I remember when I first applied for a job in a fabrication/machine shop. One of the questions in the interview was “Do you know how to read a tape measure‽” followed by “demonstrate that you can use a tape measure” along with some other fun ones like “what is the difference between these two pieces of material” (one was aluminum, the other stainless) and other such things. I remember being surprised/disappointed that there were grown people who couldn’t read a tape measure.
I’ve worked in machine shops and drafting offices for years now, and I’m no longer surprised by people who can’t use basic measuring tools. Still disappointed though.
OK - now I’m curious, what were the most common mistakes people made reading a tape measurer? Because I’m having trouble working out how someone could screw that up lol
At least for me, that has more to do with misremembering what I measured than mismeasuring it
Can’t count how many times I the workshop I measured something, made a mental note of it, walked back to the workbench, only to have to walk back and remeasure it because now I’ve forgotten what I just measured lol
I got in the habit of writing that shit down on scraps of paper or wood. And then, of course, I got in the habit of dropping those scraps of paper or wood into the growing pile of scraps of paper or wood back in my shop and picking up the wrong one when it came time to cut.
Or they even say this is a sign of wear and means you should throw it out.
And because I enjoy sharing knowledge more than boasting I know more than others: the reason it moves is to account for the thickness of the metal hook itself.
It makes a difference if you are hooking it onto the back of something and measuring from there, OR butting it up onto something and measuring from there.
If you want accurate and consistent readings in both of these situations, the hook has to move. It basically pivots around the true point you’re measuring from.
Everywhere I’ve worked, you’d “burn an inch” or “burn a foot” meaning you don’t use the metal tab, you hold the 1" or 1’ mark at the start and measure from there.
We had a guy we called “10/16” (ten sixteenths) because he was told to grab some 5/8" (0.625" or 16mm) steel plate, but he couldn’t find any he could only find 10/16" and 12/16".
People will count the little lines on the tape and not remember if they are 1/32, 1/16, or 1/8.
Oh OK - that does make a bit more sense. Still not exactly Nobel prize material, but fucking up the fractions at least makes more sense than not knowing how to read numbers and count lines lol
Metric would help with everything lol. I dream of the day we finally make the switch
There would for sure a transition period, otherwise it would be total chaos, not just at a personal level, but an industrial one. And I don’t doubt that somepeople will continue using inches and cups until the day they die.
As for the speed limit comment, that’s a almost a non-issue - practically every car on the road today either has a setting to switch from MPH to KMPH (for digital speedometers) or for analogue speedometers it will generally tend to show both. At that point you don’t need a frame of reference, just make the number on your dashboard <= the number on the sign. That’s it. Though as you say, it would almost certainly be a case of both units being on all the signs for a long while.
It wouldn’t even take a couple generations IMO. Maybe a decade or two for official stuff to move over. I have absolutely no doubt that plenty of stubborn people will completely refuse to move over to metric for their personal lives, but that’s fine tbh. No one cares in Billy over in Idaho wants to keep measuring his ingredients in tablespoons/cups/pints/etc or say it’s a 20 mile drive instead of a 30km one. As long as professionals can all rely on things being in metric in professional settings
I worked on a site with two carpenters once, and one would measure and the other cut. One guy would call out “inch and a quarter strong” or " inch and a quarter weak" etc. Meaning 1 inch and 3/8 or one inch and 1/8. Perfect cuts every time.
Isn’t strong or weak mean where the cut needs to be on the line? Since the blade is usually 1/8", weak means that the cut is made before the line, removing the thickness of the blade on the measurement (1 1/2" becomes 1 3/8") and strong means that the cut is made after the line, leaving the actual measurement. This is how I was thought, but I am not in the construction industry.
Depends on the crews tolerances? I’ve used + or - to refer to 16ths and only call out 1/8ths. 1 1/2" would be “One and four” 1 7/16ths would be “One and three plus”
In old timey boat building they denoted feet°inches°eighths°plus so 58 5/16ths would get written as 4°10°2+
I worked with a girl who would say “4 and 3 ticks!” meaning 1/8ths. We laughed at her enough that she tried to improve and started saying “4 point 3!” that lead to a discussion about decimal inches. I really blew her mind when I showed her the scale in 12ths on carpenter squares.
