Imperal or Metric?



  • I always knew that shitload is actually a scientific term, here is proof http://www.sixtysymbols.com/videos/telescope.htm (Skip to 5:45)


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

     Shitload is metric. That should be obvious, since this is an astronomy video. Fuckton can be either imperial or metric. They aren't equal.

    Assload is entirely imperial. I think it's three horse-cums to an assload, but people's asses were smaller back then.





  •  For those who are so inclined, here is a list of standard units of measurement for scientific purposes as set down by elReg

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/24/vulture_central_standards/



  • @ptProgrammer said:

    Shed being a barn or outbuilding to the american Cousins.

    We use the word "shed", too. A barn is not the same as a shed, though.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @ptProgrammer said:
    Shed being a barn or outbuilding to the american Cousins.

    We use the word "shed", too. A barn is not the same as a shed, though.

    I am neither British nor American, but I do believe that all countries that speak English natively use the word "barn". And nowhere is it the same thing as a shed (as morbius pointed out).



  • @toon said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    @ptProgrammer said:
    Shed being a barn or outbuilding to the american Cousins.

    We use the word "shed", too. A barn is not the same as a shed, though.

    I am neither British nor American, but I do believe that all countries that speak English natively use the word "barn". And nowhere is it the same thing as a shed (as morbius pointed out).

     

    Sorry, although we Australians recognise the word 'barn', it is only as a known americanism, with a definition of "american term for a shed, generally one that is lockable." Also in the pre-fab shed business, who use the tautology "american barn" for  a tall shed with dual lean-to structures, fully enclosed.



  • @robbak said:

    @toon said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    @ptProgrammer said:
    Shed being a barn or outbuilding to the american Cousins.

    We use the word "shed", too. A barn is not the same as a shed, though.

    I am neither British nor American, but I do believe that all countries that speak English natively use the word "barn". And nowhere is it the same thing as a shed (as morbius pointed out).

     

    Sorry, although we Australians recognise the word 'barn', it is only as a known americanism, with a definition of "american term for a shed, generally one that is lockable." Also in the pre-fab shed business, who use the tautology "american barn" for  a tall shed with dual lean-to structures, fully enclosed.

    I'm not a native speaker myself, I should point out. But to call a structure with tall doors, big enough to park a lorry into, used to store grain, a shed? Then again, it could simply be my Americanized exposure to the English language that makes that sound weird to me.



  • @robbak said:

    Also in the pre-fab shed business, who use the tautology "american barn" for  a tall shed with dual lean-to structures, fully enclosed.
     

    My first thought was this but it is called an "Oz Barn" for some reason. This is the shape I think of when thinking of "barn". A shed could be a small garden shed (I have one similar to this) or a large one on the farm for storing hay or tractors or whatever (my brother-in-law has one similar to this).



  • @Zemm said:

    @robbak said:

    Also in the pre-fab shed business, who use the tautology "american barn" for  a tall shed with dual lean-to structures, fully enclosed.
     

    My first thought was this but it is called an "Oz Barn" for some reason. This is the shape I think of when thinking of "barn". A shed could be a small garden shed (I have one similar to this) or a large one on the farm for storing hay or tractors or whatever (my brother-in-law has one similar to this).

     

    My guess would be that the good people at Titan renamed the American Barn to be an Oz Barn for patriotic reasons.  (And that is just a guess.)

    As a ex-Brit living in Oz I'd say that English people call a shed the smallish (6 foot x 4 foot) thing you have in a garden with a lawnmower, watering can and bike.  The bigger structure (typically seen on a farm) would be a barn.

    Australians certainly call the bigger structure a shed though.  The in-laws run an industrial laundry and they call the building that's in a shed - it's probably 10m x 15m and 8m high.

     



  • @toon said:

    I'm not a native speaker myself, I should point out.
    Neither am I, and for some reason a barn implies livestock to me...



  • @pnieuwkamp said:

    @toon said:
    I'm not a native speaker myself, I should point out.
    Neither am I, and for some reason a barn implies livestock to me...

    Those are stables.



  • @toon said:

    @pnieuwkamp said:
    @toon said:
    I'm not a native speaker myself, I should point out.
    Neither am I, and for some reason a barn implies livestock to me...
    Those are stables.
    Me being american I interpret them as follows (not necessarily the dictionary definition):

    Shed - Smaller, primarily store tools

    Barn - Larger, primarily stores hay and animal/farming related supplies, can store animals

    Stable - Larger, primarily stores horses, but can store other animals


  • 🚽 Regular

    I'm still not sure how much a shitload truly is, though. An "absolute shitload of light"? Is "absolute shitload" different than just a plain "shitload"? When we're measuring light, are we measuring the amount of photons, or are we really simply measuring the apparent radiation that occurs as a result? Or are we measuring a frequency of light over time? Can I transpose a shitload of light to something I can picture in my head more easily, such as a shitload of porn?



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @ptProgrammer said:
    Shed being a barn or outbuilding to the american Cousins.

    We use the word "shed", too. A barn is not the same as a shed, though.

    No - a barn is 10-28m2 and a shed is 10-52m2. Neither is an SI unit, although at least the first one is a widely accepted standard.

    Once a physicist, always a physicist.



  • @Ibix said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    @ptProgrammer said:
    Shed being a barn or outbuilding to the american Cousins.

