Decimalisation

I just followed a recipe which called for 2 cups of flour, 2 ounces of butter, 1/2 cup cheese, 1 pinch of something, 1/4 cup cream, 1/4 cup some other liquid. Cut butter into flour using two knives (what? I'll just cut it and rub it as usual), add other stuff...and then drop the dough on a greased cookie sheet in one ounce portions.

But I don't know how much the dough weighs! We've just used a combination of the weirdest measures known to man. And if I did calculate the weight it would probably be in pounds/feet or kilowatts or Imperial Gallons. The US weights and measures system is a complete mess.

Wikipedia gives the "cup" style table. 

Liquid volume
Most common measures shown in italic font Exact conversions in bold font
Unit	Divisions	SI Equivalent
1 minim (min)	~1 drop or 0.95 grain of water	61.611519921875 μL
1 US fluid dram (fl dr)	60 min	3.6966911953125 mL
1 teaspoon (tsp)	80 min	4.92892159375 mL
1 tablespoon (Tbsp)	3 tsp or 4 fl dr	14.78676478125 mL
1 US fluid ounce (fl oz)	2 Tbsp or 1.0408 oz av of water	29.5735295625 mL
1 US shot (jig)	3 Tbsp	44.36029434375 mL
1 US gill (gi)	4 fl oz	118.29411825 mL
1 US cup (cp)	2 gi or 8 fl oz	236.5882365 mL
1 (liquid) US pint (pt)	2 cp or 16.65 oz av of water	473.176473 mL
1 (liquid) US quart (qt)	2 pt	0.946352946 L
1 (liquid) US gallon (gal)	4 qt or 231 cu in	3.785411784 L
1 (liquid) barrel (bbl)	31.5 gal or 1⁄2 hogshead	119.240471196 L
1 oil barrel (bbl)	42 gal or 2⁄3 hogshead	158.987294928 L
1 hogshead	63 gal or 8.421875 cu ft or 524.7 lb of water	238.480942392 L

The "cooking" table has another set of them.

Most of the rest of the world gets along with things that work in multiples of ten, and are based on each other so that calculations are much easier. It's not surprising that the Mars Climate Orbiter crashed

due to ground based computer software which produced output in non-SI units of pound-seconds (lbf×s) instead of the metric units of newton-seconds (N×s) specified in the contract between NASA and Lockheed.

Pound-seconds? In an interplanetary vehicle. I think it's really time to get with the SI program. Bite the bullet, USA.

England did, officially going from the arcane LSD monetary system (20 shillings in a pound, 12 pennies in a shilling, 21 shillings in a guinea, 2.5 shillings in a half crown) to a nice clean 100 pence in a pound.



It wasn't easy.



Since then, I gather from remarks British people make, that the rest of the SI system has more or less arrived (kilograms, liters etc.) with the traditional hold-out of the "mile" (which is 80 chains, or 8 furlongs, or 5280 feet or 1760 yards).

Mind you, a country which has to teach its kids how many drams in a hogshead instead of how many milliliters in a liter might explain the education gap in my last post.

Edited: typo

SOPA and PIPA

In a couple of hours, several major websites will be going dark to support action against two "anti-piracy" bills which, if passed, would severely weaken the internet.

I like the internet. I'm sort of against piracy, but I certainly don't have any reason at all to believe that a person copping a free track or free movie off the internet would, if prevented from doing so, begin to pay money for them. And I'm certainly not convinced that the best way to stop them downloading something is to pass legislation that would make it impossible for Google, Reddit, boing boing, YouTube, all your favorite blogs including this one - and thousands of others, to function.

There's a nice flowchart about SOPA and PIPA here. Or you can check Wikipedia. For the next few hours, it's the only thing you can look up on Wikipedia, so there's plenty of netsurfing downtime you can spend on this project.

TEOTWAWKI again: We Got Five Years

...said David Bowie. Actually, we have only four and a half - the world, apparently, will end before 2012 is out.


One of the major end-the-world-in-2012 theories is Timewave Zero, which purports to produce mathematical evidence that there is a singularity at the end of 2012. A singularity is a point beyond which something cannot be known. It may foretell a physical catastrophe, or it may foretell a Rapture of the Nerds – or anything in between. Is it likely that this theory, which occupies pages of formulae and can be bought on a computer program, is predicting the end of the world as we know it?

Timewave Zero was proposed by Terence McKenna and Dennis McKenna in their book, "The Invisible Landscape". "Timewave Zero" is the McKenna brothers' way of representing the flow of "novelty" over time. The graphic representation is derived from the standard sequence of hexagrams of the I Ching in what is known as the King Wen sequence. At one point, the graph dives through the axis – this is presumed to be infinite 'novelty' – and ends. This is the end of history. It is not necessarily a violent or final end of humanity, but a point after which a discussion of changes in 'novelty' becomes useless.

Read the rest here. (Warning: Loooong.)

The End of the World As We Know It

TEOTWAWKI is planned for December 21, 2012.

Mick Farren has a piece in LA Citybeat called The Fat Lady's Aria? Humanity's Last Stand? Or Just Another Apocalypse Soon? explaining the date, summing up the arguments and talking a little bit about why people are so gosh darn keen on predicting the end of the world.

