Possibly. The lab I once visited was in the middle of a city, and the guys told me that they couldn’t make accurate measuremets when a tram was turning a corner a couple of blocks away so they had to schedule them to times when the trams were not running.
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I’ll tell you @eneroth3 is going to have her work cut out for herself on this one.
Folks won’t be able to run her extension if cars are driving too close to the house where SU is running. Or, if they have a full sheet of plywood sitting out in their garage. And they may have to even change their brand of toothpaste. and/or hold their breath.
I wonder how she’ll pull it all off?
I’m sure she’ll find some way.
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The annals of precision instrumentation are loaded with examples of things that turned out to be better at sensing atmospheric pressure and temperature than whatever they were intended to sense! I remember hearing of several instruments under development at the Draper Lab in Cambridge Massachusetts that like what you describe could only be tested in the wee hours of the night because they sensed passing traffic.
is that why they call it annals?
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I can’t resist chiming in…
The US can’t switch to the Metric system for political reasons. It’s been brought up many times. It’s more than just the practical, obvious difficulties and expense of converting. Proponents of conversion are called Communists, unpatriotic, and all sorts of unfortunate names.
Below is an artifact from the “Units of Measure” wars of the recent past. I bought something at a store and they gave me this rule. A guy, apparently named Bob, thought it would be swell if woodwork, at least, was done in units of 1/24 of an inch rather than 1/16th as is typical in the US. He had a website and everything! You gotta give the guy credit: he put his money where his mouth is (or was) He had a long rap about how dividing by 24 was better than 16. I don’t recall the arguments. Now and I again I mentally thank Ol’ Bob for the useful straightedge with the units crossed out so I won’t accidently use them.
Are stones evenly divisible by any real number?
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Bob was onto to something big with this one.
Aside from a loose merging of metric and imperial, the ruler sets itself up nicely for divisions by 3. and that could in turn fit in pretty well with musical or typographic scales… if Bob happened to be a fan of proportional based systems of design.
But, Bob could have also just been partial to hitting the bottle fairly often, and this simple shop modification could have helped out with rationing out his daily inventory.
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Frankly, I can’t believe you’re allowing this important artifact of history to sit outside and risk oxidation like this… What are you going to do when those ink marks start to fade, or get smeared around, or accidentally cleaned off by some unsuspecting do-gooder?
Thanks for the post @Glennsky, I love it!!
Just guessing, but it’s like the numbers on the clock. I’ve always wondered if they had to do with division into fractional parts; 12 is divisible by 2,3,4, not 5, but also 6. To be divisible by 8 as well, you need 24 parts. If you want a number divisible by 2,3,4,5 and 6, that would be 60, the number of minutes in an hour.
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So, thanks to the Babylonians, we also have 360° in a circle. That comes back to geometry. Makes sense for being able to make equal sized pieces of pie.
Now I also have a new expression: “Wait just an ush!” That will give me more time than “wait a minute.”
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Of course one day we’ll be forced to switch to metric clocks. There’ll be 10 months in a year, 100 days in a month, 10 hours in a day,100 minutes in an hour, 100 seconds in a minute…
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But still 12 pints at beer o’clock.
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The basic unit of time in science is one second, defined as a multiple of the frequency of the radiation emitted by cesium at certain circumstances. Putting 100 000 seconds to a day instead of 86400 would put our time badly out of sync with the sun…
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You’re talking about the old second, not the new metric second.
Someone needs to get the sun working in the metric system, too, then. 
With all this metric and summer time I pity the poor plants!
I’m no expert on 32mm but my understanding is the 32 mm system was designed for building cabinets from sheet goods. It was developed post WWII to rebuild Europe. Prior to WWII most cabinets/ furniture was solid wood (pre- sheetgoods) You can google 32mm system to learn more about it, but it’s a standardization
European hinge cup size are normally 35 mm in diameter. There are some mini hinges that are 26 mm in diameter.
Back in the late 60’s early 70’s the smallest drill heads in North America were about 1 1/4" in diameter. This was a physical limitation. The Germans used metric and 1.25" rounded up to 32 mm. 32 was an excellent number as it could be divided by 2 all the way down. 1,2,4,8,16,32
I don’t care, everyday is Saturday! Gimmie my wine.
If anyone is interested, the SI is set to be overhauled this year, and in effect May of 2019.
(The deadline to submit data toward fixing the new values has already past.)
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