RyanHarne.com

Everyone in the world, save the American government, agrees that the Système International d’Unités, also known as the Metric system, is the best and most convenient way of transferring architectural, engineering, programming, zookeeping, whatever data from one person to the next. At least for humans, given that our mathematical foundation looks nice in multipliers of 10.

So, when I come across nasty English units in any given homework problem… I cringe. And, worse yet, when I discover ridiculous units of measure in my daily living, I roll my eyes practically to the point of blindness.

For instance, I love the new resistance cycles in the War Memorial Gym - which I had to make use of tonight given the earlier rain. Great machines, overall. But. They use the worst, absolute worst, measure for power. Naturally, the most common form is the Watt, but I even would accept something grossly English like Btu/hr or ft*lbf/hr or even, dare I say it, horsepower. No, these machines use MET which is practically a dimensionless way of making everyone feel the warm fuzzies.

Without knowing the internal settings for the resistance cyclocomputer’s MET conversion, there’s no way to accurately pull that number into Watts, which would have relevance to me. Instead, I’m stuck with trying to subjectively tell myself, “well, this feels as tough as last time. i think”. Even the wiki articles has this to say regarding the inconsistency of the MET from person to person: “A workout of 2-4 METs is considered light, while intensive running … or climbing can yield workouts of 12 or more METs”. Twelve or more? “Considered”? They might as well install aromatic candles in the bikes at the gym. This is nuts.

Good grief.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 10:55 pm and is filed under , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.