Viewer that uses feet and inches

I "learned" how to measure when everything was up in the air. Now I haven't a clue how to measure anything. I used to be able to ask for a bottle of soda, and I got a large plastic bottle (could still get the small glass bottle, but that is harder to find, so if I asked for a bottle of soda, I got a large plastic bottle). Then I'd ask and find that there were small plastic and large plastic. Most of the small ones seem to be a pint. What the heck is a pint?

I have grasped, for some odd reason, how to measure by football fields. Can't we set everything to be measured by football fields? I have no ability, now, to figure anything out in feet, inches, meters, light-years, centimeters, furlongs, furloughs, dipthongs, mice.

Stupid bloody education system fidgeting about whether to teach meters or inches, now I can't do either, or know either.

"What is an inch?"
Random person holds their fingers close together "This big."
"What? How the heck big is that? What am I measuring? The distance between fingers? The entire volume of air between the fingers? Am I to include the fingers in the distance measurement?"

How about Parsecs and Kellikams?

I too remember the big push to standardize the US to metric back in the 70's. The issue here was that our country is quite large, and quite industrialized, and quite built up under the imperial system. Therefore, the push died rather quickly. Personally, SL has actually helped me to think in metric alot more, which is a good thing. It would be nice if the US could get in step with the rest of the world. Believe it or not, NASA still works in feet and inches, although they've used metric predominantly since the early 90's, the shuttle system, and some other older systems still in use were build with imperial units. We lost a Mars orbiter back in '99 due to an english/metric mishap. $125 million dollars, and two agencies didn't think to get on the same page with something as simple as a unit of measure! It's that very lag in the US's conversion to metric that caused that expensive error, and we really should get in line with the rest of the world. However, for the most part, the vast majority of scientists do use metric here in the US. It's the 'common folks' who tend to cling to the familar, but outdated imperial system. The thing that makes me laugh is how the Brits like to jab us about our continued usage of a system that THEY developed !!!


http://www.secondscripter.com/

The reason why I thought of inches and not parsecs is that inches are used every day to measure things , to take and respond to order for things, by millions of people, specifically me, while parsecs aren't.

Parsecs are rather big, compared to the size of objects in Second Life. A ten by ten by ten meter cube, expressed in parsecs, would be a 3.2407792700100003e-16 by 3.2407792700100003e-16 by 3.2407792700100003e-16 cube. To represent this without using exponental notation would be .00000000000000032407792700100003 parsecs by .00000000000000032407792700100003 parsecs by .00000000000000032407792700100003 parsecs, which would take up a lot of space in a dialog box. I used an online converter to get the figures expressed in exponential notation, and counted zeros to remove the exponent, so those values might well be wrong, but I think they are close enough to illustrate the point.

It would be amusing to see an interface designed with parsecs as the units. At least it wouldn't need to have many digits to the left of the decimal point.

I didn't realize that parsecs and kellikams are in wide use in New York. Who'da guessed?

There used to a place in New York, if memory serves, that held classes in Klingon language, culture, history, etc. I would say "I wonder if anyone can find a picture of the Klingon school?" but I expect that would produce responses that would make sense only if I had made a strident suggestion that all pictures everywhere be replaced with pictures of Klingon educational establishments.

Actually not true, all railways in the uk measure in chains for example.

We wouldn't if you got the measurements right.

For example Volume.

A us gallon is smaller than an Imperial Gallon
Same with a US pint, smaller than its Imperial cousin.

Also all science is conducted using SI units hence the UK's decision to switch to them for most things. (although we retain miles, yards and chains for roads & railways, lbs and stone for weight, psi for pressure, lbf/in2 for torque, pints for beer, etc etc)

My braincells just fled, screaming.

Usually only in the Outer Boroughs.

I doubt there are milliions of people measuring railways with great frequency in the course of their everyday lives in the UK. I've never been there though, perhaps railway measuring occurs with greater frequency there than I think.

I wonder if the high frequency of railway measuring and designing among UK residents might have something to do with the word trainspotting.

