I was riding in a taxi. I wasn't in an Uber. That's a distinction. Although for our purposes it's a distinction without a difference.
We stopped for a light and on the corner was a bank with a time and temperature sign. You don't see that much anymore but they used to be all over the place. I reached in my pocket for my phone to see if the sign was accurate. It was 2 minutes slow. That made me think of when we all had watches. None of them kept perfect time. You knew if your watch gained or lost time in the course of a day and you knew how much. If you pried the back off there was a little pointer dealy that would let you advance or retard the mechanism. Depending on how much you had paid for the watch, you might let a jeweler make that adjustment. Then they came out with the little quartz clocks. For a buck you had a timepiece that kept perfect time. I'm sure there's an old truck rusting away against a fence in a junk yard somewhere with one of those things I stuck on the dashboard still ticking off perfect time. It made me think of how groups used to synchronize their watches. That made me think of "Catch 22". Cool.
No one wears a watch anymore except in magazine ads. Now we all have cell phones and they all keep perfect, satellite dependent time. My phone, my cable box and my computer all consistently agree that I'm usually late but at least I know, reliably, to the minute, how late and I don't have to change them for daylight savings time. I'm relieved.
Time is completely, sidereal and objective. Temperature is something else as we all know from fighting over blankets. It's subjective. As a single man I always slept with the register blocked and the window cracked open. When I got married my wife said, "You're an idiot." and fixed that. Maybe so.
Bank clocks for a while gave both the Fahrenheit temperature and the Centigrade. Fahrenheit was subjective, being based on the temperature at which ocean water freezes and the body temperature of the average man. Predictably he was 2.6 degrees off on the body temperature thing. That's not really technically right but it helps make my point.
Centigrade was an effort to make it all completely objective. The difference between pure water freezing and water boiling at sea level divide by tens. Metric. They screwed that up by anthropomorphizing it by renaming it Celsius after the guy who came up with it. Just stupid. Celsius would not have approved. I assume it would drive him crazy they missed his entire point by anthropomorphizing the name.
That got me thinking about Imperial Measure verses Metric. Celcius predated formal Metric Measure by quite a bit. It was an idea that had floated around for a long time. Metric appealed to Napoleon because he didn't like the British much. In the end, you really can't blame him. There's that whole Waterloo thing. Not to mention St Helena.
A foot measure is based on the length of a King's actual foot. It does make you wonder why inches aren't called toes and it makes you wonder if he had twelve toes. It is totally subjective. Napoleon had the idea of sending out survey teams to measure enough of the earth's arc to determine one one millionth of the distance between the Equator and the North Pole. It turns out to be about a yard. I don't know of any English kings with three feet. Think about that for a minute. I mean the effort to measure the circumference of the earth. Not the 12 toes thing. I can't find a reference to how close the French got but in the end you have to realize that too was totally subjective.
So the Metric System was born in rejection of the Imperial Measure System and has been sold ever since as simpler, more objective and more exact. Bullshit.
Frankly, if you can't deal with the units of 4, 8, 12, 16, 32, etc of Imperial Measure, you just aren't mentally agile enough for the Metric System to do much for you. That's my two bits worth and if you don't get that joke, I and you just wasted a lot of time.
Then the light changed, we drove off and I started thinking about Game Theory.
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