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 ...
-——What is the purity of the cocain based on?-——
the purity is “standard” grade : )
The correct torque spec is always, “just before the bolt breaks”.
I can see that you both get my drift....
... which are much more accurate than distance measurements by direct length comparison. In practice, length is measured most accurately optically. For this reason, they abandoned the length standard and defined the meter by a fixed value of the speed of light, in vacuo. That's why the kilogram is the only standard artifact left.
Of course, you could make some atomic isotope the mass standard, but then you would have to count trillions OF trillions of them to high accuracy, so this would amount to an artifact standard anyway.
You just hook up a counter to your molecular beam!
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