Considering how many Brits object to the very idea of the metric system, I'm taking this with a pinch of salt. We have a mish mash system. People talk about their weight (which includes stones ) and height in imperial, beer is in pints, road signs and speed limits are in miles per hour.

It's a mish mash of a system, it's messy, the Second Life system as it stands with a standarsied system is far superior to a convoluted mess of people using different units to say the same thing.

Quote:

"It's a mish mash of a system, it's messy, the Second Life system as it stands with a standarsied system is far superior to a convoluted mess of people using different units to say the same thing."

smiles.. like we manage the whole world in different languages, different periods of time,and different measurements for thousands of years?

Second Life Time for example - PDT? what happenened to GMT? why cant i set the SL time to GMT +1 hour like my PC clock can?

Second Life measurement - .85 percent of a real life metre.. hmm think i might measure that thing on the end of my leg and call it a foot...

Of course, everyone speaks the same language... dont we..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorsprung_durch_Technik

Advancement through Technology.

the linden? better than the Dollar.. or the Yen or something else we might think up ?)

Alright then, let's use the Angstrom unit : that's 1/308568025000000000000000000 of a parsec, I think.

My point stands, when I'm in France and some woman is yabbering away at me in French and I can't understand a word she's saying, it would be easier if I spoke the same language as her Whatever happened to Esperanto anyway.

SLT is easier for people to arrange events than having to use umpteen timezones + or -.

People can and do cope with differences in measurements and language, but it would be easier if we were all singing from the same song sheet, the SL system works, I don't see the need to complicate it by introducing different measurement systems.

The only standard of reference for dimensions in SL is the avatar, and the way the camera operates. The avatar makes SL meters differ from RL meters because the way the avatar mesh was designed requires it to be oversized; for example a 5'8" tall figure may need to be 7 feet tall as a SL avatar to have the proper proportions.

Then you have the issue that if buildings were constructed with RL proportions, they would be awkward to explore because the camera requires additional ceiling room.

Then, stylistically, you'll have some objects that won't seem "right" unless oversized compared to RL. Trees are a famous example of this, and are oversized in height and thickness not just in SL, but in many games in general with third-person views.

All this leads to the conclusion that SL "meters" are a bit of a confusing misnomer. There is _some_ correlation, but even then it is not close to precise. It would be a lot easier to have just called them units.

so lets standardise to the the SL metre, all go PDT and talk English, and earn Lindens, who`s first?...

its not about introducing different systems, as much as about allowing anyone to view those in their own real world environment.. 12 sl metres becomes 10.2 rl metres.. that could be shown in brackets or some other localised view setting..

Its natural to advocate ones preference.. but to have one method in RL and advocate another just because one doesnt "see the need to introduce different settings" is a little singular i think?

i have no determination here, but if i was to advocate anything then it would be the availabilty in SL to view any SL setting in ones own local environment standard, and SL does have some roads that go there.. languages for example.. so why not measurement.. distance and time?

Now that raises an interesting question: which quantity is relevant: the number of people who might measure stuff using a particular system, or the number of actual measurements made using that system? I'm thinking that for a lot of the globe that has officially adopted the metric system, the majority of the populace doesn't actually measure anything by any standard measure at all, and another large percentage only at market time, using very parochial units.

Of course, most length measurements now are actually conversions of time units: how long it takes some wave to bounce between origin and destination. And the vast majority of such measurements are never seen by any humans in any expression whatsoever (so probably those unobserved measurements just don't count for our purposes).

Anyway, the point was going to be that, even if only 6% of the world's population expresses length in feet and inches, those units surely represent a much larger share of all actual measured lengths expressed in any standard unit at all.

Not that I'd want a viewer that expressed things in feet and inches, although feet and decimals would be okay. It's inconvenient enough already, with the Editor expressing angle in degrees and decimal parts (not minutes and seconds of arc), and scripts using radians (as God surely intended). I can't count how many beginner scripts in which I've corrected the corresponding error.

People are trying, but you're asking people to learn new things, ergo it's not popular, both language and time people try to standardise, neither has proven popular.




