Aug 6th 2012 08:21 am Curious yellow
Talk about technology, I’m impressed! The roving space laboratory Curiosity has landed on Mars and with style. Basically, a huge—and we’re talking big—parachute lowered a “crane” and the rover to near the surface, where the crane fired off rockets to hold it in place while it released the rover and winched it slowly the remaining distance to the surface. I can’t believe anyone seriously sold this idea, much less made it happen. Much more humble rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, were basically dumped on the surface at the mercy of high-tech Styrofoam peanuts. Those little scudders, powered by solar panels, explored Mars for years, when they were designed to last only months. I can’t wait to see what Curisoity does. I’d provide some links, but it’s all over the internet; you won’t have any trouble.
Posted by jimmyjohnson / Vintage A&J
66 Responses to “Curious yellow”
Underdog on 06 Aug 2012 at 8:33 am #
Yes, it’s awesome, isn’t it? Very exciting, very exciting. Go, Curiosity!
Dave from Phila on 06 Aug 2012 at 8:48 am #
Yes – an amazing accompishment. Rube Goldberg would be proud!
billinbossier on 06 Aug 2012 at 9:02 am #
And already the Martian government is telling the Martian people that rumors of a UFO landing on the Martian surface are unfounded.
emeritus Minnesota biologist on 06 Aug 2012 at 9:04 am #
So far so good, and I am as excited as anybody. I regularly hit NASA’s Mars Rover and Saturn Cassini/Huygens sites [along with this site, 9 Chickweed Lane, and Pibgorn]. If Curiosity’s landing had failed, guess who many would have blamed? Actually, there are several possibilities, most of them nonsense, both political and religious.
On more down to Earth technology, emb is willing to admit when he’s out of the loop. First three panels in today’s [6 Aug] strip, are easy even though I don’t own a “mobile device”. But what is bank of screens in panel 4, with what looks like a cupboard below them and a series of dark objects hanging from hooks above them, that Janis is apparently making a choice among? She’s obviously out in public, since she has her purse.
sandcastler on 06 Aug 2012 at 9:08 am #
Dave,you’re spot on with Rube Goldberg; crazy idea that worked. Guess many of the NASA engineers played “Mouse Trap” in their younger days.
Today’s strip was a wonderful four panel journey of the past thirty years. Truly amazing how time can be so easily compressed.
Mindy, take note so you can get all those another day tales told before they fade into the twilight. My memory reminds me of Jimmy Buffet’s “Semi-trues stories”; partly true, partly made up but, all true in the telling.
Nodak Wayne on 06 Aug 2012 at 9:08 am #
Janis is at a big box store looking at the new fangeled tablet computers.
sandcastler on 06 Aug 2012 at 9:10 am #
eMb, she is tablet shopping’
Mary from Mt on 06 Aug 2012 at 9:13 am #
I think Curiosity should scoot right over to Spirit, dig her out of the sand dune she’s buried in, charge up her batteries, fix that broken appendage she’s been dragging around for all those years, and get her exploring again!
Neal in Bahstawn on 06 Aug 2012 at 9:13 am #
emb, if you’re gone for two weeks, you’re back to square one in terms of technology. My two-year-old laptop has a 17-inch (diagonally measured) screen making it great for writing, video viewing, etc. Then, along comes the iPad, which shrinks everything to nine inches or less, and the various and sundry smart phone with their 4.5 inch screens (albeit with dazzling resolution). If Janis is thinking what I’m thinking, there is a point of diminishing returns on video displays, and portability becomes a liability in terms of utility.
Blinky the Wonder Wombat on 06 Aug 2012 at 9:16 am #
To borrow a phrase we’ve heard a lot this week, NASA really stuck that landing!
Seriously, landing Curiosity on Mars is probably the greatest engineering feat since the moon landings, and perhaps even greater, since it was pretty much accomplished without any human intervention.
Rickmeister on 06 Aug 2012 at 9:56 am #
And relating today’s newspaper cartoon to the Mars landing: We put a man on the moon with the computing equivalent of a Commodore VIC20. Now THAT’S amazing!
