The Changing Definition Of 'Kilogram'

DrLudicrous writes "The NYTimes is reporting that the platinum-iridium standard mass for the kilogram is shedding at an appreciable rate -- at least compared to other reference masses. The Pt-Ir cylinder is kept in France, and measured annually, and the slight discrepancy is important because the kg is an SI base unit- thus other quantities such as the Volt are based on it. A new standard is being sought- the two frontrunners are counting the number of atoms in a perfectly spherical single crystal of silicon, and another technique uses a device known as the Watt balance."

Kilogram?

[ihatewinXP]

Hey I live in America you insensitive clod! (but then again I alawys want to know how much they are lifting on Strongman Competition).

yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yay, I wiegh less!

However, I don't know by how much, since I don't live in bloody England.

My wife changes her definition...

[craenor]

Everytime she steps on the scales...I would tell you what it was defined as last week, but kids may be reading this.

Re:Kilogram?

[__aafkqj3628]

Then maybe america should move out of the dark ages sometime.

an excuse not to diet

[circletimessquare]

i'm not gaining weight, the kilogram is losing mass... so really, i stay the same weight, and they need more units to weigh me ;-)

Solution?

[The_dev0]

Why couldn't they just take it down the shops and measure it against, say, 1kg of carrots or a kg of sugar?

Why not...

[Anonymous Coward]

...just define a kilogram in terms of 'x' number of Joules. Since c is a defined constant, then this would give you a constant mass.

No wonder I keep gaining weight...

[HaloZero]

It's not my ass, it's just that the units are getting incrementally smaller. Ho ho! It's not me. *dances*

Damned inreliable measure standards. *shakes fist*

Re:any mirrors?

[Anonymous Coward]

Would have been nice to link to a site that doesn't require name, rank, serial number, and blood type to read.

Doncha mean Would have been nice to link to a site that doesn't require Bill Gates' name, rank, serial number, and blood type to read.?

obligatory....

[SandmanWAIX]

nah .. they should throw out the whole kilogram concept and weigh everything according to a "library of congress". eg. that woman weighes 2.36 libraries of congress.

Re:Counting Si

[porp]

I think I can speak for everyone and say

HUH?

porp

So that's why it takes more.

[DanThe1Man]

And all this time I just thought I was just getting used to cocaine.

Re:Kilogram?

[Tumbleweed]

> Then maybe america should move out of the dark ages sometime.

Yeah, tell it to the Queen.

Can someone help me convert here??

[Helpadingoatemybaby]

give me imperial measurements any day

Darn right! After all, it's easy enough to convert fortnights to stone with a Mayan calendar.

We're going to in the future eventually. It's inevitable.

I know it's 60 firesticks per 100 Watts, and 3000 Volts per staticy tomcat, but it might just be easier if we all just jumped in and switched to metric 144%.

I mean picture doing 100 on the highway! Wouldn't that be great? And dozens of future Mars landers would actually land on Mars, instead of digging ideal tree planting holes and landscaping future martian neighbourhoods. ("Zyphod! Incoming! It's the Americans!")

No more two sets of wrenches and lost sockets! Now you can have one set of sockets with half the sockets missing, instead of two sets of sockets with half the sockets missing. And no more asking for an 5mm and trying to make a 1 3/4" fit, rounding off the edges and carving a perfect turkey slice off your hand and gushing gallons of blood. It would be litres, which is less.

And you get to tell women that you, sir, are endowed with twenty-two centimeters of man!

Of course, the loss of the 25 cent piece will be a negative, since we'll have to pay for everything in dimes. But it's worth it dammit.

Seriously, we all know this is going to happen. When are we on board? Are we that stubborn?

Re:I Agree - We should go metric

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not the arbitrariness, but the fact that metric is a decimal system.

The only countries left that don't use metric are the US and Bhutan. Bhutan is a fundamentalist islamic country that doesn't even have any phones yet. I guess we can see what the US' technical level is.

That's easy!

[sprprsnmn]

One kilogram is equal to the weight of 1/256th of a VW beetle! Simple as that! Silly French.

In other news

[djupedal]

The only known quantity of Unobtainium (UB238) has gone missing.

The 1 kilo square block was being held in Brussels awaiting return to Brazil, where it was originally unearthed.

It was determined that the physical stability of the material was being affected by being moved from it's original location, that of being south of the equator. Investigators are anxious to reclaim the material in hopes of stabalizing it's rumored flux in mass. The UB238 was being packaged for transit, when it suddenly dissapeared from the shipping room counter. The rumor that it had created, and subsequently fallen into, a 'portable black hole' was discounted by investigators on the scene.

Once the Unobtainium is recovered, and returned to Brazil, it can be weighed and certified as a replacement for the Pt-Ir cylinder that is kept in France [slashdot.org], and measured annually, representing the kilo standard for the world.

MPEG at 11.

Re:Kilogram?

[Wavicle]

Somebody tell those non-technical folk to stop making interplanetary satellite probes! [cnn.com]

My preference in fluctuating weight standards...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the Oprah

Re:obligatory....

[jlanthripp]

eg. that woman weighes 2.36 libraries of congress.

