(no subject)

[gfish]

Terrifying idea that just came up in conversation after dinner: left-handed CDs. I decided it was a spec pushed by the Soviet Union in order to be assholes, like that horrible 'metric inch' system.

Comments

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

Aren't mils basically metric inches?

[gfish.livejournal.com]

A metric inch is 2.5 cm long, not 2.54. There is a citation needed claim on Wikipedia that some Soviet companies would copy American designs, building them in metric inches to make them look identical but still be completely incompatible.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

Ugh.

This isn't quite the same, but for many years, Campagnolo screwthreads used Whitworth threading, 55 degree angles and different thread depth. Same diameter and pitch as ASME, though, so you could force a campy derailleur into a modern frame, once or twice, if you weren't going to ever use anything else with it. But that's not really their fault: everyone used Whitworth when Campy got going, and it just took them longer to move over to UNC/UNF than their competitors.

I still think the king of awful is Italian Bottom Bracket threading, 36mm x 24 threads per inch.

[solarbird]

In the unlikely event someone wants to edit Wikipedia to site this commentary about the Soviet metric inch, you can link to The Information Age Volume III: Economy, Society, and Culture, Manuel Castells, Blackwell Publishing, Page 32, or to the original source that book cites in footnotes, Fred Langa in BYTE magazine, April 1991, Page 128.

[ilmarinen.livejournal.com]

Totally OT (sorta) but I've heard it claimed that machining in metric is a PITA. If one was getting modern lathes, mills, etc, would one want them to be natively metric or english units?

Slightly less OT, we us decimal feet for most civil engineering stuff (in the barbaric USA). While the architects use inches. So, their CAD drawings are actually 12x the size of ours. Sigh. When architects do use metric, it's in mm, IIRC.

-B.

[corivax.livejournal.com]

A Russian physics teacher was responsible for teaching me the left-hand-rule (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_hand_rule) i, j, and k.

[orawnzva.livejournal.com]

Of course, cross-products and all other "vector" functions that depend on a right-hand or left-hand rule are really a different kind of object which just happens to also form a vector space with the same number of dimensions. There are vectors and cross-vectors, and the choice of relationship between them is arbitrary in the same way as the choice of i or -i as the square root of -1 is arbitrary.

[neuro42.livejournal.com]

I still want to go around leaving pieces of left-handed allthread from Small Parts in the bins at hardware stores.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

You sick bastard.

I expect the market for left-hand taps to go through the roof.