Grrl Power #422 – Out-patience
I’ve talked about Harem’s powers in my post under some of the comics and in the comments, but only a few times actually in the comic. Plus I just liked this scene with Harem having to, as she suggests, knowingly do something that would hurt as much as breaking her own hand. Something Sydney almost gets to experience anyway since when there’s only 4 Harems, they’re each twice as strong as a fit but otherwise normal 5′ 8″ girl. Or 1.72 meters if you live in a part of the world that doesn’t use a completely arbitrary measurement system. (I was going to bag on how old the Imperial system is as well, but turns out metric has been around for nearly as long.) It’s embarrassing to me that Americans are too belligerent to change over, even though 1.72 meters is an almost meaningless value to me. I mean, I’m 6 feet tall, and 2 meters is like 6′ 6″ so I can kind of work from backwards from there, but geeze, just put kilometers on all the roadsigns in a different color for a generation, then in another generation remove the mile numbers. Have all the characters all the pop culture make fun of the old fogies that say how much they weight in pounds and how tall they are in feet. Oh and guys can start bragging about how many cm their cranks are. Weight? You’re 140? How would you like to weigh 63 overnight? Done. Easy.
Sorry, that was a hell of a tangent.
In the second to last panel Sydney’s really trying to say “I’m distracting you from your pain with different pain.” I considered changing it, but between extra strong Harem smushing her hand and all the flailing, I thought it was ok that she wasn’t belting out Sorkin-esque perfect dialog. People sometimes flub their lines in real life.
Edit: So I thought I’d explain what’s going on in this page as some people are a little confused. Strawberry blonde Harem’s wrist got broken during the big battle, so she immediately de-teleported that one which puts her in a timeless storage of sorts. Effectively she ceases to exist until that copy of her is recalled. In other words, she doesn’t feel the pain of the broken wrist. When she finally ports back in, she feels the freshly broken wrist which is why she wanted to do it right in front of the doc, who can start healing it right away, thus minimizing the amount of time she’s in pain.
Edit 2: Ok I did some art edits tonight to make some things clearer. Panel 6 is zoomed out a little so it’s clear Harem is grabbing Sydney’s hand, and panel 8 is zoomed way out to show Sydney flopping on the table. Apparently people thought she was doing a poorly executed flying arm bar on Harem which come to think of it is actually funnier, but was definitely confusing people. Hopefully that clears it up for everyone anyway. Here’s the old version if you’re curious.
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True fact – we can only feel one pain at a time.
my life disproves your theory
you can definitely feel more than one pain at a time. the brain however has a tendency to focus on on new pain over old pain in the beginning (depending on severity). for example if you say twist you ankle yesterday and then burn yourself on the cooker today for a few mins you will hyper focus on the burn. however after about an hour you feel both and get realy f****** miserable.
Completely freaking false fact. Have an ovarian cyst and a sliced open hand at the same time. Trust me, you feel them both and they are crippling.
Try having 12 Radiofrequency (Burning of the nerves) done to the nerve roots in the facet joints of your spine while also dealing with a severed meniscus. Trust me you feel it all areas and its overwhelming and crippling. You don’t focus on one your brain registers it all at the same time.
True. But brain has priorities.
1 Wisdom teeth removed on either sides. Hurt on both.
Head pain, neck pain, back pain, shoulder pain, and a cramping calf muscle right after an auto accident says you are in error. Continued years of various pains after the accident further proves such.
Cognitive Psychology also says otherwise – all brain function is winnowing down to focus on what is important, but you still feel every ache and pain. We prioritize a lot – this is why you generally don’t even notice the sound of the LED blinking on and off on a clock. Either that or you’re old like me and your hearing is going. :)
In fact, several pain killers (Demerol is one, I think) don’t interfere with the pain (nerve function) before it gets to the brain as an NSAID generally does (also, reduced swelling), they just lower the attention threshold for pain so that it’s manageable.
Well, I’m thinking of the old days when rich guys got gout and actually got the butler to apply a hot iron to their bodies so, for a second, they couldn’t feel the gout.
Here is something to try the next time you get a bad sunburn… A really hot shower!
Make it as hot as you can handle, without screaming if you don’t want to scare the rest of the family, and then turn it up as the pain subsides.
Don’t worry about any damage from the hot shower. What you feel is scalding hot on your sunburned skin is actually quite safe. You may feel like the heat is going to cause blisters, but it is just your super sensitive skin that’s screaming in agony.
What happens is that the body starts dumping endorphins and adrenalin into the bloodstream to dampen the pain and fuel your body for combat or flight. When you can’t stand it anymore there will be enough of those drugs in your systems that you can’t feel the sunburn and you will be jumping with adrenalin. Now is when you towel your self dry and crawl into bed. The adrenalin will wear off first, leaving you tired, while the endorphines will linger long enough for you to fall asleep.
It may seem excessive but I’ve used it many times when i was a kid. The short painful shower is in my opinion better than spending long nights not being able to sleep as even the softest bed sheets feels like 20 grit sandpaper.
Or an alternative is to use appropriate strength sun block, for the prevailing conditions. It has the added bonus of helping to prevent skin cancer.
Do they not have special over-powered or mystically enhanced painkillers which affect all Harem’s bodies at once? Or, she could have popped the pills before porting out?
Pain is physical, so you can’t exactly drug one physical body and have it effect a different physical body
But we’ve seen that harem shares experiances between all her bodies, logically if one was drugged the others would also be affected just because of the shared experiance, it’d still probably hurt like heck at first, but the second harem would be able to cope better if she didn’t have the pain echoing back through the other harem.
If you numb your arm, you can still feel your broken leg. Harem has five bodies we can feel at the same time, not one body that’s in five places.
How about hypnosis?
Better yet. Bring in the tickle gun.
this also wouldnt work and here’s the example of why:
Harem A has a broken arm, drugs are administered to harem B to numb Harem B’s arm. However while this does mean none of the Harem-s will feel pain from anything done to Harem B’s arm, Harem A’s arm is perfectly capable of transmitting pain-signals to Harem A’s brain, from where it propagates throughout the Harem.
The irony is it probably woudlnt help to say, get the other harems drunk or whatnot unless Harem A, the one with the broken arm, is the one getting so medicated to keep the pain signals from getting to her brainbox.
Can Harem be her own Designated Driver?
Actually, the “Are unteleported bodies younger?” makes me wonder if there could be younger unteleported bodies she hasn’t told anyone about (probably not).
AFAIK no, getting one Harem drunk affects all the rest, but they don’t get any drunker when they all drink than if just one drinks.
Well, that really unpacks to three separate possibilies: could there be, are there, and does us not having heard about it necessarily entail not having told the appropriate higher-ups within ARCHON? (The last because someone on another page called the whole thing a conspiracy theory when all it really has to be is something that hasn’t been revealed to the audience yet, or maybe something she hasn’t thought of yet).
Another question someone else raised was, can she “delete” Strawberry and therefore never have to deal with the pain?
That ‘someone on another page’ was me calling it a fan-based conspiracy-crap (or something like that)
Theoretically, she could have a dozen (or more) extra bodies either in ‘storage’ or scattered around the world
‘Deleting’ one of her is the equivalent of killing one of her, and all that just to avoid the pain of a broken wrist? You sound like one of those rich tossers who dump a car simply because it has a tiny scratch on the door, but worse!!!
If you break your foot, administering a local anesthetic to your OTHER foot doesn’t do you any good. Same principle.
You could give painkillers to the 4 current Harems before she un-de-teleported the 5th. Then only one Harem would feel the pain, and could promptly be given a local anesthetic. Of course, the rest of her would be stoned, and that might cascade since she has one mind and would be feeling stoned four times at once…
As long as she’s not on duty and the doctor is loose with pain meds, it would work.
Therein lies the rub; I don’t think Doc Chevy gives a shit that Harem hurts.
I do think she cares that a Harem is broken, though.
Her bedside manner kinda reminds me of House.
A magic spell/potion that affected the mind rather than body would also work…
Oh hey Dabbler!
Or Gwen, or Zephan
Demerol – ask for it by name. :)
Demerol sucks for me. I once had to take it when I was in the hospital and it did nothing. They had to give me several shots of it before it started taking any effect at all and the doctors were wondering why I was still awake.
Yet if I take a couple of vicodin, I will be out like a light. So weird.
At least you just have a high tolerance for Demerol. My reaction to it is uncontrollable hiccoughs for days until it flushes out of my system. Oh, it numbs the pain, but the constant hiccoughing and not being able to get any sleep is enough to drive me bonkers.
Novacaine doen’t work very well on me either – which makes going to the dentist a torture :/
I think Dr. House would have a field day subbing for Doc Chevy.
Nah, bored as hell; no puzzles. Doc Chevy’s job isn’t “interesting”, only the people she works on are.
I think that trick only works with the Bethrothal Bond from “Use Sword on Monster”.
Another problem with drugging any one of her is that that one would still have to filter out the stuff the hard way over time.
So you had a 1/5 groggy Harem, rather then a 1/5 “waiting for healing” harm.
Key to this discussion is to narrow down what sort of painkillers we’re talking about.
Local anaesthetic won’t work, for reasons people already identified–it would be like numbing the wrong foot with novacaine.
A more general pain blocker (say, Tylenol 3) would be a bit more effective, but would be diluted. Figure on it being 4/5 as powerful for her as for a normal person, at least until the remaining Harem gets dosed/fixed.
A final option would be general anaesthetic–literally knocking her out or at least getting her tripping balls on laughing gas. This would be the most effective, though timing the un-de-teleport would be tricky. What’s more, Harem will remember the pain very clearly when the other clones all wake up.
I was thinking of a drug that blocks signals to the pain receptors, like, say, an opioid, and I was thinking of drugging up ALL FOUR of the Harems that are out, since any body not blocked to pain will still feel it and send it to her mind. Of course, this will have no effect on her feeling the pain from the pain receptors in the brain that actually has the broken wrist, except that opioids don’t really do much to block pain, they mostly make you not feel it. I think that would work, and presumably even high on tramadol or something, Harem can un-de-teleport strawberry.
I think the key is to use a psychoactive painkiller like opioids.
And rule of funny Sydney strikes again? Best explanation I’ve got for how she managed to get her feet that high, or maybe the
poor memorytraining motage really did help?Well… She can fly
Not when she’s not holding an orb, and you can see that Harem has one hand being held and Sydney has her other hand on Harem’s arm.
That looks a bit like the position for an arm-bar, but applied badly. Mind you, Sydney has probably not been trained in MMA, just watched some on TV, or even professional wrestling, which uses the same move, but applies no pressure to keep from actually hurting the other person.
Yes, but at least she’s trying! And applying an arm bar to an opponent who’s actually still on their feet is not the easiest, not least because your leverage is all wrong. You’re probably right too that Sydney seems more likely to be a WWF fan than a UFC fan.
Yeah, I think she would be a fan of the World Wildlife Fund, seeing as how she is vegetarian on ethical grounds. About two decades ago, a court ruled that the WWF initials belonged to the charity, the World Wildlife Fund, because they started using it first, so the World Wresting Federation became World Wresting Entertainment (WWE). The World Wildlife Fund has subsequently changed its name too, to the World Wide Fund for Nature, to represent a broader scope than just preserving animals; they still use the WWF initials though.
I remember telling my Scout group where I was a leader, just after this ruling, that I could get a person from the WWF to come out and talk with us; the WWE were going to be doing a show in Toronto about a month later, so some people drew the wrong conclusion. The kids were really enthusiastic about it, even after I told them that the speaker would be somebody from the P.R. department and probably not anybody they knew about. The enthusiasm remained high, at least until a lady showed up to talk about pollution and habitat loss. They did admit they learned a lot about conservation that evening, even if they were looking forward to understand more about professional wrestling.
