From: John De Armond Newsgroups: alt.energy.homepower Subject: Re: An amazing AC unit Date: Sun, 22 Jun 2008 09:01:32 -0400 Message-ID: <vkgs5450kci6orjtgq24m9opprbqm7perc@4ax.com> On Fri, 20 Jun 2008 08:54:48 -0500, Morris Dovey <mrdovey@iedu.com> wrote: >Eeyore wrote: > >> In that case it's a totally stupid measure since it mixes Imperial >> and metric units. 'Only in the USA' could these things happen. It >> gives a totally false concept of real efficiency. Not allowed in the >> rest of the world. > >Well said - but what would you expect? We've been a refuge for the >"stupid" and the "unallowed" for a long time. It may take us a bit >longer to get this all sorted out... Actually, it's not well said. Small whole numbers are easy for people to remember. It doesn't really matter what the units of EER are as long as 11 is better than 10 and that 10 is about average. Consider another measurement, COP. Is 2.8 or 3.0 or 3.2 or... about average? I can recall which it is about every other day and this isn't one of 'em. >It's reassuring to know that the rest of the world has so effectively >rid itself of stupidity and has adopted universal standards for all >things energy-related. And yet we still lead the world. It must indicate the superior intellect of the US citizen, since we move so effortlessly between metric and conventional units. To listen to the foreign howls of pain, merely contemplating a foot or BTU or PSI is a problem, the difficulty of which is on par with a man giving birth. I really liked the metric system when it was MKS. But the SI system is the bastard stepchild that resulted when the french and academia fornicated. And like everything the French touch, the SI system is totally, well, french. Who but the french could come up with units where the typical measurement requires mega or giga in front to specify common everyday values? How many gigapascals does your car tire use? Or is it megapascals or kilopascals? 32 PSI is pretty easy to remember. And what IS a Pascal, the force exerted by a flea fart? At least I know what "pounds per square inch" is from the very name. And who but the french would choose a unit of radioactivity (the becquerel) so small that even barely detectable amounts of activity have to be specified with a mega prefix and working amounts with giga or tera? A unit so small that a single unit can't be measured except, maybe, by NIST and then only in a cave far underground. (OK, so I exaggerate. But only a femtometer's worth.) The Curie is a handy unit of radioactivity. Conveniently, the number of disintegrations per second of 1.0 gram of Radium. Megacurie indicated a very large amount while microcurie indicated a very small amount. Mega big, micro small. Even Ogg understand. Is a megabecquerel a large or small amount? Can you tell by the prefix? (It's a very tiny amount.) Or consider the case of the Sievert and Gray, where they gratuitously moved the decimal point two places. Nothing else changed. WTF? I couldn't imagine a worse cluster-fsck if someone had planned it that way. Which the french probably did. Then there's the SI unit of water purity, the Semen. Oops, I mean the Siemen. They were probably self-producing the first when they came up with the second spelling. At least the conventional unit, the mho, reminds me that it is the reciprocal ohm. >> The sooner you drop BTUs the better. > >What was it, exactly, that the 'B' stood for? ;-> Funny, that.... John |