Same way you’d take a third of a centimeter: Get out a micrometer and set it to 0.3333, that’ll be pretty close.

The main benefit to the metric system is it’s all base ten. One kilometer is 1000 meters, one kilogram is 1000 grams, you don’t have to memorize that there’s 16 cups in a gallon etc. For a lot of things that works well, the problem is with base ten itself. You run into the same problems with 1000 millimeters in a meter than you do trying to work in thousandths of an inch, it doesn’t divide by 3 particularly well and you get those weird repeating digits.

We kinda did have a base twelve system going, isn’t it weird how we have a special word for twelve in English? There’s 12 hours on a clock face and 12 inches in a foot. And from there, we work in powers of two.

Woodworkers don’t traditionally cut boards to 1 inch or 2 inches thick; they’re rough sawn to that thickness and then dried and milled to 3/4" or 1 1/2". Which are 1/16th or 1/8th of a foot, and both are divisible by 2 and 3 and expressed in a power-of-two fraction. a third of 3/4" is 1/4".

It works very well until someone who doesn’t actually understand it tries to contrive a way to make it not work in the same way their preferred system also doesn’t work.

For many other things, the metric system is easier to deal with, I would much rather do physics in metric than in Imperial (also I’m American, I actually use SAE) but woodworking in a dozenal system is a discipline that is millennia old, the bugs have been very thoroughly shaken out. I would rather build furniture in inches.

My sawyer has a tape that measures in tenths of a foot as well. Kind of reminds me of how aircraft measure time aloft; both tach time and hobbs time is measured in tenths of an hour.

Something that’s gonna tilt your head: 1 1/2" is 1/8th of a foot. And 3/4" is 1/16th of a foot. Common inch woodworking sizes like that aren’t weird fractions of an inch, they’re some power of two fraction of a foot.

I carry my “bilingual” tape in my away mission bag, because that way I can get away with having one tape measure. My metric tape lives on my desk and I’ve got inch tapes dripping out of the walls. I wake up in the morning and cough up a few.

I further wonder how that occurred.

One night when I was 18, like a couple months before I turned 19, I was having a fitful nightmare. And mind you, I didn’t have nightmares yet because I hadn’t gone to aircraft mechanic school by that point. I woke up extremely nauseous and with terrible abdominal pain. I staggered into the bathroom and puked my guts out. This wasn’t something I ate or some stomach flu, this was different. I couldn’t stand up for the pain in my midsection. I convinced my mother to drive me to the hospital, where they gave me Maalox.

For 18 months this went on, every now and again once or twice a month just BOOM, always at night, no apparent reason. We ruled out food allergies, I was prescribed everything from muscle relaxants to migraine medications. This interfered with my aviation medical certificate, I was grounded for ten months.

I was at University, away from my home town, and it happened again. One of my roommates drove me to a different hospital. The doc at the ER was a young chick with a nose ring, like I’m barely 20 by this time and she didn’t feel much older than me, she hadn’t been out of med school long. She had the bright idea to put me in a CT scanner while my tummy was actually hurting.

About 45 minutes later I was being whisked into an operating room to have my appendix removed, and the early morning thunderpukes never returned.

I had appendicitis for 18 months.

But if you shot yourself in the dick, now you’re bleeding out.

I actually did that with an actual bicycle and one of those “make any old bike a stationary bike” stand things. Harvested an old motor out of…what was it, a printer or something? Photocopier? It was the upper-left third of something that used to be office equipment, and built the circuit out of a 7805’s datasheet with an extra big capacitor on the generator side. It charged phones. It was jank AF though. All it did was offer 5V at I have no idea how much current on the power pins of a USB Micro-B cable.

I wonder how that occurred.

Windows RT. What a pile.

Ironically it’s probably Suckless.

37 year old American here. I was raised learning both and I can and have built things in both systems. Hell I’ve even mixed them on occasion. I own a metric tape measure and a metric/inch tape measure, and several inch tape measures.

Specifically for woodworking, I vastly prefer working in fractional inches, for a whole stack of reasons but mainly in the wood shop, you find yourself dividing by 2 or 3 way more often than 5 or 10. Working in a dozenal system in powers of 2 makes more sense for that than working in a decimal system in powers of ten. It’s just easier to buy rough lumber at 1 inch thick, use 1/4" of it to mill it flat and parallel so you have 3/4", and now if you need to do a half-lap joint it’ll be 3/8" or a tenon will be 1/4".

I have a couple restaurant apps on my phone. These are for takeout or delivery type places like Domino’s Pizza or Sheetz. In that context, it’s a genuine upgrade. Like, i can either drive to Sheetz, type my order into the kiosk there, and wait the whole time they’re preparing it, OR I can place the order from home on my phone, and they’ll prepare it as I’m driving there.