And now you know about how much attention I pay to pro wrestling.
WWF had been using those initials since the early 80’s, an prior to that, the initials WWWF when Vinnie’s daddy was running the show
The World Wildlife Fund had been using those initials since its inception in the late 1960’s, so it won the case.
She’s just laying on the examination table.
Remember, Sydney once got arrested for beating up a mugger in self defense.
“Oh, the humanity!”
That’s one mugger that’ll think twice before mugging anyone else…After getting out of the traction harness, of course.
Quote a literal use of Mugging the Monster.
That was not nice of you. I spent more than an hour desperately trying to escape from the hell known as TV Tropes…
Did Doc become an MD because of her powers, or did her powers come as a result of being a doctor?
I’d say Powers first. Maybe she’s a reluctant doctor.
For being a doctor, she seems to have little patience…
EleGiggle
I see what you did there!
Well, Sydney is a member of the “A-team”. Plus not everyone can be as tall as Leon or Anvil.
Oh, were you giggling at the “patient” play? Um, ok, I will just be over there.., err… rearranging some flowers or something.
She reminds me of healers in MMOs. They’ll keep you alive, and be very happy when they do. But if you bring the party in danger, they can be the most cynical people alive, and will drop your soon-to-be dead body down a well
I played the healer in a MMORPG for five years, and you just described me perfectly :D
Ha!
It’s a side effect of being blamed for an idiot standing in fire and killing themselves. Over, and over. Or the tank pulling half the dungeon and complaining that you couldn’t keep up.
That’s how I trained as a healer – the difference is that I trusted the tank in question. By the time he finished with me, I could keep a 5-man group alive through almost anything and still have mana left by the end of the fight.
Of course, then I started emulating his “crazy tank” style. The difference between me (and him) and the true crazy tanks is that we actually adjust for the healer’s skill level.
This is why so few people don’t like to play healers. A healer gets to observe first hand exactly how stupid some people can really get.
It’s a trend fairly common in games like Team Fortress 2…Everybody insists on having a Medic on the team, but so few actually like to be the Medic.
As well they should.
::whistles::
Quite likely she became a doctor to take advantage of her healing powers.
Teenaged Ms. Chevy: Hmm, I like helping people, and it looks I can actually heal people, judging by the way Tim’s sprained ankle is okay now. Maybe being a doctor would be a good idea. Or do I like animals better? Vet? Nah! let’s see. What do I need to get into medical school? What the heck is kinesiology?
Her last name wasn’t Chevy as a teenager, to be pedantic. It was pointed out last comic that her last name is Thai, and she’s Hindi (and presumably Indian). We also aren’t certain that she’s not a vet…it’s heavily implied because she helps around other places most of the time, but that’s with her powers. The only reason to assume any medical training at all is because she is a Dr. Technically, she could be a physicist with healing powers, but then she wouldn’t know how to give a physical, and Dave said he figures she’s a Captain because that’s what he thinks the usual rank is for a doctor.
Realistically, she could have a PHD and been a military nurse, then got bumped up to doctor in Archon. Vet is more likely than PHD for several reasons, but it would be interesting if Dave told us her actual medical training. She could use her healing powers as a nurse just as effectively, with a lot less school. The only reason we assume she’s an MD is because she’s a Dr., and again, she could be a vet. She doesn’t seem to like people very much. She would have to be cross-trained as a nurse, though. Occam’s Razor says she’s a people doctor MD, but there are alternatives.
True, her name is not Chevy; I just did not want to type all the letters in her name.
I have a friend who is a semi-retired dentist, who started out her career as a fitness instructor until she realized she had too much stage fright to be speaking in public, like her fitness classes! One-on-one, she is fine, but to get her talking in front of a whole bunch of people, even people she knows, and she freezes. So after she realized that teaching was not for her, she went and got her DDS, so much easier. So maybe she got a DDS or similar. Mind you, do I want a dentist doing my physical beyond my mouth? Probably not.
As for her attitude, take a look at Doctors House (House) and Winchester (M*A*S*H). In fact, my mother, a retired nurse, said that Winchester’s attitude and aptitude was much more realistic than that of Dr. Burns.
I heard that they put Dr. Chevy to the levy. Fortunately, the levy was fine. It was some good ol’ boys drinking whiskey and wine and saying that they were going to die that day. No one was actually injured, though.
No, I don’t just mean that Chevy is a shortened version of her name; that is her married name, not her maiden name. We have no idea what her last name was as a teenager.
Wait, did DaveB explain her name? Or simply commentators claim that she was married to a Thai? o_O
Nothing from DaveB, but her last name is Thai. She is Hindi. The commentators have made the logical assumption that she is Indian. An alternative explanation is that her father is Thai and her mother is Indian. Another explanation is that she is a Thai Hindi (though she’s a bit dark-skinned for that). DaveB explained the origin of her name, which is a Thai name, and she is Hindi because she is wearing a bindi, but really that is all we know.
Granted this is a comic, and not real life. However, it is very unlikely that she would have been a nurse in any branch of service as an enlisted, then get promoted to the rank of Captain. More likely, she went into service through OSC, (Officer Candidate School), when she had her BS in Medicine, used the GI bill to further her education, as she rose through the officer ranks.
True, nurses usually range from E4 to E5, but she could have gone through OCS, and the Army, at least, now only has one nurse MOS instead of two, so technically all nurses enlisted after a certain point are combat medics, which gives the opportunity for a lot higher rank. Still enlisted, though. The GI bill got pretty screwed by Bush. 100 grand turned into nothing.
Not sure you can get a BS in Medicine. Most pre-meds either get a BS in Biology or, if they’re smart, Chemistry. Then, if she went civilian nurse, there’s…
Oh, I looked it up, and there’s a BSN (BS in Nursing), ADN (associate’s), and LPN (1-2 years), and the first two can become an RN.
Really, we’re just guessing. Quite a lot of the supers in Archon have no previous military training.
We need some WOG.
I live in the USA, and have deliberately chosen to use metric measurements. Works fine for distance, but I can’t get my doctor to weigh me in metric. :( Anyone who needs to know distance, usually stops asking me. :(
The trouble with metric weights is that few American scales are set for Newtons.
I doubt the rest of the world understands how frigging expensive it would be for us to convert everything on this massive landmass and population into metric. Hell, people in the UK still use imperial units and that’s not even remotely as hard as switching the US.
insert obligatary: “not as expensive as your millitary” comment
Doesn’t the US military largely use SI anyway?
Some instances yes. Some instances no. It depends where things are on the “Measure to the millimeter, mark with chalk, cut with an ax” scale.
How expensive would that be, compared to the occasion lost satellite caused by the confusion between several measurement systems?
the one time that happend was a drop in the bucket compared to replacing every single roadsign in the US.
let along things like changing the tools people use or the measurements on instructions for consumer goods.
Also metric isn’t actually better at anything people really need. It’s one selling point is the base 10 prefixes but you don’t really use those much. I’d be easier to just use decimal notation with existing units so instead of converting between cups and pints you measure fractional pints as an example.
It’s quite useful to know instantly how much any volume of water weighs though
The US already made that change…twice.
When Jimmy Carter became president in 1976 the US government began to implement the 1975 Metric Conversion Act and convert roadsigns to show both 55 mph and 88 kph on all interstate highways.
However, there was a lot of backlash from the American public and early in president Ronald Regan’s presidency in 1982 the Metric Board was disbanded and most interstate speed signs were again replaced with non-metric versions.
In both cases the roadsigns were replaced over a number of years and the costs were not that great. There would be no extra expense at all for a gradual conversion if signs replaced on their normal schedule were mandated to include KPH again.
To start, there are almost 4 MILLION miles of road here (just over 6.4 million km), which is the first thing that would need changing… that’s a lot of time – and thus, money – spent on that, and the signs get damaged. Even restricting the signs to paved, that’s still a huge expense when we have other things to do.
Sign have to get replaced over time anyway, so why not go with a soft trasnsition and make any signs that get replaced over the next 10 to 15 years have both systems (should probably cover the majority by then) and remove the old system during the next 10 to 15 years.
Maybe change the timeframes depending on how long roadsigns actually last, as I have no idea if my estimation is anywhere near realistic.
1) This is only part of what a transition would require
2) Because smaller signs are processed faster
3) Costs more to make them bigger, or if you make them smaller, people won’t be able to read them nearly as much.
4) it would have awkward km measures at each mile, since miles don’t correlate to km in a pretty ratio.
5) Based on placing more natural km measures, this would cost even more, since it involves placing other signs.
Also, many of us like Imperial and are used to it. That “used to it” is really important.
Signage is relatively inexpensive and quickly solved compared to the inherent infrastructure assumptions. The US’ highway system is built on a “grid” construct, with the roads portioned out in 1.61km increments. That means the very placement of the roads themselves is based on miles. It’s why freeway exits have “mile markers,” and km are large enough increments that rounding to the nearest can create problems as well. Not to say any of that is insurmountable. It’s just expensive and would take a LONG time to correct (how many roads do we have that are over 100 years old, and what’s the cost of moving a road, vice simply resurfacing it?).
Many expressways in Ontario, Canada have a sign in the middle, between the two directions of traffic, that indicates the distance, in increments of 200 metres. So, you would see 401.2, followed by 402.4, etc.
Oops, the numbers were supposed to be 401.2 followed by 401.4, etc.
Oh! I hadn’t considered all the mile marker signs all over the USA. Speed signs would be no big deal to replace since we regularly do that anyway, but those mile marker signs would be a lot more work to reposition from mile spacing to kilometer spacing. Also, in many states the highway off-ramps are numbered to match the mile markers. So all those off-ramps would have to be renumbered, and then everyone’s GPS updated to match, and Google Maps, etc. Wow, a lot of time and expense would be involved.
Well, thats what happens when you dont change with time and improved science. It will get harder and more expensive to change when you finally have too. Most of the world started with imperial or more special/local mesurements and have changed to metric. Many are still slowly making the change and some are still using miles.
In a single limited area (like measure someones height) it usually dont matter much which system youre using, but when you need to scale up/down, expand the area/dimmensions and include more types of measurements (weight an so on) then metric is so much better.
Sorry, but the founding document of our nation say the head of state has to be native born.
Thus, no foreign rulers.
Groaner puns aside… “Imperial” measurement is just as foreign as Metric, both born in Europe.
I agree with several other posters here. Back in the 90s (or next year, whenever is more feasible) implement an incremental switchover to metric. Require that any project (whether physical or informational) funded by federal money must include metric units, and imperial units cannot be displayed more prominently than them.
20-30 years later, pretty much everything will have metric on them. Then you upgrade the rule and require newly created things to be metric-only.
20-30 years after that and we’re done, with very little expense beyond what was already needed to make stuff, regardless of units.
p.s. Abolish the penny
Congress has actually tried twice that I remember to abolish the penny, because they cost more than a penny to make, and the Senate won’t pass it for a hilarious reason. You know how all prices in the US end in 9 cents? usually 99 cents, but sometimes 59 cents or something else. Sure, some things are in even dollars and some prices end in 50 cents, but when Congress FIRST introduced the penny, they pressured retailers to make prices end in 9 cents so that the penny would get distributed. Later, retailers figured out that 99 cents seems like a lot less than a dollar to the consumer, but even if Congress pressured retailers to round prices to the nearest nickel, state and local taxes throw them off again. The proposed solution is to have retailers round prices to the nearest nickel, assuming that retailers won’t all round up and that the rounding up and rounding down will balance out, but consumers don’t want to spend one penny more than they have to.