Blinky the Wonder Wombat on 06 Aug 2012 at 10:06 am #
I seem to be in a minority, but smart phones don’t get me too excited. It is nice to have the internet available at your fingertips, but my fingertips appear to be too big to type on those tiny screens.
Ruth on 06 Aug 2012 at 10:33 am #
The hand-held graphing calculators that are used by middle and high school students are more powerful than the building sized computers used to put man on the moon. But the tech has its downside as well. Children are taught to use the tool (calculator) but not what it means or even basic math facts. So, they have no idea when their calculators spit out garbage or what the graph they just made is showing them. They also have no idea what significant figures mean and at what point to round their answers so it has meaning.
I was thinking about getting an android tablet but the small screen size was a major drawback for me. That’s the same reason why I don’t have a smart phone. I don’t want to have to squint to read something or to have to make the font so large only have the text shows up before scrolling down the screen.
Brent from Waterloo, ON on 06 Aug 2012 at 11:04 am #
Mars is a pessimal place to land. The atmosphere is too thin to land like we do on Earth (where gliding and parachutes work great), and just thick enough that trying to land on rockets (like we did on the Moon) is much too chaotic. The end result is we have to use these creative ways, which are limited in that we can’t really put down anything larger than Curiosity, and it still requires a lot of luck not to crash.
John in Virginia on 06 Aug 2012 at 11:07 am #
Curiousity is all the more amazing for the fact that humans can design such a machine [plus the transportations system/vehicle], send it over such a great distance and then land it safely with such precision…and people here can’t diagonally park a Volkswagon…Mindy said the crater is 100 miles across and there’s some pillar there that “appears” to be made by “forces other than nature.” I told he it was a perfectly proportioned [mathematically] rectangular solid oblisque designed by Arthur C. Clarke. She hit me.
Sandcastler, I’m writing down as many of Mindy’s Stories For Yet Another Day as I can with the thought of someday publishing…but some of it would be far too risque I suspect.
Tom from the Front Range on 06 Aug 2012 at 11:40 am #
Landing the Curiosity just shows what can be done when all the team members use the same system of measurement. (Hopefully they have all settled on the metric system.)
Mindy on 06 Aug 2012 at 11:51 am #
The metric system may be somewhat “easier” due to the decimal system, but I can’t see that it’s any more “accurate.” When John investigated major traffic accidents, he simply changed fractions of an inch into tenths and it worked just as well. It’s all well and good to say that water freezes at 0-degrees centigrade and boils at 100-degrees, but if water freezes at 32-degrees and boils at 212-degrees, it would seem that the relative measurements of fahrenehit are far more detailed than centigrade. But what do I know? I do know that a woman’s measurements are generally more attractive in inches than in milimeters…I’m just sayin’…
Dave in MA on 06 Aug 2012 at 12:11 pm #
John in Virginia, almost expected to hear HAL saying, “I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that.”
Dave in MA on 06 Aug 2012 at 12:14 pm #
Mindy, you made the same point I always make about Metric. It’s not about ease of calculation for me. It’s about accuracy, and 180 degrees between freezing and boiling seems so much more accurate than 100 degrees between freezing and boiling.
A friend who lives a 2 hour drive north of Vancouver, BC, in the mountains, said that they hit 47 degrees the other day (why do I keep trying to write degress?) and I had to stop and calculate that this was 116 degrees and was really hot.
47 sounds so unimpressive and inaccurate.
