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Showing posts from May, 2021

The absurdity of the use of kph

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  First and foremost I apologise (yet again) for such a long gap in between blog posts. The return of freedom over the past year has kept me away from screens. They say it takes 66 days to develop a new habit. Running is a habit I developed over lockdown, but the return to the office (and I intend to never work from home again) and frequenting the pub has reduced frequency of this.  It is, however, not completely bleak for my physical well-being. Cramming a number of social events in after work has led to me doing a lot more walking around central London. I don’t have an Apple Watch, (other brands of smart watch exist), but my iPhone records my steps and a lot of really interesting data on my walking and running. As would be no surprise, I’ve configured everything in metric units. Thankfully, gone are the days where Apple would dictate to you , based on your location, the units of measurement you use. You have a chose whether to specify distances in miles or kilometres....

Could we try metric time?

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The beauty and fundamental benefit of the metric system is its ease of use, which is largely due to it being decimal. Within the system, it is simple to compare the measurements of objects. For example, it takes very little effort to convert or compare a centimetre to a kilometre – much less than comparing an inch to a furlong. For the most part, metric measures are based on an SI base unit, with sub units which are either a multiple or a fraction of ten of that SI unit. A simple example of this is the metre. It is the SI unit for length. A millimetre is 1/1000 of a metre and a kilometre being 1000 metres. However there are some exceptions. With mass, the kilogram is the SI unit, rather than the gram, but still, all measurements of mass are still based on ten around the gram. I am sure none of this is new, but I will get to the point eventually. The SI unit for time is the second. It is common for SI prefixes to be used for times shorter than a second (millisecond, nanosecond, ...