P.S. Once you have metric on everything, yes, it only takes 20-30 years for the next generation to catch on, but you can’t remove, quite specifically, Imperial speed limits for about 60-70 years. You have to wait for all the people who only know Imperial to DIE before you switch 100% to metric.
Oh, and there’s also the grid system. Even exits are laid out every mile in urban areas. Do you think the next generation will switch to metric when it’s 9 miles to a friend’s house, but 14.48 km? People like round numbers. Switching to metric is a good idea, and like abolishing the penny it’s been proposed. Most of the proposals involve introducing it in schools first, where roads aren’t a problem. They still don’t pass.
Other countries have switched and it didn’t take them 100 years to do it. The fact that we’re a larger nation with more roads is irrelevant because our GDP is probably 16 times what those smaller countries are. Most Americans resist it because “I don’t wanna!” *stamps foot*
Roads are an awful example of why people don’t want to change over. The big reason is industry. Hardware for machines and electronics would need to be replaced with new measurements which means new sizes. New sizes means new parts aren’t compatible with old ones.
It doesn’t just cost the state hugely, it also costs each person hugely as they need to replace most things in their homes.
So that car you own that blew a spark plug? You have to replace THE WHOLE CAR because we switched to metic and they don’t make it any more. That machine in your factory lost a nut? Replace the whole thing, possibly the whole factory. Have a burst pipe in your house? Tear out and replace all of it. That 100 year old BRIDGE need maintenance? To bad, so sad. Replace it!
Yes, we can make both measurements of parts for a while, but:
1.) we need twice the facilities to make the parts in more sizes.
2.) at some point ALL of the old hardware will NEED to just be replaced, at cost. Maybe not today, maybe not for 20 years, but at some point it will have to go.
Cars, Factories, Bridges, Large Scale Buildings like skyscrapers and shopping malls, pipes, public water works, large scale electric distribution, computers, ect. Every form of hardware that ever need any form of repair or maintenance needs to be replaced instead. Some of this is easy as it gets replaced every few years anyways, others… not so much.
And things like Public Water are even worse because a town often have theirs tied together with the neighboring towns, meaning if one town wants to change over their neighbors have to as well. As do their neighbor’s neighbors. Which cascades into one or more entire states changing over all at once.
Most of the countries that swapped to metic did so when they didn’t have anywhere near the same level of infrastructure that the U.S. So they didn’t have to replace hardware. It was just installed that way.
Absolutely none of the things you mention stop working because someone switches from one measurement system to another one. And why would you stop producing parts because of that? You just name stuff differently, or in many cases, you keep calling the old stuff how it was before and new parts will get labeled with the new units.
And don’t forget that industry is a global thing already. Many Americans drive cars produced in Asia or Europe, just as many Europeans or Asians drive American cars. It worked so far, even with most of Europe using the metric units.
Your logic doesn’t fly. In Canada we have a mixture of U.S., Japanese, European and locally built vehicles and other machinery, with the resulting mix of imperial and metric parts. The construction industry also uses a mixture of both systems. I haven’t had to scrap a car because I couldn’t get an imperial part. The main spinoff is having to own more tools. We managed to change over, and metric is getting more common as the old farts die off. The U.S. should just bite the bullet and make the change over already.
Tick Tock, I would go so far as to say you don’t know what the heck you are talking about.
Australia began conversion over to the full metric system from 1971 (1966 if counting the switch to decimal currency). “Officially”, the process was completed in 1988, but quite significant sections of the country had made the switch long before then, with NONE of the dire predictions you make.
(Worth noting, BTW, that I was still at school in 1971 – and going metric was a blessed relief for me. Keeping all those Imperial measurements straight isd HARD)
All here – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_Australia
hmm… can’t seem to reply to those who replied to me… did we nest comments to far? oh well.
first: The U.S. should switch to metric. I never said we shouldn’t. All I said was it’s a lot more complicated then people give it credit. And had we done it sooner, it’d have been better. But we didn’t (for many reason, some of which were dumb… O.K. MOST of which were dumb). And there are parts of the U.S. that are switching over, it’s just slow, so people in other countries don’t see it happening.
Next: Aphotep: I never said the things wold stop working, I said maintenance gets harder. I also said we could make parts for both, but at some point we would need to stop making the old one. Key part being: “at some point.” (I even said it may take decades, or more.) If not, it’s not converting to metric. (Makes me wounder how much you actually read of my post… To be fair, I typed a lot! Holy balls, did I. And am probably going to again… sorry about that… no hard feeling?)
My point was that people keep saying we should swap over like it’s easy. It’s not. It will be long, and hard, (that’s what she said! ;D) and expensive. To levels people fail to see. All they see is the U.S. using and obtuse system (and it is obtuse!) and they say “American’s are dumb and should just fix it!” as if it’s that easy.
And as for the global industry comment. Yes, that’s true, but the level on integration between even CANADA and the U.S. PAILS in comparison to the integration between the United States, let alone the integration between The U.S. and Europe/Asia. If Europe does things differently it makes it harder to work with The U.S., but they don’t NEED The U.S. in order to keep functioning. The United States are to intertwined to work separately from one another. Heck, there are so closely tied together most people I talk to don’t even realized they are separate countries! And they live in The U.S.! (Insert stupid Americans not knowing geography joke here. ’cause, like, seriously… it true… we suck…)
Third: Roborat : Canada using both is kinda my point. (sort of.) They haven’t changed over because things need to be phased out. Which takes a long time and is expensive and slow. Having both systems isn’t “Changing over [to metric].” It’s using two different incompatible systems at the same time. And paying the cost of using both. And it does cost to use both.
Yes, major companies probably have the money to maintain both while we change over. But small companies or individual people might not. When we finally stop making Imperial parts (which is the whole point of adopting metric, even if it takes decades to do it.) whomever is the last people to still use it, gets screwed. Hard. And that’s likely poor people and small companies, who can’t afford to change.
It’s Not a simple matter of “The U.S. should just bite the bullet” as much as it’s a huge undertaking that will likely take more then a lifetime and cost HUGE amounts and needs to be done carefully. It’s not Americans being lazy, or “old farts,” or pigheadedly insisting others do as we do (even if a lot of that is true…).
That said, what is a factor is companies and governments being too afraid to take a risk in changing over to metric, because if they are the only one to do so, they will lose a ton of money for little to no gain. Which is NOT a reason to avoid doing it, but is an added concern. O.K., also lack of co-operation between companies and government also contributes. Heavily.
(Yup! I did it again… My bad. Also, I tried to make this one more lighthearted, I think you two though I was being more stern then I meant to be. I hope it worked.)
What I don’t get from your comment or even the follow-up after it is why switching from the imperial-system to the metric-system would mean you also change how everything is made? For the most part it is a difference in naming conventions.
A pipe bursts in your house? Buy a new pipe, it is not like the actual pipe is any different just because the label says it has a 2.54cm diameter instead of 1 inch. Same goes for any of your other examples.
Yes, it takes time to make the change and phaze it out, but as Aphotep also already said, it is about naming things different, non of the old stuff will suddenly become obsolete and unable to be maintained with ‘new metric materials’, because these new metric materials are the same as the old ones, just with a different sticker on it.
Lordviking: Human usability.
When repairing/replacing things you need to measure to know what part you need (documentation is always 100% correct! Right?) Said measuring is never very accurate (for humans.) More so with small parts. This is due things such as: parts changing size slightly over time, swelling/shrinking do to the current climate, inaccuracy in measuring tools, inaccuracy in humans ability to use tools, inaccuracy in human perception/judgement, inaccuracy in manufacturing ect.
So when humans measure (as apposed to machines, which, generally, are accurate) you always need to round to the nearest size. Which means you need to know which size is the nearest.
Humans are also (generally speaking) bad at remembering long irregular numbers and decimals (bonus points if it’s both. :D) So sizing of parts are much harder for human to work with unless they are in even regular unit sizes.
This is why European Metric sizes and American Imperial sizes are different. Both are using even regular unit sizes for their respective units of measurements.
Machines don’t care about the difference but humans do. Most manufacturing is done with machine, but repair and maintenance is still mostly done by people. Which is why I put it up as a maintenance problem.
So, basically, humans are dumb, lazy, clumsy, inaccurate and fixing things is hard. =( So we need to dumb it down to make it as easy as possible. At least until machines can do everything for us. ;D
Most people put the switching over from one thing to another in a perfect world, which fails to apply in practice because the world/people are both messier and more varied then they would be in a “perfect” world.
Also, just changing the sizing labels doesn’t fix the European/American incompatibility problem. Though, that’s honestly less of an issue. At least until there is more integration between the two regions.
Others have already commented on most your comment, but I wanted to point out that when it comes to bridges, only the smallest ones use any kind of standard parts. Most bridges are completely custom, so it doesn’t matter what measurement system you use, you’re going to have to custom order any replacements anyway.
That’s fair. My bad on that one.
Change-overs to new measurement systems can take a long time and leave an enduring legacy. For instance the space shuttle’s size was dictated by the width of two horses arses.
How did that work out? Imperial Rome dictated standard sizes that bridges, gates and tunnels had to be. Specifically they needed to accommodate pair of horses pulling a cart or a chariot.
In due course this convention got carried over to the Americas. Perpetuating, even when steam trains were developed, as the width of the tunnels dictated the size of the steam engines. Thus even tunnels that were being built for trains, and not horse and carts, were based on the Imperial Roman standard.
Eventually the space shuttle was built, and various components had to be shipped through some of the rail tunnels constructed to this standard. Hence could not be larger than the width of two horses butts.
I think you are letting the word “state” mislead you. Although the states that make up the United States have some autonomy, they are by no means separate nations. They are more closely akin to provinces than countries. When the states were colonies of England prior to 1776 they had more autonomy than they do today, but even then they were not independent nations as they were wholly subservient to a foreign power.
If the states were separate countries the American civil war could not have occurred, because there would have been no nation for the south to secede from. The states of the south were attempting to abjure from the country of the United States of America and create their own country the Confederate States of America.
That is quite unlike the European Union where any member country may choose to exit the union if they wish.
How about abolish the penny, but not the cent?
Then reintroduce the mil, but only for electronic payments.
Cash payments can round up to the next nickel, (after taxes are applied,) but e-payments can continue to use the centidollar, and even the millidollar.
There was a move (many years ago) in my home state to round any and all sales taxes to bring the total to the nearest nickel, effectively eliminating use of the penny in the state.
For example, if the sub-total was 14.83, and the sales tax was 1.34, the total would be 16.17, so the sales tax would round *down* to 16.15. Had it been one penny more (14.84), it would round up to 16.20 (assuming I did my math correctly).
Got shot down by pretty much *everyone*. :D
We could always just move to a non-physical currency, like in Blade Runner or Neuromancer :)
That’s how they do it over here. I’m quite sure the Euro cent isn’t being made anymore, but it’s still valid currency, and online payments still work by the cent.
Everything in super markets is just rounded up or down (on avarage, no effect on what you pay. Or if you want, you could even use it to scam a few cents of every other purchase. Pay with cash when your total is rounded down, pay with plastic when it’s rounded up
New Zealand got rid of one and five cent pieces years ago, made no damn bit of difference to the prices
SeanR: not sure if being serious, but a penny is the same as a cent, both are 1/100th (100 pennies in a pound, 100 cents in a dollar)
I’m suggesting discontinuing the physical coin, while maintaining the unit for electronic payments.
