Posted on 02/14/2011 7:01:11 AM PST by SeekAndFind
A ‘new urgency’ is how the New York Times, in a marvelous editorial this week, describes the rush to redefine the official kilogram. That famous weight and measure turns out to be what the newspaper describes as a cylinder of platinum and iridium maintained by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures. It is kept there under three glass domes accessible by three separate keys. It is, the Times notes, more than 130 years old and is what the paper calls the “only remaining international standard in the metric system that is still a man-made object.” The “new urgency” comes from the discovery that the official cylinder may be losing mass, which, the Times says, “defeats its only purpose: constancy.”
Of course, we could let the confounded kilogram just float. After all, we let the dollar just float, its creation and status as legal tender a matter of fiat, its value adjusted by the mandarins at the Federal Reserve depending on such variables as they from time to time share, or not, with the rest of the world and, in any event, as would have floored the Founders, who granted the Congress the power to coin money and regulate its value and did so in the same sentence in which they also granted the Congress the power to fix the standard of the other weights and measures, like, say, the aforementioned kilogram.
The Founders, many of whom promptly went into the Congress, turned around and regulated the value of the dollar at 371 ¼ grains of pure silver. The law through which they did that, the Coinage Act of 1792, noted that the amount of silver they were regulating for the dollar was the same as in a coin then in widespread use, known as the Spanish milled dollar.
(Excerpt) Read more at nysun.com ...
A pound is supposed to be .45359237 of a kilogram, of course. But if the Congress can permit Mr. Bernanke to use his judgment in deciding what a dollar is worth, why shouldn’t he — or some other PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology — be able to decide from day to day what a kilogram is worth?
My Fiat weight not much more than that............
A kilo is the weight of a standard export pack of cocaine
If shorted, death occurs, if long, death occurs
Is the Chrysler pound a relabeled import of the Fiat kilogram?
This paragraph in the article is particularly humorous :
“For that matter, one could go whole hog and fix the value of both the kilogram and the dollar but float the value of time. You say you want to be paid $100 an hour. That’s fine by your boss. But he gets to decide how many minutes in the hour. Or how long the minute is. You know you’ll get a kilogram of meat for the price a kilogram of meat costs. But you won’t know how long you have to work to earn the money.”
A gram here, a gram there, pretty soon you’re talking about some serious grammage....
What is the purity of the cocain based on? Is it cut with anything that would get one killed?
...”the official cylinder may be losing mass....”
...spoken like a true scientist. Or, it may not be. I suspect there is a program (which will be very expensive) which will open the official kilo, and determine if it really is losing mass...or not. After all, our methods of weighing things has improved since the official kilo was put into the domes. Most likely it will have a different mass than the last time. Who will know if the mass changed, or the scales changed?
This is all a smokescreen. Clinton added the average price of a hooker performing a specified task to the “shopping basket of goods” used to calculate the inflation rate. They desperately need to allow the redefinition of time in order to hide the real inflation rate.
The standard kilogram, if memory serves, is stored in Paris, which means that the fate of the entire international measurement system is in the hands of the French.
Now doesn’t that make everyone feel better?
Being an ex-calibration technician, PMEL, I used to keep up with such esoterica.
The NIST (formerly NBS) was working on an experiment a few years back that would do away with the physical standard for the kilogram.
They were meticulously winding a giant coil in an effort to use magnetic force applied to a solenoid type plunger to determine if that could be used as an ‘electronic force’ standard.....since I have not heard anything since, they must have abandoned it....
“Who will know if the mass changed, or the scales changed?”
Easy, you can tell if the scale has changed by using a 1 kilogram weight standard, no wait...
Because a lot of laws of physics revolve around the value.
For example, a 1 slug mass (32.2xxxx pounds) accelerates at 1 feet per second squared when acted upon by a 1 pound force. (Sorry for the traditional units - I don't think in metric.)
If the unit of mass varied, all the other relationships would vary, and the mass above would accelerate faster or slower than the definition.
It's kind of like: what if 2+2=3 ?
(Usually the tagline is enough, but in this case:) /sarc
I suspect helium is leaching out of the original casting.
Then that should make it heavier, not lighter.
(Again, check the tagline before replying...)
In aviation maintenance, the torque wrenches are calibrated so that certain fasteners are tightened to specific range e.g. “35 to 42 inch pounds”, with a high degree of accuracy.
The torque wrenches themselves, particularly if dropped on the floor, will be knocked out of accuracy/ inaccurate and need periodic checks in any case. The device THEY are compared against, ALSO need periodic adjustment and/or calibration. Presumably THIS device is standarized against yet another standard device, which also has been calibrated against even yet ANOTHER precision device or specification.
Somebody, somewhere, must have tightened a bolt by hand and said “Yeah, that’s about right...”?
Admittedly, when you buy a pound of hamburger you don't need to know the mass to 12 significant figures. But advances in measurement have real-world consequences. GPS depends on extremely accurate time measurements by atomic clocks.
I can’t wrap my brain around pork belly commodities being sold in Kilograms.
I questioned a local expert on what a kilo was worth and he said,
“bess you jus be payin up wut I ax, fool! els my stick be talking fo me. now be tippin outa here fo I do you.”
I don’t think he had a PhD, but who can tell these days?
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