For the third time in less than 15 years, the End of the World draws near. It’s discussed in coffee shops and saloons, and texted from couches by punks of the New Age while UFO Hunters flickers unwatched on TV. Theories inundate the Internet and books are already in print. Although apocalyptic theorizing might seem a hard sell in these grim times, conferences are being staged, at least two major motion pictures are planned, and the collective consciousness wonders if the date 2012 is already copyrighted.

Read the rest at the link above.

Me, I stick with Mother Shipton.









Oh, it appears she said the world would end in 1881.

Well, she was usually right.

Oh, wait, the piece above (published in 1888) also contains a debunking, including the forger's name. Pity.

"Did You Ever Hear The One About Last Year?

It was all a lie."

I like conspiracy theories. I used to hang out in conspiracy groups and listen to the sound of the bats' wings flapping in the gloom above. I have a few pet ones – the "NASA did so NOT land a man on the moon" conspiracy always figures high in my estimation, and I had a brief fling with the "holograms of airplanes in the sky coincided with bombs in the basement to bring down the World Trade Center Towers" theory.

What attracted me to these in particular was the sheer number of people who would have to be in the know and yet have not subsequently blabbed to their wives or sold their story to the Weekly World News. You can always count on a few stony SAS men or Marine generals not to talk to the press, but I found it thrilling that people could spin up a theory that relies on a thousand low-paid NASA engineers not to crack or some huge outfit with previously unknown holography techniques not to try to sell their distant-life-size-airplane-conjuring gear to the Rolling Stones or U2 as a tour gimmick.

My interest in conspiratoria flagged mightily after the success of The Da Vinci Code, however. If a hoary old chestnut like that could become a best-seller, I figured, then pretty much everyone must know every conspiracy theory out there. As time goes on, I'm learning that this isn't the case, but joy is slow in returning in listening to nutballs explain that da gubmint is apparently stuffed with antichrists and/or dupes of the New World Order who can simultaneously lie to everyone about the legality of taxation, the legitimacy of the Federal Reserve, and the multiplicity of Illuminati symbols in Washington DC.

You'll note that those are all very American conspiracies. Today I found evidence of a British conspiracy theory. John Scalzi, the SF writer, blogger and online-offer of occasional advice to writers, found an article in the Guardian that he really, really didn't like. The article, by Ben Myers, was about doing research on the internet. It concluded that it was easy, and yet not the answer to everything. Words were typed about Wikipedia. I commented on Scalzi's blog about the article. I didn't find it particularly enlightening myself.

But the comments to the article were another matter. Here's the portions I found interesting.

574871 "The fact that Googling a topic consistently throws up Wikipedia as the 1st or 2nd site on the list is frankly worrying. Is there some kind of deal between Google and Wikipedia that we don't yet know about?"

576120 "I have worked with computers for over 25 years. I know that 1 kilobyte is and always has been precisely 1024 bytes (and 1 megabyte is 1024 kilobytes, etc.). I was also aware that in order to overstate their products, the media storeage industry has for some time been exagerating the capacity of their products by pretending that the figure is 1000 (so, a DVD-R capable of storing around 4,700,000,000 bytes is wrongly described as "4.7Gb" rather than the actual "under 4.4Gb"). When a Grauniad journalist made this mistake in a recent article, I was quick to correct him. He responded by pointing me towards the Wikipedia article ... which is pure lies and propaganda by the media storeage industry! … [A]nd the vested interest bodies are clearly paying people to spread the lie as widely as possible. If such a mundane but clear-cut fact can be distorted and wrongly redefined by powerful vested interest, what hope is there for the more controversial and marginal, but which is nevertheless fact?

576636 "The big CO2 emitters support think tanks which use web sites to spread misinformation. This is a rare example of a conspiracy for which there is strong evidence… The reason why this is frightening is that it demonstrates that it is now possible for the super-rich to invest money in misinformation and spread it more efficiently than in the past."

Is this a new conspiracy theory that I've missed? That "They" own the Internet and are changing the information on it to suit Their Own Purposes?

Having read some of the arguments between Wikipedia contributors and editors, I personally feel that you couldn't buy any of them off with a trip to Phuket or even a pony (though a new IPhone might work) and anyway there's thousands of them. Wikipedia contributors are like termites, except ornerier. If they write something and someone else tries to muscle in and change a word, it's like the fight between the two dolled-up iguanas in "The Lost World".

I can't imagine any distributed network like Wikipedia falling to a single enemy. It would have to have more money than God.

Update: I just looked up Wikipedia on Google (or possibly vice versa) and apparently they do have more money than God.

Title: Lyrics from the Black Crowes "A Conspiracy".
ETA: another post on the subject.

TEOTWAWKI

I saw Apocalypse Now Redux over the weekend.

It turned out not to be about TEOTWAWKI, but it was a muy muy brisky video. No point in reviewing it or describing it as I was the last person on the planet to see it, so I drew a pitcher. Here's the LOLCAT version.

You can see the whole shebang at this Boto Phuket link. [link is breaking shortly]

I'll probably stick to writing in future. This thing only used like one intermediate Photoshop trick four times, and it still took about four hours . . . I just looked up and it was midnight. Sheesh.