There’s a great test for programmers called FizzBuzz. It’s an extremely easy task - print some numbers (maybe 1 to 100), but replace them with Fizz if they’re divisible by 3, by Buzz if they’re divisible by 5, or by FizzBuzz if they’re both.
Many reasonable people consider it way too easy - if you can write this, it doesn’t mean that you can write complex programs, or that you know the applicable languages, or that you know anything about the business domain.
But interviewers know that it’s a great test because a lot of so-called programmers still fail it.
We did a fizzbuzz interview with a candidate. He passed but I had a weird feeling about it so we asked him to do another one with 7 and 21 and he couldn’t do it even with his old code right there
Damn, dude managed to literally memorize code without having any idea of what was going on. Meanwhile, I’d spend most of my time trying to figure whether it’s div or mod that i’m supposed to use to check for the remainder of a division, I always forget which is which
It’s slightly different because all numbers divisible by 21 are also divisible by 7, so you would get all Fizz and FizzBuzz but no Buzz. So the question is, should you even be checking for Buzz, or should you make your code more efficient by eliminating those lines?
It’s good for a young dev IMO because that problem has many solutions and shows the programming style of the dev as well. But I agree that having a problem that is related to the actual work is better.
I was expected to know that one was stainless steel and the other was aluminum, but not the specific grades of stainless or aluminum. Stainless and aluminum can look very similar when they’re dirty, and 300 series stainless won’t stick to a magnet just like aluminum won’t stick to a magnet. But if you pick them up or even rap on them with your knuckles you can tell the difference.
After having a customer chew us out for something that wasn’t our fault he had us follow him to another room to discuss some more work. He borrows my tape measure and tries to measure something on the wall and the tape keeps falling over and flexing. It finally hits him in the face and hands it back to me and says “I’m not familiar with this type of tool”. I think he saw our faces turn red and eyes water up as we were trying SOOO hard not to laugh.
Kelvin use the same scale as Celsius, the only difference is the zero point. The imperial system and Farenheit sucks and result very expensive and cause even deaths because of wrong conversions: Crushed 2 Mars probes >$350M, flight crash with more than 130 victims because of an error calculating the amount of fuel, wrong amount of medicine respect bodyweight, etc…
I’m sorry, but Fahrenheit has nothing to do with the errors you cited. Hell, even the overall Imperial system, silly an (mostly) antiquated as it is, has nothing to do with the examples you cited.
The expensive failures you listed were caused by a lack of standardization. Those failures wouldn’t have taken place if every international agency had standardized on the Imperial system or the metric system.
Your point is not only a nonsensical non sequitur, it is also wrong.
It has nothing to do with standardization. With science and technology today, it is not possible to work in conditions with measurements and units random, based on parts of the body of a dead king centuries ago and not even, what is more serious, does not differentiate between weight and mass. Besides, it requires complicated conversions, a source of errors. For example of calculating the angular momentum in different parts of a 1.6 mile long bridge, if it has to be calculated with inches. No problem in a Bridge of 2,364 km to use Meters, centimetros or even Milimetros, only have to move the coma, no calculations needed. The important thing in science is that the units are repeatable and reconstructible, which in degrees Celsius is not a problem, having as a reference the freezing and boiling of water at sea level as a reference. A similar reference for Fahrenheit does not exist, at least not with sufficient accuracy, which is why it was discarded as a unit. You can be sure that the manufacturers that supply Fahrenheit thermometers to the US calibrate them using Celsius or Kelvin, then put the Fahrenheit scale after converting the values.
Apologies, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.
Both Celsius and Fahrenheit are based off the exact same thing: the freezing and boiling points of water. Fahrenheit just gives you more resolution between the two (180 degrees for Fahrenheit vs 100 degrees for Celsius), but otherwise they operate in the same way.
I agree that the underpinnings of the weight and distance measurements used in the Imperial system are silly, but they are still just as accurate as the weight and distance measurements in the metric system. The metric system’s units for weight and distance are more logical and easier to use, but that doesn’t make them more accurate given modern measurement methods.
I think the US should adopt the metric system in general, but I honestly don’t see the point in bringing Celsius along with the rest of the measurement standards.
I honestly see zero benefit to Celsius over Fahrenheit: they are both pegged to the boiling and freezing points of water, Celsius was just unnecessarily limited in the number of degrees between those two points. Beyond that limitation of Celsius, there’s basically zero difference between it and Fahrenheit.
