#Metric Conversion

[highretrogamelord]

Super Programs 2 for the ZX81

[kick-a-long]

*oh my god i hate this. oh my god i now have to learn this in my head because it works and i hate it. oh my god i am so annoyed. it is so stupid and mathy that this works. i will use this. oh my god i hate it.*

"thanks, i hate it."

Fun little math trick I find really helpful: the ratio of a mile to a kilometer is within 1% of the Golden Ratio. That means that if you have a good memory for Fibonacci numbers (1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89) you can convert pretty accurately by taking consecutive Fibonacci numbers.

For example, 89 kilometers is really close to 55 miles (55.3). Or, say you need to convert 26 miles to kilometers: 26 can be written as 21 plus 5, so taking the next Fibonacci number up gives 34 and 8, meaning it should be around 42 kilometers. Sure enough, it's 41.8 km!

[silvereyedowl]

Metric is love, metric is life. (source)

[ri-afan]

I hope people actually look up conversions for measurements before they go into a story and tell us that the person dropped 5 kg in a week.

[i-scan-your-poems]

hi! I have a question about meter vs time signatures, and I figure you're a good person to ask: basically, how do time sigs and meter interact?

is a song in 3/4 comparable to one in 6/8? they have a different but similar Feel, yk? (America from West Side Story comes to mind as a good example of both 3/4 and 6/8 — the chorus alternates between the two)

does an unusual time sig (ex 5/4) make an unusual meter? the extra beat has a stumbling motion to it, like in Animals by Muse and From Eden by Hozier. (for an even stranger example, March Of The Pigs by Nine Inch Nails)

and my last question is pretty much just about Walkin On The Sun by Smash Mouth. what's going on in there.

if you get to any of these, that's fine! I love your blog :D

This is legitimately such a good question that my answer might be incomplete and roundabout!

I suspect that when people submit song lyrics to this blog, they assume that the song's musical rhythm corresponds to the meter of its lyrics. That's sometimes the case, but it's really only one style of songwriting/lyric-writing. If you listen to "I am the very model of a modern major general", you'll hear that the poetic meter and musical rhythm fit each other almost perfectly: one note = one syllable, and the stressed syllable is always on the beat. In most music, though, the rhythm and the meter are neither totally in sync (which risks sounding rhythmically boring) nor totally independent (which risks sounding like the lyrics don't fit the song). A lot of the time the rhythm gets varied, but in ways where the stressed syllables are generally more prominent. Or a line/phrase/stanza starts out with the meter and rhythm matching but then they diverge to put emphasis on certain words. Or other fun stuff. Let's look at your example, Walkin' on the Sun!

If I scanned the poetic meter of the first few lines, it'd be something like:

◡ – / ◡ – / ◡ – / ◡ – / ◡ – / ◡ – It ain't / no joke, / I'd like / to buy / the world / a toke ◡ – / ◡ – / ◡ – / ◡ – / ◡ ◡ and teach / the world / to sing / in per/fect har/mony ◡ – / ◡ – / ◡ – / ◡ – / ◡ – / ◡ – ◡ and teach / the world / to snuff / the fi/res and / the liars

The musical rhythm in those lines is quite varied but each of the naturally stressed syllables is either on the beat or is drawn out longer than an eighth-note (but syncopated by starting it off the beat).

Even if you're trying to make a musical rhythm that closely represents a poetic meter, there's different ways to do that. One option: make stressed and unstressed syllables the same length, but put the stressed syllables at points that get more emphasis in the musical rhythm. So you can have the syllables represented by even 8th-notes and put a stressed syllable on each beat (like in the modern major general song), or make the syllables represented by quarter notes in a meter like 4/4 or 2/4. Another option: make the stressed syllables take up more time in the rhythm. So lots of songs with time signatures like 6/8 or 9/8 or a fast 3/4 or with swung 8th-notes make the stressed syllables twice as long as the unstressed syllables (while I'm citing songs from Pirates of Penzance, "pour oh pour the pirate sherry" is a very clear 6/8 example). Both of those strategies work totally fine for expressing an iambic or trochaic meter, but they sound pretty different.

An unusual time signature does not necessarily make for an unusual meter or vice versa, because the measure doesn't have to be the same length as one line and especially because you usually want a pause of at least a beat in between lines, otherwise it would sound like the lines were all running together. In your 5/4 example "From Eden" by Hozier, a lot of the lines are trimeter! ("There's something / tragic a/bout you. [rest, rest] // Something so / magic a/bout you.”

