this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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FFS, just adopt the metric system already. And "lb" is not a force unit. Also don't capitalize unit abbreviations unless named after scientists.
"pound foot" is the most intuitive name for a unit of force imaginable!
How much force? One pound of the foot. Easy!
Red Foreman agrees... "one pound of my foot in your ass"
It's one pound per foot you moron!
/s
Not just any old foot, a square one
It's a derived unit of torque. Pound is already a measure of force.
Of this, you and I, are quite aware.
The Joke, however, is in the air.
Actually pounds are a unit of force
Pounds~newtons
Slugs~ kilograms
Pounds are a unit of money.
lbf(poundforce) is a misnomer, it’s actually the pressure required to stamp the King’s portrait into a £1 coin. Slightly changes with each monarch – or by a lot whenever they switch to cheaper materials because of devaluation. The frequent redefining of poundforce is now a major consequence of Brexit. /sFairly sure there isn't any money with the king's face on yet. So we're still on the Elizabeth standard for now.
It's confusing, since "pound" is used for both force and mass.
1 lbm is roughly 0.45 kg
1 lbf is the force required to accelerate a 1 slug (32.2 lbm) mass 1 ft/s^2.
I know slugs are just snails without shells, but they don't need to go faster
I don't know what the imperial system standards committee was up to, but I've never met a slug that was 32.2 lbm
You wouldn't know her, she goes to a different school.
Mercifully, g=9.8 everywhere on Earth's surface, so we use weight interchangeably with mass, but yes, we should weigh ourselves in Newton: "I need to lose 10kg, so I can reach my ideal weigh of 700N" :P
Big nope. It depends not only on height, but also on density of stuff under ground.
The pedantry in this post is so dense you would need a torch to cut through it
I'd say it's more of a "small yes" than a "big nope."
While gravity does vary, it goes from about 9.76 to about 9.83.
All of which does, in fact, round to 9.8
On ISS it's 8.722, but it's constantly falling.
Everything experiences different gravity (and “apparent gravity”) in space. We should pass a treaty of using metric only there, if only to avoid losing more spacecraft.
What's the variation? Does it ever get to 9.9 or 9.7? It's a negligible "nope" for people weighing themselves :D
We already have a permanently inhabited base outside Earth (ISS) with effectively zero gravity and there might be one on the Moon or Mars in 100 years. We should pass treaties to only use metric in space – a probe has been lost to unit confusion already.
This is dated 2007. Apparently NASA is already using metric:
NASA Finally Goes Metric
On ISS it's ≈.89g, but agreed