    We use the word "shed", too. A barn is not the same as a shed, though.

    No - a barn is 10-28m2 and a shed is 10-52m2. Neither is an SI unit, although at least the first one is a widely accepted standard.

    Once a physicist, always a physicist.

     

    +1

     



  • @Ibix said:

    No - a barn is 10-28m2 and a shed is 10-52m2. Neither is an SI unit, although at least the first one is a widely accepted standard.
     

    I had never heard of a shed as a measure of cross-section, probably beacause it's too small for any practical use. Wikipedia also claims that a μb is an "outhouse", but I guess whoever thought of that was drunk.



  • @Ibix said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    @ptProgrammer said:
    Shed being a barn or outbuilding to the american Cousins.
    We use the word "shed", too. A barn is not the same as a shed, though.

    No - a barn is 10-28m2 and a shed is 10-52m2. Neither is an SI unit, although at least the first one is a widely accepted standard.

    Once a physicist, always a physicist.

    So a barn is on the order of 1031 barns?


  • @Ibix said:

    No - a barn is 10-28m2 and a shed is 10-52m2. Neither is an SI unit, although at least the first one is a widely accepted standard

     

    So, a barn is 0.000000000000000000000000001m2? That seems rather small for any practical purposes.



  •  @click said:

    So, a barn is 0.000000000000000000000000001m2? That seems rather small for any practical purposes.

     

    Not for particle physics where you deal in femtobarns (10-43 m2) quite regularly!

    To make things even weirder you can conflate the idea of quantifing the number of things, or possble things, happening in a given ammount of (bloody small) space to get...[b]the inverse femtobarn (fb−1)[/b]! One of these is, potentially, absolutely huge in terms of raw particle detector data (hundreds of TB).

     



  • @Cursorkeys said:

    (hundreds of TB).
     

    TeraBarns?



  • @click said:

    So, a barn is 0.000000000000000000000000001m2? That seems rather small for any practical purposes.
     

    Proton radius is about 10-15 m = 1 fm, nuclear radius is typically some fm, the section area of a (spherical) nucleus is pi*r*r, that is around 1 b. This becomes the natural unit of measure for reaction cross-sections, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_section_%28physics%29 explains it better than I could at the moment



  • @dargor17 said:

    @click said:

    So, a barn is 0.000000000000000000000000001m2? That seems rather small for any practical purposes.
     

    Proton radius is about 10-15 m = 1 fm, nuclear radius is typically some fm, the section area of a (spherical) nucleus is pi*r*r, that is around 1 b. This becomes the natural unit of measure for reaction cross-sections, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_section_%28physics%29 explains it better than I could at the moment

    BTW, that's no coincidence.  The term barn was originally coined as a unit of area approximately equal to the cross section of a uranium nucleus.


  •  Did that derive from the idea that a neutron in a reaction "couldn't hit the broad side of a barn" (a nucleus, even a relativly large one, vs the mostly emptyness that makes up most matter); yet manages to do to to continue the chain reaction?

     



  • @bgodot said:

     Did that derive from the idea that a neutron in a reaction "couldn't hit the broad side of a barn" (a nucleus, even a relativly large one, vs the mostly emptyness that makes up most matter); yet manages to do to to continue the chain reaction?

     

    It came from some Manhattan Project scientists that were doing the Rutherford experiment with Uranium and commented that the Uranium nucleus seemed like it was as big as a barn compared to other materials they'd tried.



  • They used to transport dried manure in the cargo holds below the deck of ships.  When sea water mixes with it, it will produce methane gas and creates an explosion hazard.

    As a warning, they started labeling the bags of manure with S H I T.  Stack High in Transit.

    I don't know about shitload, though...



  • @pauly said:

    They used to transport dried manure in the cargo holds below the deck of ships.  When sea water mixes with it, it will produce methane gas and creates an explosion hazard.

    As a warning, they started labeling the bags of manure with S H I T.  Stack High in Transit.

    Jesus Christ, does somebody here actually believe this?



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @pauly said:
    They used to transport dried manure in the cargo holds below the deck of ships.  When sea water mixes with it, it will produce methane gas and creates an explosion hazard.

    As a warning, they started labeling the bags of manure with S H I T.  Stack High in Transit.
    Jesus Christ, does somebody here actually believe this?

    Hey, it takes a good half a minute to find the snopes page!


  • @Sutherlands said:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    @pauly said:
    They used to transport dried manure in the cargo holds below the deck of ships.  When sea water mixes with it, it will produce methane gas and creates an explosion hazard.

    As a warning, they started labeling the bags of manure with S H I T.  Stack High in Transit.
    Jesus Christ, does somebody here actually believe this?

    Hey, it takes a good half a minute to find the snopes page!

     

    But once you've found it, you get the whole nine yards about where "pluck yew" comes from.

     


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @morbiuswilters said:

    Jesus Christ, does somebody here actually believe this?
     

    I D.I.D

    Which stands for "I Didn't. It's Dumb".

    And then the whole office stood up an applauded.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @pauly said:
    They used to transport dried manure in the cargo holds below the deck of ships.  When sea water mixes with it, it will produce methane gas and creates an explosion hazard.

    As a warning, they started labeling the bags of manure with S H I T.  Stack High in Transit.

    Jesus Christ, does somebody here actually believe this?

    lol, sounded believable enough when I heard it last night.


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