[bleue-flora]

[reblogged post]

@sketchehm now that is an interesting thought…

So let’s see, if a Minecraft day is 20 minutes long and the dsmp was 933 days long then converting that to see how many Minecraft days that’d be [(933(days)x24(hours)x60(mins))/20(min)] we get 67,176 days or about 184 years. Meaning if we determined time by the Minecraft day and night cycle, the dsmp happened across a span of 184 years… lol yea that doesn’t quite work huh…

For funzies though let’s look at some other events:

L’manberg (101 days) & Techno’s imprisonment (100 days) -> around 7,200 days or almost 20 years.

Quackity visited for 83 days -> 5,976 days or over 16 years (no wonder he’s tired and bored of it lol :] )

Finally, Dream’s imprisonment (314 days) -> 22,708 days or a little over 62 years……… yikes

[batsplat]

Agree on the engaging with motogp as a Sport here part... But anyway what is your sporty opinion on the races we've had so far (if you've watched any?)

tbh i haven't kept up properly for various reasons, i just haven't really been enjoying it and it's a better idea to disengage rather than just constantly moaning about it. icl the fandom on here probably does play at least a bit of a role in that... so i've tumblr saviour'd that to shit and hopefully after a bit of a detox i can enjoy the sport itself more again. hence also the lack of motogp posting from me, my semi-regular apology for the many really interesting unanswered asks in my inbox. i have a bit of a mental list of the ones i do really want to get to when i'm feeling in the mood again, they had enough thought put into them i feel like they also merit a response in kind

anyway, i do also feel like i haven't missed that much lol. i watched the highlights from the race yesterday whenever it was which i think will have been comfortably the best of the four, but otherwise i watched buriram on replay and MOST of the other two and the racing quality has been. dire. my real sporting take is that pundits and fans will keep telling you that the alien era was so much worse than this and it's just nostalgia/og 4 alien narrative juice that makes people think otherwise and they are. wrong. they may be right about 2010-12, which i cannot really make any excuses for, but it just straight up isn't true for 2007-09 and whoever argues otherwise has not rewatched those seasons recently enough. it's an overcorrection and also those seasons for real long time fans suffer from such an immediate contrast to 2006, but like. the average race back then was just better. don't let them tell you it's not terrible right now

speaking of things that are terrible. i feel like sprints by now have been Normalised and there is absolutely zero point moaning about them, but they still fucking suck. they're only very rarely good to watch, they make the weekend too hectic, they're dangerous and they skew any championship fight. i appreciated casey bringing it up last november because barely anyone has a moan about it anymore these days. obviously for our present purposes it also doesn't exactly HELP that pecco is substantially worse at the sprint format, which ensures a sort of built-in deficit he really doesn't need. but even in 2023 when they were livening up the title fight i didn't like them, so i've remained consistent on this. just sort of dilutes the product, i still cannot for the life of me understand the problem sprint races are the solution to

another bad thing: tyre pressure shenanigans. no new ground being covered with this take......... it was farcical in buriram but after qatar it's just an intolerable situation. i understand WHY this has happened, i get the politics, but it's an absolute joke that they have not got a tyre that is suitable to aero yet. when this first became a talking point in 2023, when it was in danger !! of fucking up !! that title fight !! everybody in the sport should have panicked and worked to ensure that the situation would be at least somewhat addressed as quickly as possible. it is a year and a half on from that and they have done nothing. this one does actually make me a bit mad, like i just think it's inexcusable from the series and from the teams - i don't give a shit if they don't want to test the bloody tyres, this is ruining the sport both by making good racing so rare and by undermining sporting integrity. it is a joke that you will get penalised for having an unexpectedly good race. it deprived fabio of a sprint podium in jerez, it should have deprived pedro of a podium in indonesia without that extremely fugazi explanation ktm presented, and now it's massively fucked over vinales. you never know what will happen that's why you line up on sunday bla bla - but if you didn't think you were going to be in the lead and you then go into the lead then you'd better stop that right now!! what kind of racing is that? you're only allowed to win if you already thought you'd win before the race?? ridiculous

anyway. now that i've channelled my inner casey stoner. eh... what else. the competitive landscape... well, marc is barring injury or massive headloss going to win the championship, he's obviously a very good rider who is still good so nothing really new there. i didn't like what he did at cota, i'm pro people being clever and dastardly (or at least people thinking they are because they didn't read the rules correctly) but at a certain point there is a bit of a line for me. doing something that could be dangerous outside of races is just... yeah, it simply wasn't really necessary? but also it's not like i want to send him to the gallows for it, just someone very high on their own stock innit. it does really annoy me how nobody in the sport seems to have properly read the rules, i'm sorry but i would know that rule book off by heart, i have very little respect for that kind of thing. be serious. and the cota race crash was really daft, crashes happen but they exist on a spectrum and that one was not great and has artificially injected tension back into the title fight. moving on...