As various electronic payment systems become even more and more common, (buying a pack of gum using your android phone, grabbing groceries using your check card, paying your onine bills using paypal, etc,) and the need for physical money becomes less and less, we might be able to afford dropping the physical coin from circulation, while still retaining the option to use it when not using cash.
They did, the physical coinage stops at the ten cent piece, but some people still prefer paying with cash, and the businesses profit (use to use Swedish Rounding, but believe they only do that to round it up {meaning more money to the business})
Australia got rid of 1 and 2 cent pieces some years ago,. and now there is talk of ditching the 5 cent piece. We seem to have coped okay.
Abolishing the penny isn’t all that hard. There’s no need to force retailers to change their pricing systems. Just round to the nearest 5¢ for anyone using cash. People paying with debit or credit card still have to pay the exact amount. Rounding to 5¢ is also less biased than rounding to 10¢ (where a 5¢ could go either up or down), so I don’t think I’d recommend dropping the nickel too.
(This is basically what Canada did to the penny, so it’s not just some theoretical idea.)
Okay. First of all, if you move the roads, you’d have to untangle a lot of property ownership issues. As far as I know, Europe is NOT built on a grid of kilomarkers, but more whatever goat path got paved over.
Second of all, I’d be more receptive to switching to metric, (a more logical system, obviously,) if the metric system switched to kiloseconds, (about 86.4 to the day, or 16 minutes, 40 seconds per kilosecond,) or millidays (one milliday would be 86.4 seconds, or about a minute and a half, long). Yet the SI system still uses something as kludgy as minutes, seconds, and hours.
Third, have you SEEN the original definition of the Kilometer? 1/10,000th of the distance from the north pole to the equator, through Paris? Why 1/40,0000th of a great circle? Why not make the KM 4 times larger to begin with? Because they chose to tweak it enough that it’d work on a human scale, (a meter is roughly a yard, both a bit longer than the average stride.)
The new meter is even better.
It´s the distance light travels in (i´m too lazy to look it up) a fraction of a second. That means that FTL-Travel is impossible forever, because regardless how fast you are, you still travel as fast as light, only with longer meters.
You’re almost right. The meter stays the same, but the second changes as your speed increases. A photon (travelling at the speed of light) experiences no time at all. And that’s why, when you move faster than light, you’d (hypothetically) travel back in time. Probably, assuming such a thing were possible (it’s not).
More on topic, and what you probably actually meant, all metric base units have such definition.
Except for the Kilogram. It’s official definition is ‘exactly the weight of this prototype that we build in 1799’.
A second is defined as a specific amount of periods of a certain frequency of a radioactive isotope
I wholeheartedly disagree with the first part, especially the time travel BS, but yes, that is what i meant.
What part exactly did you disagree with? Because the time stretching part (a photon experiences no time) is completely true.
We already see it in effect in satellites around the Earth. They travel faster, so their internal clocks run at a different speed than the ones on Earth. If the people designing those clocks didn’t take that into account, GPS would stop working
Well, mathematically u can argue that u travel back in time… but there is a catch. When u increase in speed, you also increase in mass… because of the mass-energy correlation. So when you are nearing Lightspeed you are also increasing towards infinity in mass. that’s why no particle with mass can accelerate to 100% speed of light.
“human scale” is the one reason I don’t care for metric. The inch and the foot, for all their numerical idiocy, are both very useful lengths, easily approximated mentally. The centimeter is a bit short for practical use on that scale, and the meter is just too damn big. I don’t usually envision a ‘yard’, I envision 3 feet, if that’s what I need.
You could go with the decimeter, but that’s still a bit kludgey for my preferences.
Meter is roughly a step, and 5 cm is roughly half my pinky.
Just because you’re not used to it, doesn’t mean it’s hard to estimate
Besides, i always found it fascinating how “imperialists” are always 5´8´ or 6´2´ whereas us “metricians” can be 1,76 or 1,83.
One inch is 2,54 cm which is actually pretty significant. And no one in America falls between inches?
Yea, right.
So height in the imperial system is basically pretty much guesswork.
Metricians might be 1,76 in height but do they rattle off their height as 1,765231? I doubt it. That means height in the metric system must be pretty much guesswork too. I am 6′ 1/2″ tall but find it easier just to say 6′. Both systems have their advantages and I find the argument over using one or the other just silly. The imperial system uses halves and doubles a lot. 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 or 1 cup to 1 pint (2 cups) to 1 quart (2 pints) to half gallon (2 quarts), while metric divides/multiples by ten. So what? Use the one the one that you are comfortable with. And most importantly, do not try to make someone else use your system because it is “better”. Insisting something is “better” and implying people are stupid for not changing to your method is a good way to make sure they won’t change. I think the major reason the U.S. is not metric is because of such insistence in the past that metric was “better”. I remember in the 70’s when the U.S. announced we were going metric and the big giant thudding sound as everyone refused to go along. If they had not made such a deal of it, and just started putting metric measurements next to imperial measurements over time I think they would have had much more success.
I think that’s more Americans being stubborn than anything else.
I doubt anyone cares how many micrometers someone is tall. That’s the amount of numbers you put up there. For scale: 1 micrometer is about 1/100th of the thickness of a sheet of paper
Just ask Canadians of a certain age about switching systems.
I might not be quite the right age, as the transition happened when I was a child. All the street signs were converted, often using big stickers with an 8 to cover a 5, so 50 miles/hr because 80 km/h, and a km/h placard was added under the updated speed. Cover the 6 in 60 with 10 to get 100 km/h. etc. Give our a 1 foot long ruler, showing 30 cm on one side.
Many construction trades still use feet, inches and parts of an inch. Some of that is because our major suppliers for construction materials is to the south. Just watch Mike Holmes if someone calls out a measurement at 105.3 cm. The feed back will be to try again, using feet and inches this time.
Actually as a european the whole debate is amusing yet interesting.
Oh, and about the road grid: yeah, Romans invented that (cardo and decumanus), we’re still using their roads and they’re still there. No explosions caused by the measurement system, as far as I know.
Carry on. :)
Ask Australians. I was at school when we began the switch to metric in 1971 and, if anything, it was a blessed relief for me. Basically, we missed out on having to memorize all those different values for different measurements..
The cost argument doesn’t hold water. Canada did it. Yes, the U.S. has more things to convert, but it also has more money and more manpower. Factor in the economics of doing things in a larger quantity, and as a yearly expense, it’d cost the U.S. proportionally less to convert to the metric system. The biggest obstacle is the social and political will – given some of the non-issues the U.S. looses its shit over, an effort to switch the country to the metric system would be seen by a certain noisy conservative sorts to be no less than an overt commie incursion.
Canada semi-converted. Mileage signs, gasoline sales, and temperature are metric. Small common measures are still English. At least that’s my experience in my annual visits to family in Ontario. Cold cuts and fresh meats and veg are priced by the pound/kg. A large bowl of Timmie’s soup is 431 ml… I think they mean 14 oz, but they’re not allowed to say that maybe? Yet soda is sold in two liter (litre) bottles. Ask my cousin how much his new grandbaby weighed at birth and he’ll tell you 8lbs12oz. Metric is good for scientists wanting standard measures, especially for teeny tiny stuff, but it sucks for knowing how hot or cold it is outside.
Only for people who can’t or won’t grasp that 30 or above is hot, below 20 is kinda chilly, and 0 or below is downright COLD.
Not hugely different to the old Centigrade scale, or so I have been told.
Zero Celsius (32 F) isn’t even that cold. Up here that’s a warm winter day, and “here” is still south of Canada.
Canada stretches quite a bit south, especially around the Great Lakes; the most southern area of Canada is an island in Lake Erie called Middle Island, at about 41 degrees North. 13 states are further north in their entirety than that: Alaska (no big surprise there), Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and even Michigan (further south by a few kilometres). Another 14 states go further north than Middle Island, including California, Colorado, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and Massachusetts, among others.
Although I agree that 0 is a warm winter day (or inducing yet another frost warning this spring), you do not have to south of Canada to appreciate that.
We gave it a shot back in the late 70’s road signs were printed in imperial and metric. There was a big national push to get people to.adopt the metric system. The general population basically ignored it and without a government mandate forcing the changeover, it didn’t happen. The general consensus seemed to be, “why is this necessary again?” And nobody could give a satisfying reason beyond, “because we think it’s a good thing.” Then a couple of Canadian airliners ran out of gas because ground crews confused liters and gallons and the U.S. collectively decided killing people over a system of measure was probably a bad idea. The only real side effect is U.S. cars now have speedometers with a second smaller set of numbers in KPH.
The UK has been at it for 50 years and it isn’t sticking:
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16245391
People don’t get how hard this is. Other nations didn’t peacefully switch measurement systems. The French had to literally get violent on its population to convince them to stop using the old French units and move to metric. They aren’t smarter or more enlightened, they had the benefit of the old days when the tactics used weren’t questioned as government or human rights abuses. No one in the US is going to permit Uncle Sam to fine and imprison people for not using metric measurements.
I have two sets of tools, one US standard and one metric because the metric tools don’t fit US standard hardware. There is over a century of industrialization based on US standard. That won’t get converted in our lifetimes. Yes, keeping 16 inch sewer pipes around while trying to switch to metric is impressively annoying. What is the benefit of relabelling the equipment as 40.56cm other than to satisfy an arbitrary unit switch? There is no improvement in operation, profitability, sales potential or any other benefit. Switching trillions of dollars of equipment and hard assets into metric has no value. None. This isn’t just respecting a few road signs. It is building unnecessary complexity into our lives.
Being able to divide units into even 10s won’t do us much good since nothing in our society will work that way under the system. If Europe converts everything they use into fractions, such as abandoning the 5mm screw and introducing the 6.48mm screw, then you’ll get what the US will have to put up with for the rest of time.
I’ll stick to measuring in inches. Our world here is built for that. 2 inches is a whole lot easier to deal with than 5.08 cm.
Actually… how many Harems do you need to drug in order to impair Harem’s judgement?
None. They come pre-impaired.
+1
That is so…true.
Think about it for a second; Harem could be “called to the carpet” up to five times for a single misjudgment call. Archon might even have a special category in their budget for Carpet Replacement for that purpose alone!
+1
Pretty sure Sydney has seen this movie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EuqxFwS9I8
As long as you don’t intend on doing any complicated calculations (like bringing a robot-probe to the surface of another planet or moon), measurement systems don’t matter that much. It’s more of a problem of the frame of reference whenever you are confronted with the one you’re not that familiar with.
But once you have to work out multiple dimensions, the metric system (or International System of Units) shows it’s true strengths because of the way the base units and derived units are defined.
Though, admittedly, there are still some arbitrary definitions in there, like the base unit for the dimension of mass b eing kilogram and not gram for whatever reason.
Anyone else knew that one before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter
Sure, but you can turn that base kilogram into a gram super easy. The answer is right in the name: kilo (thousand)
And, 1m3 (cubic meter) is the same volume as 1 litre. And if its water, it will weigh 1kg.
A cubic meter is 1000 litres. A millilitre is one cubic centimeter. Not everything is 1 to 1 in metric.
1 litre is 1 dm^3 = 1000 cm^3.
Actually everything is 1 to 1, litre is just a little weird. It’s not an official SI unit
Metric is easier for maths, physics etc… But as a metric user(Au) I can understand why people stick with the imperial measurements.