Singular? Absolutely, it's quite clear that standards make life easier, that's why I'm responding to your post here. If you start adding extra variables it complicates matters. If someone is asking me if a house with dimension local is going to fit on a 512M plot I have to go out and find out what dimension local is, then make sure I know what dimension local a to z are in case somebody else asks, why go to all that trouble when we have a working system in place that is much easier for everyone to understand?

I can't believe that such a geeky thread has got 42 (Now 43) posts.

You've all really disappointed me.

Oops! 44

It's hard to see why an SL builder would care whether the in world unit of linear measurement its called meters or yards.

I really can't believe that anyone would want to use a base-36 system to make fractions of that unit.

The way the program I use at work, as I described above, is nice. Set one standard unit, which all values are displayed as. We use inches. If we want to use feet and inches, we can enter "4ft + 2in" and the display will change to 50.

What prompted this speculation about the possibility of open source programmers (by which I mean people NOT ON THE LINDEN LAB TIMECLOCK) producing a viewer allowing alternate units was the desire to make some crude models of things around me in my immediate environment using the units that come naturally to me, either by measuring with my feet and inches tape measure, or by estimating with my feet and inches brain.

Over the course of my employment, the place I work at has taken hundreds of thousands of order for things of certain dimensions. The units used for all these hundreds of thousands of orders was feet and inches on the work orders, and inches in the design programs. The customers weren't necessarily measuring things in the sense of taking a ruler or other measuring device, but they were doing something that involved using units of length, and the units they select to order things in is feet and inches, and the occasional use of points . For the workers at such a place, one third of their lives during their period of employment consist of doing stuff that involves thinking about units of length, namely feet and inches. When I buy clothes, if there are standard units of length on them that I use to select sizes, it's always inches. I may not exactly measure the pants, but I know what number to pick out to try on first, and the number is inches, not centimeters, and there's plenty of other people in the same position.

To try to make it clear, I didn't mention the metric system at all in my post, and have no grudge with the metric system. I didn't call for and don't support the abolition of the metric system.

I also didn't suggest anything that would affect anyone other than people that choose to be to be affected, namely, the open source programmers that might write such an "inclusive unit system" viewer would be affected by their choice, and the people that used this hypothetical "embracing units diversity" viewer would be affected by their choice.

Those who choose to use the "one size fits all" viewer from Linden Lab would not be affected at all.

This is perfectly understandable but honestly if you try it I'm sure you'll find that measuring in meters is just as easy as measuring in feet. And since you already know how to count using the decimal system I believe that you'll find manipulating measurements with it is very easy too.

Wow, you people debate the strangest things. The OP is asking about a *client* feature, the servers would be unaware...as would you.

Anyway, to answer the OP, the problem with 3rd party developing for SL is maintenance and support. Nicholaz bitches about it constantly. Every time LL releases a new client/RC it could screw up anything you've been working on, since all your work is "unofficial" to them anyway. They don't consult 3rd parties when they make internal code decisions. SL has no way of making a modular "plugin" which would survive minor client version changes. There's no official extensions API. So every 3rd party add-on is a hack. A hack that could break with no warning.

The closest thing I can think of would be a HUD. Would a calculator-esque Unit Conversion HUD be of use to you? I personally look at my RL coffee table and say it's a foot by two feet, not .3mx.6m. So a handy HUD calculator would be of some interest to me. But I'm lazy unless it seems others might be interested in it too. Along those lines...does anything like this already exist? I hate reinventing the wheel.

I have a tape measure. It has feet and inches on it. It doesn't have metric units on it. There's a reason why it was made that way. I have already in my mind a sense of how big things are in inches and feet. It's easier to make use of what I already have than what I don't already have.

I do at times use metric units to measure things at work for one specific reason: to determine the shapes of things. People bring in hand drawn layouts or printouts of designs, and I need to know the ratio of height to width or width to height. The rulers at the counter have centimeters and tenths of centimeters on them. The tenth of centimeter unit is small enough to get pretty accurate measurements. What I do is automatically convert the centimeters into millimeters in my mind and produce measurements like 23 by 68. Then I can punch the numbers in without decimals to get the needed ratio. Then if the customer is looking for something X feet tall or Y feet wide I can calculate the unknown value easily and accurately. Doing this using inches and fractions of inches would be much harder. That's what everyone else does. I've tried to explain how to use the metric part of the ruler for this purpose to the order takers but no one that didn't already understand it has ever gotten it. Most of the people that have worked at the shop can't figure out how to scale things at all.