It’s not like that. Fahrenheit is not based on the freezing and boiling point of water, which is used32ºF and 180ºF as a reference, if not, it would result absurdo. No it serves to consider it the same claiming that water freezes at 32ºF because it is known. It does not make it reconstructible, essential in science. You can’t work with randomly obtained values if you use a fixed reference like water, how do you want to determine a zero point without do all kinds of conversions in physical or chemical applications and experiments? Sure, you can put a thermometer on ice and in boiling water and then put a scale between 32º and 180º instead of between 0º and 100º, to measure in Fahrenheit, but this does not solve the problem of reconstructibility of these units. Fahrenheit set the 0ºF and the 100ºF on the scale by recording the lowest temperatures he could measure and his own body temperature, by being in a slight state of fever. He took the lowest temperature that was measured in the harsh winter of 1708 to 1709 in his city of Gdansk (Poland), about -17.8 C, as point 0 F, with this we have the same problem as with the other imperial units, they lacks an exact unit for the reconstruction, not better than the pie as unit for the lenght. Even the Réaumur scale is better, also use 0º for the freeze point of water, but using a octagesimal scale where water boils at 80º instead of 100º in C.
The US doesn’t use imperial, it uses US customary.
There’s no US customary Roman mile, ell or skeine, for example.
Chains and links are basically standard surveyors chains. They’re distinct units in their own right in the sense that a metric chain or metric link is. Should your metric chart have a metric chain on it? What about light years or parsecs?
Hands are used in measuring horses, and that’s basically it. They’re used in commonwealth countries, the US and South Africa.
I mean… I guess in a way it is a symptom of it, if you consider the growing concern of hacking part of enshittification and this, a method of stopping or at least slowing an attack down, being a product of that.
It’s more of an anti-enshittification device that just comes with a slight bit of shittiness in the form of another step to logging in.
Yeah, it just winds me up when sites impose these bits of shittiness on you without allowing you to opt out. Because I was happy to sacrifice a bit of my account’s security for convenience
JEG VIL IKKE MERE! År efter år er det gået på samme måde. Alt er gået som det skal, indtil det er gået galt, og hvorfor? Fordi man er omgivet af hundehoveder, ignoranter, fæhoveder, fejehunde, uden fantasi, et par IMPOTENTE HÆNGERØVE, et par småimpotente grødbønder
My account is named after the character from a series of movies about bankrobbers. It was the only western movie-series allowed in the GDR. The guy had a bit where he would go on long insulting rants against his comrades after they’d fucked up, calling them all sorts of names, typically finishing off with declaiming they were SOCIAL DEMOCRATS (this being the worst he could call them). Here’s a compilation of him tearing into people, and also being torn into a little bit
Here’s a really famous scene where they rob a bank to Elverhøj
I DON’T WANT TO DO IT ANYMORE! Year after year, it’s been the same. Everything has gone right until it’s gone wrong, and why? Because you’re surrounded by dog-headed, ignorant, stupid, cowardly, unimaginative, unimaginative, a couple of IMPOTENT PIGS, a couple of small impotent porridge farmers.
according to some, i dont have enough hot potatoes in my mouth to translate danish blob-no-thoughts
Perfect translation 10/10 Maybe there’s a little bit lost in translation between the non focused way “Jeg vil ikke mere” goes than the focused way “I don’t want to do it anymore”, but that’s incredible nitpicking.
Some of those words hit much harder in english lmao. Gonna have to start calling people both impotent pig and “small porridge farmer”
A different version of the same rant can be translated to:
It’s the same thing every time! You have a plan, a brilliant plan! And then your surrounded by dogheads and deadbeats, lousy amateurs, miserable hacks, ridiculous shitkickers. Incompetent assholes, impotent mush peasants and social democrats!
Åh gud jeg ville betale gode penge for at se noget moderne med Egon. Desværre er Ove død, og ingen kan fylde Oves små og Egons mindre sko - Balling, Bahs og Sprogøe fik virkeligt fanget en karakter af dimensioner, og samspillet med de øvrige karakterer var på samme tid plat og eminent, især Kirsten Walther. Åh altså.
