That means circles of radius 3ft, for a total of 8,693 square miles.
You have a ridge with discontinuous bands of acceptably sloped terrain, usually highly irregular shapes and you have to fit wind turbines along it, taking into account the minimum clearance between turbines and pack as many as possible within. This type of problem is NP-Hard and almost always ends up being done manually due to additional constraints. These include, access road placement, viewsheds, and turbulence modelling.
Average volume of a human is 66l [1]. Make it 130l to allow some unused space due to imperfect packing.
7.6 billion * 130l = 988 000 000 000 liters.
1 cubic kilometer = 1 000 000 000 000 liters.
[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=average%20volume%20of%...
"What would happen if you were to gather a mole (unit of measurement) of moles (the small furry critter) in one place?"
Would be interesting to learn how other disciplines have applied such a tool to solve real-world problems.
A lot of this is private property. Offices, people's houses, a farmer's farmland. We can't go inside, or trample on the crops of farmers. Then you need to subtract roads - because you can't walk on a road and definitely not a motorway.
So really, shouldn't the land area used be the publicly accessible pedestrian area?
And I dunno about others, but my footpaths are less than a metre long in width in my residential area. In the commercial areas, they tend to be less than 6 metres.
Memories of enjoying it with that one.
Singapore's density at 20,445/sq. mile is less than 1/2 that of Monaco, says its reference 5, which is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen... .
Thus, only 10% of the land is needed, giving plenty of space for roads, etc.
Of course, if you include walls then you can place people on either side of the wall without an infection problem, so that changes the calculation considerably.
FWIW, I wondered if Vatican City could reach the limit during a papal audience. It looks like perhaps 15,000 people could be there for one? That alone gives a density of 88K/sq. mile (bearing in mind that Vatican City has nearly 6 popes per square mile - or nearly 12 if we include Popes Emeritus.)
Then there's the staff, and the people visiting the museum, and others beyond the estimated population of 1,000.
Even with those, it doesn't seem like it comes close to 223,563/sq. mile.
Sometime in the 2100s it would be half what it is today and my country could easily fit everyone!
You just need to glance at China's current demographics to see that hard limits on number of children is not a good idea, both societally (in terms of treatment of women and prospects, for want of a better word, for large numbers of single men) and economically (such as the burden of numbers of children and pensioners per working age adult).
The Economist did a brief piece on Africa's demographics recently. It's an interesting read.
https://www.economist.com/special-report/2020/03/26/africas-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsolete_German_units_of_mea...
/S
(honestly, once the US empire is gone for good, historians will have a good laugh about their stubborn refusal to adopt the metric system. Must be the worst case of NIH in history)
A foot is the distance light in a vacuum travels in 1.01 nanoseconds. A meter is the distance light travels in 3.33 nanoseconds. It is not really a big deal what you name that, they are both totally arbitrary. They have no relationship to any core feature of the Universe except by some reverse-engineered arbitrary constant. (You start by defining that there are 9192631770 transitions between the two hyperfine ground states of caesium-133 atoms in a second. You then build the meter by saying that light in a vacuum travels 299792458 meters in 1 second. There is no special meaning to 9192631770 or 299792458; they are totally made-up bullshit constants that mean nothing. Kilograms are even worse; before 2019 it was just a big arbitrary ball of metal in a museum. I won't even mention how the base unit has the prefix "kilo". How crazy someone is for not using the elegant kilogram/meter/second unit system. It's just so pure and natural!)
It seems pointless to me to argue over (or worse, get high-and-mighty over) what these constants are called. SI has a bunch of bullshit constants. The imperial system has a bunch of bullshit constants. It's bullshit all the way down, my friend. As long as you know what constants to use, which is why we name units, then it doesn't really matter which you use. None is better than the other.
Arguments about units usually devolve into how crazy it is that people use fractions with imperial units. But nobody using the units for real things uses fractions; for low precision applications, sure, people will say "a half inch", but when precision matters, it's "500 thou". And people use fractions with meters/kilograms/seconds, they say "half a second" when they really mean "500ms" or "500.000000000ms" or whatever. (This is all weird to me because fractions exist in real life -- you can fold a sheet of paper into thirds. But there is no way to express it in a decimal dimension. You can make three sections that are 33mm, 33mm, and 34mm, but that's not quite right. So I guess you make them 33.33333333333mm, 33.33333333333mm, and 33.33333333334mm?)
It gets weirder when you start using the SI prefixes. There are names for every power of ten, but people only use certain prefixes with certain base units. Nobody ever talks about centiamps, but they'll happily use centimeters. Nobody ever uses deci-anythings, but there it is on the trivia test for SI prefixes. And of course, computer people thought that prefixes would be pretty useful, but we make bytes from 8 bits and not 10, so a kilobyte is 1024 bytes... for some reason. (It's 8192 bits, of course!) Decades later someone decided this was stupid and invented new words for every SI prefix just for computer people. The best case is that you sneak in an extra letter for every quantity ("1KiB") and people will think you made a typo and interpret it as 1024 bytes... exactly as they would if you wrote "1KB". If you want to refer to 1000 bytes you ... just say 1000 bytes because there is no byte prefix that means 1000 unambiguously. (The only people smart enough to benefit from this were marketers. They could write 1K and say "well we thought you were using SI prefixes" and convince customers that they were getting 1KiB of storage for the price of 1000 bytes. If it sounds too good to be true it probably is.)