Ft,In is coarser, it is easier to comprehend, 5’8″, but 172 cm is far more precise than what people need to get an idea…
Much like Digital V analogue speedos in cars, digital display is more accurate, but analogue is safer, as the brain can interpret 60ish faster than it can interpret 63…
For someone who grew up with metric, imperial is incomprehensible nonsense. Working with it is a pain because converting units is way more complicated than it should be.
I also don’t buy the “it’s too expensive to switch” argument. The entire world except for maybe three countries is using metric, many of them switched in the past 100 years… and somehow they could afford it. Somalia is using the metric system, but the USA can’t afford it?
No one is demanding for it to happen instantly, just teach it in school and get companies to print both measurements on their products, then slowly introduce new traffic signs etc. It’ll be a process that will take years but at some point you’ve got to start.
Also, most numbers go up when you use metric. 8 inches are ~20cm, how does that sound? :P
Somalia has less than 3000km of paved road. The US has ~6.5 MILLION. That’s approximately 10% of all the pavement on the planet. Scoff as expenses as you like, but we’re not talking about insignificant amounts.
As far as changing the culture, the US did start making those dual-system signs in the late ’60s… by the ’90s, they were all but gone. It was also one of the first nations to teach the metric system in all its schools, and continues to do so. Sadly, it’s not taught as the standard, but as a conversion. Not really sure why that hump was never crossed.
What’s more, most of those roads are crossed by another road, every mile.
Because Americans are very much creatures of habit unless…
a) The benefit can be demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt and that is applicable to all of us (that’s hyperbole, by the way).
b) None of us have to pay for it unless it directly applies to each individual.
Most Americans just flat out don’t like paying to fix something that doesn’t appear to be broken, and if it’s working fine for ME…
We can be reasonable, but it usually involves crisis or tragedy. Better to have both.
The Metric Conversion Act was passed in 1975 and the US began putting up the 55mph/88kph signs in 1976. By 1982 the Metric Board was disbanded and the signs began to be removed. By 1986 most of the metric signs were gone, but Interstate 19 in Arizona still has a few metric signs today.
But we do teach it in school…and print both on (most) products…
That’s a frame of reference thing.
5’8″: no idea.
172 cm: about 10 cm less than I am big.
Temperature is also something that feels more natural to me in °C than °F. 0°C means water freezes, 100°C means Water is boiling, 25°C is slightly too warm for my taste at this time of the year. Going to K is a simple shift by 273,16.
With how inaccurate the measurement for a car’s speedometer actually is, there’s basically no reason to put a digital display there. If you have a car with a digital speedometer display, just compare that to the result you get with your navigation system’s GPS, which is much more accurate.
I like digital speedometers because I find them faster to read, which is important when you need to spend as much time looking at the road as possible. Also, in the US, you can’t get at ticket for speeding unless it’s at least 5 mph over the speed limit due to inaccuracy of speedometers and radar guns. A lot of people use this as an excuse to speed a few mph. I’d rather not get a ticket because of a confluence of inaccuracy, and would like to know when I’m doing the speed limit and when I’m doing 1-2 mph over it…according to my inaccurate speedometer.
Also, not everyone has a navigation system, elitist.
You can get a rough calibration if your GPS displays speed. Though you have to hold a constant speed in a straight line for a while to get an accurate GPS reading.
If you have a dedicated GPS speedometer, they are a little bit better when it comes to changing speeds or driving round corners.
I JUST said, in the comment you’re replying to, that not everyone has GPS.
Correction, you CAN get a ticket for going as little as 2 mph over the speed limit. MOST police will forgive up to 5 mph because of equipment inaccuracies, and the fact the a moment’s inattention can cause that much speed drift.
My father once to a business trip in a rental and got a ticket, he then took the car to a mechanic and had them test the speedometer. It was off by over 8 mph, so the ticket was thrown out in court.
Okay, I guess the 5 mph rule is just the state I live in.
It’s an unofficial rule in most places.
The tolerance for going faster than the speed limit varies from state to state, officer to officer, and sometimes road to road. On the one hand, I’ve been pulled over for going 56 mph in a 55 mph zone. On the other, I’ve gone 105 mph in a 55 mph zone and gotten only a courtesy blip.
(It was 3 a.m. and I thought I was the only driver on the road, otherwise I would’ve stuck to the speed limit. Also, this was more than 20 years ago… I was younger and cockier. If the policeman had wanted to, he could’ve given me a ticket for over $250, but he didn’t even pull me over… just blipped his siren at me to tell me to “slow the f–k down”)
As Ie Yamof Ool says, most police will forgive up to 5 mph because it’s possible your speedometer needs recalibration. In general, they’re much more tolerant on highways and freeways (as long as you’re not driving erratically or recklessly), and much less tolerant in school zones or construction zones.
The old mechanical speedometers were a hot mess, but the digital ones are super accurate so long as you use the same size tire forever. My bicycle speedometer measured in the .001 Miles and was accurate to .01 MPH even though the display was in .01 miles and .1 MPH. That presumes you have entered an accurate circumference measurement +/- 1mm. If that’s off them distance and speed will be off by the same ratio. I used that once to tell I had a tire going down, because it was so lightly loaded I couldn’t feel it until it was almost flat, but since the computer was using that wheel to measure things as it got closer to flat it also got smaller, so my alertness test of comparing miles-to-go signs with my odometer reading kept giving me answers that were getting further and further away.
The tires on a car change size significantly based on temperature and pressure loss. They have a wider range of operational size than a bicycle, so people refill the air in their tires less frequently. Then, when it’s hot, it expands, and when it’s cold, it shrinks.
I had a car that would park with a hot engine with the engine compartment well above the concrete stop, but if I did that, it would be resting on the concrete stop when I started it, and scrape the undercarriage as I backed out of the parking space–and that was just the difference a hot vs. cold engine made to tire size.
I was actually explaining how to swap between metric and imperial to an Australian and a German last night. The ONLY reason I can do that is because I liked science in school. All of us here in the US get a basic premise for conversions but not every has the ability to absorb such types of information. Converting would probably be more of a human issue than cost issue. Plus we’re stubborn.
I always wondered about the precision of metric. Like if something is about a foot long, say a stick or a horn or whatever, if you say “it’s about 30cm” it sounds like you’ve measured it. On the human scale, a foot is a good unit of measurement when ambiguity is ok. If metric had a “third-meter” that would be handy, as a decimeter is too small for vagueness.
Depends on the application. I work in the industrial world, so this is why I’m so opposed to switching everything over to metric. To keep within the tolerances necessary to avoid machines failing on us, we’d have to operate in two decimal places of millimeter accuracy to keep things even with the current units.
If the US was some backwoods, uneducated country, there wouldn’t be any reason to oppose the metric system. This is why metric became the main standard across the globe. It’s an easier system to understand and the imperial powers that used metric just got to the third world, uneducated people first.
Precisely because the US is advanced, intelligent and well-educated is why we can’t switch over to metric without making a massive production out of it. I don’t see Europe willing to pitch in and pay for all the retooling of our economic system.
Any and all benefit of switching to metric is wiped out with how we’ve built our society. It’s sold on the easy to understand base-10 system, but nothing we have built converts cleanly. Europe likes to act like they’re more enlightened for using metric, but if you look at their measurements, everything is in nice, round numbers. If they were so bright and intelligent over there and so well educated, why aren’t they switching everything into weird decimalizations?
If I need a 16 inch pipe and we up and switch to the metric system, I have to ask for a 40.64 cm pipe. I can’t just say, “Aw, fuck it, give me a 40 cm pipe because that’s easier to measure”. Now I’ll have fluids leaking all over the place and I’ll have to buy an expensive sleeve clamp to fit that section of pipe to the old one. I’m screwed if I have to attach it to a machine because I can’t just clamp that.
There is literally no benefit to switching to metric in the United States. Either we have to operate in goofy fractions that no one else has to operate in or expend tens of trillions of Dollars converting everything just so we can use a base-10 system.
Sorry, but we aren’t gaining trillions of Dollars of improvements by switching into the metric system to justify the expense of retooling and the metric system becomes worse if we just relabel everything.
If you wanted the ambiguity you could always say “about 3 decimeters” instead of “about 30 centimeters”. However, even though decimeters are part of the metric system, I rarely if ever hear people refer to them.
I’ve studied a lot of science and engineering and so I’m pretty well versed in metric measures as a whole and don’t really have a problem with them. But I’m also a woodworker and general crafter and in that world I hate metric. Quick! Grab your meter stick and accurately measure one quarter of a centimeter. And no, visually kinda halfway between two and three millimeters doesn’t count. I said accurately! How about an eighth of a centimeter? What about a third of a meter? Working with most fractions in metric is much harder than it is with imperial measures. Imperial measurements were created for this very function and they do it well.
And as for conversion to metric from imperial, roads are only the beginning. What about buildings? Everything is constructed around imperial standards (2×4 lumber, 16″ distances between stud centers, etc). What happens when you’ve converted everything but need to upgrade an existing structure? In the UK, at least, it means that everything is labeled in metric sizes but is actually manufactured to inches and feet to make it backward compatible. And a 2″ x 4″ x 8′ stud is far easier to remember, say, and find than a 38mm x 89mm x 2.44m stud. Same with a 16″ duct, or whatever. There’s a hell of a lot of infrastructure already built to imperial measurements that you can’t just rip out and throw away and for most of it there’s no real benefit to changing anyway.
In the sciences and technology fields, metric makes a lot of sense and I certainly understand using them there, but I don’t really see any reason to convert everything everywhere. What’s wrong with using each system for what it does best?
true, but don’t forget… that “2 by 4 by 8” is NOT actually EXACTLY 2 inches, by 4 inches… that is what they call the “nominal size”… so your hypothetical 38mm x 89mm stud would probably end up being called a 40mm by 90mm by 2.5 meter stud, not really the ACCURATE measurement, but a “nominal” one.
sooner or later (probably later) the list of countries that do NOT use the Metric system will shrink to zero… currently it stands at THREE… the USA, Liberia, and Myanmar…
It isn’t that it’s nominal, it’s that it WAS 2″ by 4″, before they ground off a 1/8 inch off each side to smooth it.
Wow, Can o worms opened….
I never intended the argument to be about accuracy, both systems can be accurate, metric is easier for me, I grew up with it.
For approximations of height/length imperial measurements are quite easy as a foot is a fairly coarse measurement… But I concede that is not always the case, it may well be just my perception..
As for the Speedo reference I was talking about how quickly someone can get meaningful info off them, digital speedos give more precision(which is not necessarily any more accurate), but an analogue is faster to read..
Is the needle above or below the speed limit line?
as opposed to, read actual number, compare to speed limit number..
Again, I have an easier time with ANYTHING digital than analogue. I HATE analogue watches. I can think in terms of numbers more quickly than interpreting two lines. Same for speedometers.
At the other end of the spectrum are people who must use analogue watches. One of my friends has an unusual body chemistry that will drain any battery-powered watch within an hour. They don’t make wind-up digital watches.
Quick, grab your ruler and measure one fifth of an inch, and no, between a quarter of an inch and 1/8th of an inch doesn’t count, I want it accurately!
If you’re going to be like that any measuring can be made to sound complicated, the only difference is that the metric-system actually has units that go smaller than a centimeter, which is already smaller than an inch and thus much more precise for measuring.
Shouldn’t all the harems be there? To sort of distribute the pain?