Burns on 06 Aug 2012 at 12:18 pm #
Regarding Rube Goldberg and “I can’t believe anyone would propose this seriously”: Remember that when Pathfinder used the big airbag, it was called Pathfinder for a reason. Dropping off your parachute and bouncing around for a couple minutes inside a big “rubber ball” seemed pretty bizzare and impossible too. Before Pathfinder, any landing (and there were darned few of them!) was done with rockets under the lander, which touched down on legs. So they already know how to bring a rocket-powered landing to a halt as you reach 0 altitude above Mars. The big difference with the sky crane is that they bring the lander to a halt at 5 or 10 meters above the surface with a rover hanging under it
Not that I mean to minimize this achievement. ANY landing on Mars is hard, (witness Mars Polar Lander, the ESA’s Beagle, and number of Russian attempts, etc). I just think NASA did themselves a disservice. It’s a fine line to walk between a WOW COOL! reaction and a “Those wacko scientists, why are we using our tax money..etc etc”. In fact, I think what is the MOST revolutionary about this landing is the inertial nav system built in which steers the lander as it is screaming through the atmosphere. That’s what allowed them to land INSIDE a crater and very close to a mountain!
Sorry to go on and on. I’m really into this stuff. I almost woke up my wife screaming YES YES as each step of the EDL was accomplished successfully.
Burns on 06 Aug 2012 at 12:24 pm #
Re Metric: Well, for more accuracy you add more decimal places, so in reality there is no difference in accuracy. However, if you just say “it’s 30 degrees out” or whatever, certainly a degree F is a finer quantity than a degree C. So you can express the temperature more accurately without using a decimal in common usage. But for engineers, it makes no difference at all.
Except you’d better all agree on the system you are using. I’m sure the reference above was to the Mars Climate Orbiter, where the contractor gave some data in one system and those doing the nav calculations used the other system, with the end result that an orbiter became a lander, if you catch my meaning.
Bob, near Mark on 06 Aug 2012 at 12:36 pm #
Dave in MA, instead of trying to write either degress or degrees, just write °.
E Amundsen on 06 Aug 2012 at 12:46 pm #
As an engineer I have to sometimes work to not anthropomorphize machines. But I’m clearly not the only one who has this trouble. This always brings a tear to my eye http://xkcd.com/695/
Tom from the Front Range on 06 Aug 2012 at 1:35 pm #
@Burns,
Correct, that was my meaning with regard to using the same system of measurement.
@E Amundsen,
Great cartoon. As for not anthropomorphizing machines, well, I learned early on to never let any machine just repaired overhear you say something like, “There, all fixed, now I have a flight to catch in about an hour.” or “Mr. Customer, I think the machine has been running long enough now to be confident that it is fixed.” or “Apparently that washer I dropped fell into a place where it won’t cause a problem.”
Those of you that may be or might have been in the repair business probably have other statements you never say in the presence of a machine.
Blinky the Wonder Wombat on 06 Aug 2012 at 1:46 pm #
XKCD (THE comic for science & engineering geeks) had a great Curiosity-related comic today:
http://xkcd.com/1091/
Ghost Rider 6 on 06 Aug 2012 at 1:54 pm #
Mindy, I of course know very little about the subject, but I understand they use centimeters for such in Europe. “And here’s the lovely Miss Lichtenstein, who measures a shapely 92-60-90.” And since they use a different system for bra sizes over there, if they wanted to get really up close and personal, they might report that she wears a size 80E. Impressive, no?
Now if there were just some male measurement that would lend itself to conversion to centimeters…
Steve from Royal Oak, MI on 06 Aug 2012 at 2:23 pm #
Just so that everyone is prepared, but the automakers are already phasing out CD players in automobiles. They figure that most people have their music via their phones and portable players and they need to real estate on the dashborard for other things.
sandcastler on 06 Aug 2012 at 2:27 pm #
GR6, there are 2.54 centimeters to an inch; multiple your object measured in inches for a more impressive outcome.
Mindy on 06 Aug 2012 at 2:32 pm #
Bob near Mark, okay, where in the keyboard is that little degree symbol?
Ghost Rider 6, Hugh Heffner and that other guy, the one who got shot, really did you men a very large disservice. Big ain’t always best, boys. Period. And it sounds like Sandcastler ain’t exactly immune to the Hollywood or Bust image, either.
Like the pun?
Mindy on 06 Aug 2012 at 2:33 pm #
I’m just sayin’…
Robin in Fl on 06 Aug 2012 at 3:09 pm #
E Amundsen
That is so SAD. Really.
