Comments on: Attending mass

By: Common Sense

Common Sense — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 22:36:32 +0000

I think all of you make an elephant out of an ant. Around the world, other than the English Speaking one, People weigh themseves and other opbjects in Kilograms, grams, decigrams and hectogrames, etc. and they know precisely what is meant. They are a mass, and their “weight is x kilograms;they don’t use another unitfor weight. The reason they do this is more than likely that they never expected to leave their planet and thus they are happy with their choice..

By: Astronomers find a planet denser than lead | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 21:15:01 +0000

[...] those of you who want to complain about my use of mass as a weight, read this, and acknowledge my superior logical [...]

By: nevada dog breeders

nevada dog breeders — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 09:21:13 +0000

nevada dog breeders

[...] if I”m not wrong, then lets see you with your pet(s), or, if you have no pets, then lets see you with someone else’’s pets or with a stuffed pet! Originally posted at 1:29PM, 28 January 2007 PDT ( permalink ) chrismaverick (a group [...]

By: Tim Eby

Tim Eby — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 19:24:42 +0000

Sergeant Zim, Knots per hour is completely valid although an unusual and perhaps somewhat rare unit of acceleration!

By: Nigel Depledge

Nigel Depledge — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 18:44:06 +0000

Bald Ape said:
“I like your usage. I absolutely hate it when someone uses â€œweighsâ€ with kilograms. Especially someone who ought to know better. A NASA scientist said, in a TV story on the Moon landings, that the EVA suit for the moon â€œweighs (however many) kg on Earth, but only (whatever) kg on the moon. Aaarrrggghh!”

Hey, what’s the problem?

People say “molecular weight” when they actually mean “relative molecular mass” quite frequently. As a biochemist in the UK, I use kg as a unit of weight at the Earth’s surface, because it is SI. At the Earth’s surface, mass and weight are equivalent.

I would never try weighing out 235.4 Newtons of urea, for example! No, it would be 24.024 kg.

The opposite occurs in the US, too. The pound is used to mean both mass and force.

By: BaldApe

BaldApe — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 16:01:25 +0000

AndreH said “If you use typical old mechanical scales for â€œweighingâ€ a kg flour will give you the same amount on moon or on earth, because you compare the mass of the flour with a standard.”

Depends. Are we talking about a spring scale (force) or a balance (mass)?

By: Kaleberg

Kaleberg — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 04:23:44 +0000

Astronomers might weigh stars in tons or tonnes, but I gather physicists weigh them in meters, as in “That star masses 1.5 kilometers.” I gather that the distance is the Schwarzschild radius, and if you measure time in meters as well you can really simplify orbital calculations. Of course, dimensional analysis goes by the boards.

I’ve got no problem with “mass” as a verb. Humans find verbs and nouns extremely flexible, and a word usually has many grammatical roles. I gather this is even worse in Chinese than English since Chinese is more strongly positional and much less inflected than English.

There are a lot of idioms involving common measurements. A sailor might say “The SS Slowboat makes 10 knots on the high seas” which sounds like the ship has taken up macrame.

Also, Americans shouldn’t be so smug about being non-metric. Try buying a half gallon of soda or a fifth of a gallon of liquor. Liquids, except for milk and a few other such products, are sold in liters. Look at your next supermarket receipt and see if you’ve bought one pound eight ounces of cheese. My supermarket says 1.50 pounds because the standard is now pounds and hundredths, not ounces. (I assume that the scales are piezoelectric and so measure weight, not mass).

I’m not surprised to find that Germans have a half kilo measure. The French have been using livres since before the Revolution, and they still do. Interestingly, they buy their computer screens in pouces, thumbs, which are American inches. Look at a French computer ad, and you might find centimeters in the fine print, but the screen size is in inches.