quantum/qtm/fund.html

This earlier article (1998) in Science Journal sets
the scene, but things have moved on quite a bit since
that was written:
http://ep.llnl.gov/msds/Chem120/Kilogram.html


The gist is that in future the metric system will probably be redefined in the next decade with natural constants and ugly numbers---in fact top people in NIST and CODATA have in effect proposed this. It would work out about like this:

time unit-----one second
metric speed unit: meter per second----1/299792458 of the natural speed unit, c.
metric action unit: joule second----9.48252355 E33 of the natural unit of action, hbar.

There are half a dozen ways of saying the same thing that superficially sound different but this is one simple way of characterizing the set of definitions the SI people seem to be moving towards---exact tho ugly values of c and hbar.

the above shows how meter and joule can be defined and then kilogram is just joule x sq(second/meter)---the unit energy divided by the square of the unit speed.

These definitions do not change the sizes of the SI units in any perceptible way.


****What I prefer****

Instead of this emergent picture of SI, I think this system (centipace-ounce) is preferable:

time unit----54 millisecond
speed unit----E-9 c---one billionth of light
action unit----E30 hbar---a nonillion times the natural unit of action.

It is easy to extend this definition so as to make practically all the main natural constants be powers of ten---G approximately and the rest exact: c, hbar, Boltzmann k, Avogadro, gas constant, elementary charge...

*********trimmed metric********

Another poster, P.D., has suggested a trimmed metric system in which the metric units are virtually unchanged in size but the numbers are a good deal nicer. The speed of light for example is exactly 3E8 instead of 299792458. Definitions along the same lines go:

same time unit as SI-----one second
trimmed speed unit: meter per second----1/(3E8) of the natural speed unit, c.
trimmed action unit: joule second----9.5 E33 of the natural unit of action, hbar.

******independently defined anglo-roman******

There is evident interest on the part of several people in defining anglo-roman units in a way that makes them completely independent of SI metric and this is easy to do in this common format of definition, so why not? In addition several people like having a force unit that is around poundforce size as well as poundmass (lbm) and foot.

For a coherent system (one in which the laws of physics work out without fudge factors) I see no alternative to a time unit which is 3/17 of a second.
A medieval time unit of roughly that size was once called an *atom* of time.

One foot per atom per atom is the same as 32 and 1/9 feet per second per second. So if the mass unit is made lbm the coherent force unit (giving unit acceleration to unit mass) will be the familiar weight of a pound in fairly typical sealevel gravity---so call it pound (abbr. p). Then the energy unit is footpound (abbr. fp). And the action unit which is always unit energy X unit time, is fp atom.

time unit: atom-----3/17 second
speed unit: foot per atom----1/173,571,363 of the natural speed unit, c.
action unit: footpound atom----2.2643693E33 hbar.

This choice of defining numbers preserves the sizes of the foot and lbm. The numbers may appear daunting. But remember that the defining numbers for SI metric
are about as hairy. It is to be expected. I repeat
the emerging metric definition for comparison:

time unit-----one second
metric speed unit: meter per second----1/299792458 of the natural speed unit, c.
metric action unit: joule second----9.48252355 E33 of the natural unit of action, hbar.

The "intrinsic" approach (NIST buzzword) to defining units dispenses with artifacts (like the metal kilo) and in effect replaces the artifacts by numbers like this. So if one does that in the reformed anglo-roman case one should not be too surprised to get long stringy numbers there as well.

Well. This may or may not have clarified the situation. Anyway there is a kind of range or spectrum of alternatives to metric. One can define all the alternatives in the same way for comparison. Life might be simpler if there were just one preferred alternative, but since it apparently is not that simple I've sketched things out.









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