Mary in Ohio on 06 Aug 2012 at 3:39 pm #
Ruth : Amen, Sister! I used to hand out calculators and assign 20 problems of 3-figure multipliers, then grade ‘em and hand ‘em back – half the class would fail for the very reasons you cite! And the “proficiency tests” don’t allow time for the rote drudgery of learning the times tables!
sandcastler on 06 Aug 2012 at 3:42 pm #
Mindy, what does Hollywood have to do with measuring system conversions? is there an attempt I am not aware of to secret us onto metric system? Someone needs to call Clint Eastwood with an alert.
Ghost Rider 6 on 06 Aug 2012 at 3:46 pm #
Hey, Mindy, I was just expanding on your comment about inches versus millimeters for female measurements. I don’t think anything I said could be interpreted as me saying size matters. In fact, I think you already know me well enough to guess which side of the “large” vs. “small but perfectly shaped” argument I’d come down on. So to speak.
Boise Ed on 06 Aug 2012 at 3:51 pm #
phasing out CD players??? I just recently replaced my’96 Miata’s tape player with a CD player.
Mindy: On your Mac, it’s option-zero (º).
Bob, near Mark on 06 Aug 2012 at 3:54 pm #
Mindy, the ° is over right next to the… Oh, where DID I put that little…
Never mind. Hold down the Alt key and type 0176 on the number keypad (NOT the numbers along the top of the QWERTY keyboard). You will get a perfect little °.
If you type 0177 by mistake, you’ll get a ±. 0175 will give you a ¯.
Bob, near Mark on 06 Aug 2012 at 4:00 pm #
PS; If you really want to be adventurous you can try ¶, ¥, §, £ (or € if you’re elsewhere in Europe), or even a cute little ¤. OK¿
Tom from the Front Range on 06 Aug 2012 at 4:23 pm #
@Bob near Mark
And make sure NUM LOCK is on.These instructions are specific to a standard PC keyboard. If you have a MAC you are on your own. Of course I’m told that Mac’s are so simple to use that you shouldn’t need any help.
Steve from Royal Oak, MI on 06 Aug 2012 at 4:25 pm #
?? For those of you musically inclined.??
Mindy on 06 Aug 2012 at 4:28 pm #
Alt 0176 was sort of like Alt F4, right? I ended up with three new windows and a severe case of vapors.
And I don’t have a Mac. I don’t even have a computer.
sandcastler, I love Clint Eastwood’s work…but what’s he have to to with Hollywood or Bust? Ghost? Bad boy! Bad!
Mindy on 06 Aug 2012 at 4:29 pm #
And, no, I will not define vapors. Nor will John, if he has any concept of self-preservation and being able to sleep in the bedroom tonight. Or tomorow night. Or anytime in the next calendar year.
Anonymous on 06 Aug 2012 at 4:36 pm #
(This is CW in 617, on a more convenient machine.)
To back up a week or so, since I was sans Internet on purpose, and converting from Celsius to Fahrenheit in my head:
John – Like David in Austin, I had learned that a bowline on a bight was a rescue knot. Last week, I did indeed try this knot to give me a fixed loop (with a taut-line hitch at the other end). I took me a while to get it right, since I was used to a longer bight (an accidental rhyme, there).
Later, I found some lengths of three-strand hemp rope, and managed to do two short splices, more ornamental than functional, but it still impresses the younger generation.
Hey, I can splice a rope, use a slide rule, and calculate pi in binary by hand (home sick that day). When the Internet crashes completely, I might become a popular person.
Ghost Rider 6 on 06 Aug 2012 at 5:15 pm #
Vapors? Is that anything like vapor lock? Never had that happen, but I did once experience carburetor icing, and if you’ve ever had that, you know how painful it can be.