That's one BIG woman!

Re:Kilogram?

[Spooky Possum]

Consider the facts:

Congress authorised the use of the metric system in 1866.

The US signed the Treaty of the Meter in 1875.

Congress passed the Metric Conversion Act in 1975.

So clearly the US *is* on the metric system :).

Re:The mystery unit?

[sould]

Is it the mole?

I can't reveal its identity for this precise reason.

Yes - there is a mole in the base S.I. units - but I can't tell you it's name. Its been on a secret long term sleeper mission - to liberate the S.I. units and term them into "Freedom Units"

Re:Kilogram?

[deadsaijinx*]

how could it take 100 years if they never get started?

huzzah!

[madmarcel]

So I now weigh 75kg...give or take a bit :o

Wait till I tell my fiance that her weight
fluctuates on a weekly basis!

Alternative Physics

[SEWilco]

a perfectly spherical single crystal

These pseudoscience concepts are getting out of hand.
I don't think we need "feel-good" physics.
Now they want to base a standard on a crystal ball?

Re:Kilogram?

[Scaba]

Then maybe america should move out of the dark ages sometime.

No, we'll just bomb [iraqbodycount.net] the rest of the world back into the dark ages with us, thank you very much.

Re:Kilogram?

[Anonymous Coward]

Moving to the metric system... inch by inch.

It's about time

[jmoore2333]

I've been waiting a while to tell my high school chemistry teacher that a Kilo is 1024 of anything, and I do deserve that A. ~JM

Re:Counting Si

[miracle69]

I only went as far as Chem 1 for majors, so don't try to save the earth with this information.

Can I use the information to destroy the earth?

Re:yeah it's a mess

[Waffle Iron]

I think that these base-2 units are confusing because their names look too much like the base-10 units and because their magnitudes are too close.

A better way would be to invent an all new imperial-style system for measuring computer storage. That way, there would be no chance for confusion with any base-10 system. For example:

korb = 3 bytes
fleb = 12 korbs
splin = 20 fleeb
fnit = 6 splins
Fnit = 6000 splins
frush = 48 fnits
watz = 18 frushes (19.5 frushes in the U.K.)
spoff = 480 watzen
nurm = 320 spoffs
long nurm = 80 nurm
munnel = 24 long nurm

This system easily covers storage capacities up to today's confusingly named "petabyte". Plus, there's no ambiguity about what you're measuring. Any of these units implies bytes of storage, which is a much cleaner solution.

The computer I'm using now has 71+29/32 watzes of system memory and 44+10/16 spoffs of disk space. There's no confusion about fuzzy definitions of "mega" with that measurement.

Wrong subject... yet...

[Qender]

"'It's certainly not helpful to have a standard that keeps changing,' says Peter Becker, a scientist at the Federal Standards Laboratory..."

Wow, someone should tell the computer industry that.

"Some of the metal plugs were issued to countries that later vanished, including Serbia and the Dutch East Indies. The Japanese had to surrender theirs after World War II. Germany has acquired several weights, including the one issued to Bavaria in 1889 and the one that belonged to East Germany."

SURRENDER YOUR KILOGRAM!

Re:Solution?

[The_dev0]

Ahhh... but next week the shop will have fresh, new carrots! They need to pick a standard and stick with it, after all, I don't want to get ripped off when I buy a kilo of sausages just to find out it was judged against a kilo of feathers, while the shop up the road measures against a kilo of hammers. That's just not cricket!

Re:Kilogram?

[AftanGustur]

Hey I live in America you insensitive clod!

Ok, so for you it's "FreedomGram" then.

Re:I Agree - We should go metric

[Zork the Almighty]

A year is 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes (365.2424 Universal days)

Why don't we just get a big rocket, and alter the orbit so that it is exactly 365 days ? Or better yet 366 days, then we can give everyone a holiday (in rememberance of all of the species that were extinguished for our selfish ends).

Re:I Agree - We should go metric

[spiny]

1/100th of a meter is indeed a centimeter, but 1/100th of a kilogram is actually 100 grams.

centimeter > meter > kilometer

gram > 100 grams (hectogram) > kilogram

easy see?

OT: Bogus moderations

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously now, where in the fuck are all these bad moderations coming from? I mean informative... Christ on a crutch, man. Is informative right next to funny on the list or something?

Could it be that this a new plague decending on /., namely the Troll with "Excellent" karma? I know they're out there: real trolls who delight in the spoiling of anything worthwhile, yet who have played nice and gotten excelent karma. Naturally, these dudes get to moderate sometimes.

When they do get mod points they fuck it up on purpose, for example moderating funny and obviously fictional posts informative. Or moderating things flamebait, so other mods who simply mod posts the same as other people also mod them flamebait or overrated.

It's almost enough to make me wonder if there aren't organized clans of these foul creatures about with the same old troll goal, to get us, the more or less rational and intelligent to respond with a, "Informative, WTF?" post. I think it's the lack of consequences. These little mofos get a kick out of making grown-ups angry, but they know that if they did that shit in RL they'd get their asses beat or worse. They just love that the only thing we can do is rant and rave and we being who we are can't always resist the temptation to post "WTF?"