pecco's done a reasonably strong job thus far in the season, his worst misstep was the quali crash at qatar but otherwise there's no real complaints. he hasn't felt comfortable with this bike and has a very renowned title rival who started the season flawlessly but he didn't panic, he's kept chipping away at it. could easily have leaked far more points than this, which he had by this point in 2022-24 to his respective title rivals. obviously you can't wish away a fundamental pace deficit, especially with his sprint struggles - but i had the first three circuits at least marked as marc-leaning and my advice to pecco would have been 'try to weather the storm, don't do too much and bring the points home', which he's done. can't be doing quali crashes on what could have been a far better weekend for him, though, i get why it happened but. well. can't do it. can't do it!!

i do actually have a bit of a hot take here in that i think marc isn't faster than 2016-19 but To Some Extent he's cleaned up his game, and depending on how pecco does this season you can make the argument pecco's the toughest title challenger marc ever had to deal with. jorge/dani 2013 injury penalty, yamaha line-up post 2013 kinda washed and more often than not on worse bikes (especially ofc when those fuckers from michelin returned). and 2017-19 dovi ofc not quite at that consistently elite level, and the other challengers were ultra-washed valentino and 'maverick vinales'. like idk man i am EASILY taking 2025 pecco over 2013-19 yamaha line-up (or well post-2013 assen jorge) but i kinda feel like we're not ready for that particular conversation yet

i'll admit a. marquez did blindside me with his start to the season, obviously he won't come close to winning the title but it has been very impressive in its consistency. we'll see if the terrorism relapse was a one-off or the beginning of the end of that particular chapter. also i love my sibling more than anything and i would still kill myself in a. marquez's position so kudos on not doing that. i don't have much to say about either vr46 rider. the ducati situation in general though is obviously intolerable, like my god. in 2023 i kinda did self-gaslighting and went 'well you enjoyed 2003 and intra-manufacturer beef can be fun!!' which was true for maybe one season but.... not to this extent. not a complete PODIUM lockout. this is terrible!! it's not what motogp should be like!! every year we think it can't get worse and it does!! i guess i should have seen this coming because i was sniffing the 'surely at some point we've reached peak ducati domination' hopium but then every time i actually went through the manufacturers in my head to guess who might take the fight to ducati, i found all of them deeply unconvincing. this is another thing that has stealth made the racing worse... it helped back in the day to have two bikes with really different performance profiles and two riders with very different styles teeing it off, because you'd get more variation of performance in any given lap and then the speed differential means they can like. actually fight it out in different bits of the track. look, i don't need to explain this. modern poster child rivalry for this is obviously casey/valentino - cumbersome but lightning fast ducati vs underpowered nimble yamaha, wild instinctive casey versus precise calculating valentino. run it back! but yeah, homogenisation of bikes and riding styles is more of a long-term inevitable trend you probably can't really do anything about, but is still a shame

the other manufacturers exist on a spectrum of how pissed off i am at them currently. least pissed off is honda, then aprilia, then yamaha, and the prize for most pissed off is ktm. honda has obviously looked way better this season, though a part of me still suspects this is flattered by how aprilia and ktm have completely fucked it. i am historically not a honda fan but i am increasingly in the 'anyone but ducati' tent so i will offer my support to my allies in this cause. i have however given up on the joan mir revival cause, which deeply saddens me. zarco's been great, he's not been this good a watch since his early yamaha days. so so impressive

aprilia comes after that because it's not really their fault that their star rider has been cursed. it's just made the season SO much worse. obviously everything to do with jorge v scary and miserable and i hope he recovers well. could be one of those things where he's never the same rider again and i really hope that won't be the case. might have a pretty substantial psychological impact u have 2 say. bez has been appalling and i think it's increasingly clear which of 2023 or 2024 was the blip. i don't have anything to say about ogura that many others haven't already said, he's been truly fantastic and the star of the season thus far, i was already reasonably high on his stocks headed into this year but nowhere near this high. i hope his momentum doesn't fizzle out and he has a long and very fruitful motogp career, he reminds me a bit of 2008 dovi. raul fernandez needs to be fired into the sun and then fired, i still have no clue why he was given a two year contract extension. obviously this collection of riders makes it a bit hard to judge the aprilia, i don't feel like they've done... a great job in closing the gap to ducati? but also maybe it's the riders