So this all continues to be arbitrary. What about fastener sizes? The metric system gave us the intuitive ISO metric screw thread. How big is an M4 screw? The minor diameter is 3.242mm, which is obvious from the name. An M4 socket head cap screw accepts a 3mm wrench. An M10 screw accepts an... 9... erm... 8mm wrench. (The SAE/UTS system makes even less sense, if that's possible. It's wire gauges and threads per inch, I think.)
Anyway, my point is that it's all super arbitrary and to do anything you need a lookup table. You can go look at a cesium atom and you'll have no idea how that defines the meter, kilogram, second, or inch without a lookup table. You'll never be able to make a screw with just one number ("M4"). So it's not really worth making snide comments about.
To answer your actual question, why does the US use the metric system? Because we started doing science and engineering before the metric system was invented. There was no reason to switch because there are no benefits in switching. It's all arbitrary.
In general, yes. Though like everything else in the US education system, it’s really up to the local school boards. When I went through a couple of decades ago, we did almost everything in SI units with the occasional oddball problem in traditional units to make sure we knew how to do the conversions.
How long does it take immigrants in the US to "go native"?
Also, here in the UK, for the purposes of identifying COVID-19 symptoms, a fever is being defined as 38.6 °C = 100.0 °F, so US recommendations are clearly having an influence in other countries.
Many places still have very high mortality-before-reproduction rates and correspondingly high birthrates, or at least generational recent ones.
It seems, simply, that overpopulation is a problem which solves itself. High standard of living seems to come with high costs and emphasis on investing in children far more combined with delaying children until proper resources can be had. The result? Fewer children.
The doom and gloom about overpopulation was overblown and doesn't look to be a problem. We have enough food production capability (especially with new lands to open up with global warming), hunger comes from dysfunctional economies, not lack of food.
It doesn't make much sense to think about global population as a whole when there is such variability. You can't compare Manhattan to sub-Saharan Africa at all, they are totally different worlds (or perhaps a hundred or two years apart developmentally).
Granted. Yet it is wrong of you to imply that makes all measurement systems equally bad.
> There was no reason to switch because there are no benefits in switching.
SI has two advantages designed into it, namely easy conversion between unit orders of magnitude (e.g. 1 ℓ = 10 dℓ = 100 cℓ = 1000 mℓ), and easy conversion between units (e.g. 1 t water = 1 ㎥ water, 1 ℓ water = 1 ㍹ water).
Once I got into the engineering curriculum, we were also expected to be able to do simple torque and force problems in pounds (force or mass, depending on context), feet (distance), foot-pounds (energy), and pound-feet (torque). Mostly it was to show that all the concepts work in both systems, I think. In case you found yourself working in an industry that hadn’t switched to metric.
The 6 feet suggestion is based on the travel distance of possible virus-carrying particles, given people on a flat surface.
Since gravity pulls particles downward, I suspect that being 5 feet above someone sick is better than being 6 feet below. Possibly even better than being 6 feet to the side.
Your assumption is correct if you overlap circles in a way that everyone is on edge of someone else's circle.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid...
There just hasn’t been much of a reason for the purely-domestic parts of the market to switch: house builders are looking for 2x4 lumber, and won’t buy from a lumberyard that calls it 50x100mm. Knowing that, the sawmills continue producing the 1.5x3.5 inch profile that’s called “2x4” and anything else is a specialty item. Who has an incentive to push through the change?
And also because that's what was used to actually design the container. Milk bottles in 1 / 2 / 4 / 6 pints (imperial pints, not US pints), 454 g jam jars.
• Beer served in pints by on-licenses, millilitres by off-licences
• Even though distances are all in miles, and petrol/diesel sold in litres, fuel efficiency is in either g/km or miles-per-gallon
Sure but a pint is defined as 568ml. The only one that really is quirky is how people haven't yet grasped kilometers yet they're the easiest to grok, it's just 1.6 * miles.
. . . which I have previously determined to be within 0.5ml of the traditional volume.
This way round makes more sense -- "how much will it cost to travel X km" is a more common question than "how far can I travel with Y litres or £Z".
In essence I'd argue that most of the use of the any fuel efficiency metric is to simply rank cars, rather than to ever back out a genuinely useful cost/distance number. At which point furlongs per quart would be as effective as anything else...
- People’s heights are, I guess, officially metric. My drivers’s license lists me as 173cm. But at the exit from most convenience stores, there’s a measuring stick on the wall (for the security cameras to have a height reference), and they’re exclusively in feet-inches.
- Peoples’ weights on home scales are still pretty much exclusively in pounds. Doctors may have switched to kilograms, but I’m pretty sure asking someone how much they weigh in kg would result in a blank stare while they try dividing by 2.2 in their head.
- The entire official highway system has moved to kilometres, and you’ll pretty much never see a sign in miles. But... the grid system for gravel roads (from the Dominion Land Survey) is in miles and obviously we can’t go around changing everyone’s property boundaries, so they’ll stay in miles forever. Most rural folks know the 1 mile x 2 mile grid, and directions from one farm to another will almost always be (2 miles east, 3 miles south)
- I think oven temperatures remain in Fahrenheit because of our collective shared culture with the US. Most recipes you’re going to find have cooking temperatures in F. More things have shifted towards C though; growing up I recall house temperatures to generally being in F, and now they’re frequently in C.
- Fuck gallons.
(Source: Saskatchewan resident)
MPG (l/100km) Combined: 52.3 (5.4)
https://indd.adobe.com/view/5e31eb47-fa8c-4be9-b739-b19d58c8...