Location doesn’t matter for that. Harem’s brains are quantum entangled. Distance is a nonfactor in that regard
Remember the Maxima-wedgie chain reaction? Bodie got the wedgie, causing Berry to stub her toe wherever she *vorp*ed to, causing Gothamer to bang her knee having lunch with Peggy causing Abbie to faceplant into a cupboard door flashing either Hiro or Wart behind her
My main criticism about the push to use the metric system is that while it is useful from a scientific perspective I feel that it is less relatable to the human condition. Because the imperial system was based around the needs and limits of a human body I find it easier to comprehend information like distance and temperature using its standards
No, that’s wrong. It’s simply a matter of what you were exposed to when you grew up. Imperial makes no sense to someone who is used to metric and vice versa.
Humans aren’t uniform, so feet, inches etc are arbitrary.
The volume measurements are where it comes up.
The “mess” that is imperial units is actually a base 12 system with the most frequently used divisions getting their own names (and therefore their own line on the measuring vessel).
It doesn’t matter when you’re just following set directions, but when you realize your one egg short, and now you want to make a 3/4 scale cake so you keep the ratios right but within what you have, imperial units help while metric units get in the way.
New Zealand uses metric, but personally find the Imp system to be easier to understand (blame that on the WWE :P)
You do know that the ‘Imperial’ in the ‘Imperial Measurement’ is referring to the Roman Empire, right? At least the Romans since AUC (about 370-something BC) used 12 uncae (inches) to the foot as opposed to the Greeks who used 16 digits. At least the US didn’t adopt the full British traditional measurement system with rods, poles and perches, and gills, firkins, kilderkins and hogsheads for liquid measures.
Interestingly the US Military was one of the first adopters of metric measurements outside of Napoleonic France, many of the early muskets used metric standard screws and parts – just as the ‘Metric’ system actually followed the French variations of the old Roman Imperial measures, for instance a Kilogram is almost exactly 2 pounds of Paris Standard weight, 10 Centimetres equal to 4 inches Paris Standard – it goes on if you do some scratching and simple math.
Um… the definition of an inch is exactly 2.54 mm. Right now the imperial units are just adding a layer of unnecessary complexity over SI units.
You mean cm.
It’s 2.54 cm, not mm, and depending on where you look, it’s actually defined as 1/12th of a foot.
Damn that wandering decimal! You she see a doctor about that.
::coughs::
Sorry, sorry…
The correspondence between the kilogram and the 2 Paris pounds is coincidence. The length measure was from (a mismeasurement of) the distance from the north pole to the equator along the Paris meridian. That naturally gives a volume measure, which originally defined the liter, and the gram was the weight of a thousandth of a liter of water. The measurements were refined later, and liters have somewhat fallen by the wayside (cubic meters work just as well, scientifically and industrially).
I imagine that would be because the French contributed to the American revolutionary armies while the British didnt, and those weapons etc would be in French standards?
I don’t think the SI got really going until the French revolution. I figured it was as much an attempt to take the royalty out of the definition of measurement as anything else, but that bit about the Kg and the french pound being so close is telling.
Napoleon invented the metric system, which happened after the US gained independence.
OK, that’s it. No more arguing. From now on we are all going back to the cubit.
For those of you who want something more scientific, we can use the femtoparsec, which is equal to about 101 feet. For smaller measurements the attoparsec is about 1.21 inches. *
*note. This unit of measure is not applicable when determining the length of the Kessel run.
Reminds me of Bill Cosby’s stand-up sketch as Noah talking to God.
“God, what’s a cubit?”
We will also be going back to the pre-1971 British monetary units:
1 farthing (the lowest value coin) = 1/4 penny
A ha’penny (Half penny – a copper coin) = 1/2 penny (pronounced “heipni”)
1 penny (a copper coin) = one of the basic units (1d)
Threepence or Thruppenny Bit = 3 pence (pronounced “thrupence”)
Sixpence (a silver coin also called a ‘tanner’) = 6 pence
1 shilling = 12 pence (1s)
1 florin = 2 shillings
A half-crown = 2 shillings and 6 pence
1 crown = 5 shillings = 1/4 pound
1 pound = 20 shillings = 240 pence (£1)
1 sovereign = a gold coin with a face value of one pound
Also: 1 Guinea = 21 shillings = 252 pence
Actually, it refers to the British Empire.
Today is brain fart day. I don’t have enough brain cells to understand what’s happening… Please help?
Second that, here.
One of the Harems broke her wrist here: https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/1477
The intense pain radiated to the other Harems, much like this: https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/389
So as a solution, Harem un-teleported the broken wrist version. The doc was super busy healing everyone from the fight, and since Harem’s wrist was in stasis, there was no rush healing her. But now that it’s time to heal the wrist, that broken wrist has to go out of stasis. And the pain will start again
Oh I see – thanks so much for the explanation~! :)
It all makes sense now. (It feels so much better to be able to finally laugh at the funny bits on the page).
And it’s just occurred to me that in the 6th panel, it’s Harem suddenly grabbing Sydney’s hand (thought it was the Doctor’s).
I believe the doc has decided that bedside manners are for people without white Mage powers. Although I do hope she fixed harem’s arm before tossing out the others.
Side question; how does her healing power work? Does it rapidly advance the healing the body would do on its own, or does she restore the limb to a state before the wound, or is it a standard heal over time? And most importantly, does it have pain killers included?
Yes.
Maybe Dr.Chevy should take a picture of both Sydney and Harem,later display it on her office door under a banner that reads: “Banned For Life.”
It would probably be a very bad idea to ban Sydney from the doctor’s office. You know she’ll need to go there atleast once a week
If Maxima were there,how’d she handle that???
Probably pick both up by the scruff of their necks, shake them, then toss them out :P
But banning someone in the military from the doctor’s office is a stupid idea
Maxima would order the doc to take down that sign or risk a court martial…!
Nah, she’d understand.
She may very well understand, but she would still order the Doc to take it down (probably take her out for a drink later to commiserate having to deal with Daphne and Sydney at the same time :D)
On the pain thing, when I had my wreck all I could feel was the broken hip, which I told people was the “upper end of my femur”. Nevermind the other break in the femur, the torn ligaments in my knee, the broken tibia and fibula, or the gaping hole where the front of my leg used to be, the fact that half of my face was hanging off, or the 3 large patches of skin that were no longer on my arms and hands. And I didn’t even notice I went blind from the negative g-forces on my head until after I recovered and asked why the ambulance and ICU were so dark.
Congrats on living through that. Condolences too : (
What Little Guy said.
I had a kidneystone and cried like a two year old. :D
Have to ask, car accident or motorcycle?
Idjit in a car decided he didn’t want me using “his” road, so he pulled a U-turn at the next cut-through in the median and floored it and hit my bicycle (not the one in my grav) at roughly 60 MPH (100 km/hr) from behind. I’m lifetime 2-0-1 against pickup trucks in death matches, that one was the “draw”. He drove it away from the wreck, but it never drove again, unlike the other 2 that hit me and could not be driven away.
Bicycle? You were on a bicycle? Tell me he got charged with attempted vehicular homicide. PLEASE.
I hoist a beer mug in your honor – bicycle people who survive bicycle versus car/pickup interactions make realize that grace is still in the world. And I hope you’ve fully recovered or at least 95% or better.
The metric system is ALSO entirely arbitrary, you know. A meter is the distance light travels in 1/299,792,458 seconds. How is that not arbitrary?
Being arbitrary in base 10 for commonly used measurements is more convenient. Phrased another way: Convert 400,000 inches to miles.
Then convert 400,000 cm to km.
Bet I know which one you did faster :)
Just because the metric system is easier to use doesn’t make it any less arbitrary. :P
My greatest metric peeve is measuring temperature. Perhaps it’s more accurate to use Centigrade in the lab, but it sucks as a measure of how cold or hot it is outside compared to Fahrenheit.
..No? As someone who grew up with the Celsius scale, I understand “20 degrees celsius” easier than I understand “70 degrees Fahrenheit”. It’s all about what you grew up using.
I could calibrate a thermometer myself with Celsius.
All I need is a heatsource (and cold source) and some clean water. When I see water with ice in it, I know it’s 0 degrees. When I see water boiling at sea level, I know it’s 100 degrees
Good luck doing that with Fahrenheit. 0 is the temperature of freezing sea water (what sea water? What salt concentration? Good luck), and 100 is the inside of a cow’s stomach. Because that’s always the same thing
Wrong -32f is the temperature of water with ice in it, 212f is the temp of water boiling at sea level.
you don’t use 0 & 100 for Fahrenheit, you use -32 & 212.
Oh and if fresh water freezes at -32, seawater would freeze at a lower temp, not 0.
Who the hell came up with those numbers?
It’s not NEGATIVE 32, just 32.
There is actually a simple conversion between F and C.
C -> F: (5/9 X) +32
F -> C: 9/5 (X-32)
Try it with freezing water (0 C/32 F) and boiling water (100 C and 212 F).
No, that’s just a matter of what one is familiar with.
Now…that IS completely because of familiarity. Most humans used base 12 for at least centuries, and in a lot of ways it’s a hell of a lot better. For example – you can easily count from 0 to 156 just using your fingers, as opposed to base-10s mere 10. There’s also the benefit of more factoring numbers (1,2,3,4,6,12, instead of 11,2,5,10) as well as simpler geometry tasks (why do you think a clock has 12/24 hours? Metric clocks suck, which is why even the metric system doesn’t use them anymore.
I have no idea how to count to 156 on my fingers… except by a system that goes to at least 1023.
It doesn’t matter what side you start with, thumb or pinky, when you count binary someone is getting the bird when you reach four (100).
The best way I found to count on my fingers is four fingers & a thumb for 5, four finger for 10 and a thumb for 50. This gives you up to 99 without needing to remember positional amounts.
That’s the same system as Chisanbop (from the Korean chi (ji) “finger” + sanpŏp (sanbeop “calculation”)) which originated in Korea in the 1940s, and imported into America in about 1977 by Hang Young Pai. It’s pretty useful for doing basic addition and subtraction, as long as none of the numbers is greater than 99.
Originally, the mètres was defined by one ten millionth of the distance from north pôle to equator but the definition was replaced a few Times to be more accurate.
I could have sworn the “old” powerpage of Harem stated that she’s taller the lesser copies there are. Did this change or am I imagining this?
I am not sure about her size. Her teleport carrying capacity goes up slightly with each fewer of her bodies present. Also her strength doubles for each of her not present.
5H=1x strength each
4H=2x strength each
3H=4x strength each
2H=8x strength each
1H=16x strength solo.
If she were not there at all, she could probably be stronger than Anvil.
You almost caught me with that last comment about Anvil :P
Take off all your clothes and you can be Invisible!
Only as long as no one is looking at you
Her teleport carrying capacity goes up because the fewer of her there are, the more each body weighs. Since she, presumably, stays proportional…yes, she gets taller.
Sydney was talking about how everyone with powers was taller than her. She then commented on the fact that Harem was the only one close to her height. Then joked that Harem would probably be just as tall if she hadn’t had to grow 5 bodies.
This wasn’t a comment on her size when de-ported, it was a guess as to why she wasn’t taller.
My only (confirmed) break is when i snapped my thumb. Hurry a lot at the time, but only about half as much later when the adrenaline/endorphins etc from belting out downhill on my bike wore off.
Haerem is probably lucky she won’t be feeling the full pain right now.
I also possibly broke my collar bone, though a fracture is probably more likely. I never got it looked at, as I was snowed in at Christmas in a cottage in the middle of nowhere (I really should get it checked out at some point, of only to check against future problems – I can feel where the bone is misaligned a little, and sometimes my entire arm goes numb) … anyhow, when I did that, there was surprisingly little pain, unless I then tried to move my arm, if I tried to lift it, cue massive pain and the inability to move it. Whether that was a mechanical issue or one that was sensory in nature, I don’t know.