Let's suppose I want to make a box the size of an standard sheet of paper in my part of the world. I don't have to measure it, I already know how big it is, it's 8.5 by 11. There's no way that it could possibly be as easy for me to enter this size using any other system of units. If I want to make a sign in SL the size of standard sheet of plywood in these parts I already know the numbers to enter. If I want to make a model of the room I'm in, I don't have to measure the height of the walls, they were made with standard 4 x 8 sheetrock. Having to convert in my head, or learn a whole set of multiple digit equivalents to single digit numbers in the units I already am familiar with, is more work than not doing that. I'm fairly likely to die within twenty years, based on the lifespan of relatives. I'm not likely to live long enough to for metric units to be as familiar to me as the units I've been using roughly half a century.

For just plain building stuff in SL without trying to make them be accurate sized versions of real life stuff using what's familiar to me, the meters in the SL editor work fine.

Yes, the idea that open sourcing the client would lead to a whole bunch of alternate clients doesn't work out in practice.

I'm sure there are calculator huds that do unit conversion, and I think Kex Goedel had a chat based calculator 4 years ago that I'll bet did unit conversions.

In case it's not apparent, I was not trying to speculate about the possibility of an open source programmer producing a client that is ONLY capable of showing feet, or inches, or feet and inches. I meant, but failed to say, I wonder if some open source programmer might someday produce a viewer that allows one to choose their units.

I could make myself a custom tape measure at work, printing on sturdy banner material, with divisions of millimeters, numbered in meters, marked with .5 at the half meter point, and .01 the one centimeter point, and the like, thus eliminating the need to move decimal points.

Actually, if you had a tape measure with both systems on it, it would make comprehending and automatic conversion in your head that much easier, because every time you measure something, you would see other measurements at-a-glance. I can't count how many times I have gone "Ooo neat.. so that is 0.8m too!".

I'm not much younger than you suggest you are, and I have no issues converting between Fahrenheit / Celsius, Imperial / Metric, Parsecs / Light years, etc, because, just like all other things one can learn (algebra, trig, arithmetic), once you know it, and use it fairly regularly, it comes as second nature. There are easy approximations in conversions that you can learn which make it pretty easy to convert to approximate equivalent values. For exact values, every OS comes with a calculator applet installed, and it would be trivial to come up with a drop-in script which converted pseudo-units to actual units (ie, if you want a 4ft x 8ft by 1/2 inch piece of sheetrock, type in those numbers in the size fields, then drop a script in which does an instant resize, changing ft to meters).

That all said, I understand what you are asking is not to have the whole client changed for everyone, as you are asking for someone to develop a third-party client with configurable units. Well, actually, what you are ideally asking for is a viewer which uses expressions in its numeric input fields as opposed to just numbers. Having written those in the past, they can be quite complex, and there are issues with "evaluation memory". IE, most of those, you type in the expression, and once you tab out of the field, it replaces the content of the field with the computed answer. You then have some number that may "look right", but you can't tell for sure if you might have muffed the expression somehow, since you can't see what you actually typed in anymore, thus you assume it is probably correct, and go on with the rest of your work, only to later figure out that you muffed the expression and have to do it over again. It's not a huge issue, but it is a known one with those kinds of input methods.

As for asking someone to develop an open source viewer with those capabilities, that is all well and good, but unless you can sell it to someone that it is a sorely needed feature, it is unlikely that anyone will pick it up and run with it. As someone astutely pointed out earlier, working on a third-party client with the way LL does their updates is already a rather severe pain in the tail. I mean, if someone offered to pay for it, I or anyone might be inclined to take the job, but open source work is often "what do I wanna work on that is cool for me to do?". That's what is great about open source, though; if you want something bad enough, there's the source; learn to munge it until you get what want out of it.