Et moderne reboot af Olsenbanden ville have en masse materiale at arbejde med. Det moderne erhvervslivs opblæste disruption-hype og finansielle fiksfakserier vil sagtens kunne skabe en ny version af Hallandsen. Den moderne Jensen vil passe perfekt ind i new public management. Og så vil der kunne være meget sjov i at lade de moderne Kjeld og Yvonne have mellemøstlig baggrund. De skal i hvert fald ikke bo i Valby længere, for det er blevet for dyrt. Måske skal den røde kuffert indeholde en harddisk med bitcoins?
Jeg kan godt forstå din entusiasme, men jeg synes efterhånden vi har set så mange reboots af ting hvor det er håndteret så ringe at det trækker ned på originalerne.
Dem der laver det er også fanget i en sump af at skulle respektere det gamle for ikke at få på puklen for det, ikke være for trendjagende, ikke at være for meget eller for lidt woke, ikke at have samme “feel” osv. Bare se de “nye” Far til Fire.
Den var også lidt en tidskapsel for det Danmark og især det København der fandtes dengang, om end i et meget statisk perspektiv. (Selv om jeg har kendt mange fra det miljø og den tid… Det er en type karakterer jeg ikke ser meget længere med mindre jeg finder et overlevende brunt værtshus eller tager på Staden)
Jeg må indrømme at jeg ikke har turdet se noget af “det nye” og ikke kan huske noget som helst af “den sidste rigtige” med de gamle drenge.
Hvis nu ham der spillede Børge ikke havde kastet sit liv i rendestenen kunne der have været et Kim af en chance for et ærligt “generationsskifte” hvor man finder nye stereotyper han kan spille op imod, evt. “hans børn” der nu ville være lige så gamle som de oprindelige bandemedlemmer.
På den anden side kan jeg da godt høre at jeg nok tager det mere alvorligt end nogen som helst i de gamle film gjorde. Jeg er bare bange for at der er nogen der kommer og besudler mindet om en serie der egentligt toppede i 1eren fordi der var nøgne damer.
Nye film må godt have nye ideer og så lade sig inspirere af gamle film.
Another great quote is made by Jensen, the burnt-out detective tasked with catching Egon and his gang. His younger and more naive colleague remarks that “crime doesn’t pay” which prompts Jensen to give the following answer:
Oh God! My dear, dear young friend, you are terribly mistaken. Believe me, I’ve been on the force for more than 25 years, and I know what I’m talking about. Duty carries its own reward, but it’s modest. Integrity is beautiful, but meager. Justice is proud, but one-eyed. Love is sweet, but costly. Friendship and camaraderie, those are good to look back on in your old age. But the only thing that pays, that’s crime!
Jensen makes a lot of glasses-off remarks such as “when the really big criminals arrives the only thing the police can do is to offer them protection”.
Yeah it’s honestly a really good series. There’s a reason it got big in the GDR. It’s wild what they could deliver while still keeping it comical. Like that text reads as some really deep quote, but in the scene it’s probably played for jokes. It’s great.
My only gripe is how Yvonne ping-pongs between being more insightful than Egon, and being an immense dumbass, depending on what the plot demands
“The study found that for most of the participants, the cost of housing had simply become unsustainable. Participants reported a median monthly household income of $960 in the six months prior to their homelessness, and most believed that either rental subsidies or one-time financial help would have prevented their homelessness.”
That’s Soviet MBV-2, two were made in Kirov manufacturing plant in Leningrad in 1936-37, though i guess the transformation of one of them into a Thomas was post war development (second one is preserved in museum).
Loss of precision. Most digital thermostats only display two digits for cost savings. I’ve had experiences with mini-splits that are too cold at 27 and too hot at 28.
I got downvoted to hell for expressing this opinion on reddit. Like, I know metric and US customary. I use both everyday at work. But Celsius sucks for weather and I will die on this dumb hill.
You’d think after a decade or so somebody would figure out some system better than upvotes and downvotes that don’t mean what everyone assumes they mean. How about a tooltip to explain?
Even adding a separate 5-star agreement scale next to the up/down arrows would help so I could like upvote for a good contribution and give one star to say I disagree.
Is piped working for anyone else? I started using it about a month ago after seeing it here and loved it, but it hasnt worked for a couple weeks now so I moved to invidious. Maybe YouTube did something?
lemmy.ml
Active