I hate the metric system. It’s every bit as arbitrary as the Imperial system, plus it has inconvenient sizes. Yeah, sure, a liter of water is a kilogram–but a pint of water is a pound. The Fahrenheit scale brackets normal weather between zero and a hundred. Twelve divides so conveniently in so many different ways — halves thirds fourths sixths — we have a special word for it: dozen.
And contrary to Euro propaganda, the metric system isn’t all that tailored to scientific pursuits, either. In the SI system, fundamental constants have weird, complicated units, like Planck’s Constant being equal to
instead of something reasonable, like oh, say, 2 pi.
All of this is by way of introducing the Postmetric Fables, “Stories Told in Human Scale Units”, which I ran across back in the early days of the web. These are hard little pieces, jawbreakers of the brain, but immensely rewarding of slow reading and careful thought. You can learn a lot about the way the universe works by trying to figure these out.
Here, for instance, is “Planet Hopping and Rumpus”:
In a dream, you and your friends are planet-hopping — you visit a series of small planets and whenever you arrive it always happens that the people there are celebrating their planet’s new year. For them, the new year celebration is a birthday party for the planet: the beginning of a new circle around its star. They light bonfires, put on displays of fireworks, and all go into orbit — a kind of mass helter-skelter horizontal sky-diving in all directions.
In going from planet to planet you discover that on all of them speed is measured in cents (in Earth terms about a hundredth of a mile a minute). Not only that, but they all use the same measure of force, which they call a “ton”. In Earth terms it’s about 2700 pounds,. They have a saying that if surface speed on a planet is a cent then the planet weighs tenthousand tons.
One of the first things to do upon arrival at a small planet, after checking in at the hotel, is to discover the surface orbit speed, the skimspeed — where your path curving around the planet just matches falling. Since it takes no effort, this is the speed you and everybody else will be traveling. Never exceed the skimspeed unless you wish to leave the surface, which after all is where the party is. Ten cents wouldn’t be at all unusual for skimspeed on a small planet.
Rumpus is tumult, according to Webster’s: “a disorderly agitation or milling about”. Experience shows that rumpus grows disproportionately with speed. In a milling crowd, whether of convention-delegates, dancers, bumper-cars or celebrants, if you double everyone’s speed you may get considerably more than twice the commotion. In some cases doubling the speed might increase the rumpus by as much as sixteen-fold. We can define a rumpus quantity that does increase exactly sixteen-fold when speed is doubled, simply by making rumpus the fourth power of speed. You obtain it by squaring the speed twice — a square square cent is a quartic cent.
If the skimspeed on a planet is 3 cents, then its rumpus is 81 quartic cents, which is a considerable amount of rumpus.
The local people say that a planet’s rumpus is proportional to how much it weighs. (They mean weight as measured in the planet’s own surface gravity — in other words the planet’s idea of what it would weigh.) They say that heavy planets have a big rumpus, and that for each extra quartic cent of rumpus you can count on an extra tenthousand tons of weight. If the skimspeed on a planet is 3 cents, they say, then the planet is sure to weigh 81 times tenthousand tons.
And I love the names of the units: “Skimspeed”. “Rumpus”. “Rush”. “Pony”. “Bone”.
There’s more here.
I don’t really care if you read any of this. I’m mostly making note of it so I can find it when I need a bit of mental exercise.