[sdiy] Metric vs imperial, was: My new Moog 960 sequencer clone module project.. slowly but surely ..

[Ingo Debus]

> Am 09.11.2020 um 20:43 schrieb David G Dixon <dixon at mail.ubc.ca>:
> 
> I live in Canada.  We use metric units in our everyday lives.  However, if you take something to a machine shop, they will typically want the specifications in 1000ths of an inch.  It's not just electronics.  All the "trades" still use feet and inches.  2 x 4s are still 8 feet long, and house areas are still expressed in square feet.  We just had our house renovated last year, and I never heard the word "centimeter."
>  
> Also, at the supermarket, things such as meat are priced per 100g, but often sold by the pound -- yes, it's very confusing and annoying.  Also most Canadians express their height in feet and inches and their weight in pounds (avoirdupois).

Sorry, this is getting way OT, but I just have to rant.

Recently I bought the book „Musical Mathematics“ by Cris Forster. Everything is done with imperial units there. No problem, I first thought, but soon it dawned on me where the problem is: prefixes like kilo, milli etc don’t exist. As an instrument builder, the author preferred to use inches rather than feet. To fulfil Newton’s equation F = m *a, he had to „invent“ a new mass unit, which he called „mica“. He needed a whole chapter of his book to explain that! (After googling a little, I found that such a unit already exists, called blob).
The funniest thing is, he preferred inches because they are more handy when it comes to the lengthes of strings etc. But a mica/blob is about 175 kg! Handy for instrument builders? Maybe if they want to measure the weight of a whole piano.

Ingo