Neko in San Jose on 06 Aug 2012 at 5:17 pm #
Last night I partied alone in my house with the brains who DID “Curiosity” and relished in some wonderful news in the midst of the ostensible decay of this once excellent Country. My own, dearly beloved husband is a Luddite and naysayer, but saves his reputation by being a “Renaissance Man.” To those who acheive wonders and those who respect such achievement, may the greatest blessings and luck befall you, as long as there is life.
Ghost Rider 6 on 06 Aug 2012 at 5:28 pm #
Haven’t seen your name here in a while, Neko. Welcome back.
John in Virginia on 06 Aug 2012 at 6:03 pm #
I can see Mindy…I mean, Janis…jumping at something fuzzy or with many legs or something like that. That happens around here all the time, but Mindy immediately recovers, grabs a rake or baseball bat or axe and does on the offensive screaming, “Banzai!” or “Die, filthy {insert proper noun/adjective here}! Die!” But to aggitate Luddy so much? Whatever it was, it must have attacked! Neko, I was once told that Life may be a poor thing, but it surely beats the alternative. Don’t know if that’s true but have stopped taking the risks that might hasten forward knowledge. Whatever that means.
As Mindy would say, I’m just sayin’…
Neko in San Jose on 06 Aug 2012 at 6:32 pm #
Thanks GhostR6. I can see a toad or small snake frightening a cat and a human, but I see them both sneaking back to study it further, not killing it. Life is an enigma for sure; what sort of god or mind would invent a system in which the participants must eat each other to survive and procreate? Why can’t we eat dirt and rocks instead of our fellow fauna and flora?
Please, John, don’t give up thinking–it doesn’t hurt, really. And please vote in November!
emeritus Minnesota biologist on 06 Aug 2012 at 6:47 pm #
People died of “vapors” and even “spontaneous combustion” in Dickens’s and others’ 19th century novels. David Copperfield’s [dumb] Dora sounds much like leukemia, but we didn’t have a pet that died at home at exactly the same time. How could Dickens’s readers stand so many coincidences? Copperfield has dozens.
Beetle on 06 Aug 2012 at 7:11 pm #
This is one of my favorite Arlos & Janis comic stips. I have it posted on my filing cabinet. Thanks for a great strip.
Ghost Rider 6 on 06 Aug 2012 at 7:23 pm #
eMb: Miasma theory was more logical but ultimately just as incorrect.
Good question, Neko. I guess it’s about energy transfer. Rock and dirt simply don’t contain energy in a form our biological engines can utilize? I can’t wait for our resident professors to weigh in on this one.
Rick in Shermantown, Ohio on 06 Aug 2012 at 8:14 pm #
phil in Missoula, MT:
Thanks for the tip on the Aero2bic mouse.
It looks as if it will work even better than this one that I have been considering: http://www.alimed.com/penguin-mouse-24264.html?gclid=CJPQ9OvLmK4CFRLGKgodslKPHw
Mark in TTown on 06 Aug 2012 at 8:37 pm #
I didn’t know Pinocchio was in the Olympics! Look at today’s Google doodle.
Love the retro comic. Great reactions from all 3.
I can’t stand to read anything on my Iphone either as the screen is just too small. Not much good for movies either for the same reason. But I have no intention of buying a tablet because I have no need for one.
Ghost Rider 6 on 06 Aug 2012 at 9:29 pm #
Getting back to today’s topic, when it comes to selecting a device, I sometimes feel like a duffer reaching into my golf bag for the right club. I can select from a smart phone, a tablet with a 9.7″ screen, a netbook with a 10″ screen, an ultrabook with a 13″ screen, a laptop with a 15″ inch screen, a laptop with a 17″ screen and a desktop with a 20″ screen. Before someone asks, these were collected over the past eight years, and since I take good care of my toys, all of them work quite well. (Don’t say it, Mindy.)
sideburns on 06 Aug 2012 at 9:57 pm #
The monitor in the first panel of today’s strip is way, way too big. Back when monitors all used what a friend of mine likes to call “empty state technology,” one that big would have weighed well over fifty pounds, and cost at least $500. I can remember buying a 17″ model back then, for about $200, and it weighed enough that I never wanted to move it once I had it in place. Now, of course, I have a 19″ flat screen that I can pick up with one hand if I need. Isn’t progress wonderful?