Either way, some of the flesh wounds I’ve accrued have been far more painful.
My only break, was a hairline fracture of the bone in my shin(I dont know the name and couldn’t be bothered to google it).
I was helping out on the discus field at school(19 years ago) when someone almost broke the new school record that I was marking, I say almost as the metal rimmed discus bounced backward off my shin… It left a nice hold about as big as your ring finger and you could see inside…..
“Distracting your pain with different pain” is perfectly Sydney, don’t worry.
Also, as a European, it never stops to bother me that due to globalization so many things come from the USA and all of that stuff is always is in feet and pounds and Farenheit. Of course the metric system is totally arbitrary too, because a meter is “this much”, but it is an almost global standard that (almost) everyone uses and understands. I know there Are some reasons for not switching over to metric just in an instant (some economy and engineering stuff I think), but it’s still annoying.
Thank you for being understanding.
I don’t know of any engineering issues (at least, not ones that switching to Standard wouldn’t make easier, but there are the dual problems of economics (especially regarding distance) and consumers.
It’s hard to get people to switch to Centigrade when heating instructions give oven temperature in F and oven knobs are in F. Change the packaging, and people won’t buy the food (or if you put both, will ignore C). Change the oven knobs, and people won’t buy those ovens.
Change both, and most people will stick with what they’re comfortable with. Grandma’s recipes aren’t written in C. The people who do embrace the change would likely be labeled as hipsters, putting even more negative feelings on conversion to Standard.
There are two types of countries. Those that use the metric system, and those that have been to the moon.
Lolmao
Yeah. They can just learn our system. They learned English easily enough.
They didn’t get to the moon using the imperial system. The best rocket scientists in the biz were recruited from Germany after the war, and they used metric, as eventually did all the engineers who learned from them.
US can’t switch over to the metric system because American corporations are exceptionally greedy. I remember in the late 70s / early 80s when gas stations were selling gas by the gallon and also by the litre. It was like $1.00 per gallon, or 35 cents a litre. Imagine the resentment when people finally figured out how badly they were being ripped off.
And the choice between being resentful at a corporation and being resentful at the metric system?
Well, the metric system is foreign…And we are Americans
Try driving in Ireland where the speed limits change from MPH to KPH depending on if you’re in Northern Ireland or the Republic.
@daveb
Just an FYI, we americans did try that in the late 20th century
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_States
Okay. First of all, if you move the roads, you’d have to untangle a lot of property ownership issues. As far as I know, Europe is NOT built on a grid of kilomarkers, but more whatever goat path got paved over.
Second of all, I’d be more receptive to switching to metric, (a more logical system, obviously,) if the metric system switched to kiloseconds, (about 86.4 to the day, or 16 minutes, 40 seconds per kilosecond,) or millidays (one milliday would be 86.4 seconds, or about a minute and a half, long). Yet the SI system still uses something as kludgy as minutes, seconds, and hours.
Third, have you SEEN the original definition of the Kilometer? 1/10,000th of the distance from the north pole to the equator, through Paris? Why 1/40,0000th of a great circle? Why not make the KM 4 times larger to begin with? Because they chose to tweak it enough that it’d work on a human scale, (a meter is roughly a yard, both a bit longer than the average stride.)
Forgot to allow more scripts to run before hitting post.
Why would you need to move the roads? They are the same distance away, just in different units. You don’t become taller or shorter when someone measures you in meters instead of feet and inches.
And there are many advantages to the metric system. Eg, 1m3 (cubic meter) is the same volume as 1 litre. And if its water, it will weigh 1kg.
This was intended to be a reply in a thread upstream, (where I’ve duplicated it,) In that thread, someone suggested moving the roads to make the meter fit better.
I don’t get it. How does her powers come into play here with a broken arm?
Blonde Harem came to ask Doc Chevy to fix Strawberry Harem’s wrist. The Harem with a broken arm is currently de-teleported, i.e. in Hammer Space. As soon as Harem un-de-teleports “strawberry” Harem, Harem will feel the pain of a recently broken wrist. Harem is, understandably, reticent to do something that will cause her pain.
To summarize: the four Harem’s currently in reality are fine. The Harem with a broken wrist is in storage, where Harem can’t feel the pain because no time is passing. Does that explain things?
Yes thank you. I didn’t realize that she could do that. I didn’t and probably still don’t understand the mechanics of her powers. I thought her bodies could be teleported but only erased, not stuck in between point a and point b.
Check out the cast page, it explains quite a bit about everyone’s powers
That was pretty much how she discovered her extra powers: she *VORP*ed somewhere like she had been doing, but this time she left herself behind (she still doesn’t know which her is the ‘original’, Berry is simply the one who resembles her un-modded self the most)
this page does not make sense
Blonde Harem came to ask Doc Chevy to fix Strawberry Harem’s wrist. The Harem with a broken wrist is currently de-teleported, i.e. in Hammer Space. As soon as Harem un-de-teleports Strawberry Harem, Harem will feel the pain of a recently broken wrist. Harem is, understandably, reticent to do something that will cause her pain. This is why she takes so long to un-de-teleport Strawberry Harem (7 panels). Harem grabs Sydney’s hand to squeeze because people do that when they are in pain, or about to be. Sydney tried to get her to let go. Doc Chevy kicked out Sydney and Blonde Harem so she could fix Strawberry Harem’s broken wrist without distraction.
Make sense now?
You’ve been cutting and pasting a lot today, haven’t you? :D
Check the two explanations, and you’ll see a surprising amount of difference. -_-
All measurement systems are entirely arbitrary. Including metric.
Metric was designed to be easier to play around with in base 10, the Imperial system was built when fractions were how people thought of things.
And I do hope there are no English in here bashing on our lack of conversion to metric, because every bloody one of you thinks of weight in stones and that doesn’t even begin to make sense.
exactly how much weight is a stone, anyway? Wouldn’t it be different depending on the size of the stone?
I think 1 stone = 14 pounds
This is why we need to switch all our measuring systems to base 2! Yes or No, 1 or 2… the perfect system.
(I’m joking around in this one; don’t roast me, anyone)
I prefer to Braise, i mean that perfect combination of dry and wet heat makes things so tender!
You wouldn’t happen to be a fricasseeing Aura Guardian, would you? I just happen to have a license for that somewhere…
Hasenpfeffer? What’s Hasenpfeffer..?
https://www.whats4eats.com/meats/hasenpfeffer-recipe
that’s hasenpfeffer
the better question is ‘is Welsh Rarebit also rabbit?’
Not all! I know I’m about 90-100 kg. The only reason I know that’s 14-15 stone is from having to look it up a while back. Apparently it’s also 195-200 lb, but as far as I’m concerned a pound is a unit of currency.
So Harem would be super strong if she de-teleported most of her figures? How do they stay the same? Are they put into a pocket dimension? So many questions!
She is almost as strong as Anvil when there is only one of her.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/1302
What do you mean, “how do they stay the same?”
They are not put in a pocket dimension. They “essentially cease to exist”. See panel 4 of Dabbler’s Science Corner above.
Dabbler’s Science Corner: so many answers!
Excuse me, she’s about as strong as Anvil when there is only one of her not almost.
Clearly, Dave should have linked the Science Corner in his comments.
He means “how do they stay different?”. When she originally created them each extra port was just like the body that formed it. She then dyed, tattooed, and altered them to make each unique. When she merges a body, how does it return in its’ original form, and not as a duplicate of the body it jumped from?
Simple Answer: That body is in Hammer Space.
Complicated Answer: That body “de-teleported”, which I think means that it teleported without any destination, and is in whatever place her bodies go in the brief moments between “vorp”ing from one place to another. She has stated that her teleportation is not instantaneous. That’s how Mach the Knife got her.
Took me ages to work out Harem was using the old ‘squeeze my hand if it hurts’ trick.
Interesting question on the way Harem delegates her mind among her bodies – are they all focussed on girding themselves for the pain at the beginning, or can they get on with other things (assuming there are ‘safe’ jobs to do when you’re expecting to have broken-wrist-level pain about to hit you…)
Just curious what sort of mental processes are separable, and which aren’t.
Also, given one mind is processing multiple sets of sensations, is it better or worse if she de-teleports to one self before un-de-teleporting the injured self? Is the pain softened by having ‘healthy’ inputs from the other selves?
I don’t think it makes a difference how many of her are healthy and in reality, only how many are injured. The brain has pain receptors. It does not have “everything is fine” receptors.
Yeah, but she’s perceiving 5 sets of receptors. Obviously she’s getting a full sensorium from each body, and somehow managing that much input. If her mind is affected by pain as much as a one-body mind, but from each copy cumulatively, it sounds horrendous if multiple copies get hurt at once. Unless the effect is perceived as weaker.
Hmmm. Worst. PMS. Ever. Given she’s pretty much bound to synch across all her bodies.
Plus, part of the point of the multiple bodies is to keep herself busy/amused. de-teleported, there’s fewer distractions from the pain. Endorphins? No direct chemical effect on the injured body, obviously, but how does she reconcile euphoria in one brain and pain in another?
Nitpicking: The brain actually has NO pain receptors. The rest of the body does. Though as NielsR points out, she feels 5 sets of pain receptors…
Your nitpicking made me learn something! Namely, how the thalamus and hypothalamus interpret and modulate pain, respectively.
So, fine, the brain has an anterolateral system. It also has the dorsal column medial-lemniscal system. My interpretation of this is that the best way for Harem to handle the pain from the broken wrist is to have three or four of her bodies having orgasms when strawberry un-de-teleports, depending on if one of her brains needs to concentrate on the un-de-teleport or if strawberry can un-de-teleport herself.
There is a real issue here of brain vs. mind: do painkillers that affect the brain affect the mind? If it’s just blocking signals from pain receptors, then no, but opioids have rather peculiar effects.
Masturbation as substitute painkiller? Sounds like fun, actually! (Well, definitely more fun than having to suffer through the pain of broken bones, anyway. I’ve had broken bones before.)
As for the “brain vs. mind” issue, I’m not qualified to comment. Not without a lot more research into the actual mechanisms by which painkillers work, anyway. I know we have at least one nuclear physicist that reads Grrl Power… any clinical pharmacologists in the crowd who might have an answer for us?
I giant flaw in the Multi Big-O plan, if 3 out of 4 Harems were enjoying tat moment, I doubt the 4th would be able to concentrate enough to bring harem 5 back…
This decimal metric argument is totally discriminatory to all the alien residents on Earth. Take Dabbler for example. With 4 hands of 4 digits the ‘logical’ way to measure something is using a base 16 or hexidecimal system.
There are 10 kinds of people: those who would agree to a hexadecimal-based system, and those who would not. Really, any system of measurement is a bit arbitrary. The decimal-based measurement argument relies on base ten math. Why not use Imperial and switch to base twelve math? As you point out, it’s not a question of A or B. There are alternatives. It’s a bite of food for thought.
You forgot to mention the other E types of people between 1 and 10.
for those of us who understand binary, Shen’s comment makes perfect sense.
1=1
10=2
11=3
100=4, etc.
Yes, in binary, that comment makes perfect sense, but Shen specified hexadecimal, then only defined 2 cases, leaving E cases undefined.
0000 = ‘0’
0001 = ‘1’
0010 = ‘2’
0011 = ‘3’
0100 = ‘4’
0101 = ‘5’
0110 = ‘6’
0111 = ‘7’
1000 = ‘8’
1001 = ‘9’
1010 = ‘A’
1011 = ‘B’
1100 = ‘C’
1101 = ‘D’
1110 = ‘E’
1111 = ‘F’
“10” = two in binary, but sixteen in Hex.