At a sit-down restuarant, what are you trying to do? Trying to use that instead of the waitstaff for ordering or paying…some customers are going to and some aren’t. There’s a procedure people understand about eating at a restaurant, and now you’re throwing a wrench in it for…what? The ability to update the menu without printing a whole bunch of them, somewhere to write down the specials so the waitstaff doesn’t have to remember them, or “because technology?”

And at something with counter service like a deli? Fuck off.

You know all that medical gaslighting and not having their problems taken seriously women complain about?

Men don’t experience that as much because we just don’t go to the doctor in the first place.

i just want a stationary bike that can charge my phone.

The NATO phonetic alphabet does make some intersting choices. Sierra being particularly bad because over a poor quality radio it can sound a lot like “zero.” the WWII American phonetic alphabet used “sugar.” Able Baker indeed.

That British guy, Jack “That guy who fought World War 2 with a claymore and bagpipes” Churchill, was also an early pioneer of surfing.

There’s a LOT of e. coli up your ass.

Put more delicately, you are a great big multicellular eukaryote, each of your cells has (or had, in the case of red blood cells) an inner chamber called the nucleus, and you’re full of mitochondria and other organelles. Your body is covered and filled with other organisms, many of them simple, tiny little single cell prokaryotes which make a living helping their gigantic, complicated host function. Like all the bacteria in your intestines that help you digest food. Their cells outnumber yours by a wide margin.

So, here’s a lesson from the flight physiology chapter of the private pilot syllabus:

Your vision is a lot worse than you think it is. You probably conceptualize your eye as similar to a digital camera, there’s a lens that focuses light on a sensor made up of an array of light sensitive cells, and that the edge of that array is as densely packed as the center. This is the case for a camera, but not for your eye.

Each of your eyes has over 30 million photoreceptors called rods and cones.

Rod cells come in one variety and are only really good for detecting presence or absence of light. They work well, or can work well, in very dim light, and they form the basis of your night vision. This is why in very dim conditions you might experience your vision in black and white.

Cone cells are less sensitive to light requiring relatively bright light to function, and come in three varieties that respond the strongest to low, middle and high wavelengths of light, what we know as red, green and blue. By comparing the relative intensities of these wavelengths, we can derive color vision. They don’t work well in low light conditions.

The sensor array in the back of your eye that contains these photosensitive cells, called the retina, is sparsely populated toward the edges and doesn’t have very good resolution. Try reading this sentence looking at it through the corner of your eye. It gets denser and denser, and the ratio of cones to rods increases, until you reach a tiny pit in the very center called the fovea.

This is difficult to put into words but unless you’ve been blind since birth you’ll understand what I mean: You use your whole retina to “see.” You use your fovea to “look.” The detailed center of your vision, the spot where you are “looking” is drawn from the fovea through the center of the lens out into the world. When you are looking at something, you are pointing your fovea(s) at it.

There are no rod cells in your fovea, only cones. So you have very high resolution color day vision, but next to no night vision, with your fovea.

This is why things like dim stars in the night sky can be more easily seen with your peripheral vision than your central vision. Your central vision does not have the cells to see well in the dark. It’s not in the anatomy.

We teach this to pilots because distant lights the pilot is using to navigate by, avoiding collisions with obstacles or other aircraft, might be dim enough that the night adjusted eye can’t actually see it with the center vision but can with peripheral vision.

The same chapter teaches about the “hole” through which the optic nerve passes and how that blind spot is capable of hiding something like another airplane from you, which is why you look around and don’t just stare out the windshield. It’s not often a problem because most of the time one eye can see into the other’s blind spot, but it’s useful to know that about your vision.

Each cell will detect some light, undergo a chemical process that fires an adjacent neuron, and then take a very brief moment to reset to be ready to do it again. Each cell is doing this independently, so your eyes don’t have a “frame rate” the way a camera does, but a flickering light begins to look continuous to humans at a rate of about 18 cycles per second and no flicker can be detected somewhere around 40.

Your occipital lobe takes in this choppy inconsistent resolution broken up mess of visual information passed to it via your optic nerves, does some RTX DLSS 4k HDR10 shit to it and outputs the continuous and smooth color 3D picture you consciousness experiences as “vision.”

AND THEN ON TOP OF THAT your brain does optical everything recognition. You can look at millions of different objects - the letters of the alphabet, tools, toys, people, individual people’s faces, leaves, flowers, creatures, stars, planets, moons, your own hands, and recognize what they are with astonishing speed and accuracy.

It’s what scientists call the hellawhack shiznit that happens inside your brizzle.

As an American, I’ll take the Mojave over the Outback any day.

I was picturing Phalanx CWIS. doesn’t take much mampower to run one of those.