The Glade 4.0

I had to get some passport pictures taken to renew my German passport. The specification for these is 35mm x 45mm. I had to call eight different stores (four pharmacies/convenience store, and four specialty camera places) before I finally found one that could do it. Things that I found out:

1. Many people in the stores had no idea what a millimeter was. A lot seemed to just not know how to convert to inches, but the majority had no or only a vague idea of what the concept is. Seriously. I suppose I could have just started asking in inches straight out, but I was curious. Various responses I got:

"Millimeters? Is that like the same thing as kilometers?"

*laugh* "What is that in real units?"

"Uhm, let me ask my manager" *puts phone down*
"Hey, we've got a guy on the phone who wants European passport pictures. He says they're measured in millimeters. Do you know what that is?
"I - I think that's what they use up in Canada."
"No, he said it's European."
"I don't know, must be some kind of generic units. Ask him what it is in inches."

2. The people in their first seven stores don't know how to operate their own equipment. Even when I told them it's one and three eighths by one and three fourths inches, noone knew how to resize to that size. All insisted they could only do two by two. It's a digital camera, you can just resize it on the computer or at least zoom out a little bit and then crop it down. Only when I hit the eighth place did I find a guy who knew how to do this.

Holy ****.

This is why my default judgement of others is that I'm probably smarter than they are.

If this was in the US, then I'm not surprised. Metric just isn't pushed here -- at all.

If it was in Europe, then LOL.

BTW, wow only 35x44mm? That's like not even 2 inches either way. Tiny pic. But then again, I guess it's not the size of the pic that matters . . .

wow... Walgreens out here can do it with no problem.

_________________
Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

Doesn't the Post Office take pictures for passports?

_________________

I can fully understand not knowing the conversion formula. I usually look them up when I need them. But the lack of inquisitiveness that would be required to have never even heard of millimeters is mind-boggling to me. I don't understand how people can be so insular.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I'm guessing at least some of them knew what millimeters are, but not in the context of taking passport photos.

An inch is exactly 2.54 centimeters.

_________________
Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Hey buddy, what kind of crap are you trying to pull? We're talking millimeters, not centimeters.

_________________

http://xkcd.com/ today..... So closely related.

And such an awesome idea!

_________________
Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

The problem with the metric system is that the units change by factors of 10, which is difficult to divide without calculators. However computers are extremely prevalent nowadays so it doesn't matter too much. Without a calculator, a foot is superior to a meter because you can divide it by 2, 3, 4, and 6 to get another whole unit.

That was almost funny....

_________________
Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

Inches are easier to use than centimeters or meters without calculators. Sure you can chop up meters into 1/12s, but using fractions instead of just 1" or 2" is unwieldy.

He's being serious. Decimal-based units are only evenly divisible by 5 and 2. Units based on 6 or 12 are actually superior in that sense, but they clash with our base 10 number system.

The best system would probably be a duodecimal number system with base 12 metric-like units.

Edit: exluding 1 and themselves, of course

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

In the age of computers, base 16 is probably best... base 12 is good too. Both are comparable actually. Base 10 is just horrific for our number system. It sucks how people use this universally. I wonder if technology would have progressed faster if we were born with 12 fingers.

Oh, I get it. I thought he was referring to the use of a base 12 measuring system in conjunction with a base 10 numeral system, which I find to be quite cumbersome.

A base 12 or base 16 number system would be quite interesting... Base 16 is nice for computers, but you run into the same problem with division by 3 and 6 as with base 10.

I'm just so used to a base 10 system with measurements that I consider the use of 3.33 and 1.667 very common. Extended to whatever degree of accuracy is needed, of course.

_________________
Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

If you're chopping up wood and you don't have a calculator (even building a ship for that matter), using feet and inches with a base 10 system is still better than metric.

16 is not evenly divisible by 3, and therefore fails. However, having ten fingers rather defaulted us to a base 10 number system.