Thinking about it though, maybe that's the reason the slash-dudes are begging us to meta mod? They know this is happening, but they can't weed out the people from the mod pool unless they get lots of unfairs in m2. I know I won't be giving obviously wrong moderations the benefit of the doubt that they were accidents anymore.

Okay, editors. You can mod me down now as offtopic now, I guess I'm done ranting. Just for God's sake don't mod this funny or informative.

Re:reproducibility

[vrt3]

I think we should digitalize it and put in Kazaa. There will be thousands of perfect copies in no time.

Re:yeah it's a mess

[clambake]

The computer I'm using now has 71+29/32 watzes.

Are those watzen in UK frushes or US frushi? Ah, man this is so confusing! I say we all go back to counting in base-L.

I apply for the vacant job!

[q.kontinuum]

The kilo shall be defined to be 1/80 of my weight. In return for the honor I promis to make the worlds people slim down.

Re:I Agree - We should go metric

[BillTheKatt]

What clueless idiots we are in the US! It's obvious we should give up our strange system of measurement and switch to metrics.

I mean, what's not to love about a system based upon a weight who's mass keeps changing, ahhh and that ever accurate meter, you know the one that's defined by two scratches in a platinum bar? Now that's a quality definition!

Who came up with this system, some wierd Frenchman?


"My car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I like it!" --Grandpa Simpson

The happiest day of my life

[KingRamsis]

he kilogram is shedding at an appreciable rate

you mean I'm actually losing weight without doing diets or a workout !!

Great scott!!

[verbatim]

one point twenty-one jigawatts?
That's almost a bolt of lightning by degrading metric standards.

On a more serious note, does the declining metre have anything to do with the rising Canadian dollar? And they [torontostar.com] say that Canada doesn't matter. Humbug, I say. :)

Re:Can someone help me convert here??

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhhh, do what the metric world does. Buy 1 litre of milk. I'm sure that cows can produce the requisite 54 millilitres extra per bottle.

Re:Pipe-sizes are not that simple...

[Rolo Tomasi]

Sir, you are indeed a well-traveled man! You obviously have laid pipe across the globe.

Re:reproducibility

[troc]

Except for the madonna version which would have

"Stop stealing Mass, you fucks"

written through it

Troc

Re:Mass not weight guy

[mikeage]

Yep. Or they should say something masses 80kg... but that just sounds really stupid.

France?

[strAtEdgE]

Uh oh did someone say France? Next thing you know the americans are going to want to call it the 'freedomgram'.

Re:Kilogram?

[Wigs]

No, the federal government of the USA is on the metric system. The American people, being free, use whatever system they please.

God Bless America!!!

I will take over the world!

[bgarcia]

The agency guards the international reference kilogram and keeps it in a heavily guarded safe in a château outside Paris.

It is all part of my nefarious plot to take over the world! I am slowly stealing the kilogram standard, one microgram at a time! Those French guards are clueless!

Once I have obtained the entire reference kilogram, I will change it to be whatever I want! People will be fad-dieting to lose the extra 20kg's they picked up last night! With my recent investments in Jenny Craig and Richard Simmons workout videos, I'll be "sweating to the oldies" all the way to the bank!

MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Re:Kilogram?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dark Ages? You mean the America that landed a man on the Moon using thou's and feet/sec?

Re:Kilogram != 1 litre water, sadly.

[HermDog]

PS: If you Yanks are wondering why it's easier to get drunk in the UK, it's because a UK pint is 20% larger than a US pint.

We are under the impression that there's a 80% larger chance that a UK pint has actual beer in it, as well.

Just what I needed to hear . .. .

[vizualizr]

Great. A kilogram is getting smaller? That means I'm getting fatter!!

Good thing the pound is nice and stable . . I couldn't stand for my quarter-pounders to get any smaller!!

Re:Kilogram?

[squidfood]

...move out of the dark ages sometime.

America? Bah! All you primates should move out of the dark ages sometime. Base-12 is where it's at.

We'll take our easily divisible Freedom Inches (tm) any day, thank you.

Re:OT: Bogus moderations

[Anonymous Coward]

Crap! I just happen to have mod points right now, and I was soooo tempted to mod you funny or informative. But I don't know if the meta-moderaters would find my moderation funny.

Hmmm, too bad you can't meta-moderate a moderation as being funny.

Replace outdated platinum iridium

[CERDIP]

The standard 1 kg block should be replaced by the 1 kg Christmas Fruit Cake. As everyone knows, it is indestructible, and only one exists in the entire world (people just keep mailing it around to each other every year).

Re:Planck units

[Anonymous Coward]

there IS no smallest time-slice

Sure there is, 11ms. It might not be universal though, I'm using Windows 2000.

Re:Kilogram?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is an UNGODLY amount of installed bass there which is already in inches

Those fish really need to get with the program.

Re:Kilogram?

[charon_on_acheron]

Sure we can find it on the map. It's that large shape right in the middle, with water at the left side and right side of the map, and Canada above us and Mexico below us. It's the easiest thing to find on the map.

The only confusing thing is why is Alaska so cold, when it is sitting down there next to Mexico, with Hawaii in between them?