Mindy on 06 Aug 2012 at 11:22 pm #
Moi, Ghost? I watched some local and federal law enforcement officers playing golf on the course at Audobon Park. The U. S. Marshal was one of the fugitive trackers and he had an 8-shot Remington 870 riot gun with a 20-inch barrel in his golf bag. I never asked him if it was a putter or a driver. I’m just not sayin’…
Good night all.
TruckerRon on 06 Aug 2012 at 11:24 pm #
As I’ve mentioned here some months ago:
1) My cell phone is a phone and that’s how I use it, to make and receive phone calls.
2) I do any writing or data entry with either my laptop or a desktop computer with real keyboards. I’m a touch typist who refuses to slow down to a few characters/second from 60+ wpm.
3) Tiny screens are inadequate for enjoying much of anything when you’ve got superior, bigger screens available.
Ghost Rider 6 on 06 Aug 2012 at 11:26 pm #
I keep mine in the trunk of my car. One of them anyway. I’m the driver, so it must be the puttter. G’nite.
Jerry in Fl on 07 Aug 2012 at 12:28 am #
Curiosity and the cat. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
curmudgeonly ex-professor on 07 Aug 2012 at 3:57 am #
LOVE the retro ‘toon! That is a true classic, albeit unbelievable if Arlo is that uncurious.
GR6: For what it may be worth – and I am sure eMb will have more and better info than I – the various things found in the earth’s crust are already in relatively low energy states. Matter just naturally goes into the lowest energy state possible for the conditions prevalent at that time. Thus, rocks roll downhill until stopped, minerals form, and so forth.
Stuff in low states simply don’t have the ability to give off significant energy in most cases. Of course, conditions can change. Witness the energy contents of the fossil fuels. They were formed sans oxygen in the lowest energy states possible. When exposed to oxygen, they can get to yet lower energy states in the forms of water and carbon dioxide, so we call them “fuels”, but it does take special set ups to allow them to do so.
Our bodies are set up with various enzymes to help extract the energy from, say, carbohydrates, as well as dilute hydrochloric acid (stomach) to break down proteins and fats into usable fragments. Neither would have any significant effect on something like granite and not much (and not fast enough) on things like the components of humus found in good soil. Thus, we cannot graze. The hydrochloric acid would do a job on limestone, which is calcium carbonate, so you could all get your calcium needs met by judiciously comsuming some limestone!! That’s theoretical, of course…but it would be cheaper than buying the stuff.
emeritus Minnesota biologist on 07 Aug 2012 at 6:23 am #
c x-p:
Nicely done; I’ve nothing to add. As to Ca++, wife took calcium pills since she got her uterus and ovaries out at age 51. [That yields instant menopause, and we both saw it as funny--she didn't know the ambient temperature from one hour to the next, but hormone pills took care of that.] Basically our Ca source was milk and mine still is. When she got a new knee at about age 75, orthopod said to me after the operation, “She has the bones of a 60-year old.” I’ve been doing a quart a day for > 70 years. Major difference is it’s now skim, to help keep the cholesterol level down so I won’t have to take statins. Low-fat diet keeps it down to about 170. I’ve probably mentioned this before. At 82, you’ve mentioned everything before someplace.
Robin in Fl on 07 Aug 2012 at 8:10 am #
c-x-p
Good explanation for why our bodies–as they are now–cannot subsist on minerals. However, a larger issue I saw in the question is why were creatures designed to be that way.
I would suggest that, all other things being equal, if creatures (mammal and otherwise) could subsist on rocks, we’d be living on an increasingly diminishing planet and worrying about global, um, downsizing? diminishment? shrinkage? instead of climate change. Or both. Who knows what we would excrete besides sand!