_________________
Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Honestly, if I'm chopping up wood or building something, the error induced by the width of the saw blade/irregularities in the measuring device is going to be greater than the error induced from rounding the calculations without a calculator. 3.33 and 1.67 work fine in those instances. And 2.5 works great.

But take all the other examples for use of units... Do you prefer to use feet and inches when calculating volumes? What about when it comes to large computations, and you have to move from feet to miles?

Calculating the number of square feet in an irregular area given in square miles....

Or calculating the number of square decimeters in an irregular area given in square kilometers?

The feet and inches system is ok for a very narrow range of values- once you get below an inch, it's pretty bad... And the same for when you get above a few thousand feet.

_________________
Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

US passports, not German ones, which have different specifications. And only select locations can take the photos, for which they charge more, IIRC.

_________________
Women are from Hoboken, men are from Trenton. ~ Jimmy Kimmel

regardless of the utility of 12 as opposed to 10, it doesn't hold up through the entire imperial measuring system.

Yards are 3 feet, not 12 feet. A mile is 5280 feet. What's with that? And the inch is the smallest direct unit of measurement in the imperial system, despite being relatively large. Beyond that, they use odd fractions. We aren't trained to think in terms of 5/16ths. But we immediately know how much 0.3125 is.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Good to know

_________________

It's much easier to find 4, 2, and 6 on a ruler than looking at the millimeter ticks on a metric ruler, and realizing you have to round 3.33cm further.

The metric system is a better measuring system not because of any inherent superiority of a base 10 metric by itself, but because it was designed by people who actually knew what they were doing, as opposed to a group of commonly used measurements that got thrown together haphazardly.

Inches and feet handles small units perfectly well for what it's used for. Carpenters and such do not care about something smaller than 1/16 of an inch. It falls down on the atomic scale, certainly, but the British Imperial system had been largely abandoned by the time research in that area was being done. There's little need for a unit between a foot and a mile, even though we have several. If I'm in miles, I don't really care about feet.

The other problem with the mass conversion to the metric system is that nobody uses it. Most people who advocate it's superiority don't actually know how big a kilogram is, or how long a meter is. They don't know how hot 313K is. I use the metric system all the time. All of our electrical units are in metric. Yet if asked how tall I am in SI units, I have to convert feet to meters. If asked my mass, I have to convert pounds to kilograms.

_________________
Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

This is partially true. We do rather hybridize our use of it.



Kilogram, true. We use grams for cooking, but rarely do people measure themselves in kg.
Meters, yes, we do know. But again, for differing purposes. Generally I know i'm 162cm tall. But i measure myself in feet and inches, not meters.


Beach weather! But we use Celsius/Centigrade, not Kelvin. Kelvin and Celsius are really the same thing (in that the degrees represent the same difference in temperature), but the zero-point is different. Kelvin is truly more useful scientifically, with our understanding of what "heat" really is. But in a daily usage scale, Celsius is far more useful. We need to know the temperature at which ground-water starts freezing, or water starts boiling. (roughly, variances in elevation make this less than precise.)

Fahrenheit has neither of those advantages. Nevertheless, when I'm thinking of sun and sand, I still think 104F sounds more like beach weather than 40C or 313K. But when ice starts forming, it's 0C, not 32F.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

The U.S. probably would have successfully switched over to metric for day-to-day, non-scientific purposes if it had been done right. The problem is that when the metric system was first introduced, it wasn't fully embraced by the consumer goods manufacturers. They kept producing things in even imperial units, but labeling them with their odd exact metric equivalents. Thus a 16 oz package of whatever became a "453.6g" box. This left people with the impression that the metric system was "weird".

Obviously, that's not how it's done in countries that have converted to metric. No one has 64.373 kph speed limits. You don't order a 283.5g steak. Had everyone decided to start producing things in nice, round, metric amounts, it probably would have worked. I.e., they should have sold 450g boxes with "(approx 16oz)" beside it -- dropping the imperial at later date -- instead of what they did. In those few cases where it was done correctly, no one complained. For instance, large soft drink bottles in the U.S. are ubiquitously sold as 1L, 2L, 3L, etc. even now.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.