yamaha has been. well. disappointing! i let myself sniff some hopium after the sepang test, which is a mistake that shall not be repeated. fabio's first few race weekends have also been a bit too patchy for my liking (but qatar's been better tbf). these fuckers are my team so i'd really like them to get it together. miller has adapted very impressively, fair plays i thought he was washed. i mean crucially idt there's more to come from him, like he was on the pace pretty much immediately on the ktm and if anything his best ktm stretch was right at the start of 2023. which speaks to his natural talent, he can adapt really well and clearly the yamaha does suit his style,,,,, but i still expect fabio to comfortably be the leading light in that manufacturer (he'd better fucking be). shout out to oliveira, still the most cursed rider. still have not forgiven the 2023 honda for essentially ending rins' career as a front running rider, miss u king

and ktm................................................................ i'm a ktm hater and i can't even enjoy this downfall. vinales being vinales and randomly deciding he's the second coming of jesus christ if he raced motorcycles one sunday per year is very funny, but obviously that shouldn't obscure how otherwise disgusting this start of the year has been. and like, i thought they'd decline in the second half of the year because of the whole bankruptcy situation, but the fact they're ALREADY struggling makes me think... idk man, i feel like there's enough of a lag in the bike development pipeline that they might just organically suck right now. ktm does traditionally have very strange early season periods, but i am kinda over it? and if they're going to suck late season too, then this hypothetical window where they don't suck to me feels rather narrow. maybe they'll get a bit better, but they have a generational talent on their roster who should be fighting for wins and preferably championships at this stage of his career. this sucks!! all the aliens were on machinery that could challenge for titles at latest by their second year in the premier class. acosta should be showing us what he can do on a bike that isn't completely fucked. all you can do is hope it doesn't end up completely derailing his career, i do sort of want him to escape next year even though i understand the reasons why that's unlikely. honda, pay the bill. otherwise... my takes on binder have not changed in the slightest since like 2023, it's everyone else who keeps flip flopping on him. i am withholding my bastianini verdict until a later date, but trust i am Watching and waiting and cracking my knuckles

anyway that's my hot takes on 2025 motogp, sports edition. not all of them but i feel like i've covered the major points. write in with your own

[fala-alfredo-pasta]

I’m the anon who send you the height fact and laughed my ass off when you went to into a rant. I don’t blame you. I always found the height system confusing too. At least we got a good laugh on the insanity. Though in all seriousness, RIP Makoto.

Universal Short King Makoto is so real 😩👌

[dunmeshistash]

how tall are you?

Not that tall, 170 (5'7")

It's just that where I live people are shorter, the higher side of the average height is 162 (5'4") 😞

[sunstormbudgie]

Pearl is tall???

[hybbat]

It's so funny that so many of the hermits are just so "the hell is a real name? Your name clearly says Beans" at Joel that even the hermits that have known him for years now are reverting back to it.

[death-of-cats]

RIP Davos Seaworth, the only emotionally mature adult in Westeros.

[strongermonster]

what in tarnation is going on here. who in the hell measures salt and flour in ml. this is looney tunes.

[pigeonedlilac]

WAAHAJAIAUUUU!!!! LOOK WHAT CAME IN TODAY!!!!! @escookbook

this zine.. omg this zine is so incredibly cute.. so many artists I love so much and every single page of art and piece of merch is so cute and gorgeous!!! There’s so much in this little package I’m so in love. best purchase in my life probably definitely.

Only regret is not buying the physical version 💔 but I’m so ecstatic anyways :D:D:D !!!!

[fishing-lesbian-catgirl]

This hardly matters for anything but pointless online discourse, but I feel like some of you should be aware of this. Even if you somehow managed to convince them that metric is a better system by calling them stupid online, Americans who defend imperial units wouldn’t be able to switch to metric if they wanted to because everything in the country would still use imperial.

I wholeheartedly agree that having easily convertible units on a simple base 10 system is a better designed system, but if I try and give someone measurements in metric I’m just going to annoy them because they now need to convert it to imperial. I could admit that I do think Celsius being a 0 to 100 scale based on water freezing and boiling temperature is a better basis for a temperature scale than uh this

but it doesn’t matter because everything that lists temperature from cooking to weather for where I live is in Fahrenheit, and if I told someone the temperature in Celsius they’d think I’m an asshole. I don’t want to convert the temperature that’s in Fahrenheit in a recipe book to Celsius just to feel smart because my oven is still going to be in Fahrenheit and the conversion would be a waste of time.

Do I think that the US should switch to metric? Of course! But considering the millions of cars, ovens, thermometers, and basically everything else that’s measured in this country is in imperial that sounds like an incredibly large amount of work to do when imperial is still a perfectly functional system of measurement even if it’s numbers don’t convert between each other cleanly. And I seriously wouldn’t want to be on the roads when speed limit signs and speedometers stopped being consistently in the same units

[parsleysagerosemarytimemachine]

Very important work skill: blowing smoke up the bosses' ass.

Seriously, learn how to do this.