John in Richmond Texas on 07 Aug 2012 at 8:10 am #
the retro strip – So I’m weedeating the street and spot something in the yard, apparently earlier while I was on the rider mower, circling an island of trees, where it was all mulchy, rooty and dirt I went right over a good sized snake, I got close enough to satisfy myself 95% that it was a snake and had to have my wife check to be positive, I did dig the hole for her to shovel it into, though.
on little tablets and phones, a co-worker showed me one where it’s so small they give you a stylus to touch the keyboard – now that’s just silly.
But I think smaller screens can benefit some people depending on their vision, for some stuff I actually like watching it on a computer rather than finding the right distance from the big screen TV and I’m always watching things from the Prelinger Archives on my iPad
My wife had a hormone scare a year ago. She had a pinch of breast cancer, really about the least amount you could have and still have it, barely left a mark, but the aches, pains, whole body fatigue and a little arthritis, was a mess, she asked me how I felt spending the rest of my life with a boyfriend, but it got back to normal in several months, bless her heart, she just wanted to be perfectly normal again immediately, in the total of our lives together, it was just a blip
Dan in SWMo on 07 Aug 2012 at 6:48 pm #
On measurements, it is partly what you get used to. While Dave in MA is correct that 47 degrees (C) sounds unimpressive, if you are using Celsius all the time, you very quickly get the realization that anything over 40 (104°F) is getting up there into very uncomfortable levels. (Actually, the mnemonic someone wrote to the South China Morning Post when HK was first changing over to Celsius was that 10° was too cold for comfort, 30° was too hot for comfort, and 20° was just right. This is a bit subjective, and reflects that HK temps never got as high as 40°C, but you can kind of get the idea when I say that these are the equivalent of 50°, 68°, and 86° in Fahrenheit in an area of the world where the extremes are neither as cold nor as hot as here in the US Midwest.) I do agree that the smaller degree in the F scale makes for more precision in temperature changes.
For that very reason, as a typographer, I like to use points and picas, even though my graphic designer friends find the use of such esoteric measurements rather confusing. They would rather use decimal fractions of an inch (using a crib sheet to translate “normal” fractions to decimals) rather than whole numbers of points.
Mark in Boston on 07 Aug 2012 at 7:22 pm #
If plants can live on sunlight, carbon dioxide, water and a few minerals, shouldn’t God have designed “the noblest creatures of God”, i.e. us, to do the same?
Brent from Waterloo, ON on 08 Aug 2012 at 3:37 am #
The problem is that a degree F isn’t that useful when it comes to measuring weather. I’ve heard this argument before, from someone who claimed to prefer F because he’d use it to judge if there would be ice on the road on the way to work. The problem is that the temperature at your house, or the airport/weather station you got on the radio or TV, doesn’t represent a large uniform blob over your entire town. There are these things called micro climates… little areas that can make the house at the other end of the block vary by a few degrees F (or a couple C). So if you assume that because you see that the temperature is one degree above the freezing point you won’t have to worry about ice on a bridge and drive that way, you might find yourself sliding into the river. You need to assume that there might or might not be ice when the temperature is a few degrees above freezing. And so it’s really a false precision… most people don’t really judge things outside ranges of 5°F… 80°F/85°F is a perceptible difference, 84°F/85°F isn’t. People are just oddly attracted to accuracy, but the weather report in 5°F intervals is pretty much just as useful.
Another place where F gets claimed to be more accurate is with body temperate… saying 98.6°F is more accurate than 37°C. Which has two problems. The first is that normal body temperature varies from person to person, and even for the same person over the course of a day… it’s not a thing that you can be precise about to that sort of accuracy. The second is that the value of 98.6°F isn’t a separate measured value… it was gotten by converting 37.0°C. The two values are exactly to the same accuracy because they’re from the same measurement.
Lost in A**2 on 09 Aug 2012 at 6:12 pm #
(There is a difference between “accuracy” and “precision.” A digital clock reading ’13:15:43′ is not necessarily any more accurate than an analog clock with the little hand on the one and the big hand on the three. The digital reading is more precise but could easily be less accurate.)