Binary is often converted to Hexadecimal in programming. You obviously missed my puns about a “bit” and “bite” (byte).
We interrupt this argument for a Foxtrot comic.
https://math.sfsu.edu/beck/images/foxtrot.100.in.binary.gif
There are 10 kinds of people: those who understand hexadecimal and the rest are Effed.
There are two kinds of people.
Those who can extrapolate from incomplete information.
What’s the other kind???
Please extrapolate
Just because we use the total of all our hands as our base doesn’t mean that is the only logical way. Base 12 or 3 hands has many advantages or maybe her species can count multiple things at once and so uses base 8 or 4. Not even all human cultures use base 10. She easily could have grown up using base 5, 0-4 fingers on each hand, or even something as strange as a bi-quaternary system where her thumb counts as 4 fingers. Base 6 and bi-quinary are actually used in some languages.
A decimal-based measurement system is not arbitrary, because we use a decimal number system. Of course, the number system itself is arbitrary, but basing the measurement system around the same number as the number system can make calculations easier.
And for people who have played Mass Effect… If I remember correctly, one Krogan complained about “stupid base-10 mathematics”. It isn’t unreasonable to assume that the Krogan, Quarians, and Turians use base-6.
As Scott points out, not every human culture uses base-10. Well, they probably do nowadays, but just to give an example, languages in the Nigerian Middle Belt, the Chepang language of Nepal, and the Mahl language of Minicoy Island in India, all use the duodecimal system (base-12). Another example would be the ancient Sumerians and the ancient Babylonians; they used sexagesimal (base-60).
I suppose I’m untalented, but what is going on? Is that another (undamaged) Harem holding the hammer in panel 5? Isn’t that very quick to have a hammer available for illustration? Why did Harem grab Sidney’s hand in panel 6?
I don’t think understanding is a matter of talent, but you are the third person I am explaining this to, and you understand more than the other two.
Blonde Harem came to ask Doc Chevy to fix Strawberry Harem’s wrist, so that is either Black/Purple, Purple/Pink, or White Harem with the hammer. Yes, it does seem quick to have a hammer available for illustration, but Harem has been bracing herself for 4 panels. Maybe she anticipated the question. She grabs Sydney’s hand to squeeze because people do that when they are in pain, or about to be. People in pain like to squeeze things. Go hold a woman’s hand while she is giving birth.
Or hit yourself in the hand with a hammer, drop the hammer, and see if you clench the uninjured hand.
Guessing the Hammer is another Harem popping in and out. Blondie grabbed Sydney’s hand because of the pain she would feel once Strawberry reappeared. ‘Biting the Bullet’ only she forgot her own strength and nearly broke Sydney’s hand. Sydney tried to pull away, but in her won style ended up kicking Blondie instead [guess she grabbed the Fly Orb with her free hand to do it.
No, she is simply using Blondini’s greater-than-her strength to hold herself up (one Harem could probably quite easily lift one Sydney with one healthy arm)
Forgot about Sydney being on the examination table. That is how she got her legs up in Harem’s face.
It might have been said before, but what is with the second eye chart? I looks kind of like the regular eye chart, but with the font set to Wingdings.
Dave confirmed in (currently) page 3 of last comic’s comments that it is a Kryptonian eye chart.
Well, actually, when asked “…is that a Kryptonian eye chart behind Sydney? Neat choice if so.” Dave replied with “:)” but I consider that confirmation.
:)
It looks like Sydney has realized that Harem has an eternal youth hack. I wonder if Harem has?
If Harem ‘uses’ just one body at a time and keeps the rest in storage until the current one is about to expire, then she has a conservative life span of about 5×70, or 350 years.
The hazard to only having one copy active is that if she meets a sudden untimely end then the remaining copies could stay lost in limbo for eternity.
That assumes she can’t start a form over. If she can, she can delete the octogenarian, (or even trigenarion, why put up with being in her 30’s?), respawn a fresh copy of a teenage to twenty-something form, and go visit the tattoo parlor to recreate her old markings.
Your logic is not entirely flawed, but fails to take into consideration Daphne’s feelings about number of bodies.
1 body at a time gives her 5 times the lifespan, since she can swap out for a younger body when she gets old and decides to die. She has compared that to wearing blinders and being deaf in one ear.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/1302
4 bodies at a time gives her at least twice the lifespan, but she has compared being a foursome to being blind in one eye.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/2095
And she would live out the second half of her extended lifespan with just one body.
UNLESS she actually kills some of her bodies and teleports to create more, using the young body as a template and putting a young body in storage…spending her infinite lifespan ‘blind in one eye’. This is assuming that she can create more, and 5 is her “at one time” limit and not her “per lifetime” limit.
While there has been plenty of reader argument that Harem’s low self control likely meant she found out she can only sustain 5 bodies at once the hard way–that she made too many bodies and started to die until she reduced the number to five–I’m pretty sure Dave hasn’t commented. She may have hit five and started destroying the original when she teleported. In that case, she can live a normal life–‘blind in one eye’–with only four of her, then un-de-teleport her younger self, kill her older selves, and teleport her younger self…if her limit is five at once, she has eternal youth. If her limit is 5 bodies ever, then she will have spent her whole life ‘blind in one eye’ for nothing except a second lifetime ‘wearing blinders and deaf in one ear’.
Do you think Daphne wants to risk it? The only way to find out early is for one of her to commit suicide. If it’s five bodies ever, she spends the rest of her life ‘blind in one eye’ for nothing, and even if she finds out that she can live ‘blind in one eye’ forever, she has to go through the trauma of dying once to test the theory and four times at once every time she resets her age.
I don’t think Daphne would kill herself just to find out.
She shouldn’t have to kill herself, just unteleport older copies and overwrite them. Given that she apparently has access to a personal pocket dimension where time doesn’t exist and that the number of bodies she can keep running at a time has been increasing over the years she is only a few extensions of her existing powers and some experience away from becoming a minor deity.
Where does it say that the number of bodies has been increasing over time? Please link.
Also, you are assuming that she CAN overwrite her bodies. The fact that each body is pervasive, even if de-teleported, argues against that. Why bother to have her wrist fixed if she could just make a fresh copy?
“I was going to bag on how old the Imperial system is as well, but turns out metric has been around for nearly as long.”
The “imperial” system, so named, does originate in 1824 (which makes it newer than the metric system’s 1799), but feet and inches etc and the other units are individually much older. As a concept, they date back to at least the Roman Empire, and as a standard unit in England more or less the same length of the modern one… well, a physical yard standard dated 1445 is only 1/100 inch short, and references to the practice of standardizing measures based on a centrally located standard “yardstick” (etc) can be found as far back as the 900’s – and I’d assume that each new standard was copied to the best of their ability from the previous one.
The only truly original unit in the 1824 imperial system is the gallon, which isn’t even used in the US. (the US gallon is based on an older standard, originally defined in 1707 for measuring wine – there were other gallons for other materials.)
It’s not clear, though, why you would consider being old to be a bad thing.
That imperial gallon, incidentally? It was intended to be (didn’t quite manage it, but neither did the kilogram manage to be exactly a liter of water) exactly ten pounds of water at room temperature.
I don’t understand. A milliliter of water is a gram. A kilogram of water is a liter. Right?
The kilogram was originally defined as exactly a liter of water (of unspecified isotopic composition) at its melting point (at unspecified pressure).
The definitions of the kilogram and meter (and hence the liter) have been refined since then, and they end up not quite nicely converging. At some point it was redefined to the maximum density point (~4 degrees celsius) rather than the melting point, and this was used for the 1799 kilogram standard.
But you can’t be 100% precise… and when more precision was provided for both units, they ended up diverging from this definition. By today’s standards, one liter of standard water at the point of maximum density ends up being about 999.9720 grams.
You know what annoys me about Metric fanboys? (aside from the fact that even the UK recognizes the utility of Metric length measurements)
It’s that Metric (or SI) is just as arbitrary, if not more so, than Imperial. It’s based on the calculated circumfrence of the planet to start, and now is based on the mass of a single Kilogram weight sitting in a museum somewhere (literally, THE KILOGRAM is a singular artifact upon which all other Kilograms are based) which means the entire system is technically slowly losing mass as that weight evaporates.
So here you have a system that is based around concepts that are so large you cannot really comprehend them, and divisions thereof.
Then, you have Imperial. Which is based off of the human body and common everyday experiences. An inch is the length of your thumb tip. A yard is your nose to your outstretched thumb. A foot is, surprise surprise, a FOOT. Etc. etc. I don’t remember what things like the Mile and the pound are based on everyday occurrences and things that are intuitive to the human form. That’s part of the reason that children find it easier to learn the Imperial system than SI- and why so much of SI lovin’ Europe still has remnants of Imperial units that they use.
Yes, SI, being an arbitrary, constructed system of measurement, is easier to use in mathematics. That’s why engineers and scientists the world over (including in the UK and America) use SI primarily. It’s base 10, nice and easy to move decimals around. But for day-to-day use by the Layman, it’s rather easier to use Imperial, because you can compare stuff to what you’ve experienced.
Mile is the Latin word for soldier.
Hitting Wikipedia, expecting an explanation on how the word for soldier came to be the word for about 15-20 minutes walk and I found…that it was 1,000 paces.
That’s the thing about standardized systems of measurement. They ARE arbitrary. Every. Single. One.
And, I’m sorry, but children find the Imperial system easier to learn than Metric? Australia began the switch to Metric in the 1970’s, while I was in school.
I, for one, am forever thankful I was spared having to memorize the many many idiosyncracies of the Imperial system (How many yards in four and a half miles? OK, that’s three times as much in feet, but how many inches is that? And what’s the area of a square with sides that size?).
I don’t think I’ve ever needed to convert a distance in miles to yards, feet, or inches except as an academic exercise.
Refer Paragraphs 2 & 3 of my previous post.
Heh heh, ‘undie’ teleport…
Here’s a link to a site:
https://www.best-norman-rockwell-art.com/norman-rockwell-willie-gillis-series.html
Now which one best represents Sydney?
I kind of feel like Dave should try and seek royalties from the makers of overwatch considering they completely ripped off Peggy for Zarya.
Isn’t Zarya based on one of the employees over there? Which means, DaveB used her likeness without her permission
Ooo, but only if she was using her likeness for financial gain or for reputation culminating in profit or loss of profit!
But then again…
iZod! Kneel before iZod!
::runs screaming off into the night::
when you hear that “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” was played by the same actor… most straights i know cringe slightly once the cross-genre squick factor kicks in and gives Zod’s quote new meaning…
Heh – Terence Stamp is awesome.
Remember the iPod t-shirts with the silhouette-like people dancing on them? Some guy put a picture of General Zod in the hands-behind his back, feet planted firmly and about 2 feet apart, menacing glare and all, with the “iZod” to the left and just by the shoulder.
Apple and Izod did nothing (apparently this producer was too small time to bother). Mr. Stamp saw one at a convention, tracked down the manufacturer, and asked them to please stop selling the shirts. The manufacturer complied and offered compensation. As I recall, Mr. Stamp turned it down but thanked them for stopping. Wish I had gotten one before that.
My friend has one. He goes to anime conventions and wears it, and there’s always three or four people each time (different ones each time) who walk up to him, drop to their knees and beg for mercy.
People ar weird and awesome.
Stamp is a guy I’d like to see land a leading role in a hit film. He strikes me as an actor who has all the chops, has performed well in a number of roles, but just hasn’t ever been trusted with the lead. He can dooo iiit. Just leeeet hiiiim.