Are youngers being more stupid?

in relatively select subsects of society.
Agreed. Only in areas where people routinely do a lot of calculating and routinely work with lots of mathematical formulae.

It seems to me that for the average non-technical person doing everyday things, it doesn't really matter what units are being used. If I suddenly found myself in a country where they sold milk in fluid ounces (or spherical inches, or cuckoo's eggs!), I could still look at a package of milk and say to myself "That will last me about a week, that's the size I want." The unit isn't that important.

But if I want to do even a simple calculation - say, compare the unit cost of milk in cuckoo-land with the cost of milk back in BC - now I'm in trouble, because I don't know how many cuckoo's eggs correspond to one litre. 🙂
...tattoos?
This is a very sensitive topic for many tattooed people, some of whom have experienced considerable discrimination, anger, and profiling just because they have "ink". Probably wisest not to discuss this here, as you can almost guarantee hurt feelings will follow.

-Gnobuddy
 
This is a very sensitive topic for many tattooed people, some of whom have experienced considerable discrimination, anger, and profiling just because they have "ink". Probably wisest not to discuss this here, as you can almost guarantee hurt feelings will follow.

-Gnobuddy

Same, often, with music tastes! (although you can hide those mre easily, perhaps!) 😀
 
Without a history in metric the relationship probably isn't obvious.
The 2L Coke bottle fascinates me. It's been so common for so long that most in the USA know exactly how big that it. Car engine displacement has almost all shifted over to liters. When I had a 3.4L Jaguar in the '70s, not many Americans could relate so I told them 207 cubic inch - and that made sense. These days most people under 50 have no problem with engine size in liters or cc.

Those things make me think that the US would have had no trouble adapting to the metric system. Children who could have grown up with metric would now be about 40 years old.
 
This is a very sensitive topic for many tattooed people, some of whom have experienced considerable discrimination, anger, and profiling just because they have "ink". Probably wisest not to discuss this here, as you can almost guarantee hurt feelings will follow.

-Gnobuddy

Maybe, maybe not. I'll poke the beehive.

I don't know about the trends of youngsters, but tattooing is not exactly a new thing and in some cultures it's basically the more the better. Being what I would consider a true lover of tattoos I have to admit it's a bit annoying to see them everywhere, on everyone. I rarely show mine in public. They are there for me and me alone. Sure it's your skin and you do whatever you want with it, but there is a reason why there has been an explosion of tattoo removal clinics. When I had my first ink done there were practically none. Now they're everywhere.

I've loved tattoos ever since I was a kid. I don't know how to explain it, I just like them. It was sort of baffling when one summer day many moons ago some 60-ish old git started ranting and raving at me about my tattoos as I was just cycling down the road and minding my own business. Funny how these same old gits are the ones who complain about the lack of manners. I didn't say a word, but just smiled at the idiot. There was a split second where I was about to ask him if it was his common demeanor to yell at strangers in the street, but I decided to keep my mouth shut and keep going. His wife(?) did look a tad embarrassed by the whole thing so at least one of them seemed to have a few functional brain cells.

I do not understand this:
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I do understand this:
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That is crazy; if a gallon weighs 10lbs, then a quart should weigh 2.5 lbs. (40ozs).

It does in imperial measures. Our gallons are 160 oz. The American is 128 oz.
The American ounce is 4% larger than ours, so the American gallon is 133 Imperial ounces. The Imperial gallon is 154 American ounces.

Fascinating yes?

Well no, but a little bit interesting anyway?
 
I am convinced that the younger generation is just as smart, productive and worthwhile as any of us geezers, but I must admit that the runaway popularity of tattoos among them is the one factor that raises doubts in my mind. Like the fads of my youth though I suspect is just another example of showing one's individuality by looking the same as all of your peers.
 
We could all define our own ounces or pints, just to make life really complicated.

I am reminded yet again of my youth Pano, as a half hearted mod who didn't really fit in, I remember well the way they all had numerous mirrors on their scooters, just to express individuality. We later even developed a group called the 'individs'.

What occurs to me vuohi, is that the tattooed lady looks as if she has a presence of mind and direction with what she has done, maybe even Da-Da ism, whereas the (what we would as hippies have called a 'straight'), man at C&A, just looks to me like a dork.
 
...steradian...
They're the three-dimensional cousins of (two dimensional) radians.

Using radians and steradians simplifies many formulae, often getting rid of annoying factors of "pi" or pi-squared.

For example, if you cut a pie-slice out of a circle, and the vertex angle of the slice is theta degrees, how long is the curved edge (arc length)? Well, 360 degrees corresponds to (2*pi*r) of arc length, so a little algebra tells you that "theta" degrees corresponds to an arc length of (pi/180)*theta*radius. There's "pi" rearing its head!

But if you measure the vertex angle in radians instead of degrees, the formula is cleaner and more elegant: arc length = angle * radius. No more "pi" or 180 to ugly-up the formula!
Could that relate to an area in square inches over a 1" sphere ?
As the ancient Greeks worked out, the surface area of a sphere of radius "r" is always 4*pi*r*r. So a 1" sphere has a surface area of 4 pi square inches, or about 12.56637061 square inches.

But what if you have less than an entire sphere? What if you have an "ice cream cone" shape, with the point at the centre of the sphere? In that case, steradians can make it simpler to calculate the area of the "ice cream" at the blunt end of the cone, in terms of the angle of the point of the cone.

Imagine you're an automotive engineer designing a headlight for a new car - you have to design the reflector to provide a reasonable beam angle (so you can see enough width up ahead, not blind the oncoming traffic, and meet legal requirements in that country), and then you have to choose a light bulb power rating to make that entire region bright enough to be useful - a guideline is that the average driver should be able to see 50 metres ahead of the vehicle at night.

You can see immediately that the fundamental problem is this: we're dealing with a cone of light, cut from a sphere of 50 metres radius, and of a specified beam angle. If we know the beam angle in steradians, we can easily calculate the area of the patch of 50 metres away.

If we know that "x" watts of light (from the headlight bulb) are spread over that area, we can calculate how many watts/square metre of illumination we'll get at that distance (50 m).

And some authority somewhere probably has done thousands of tests and come up with a table that tells us how many watts per square metre of illumination the average adult human eye needs to be able to see, with reasonable clarity.

Back-tracking, we can figure out how many watts our headlamp bulb needs to be emitting to produce the desired brightness at 50 m.

Plug in the efficiency of the type of bulb we're using, and we can figure out how many electrical watts it will need to draw.

If we get all our calculations right, our average driver will manage to avoid accidentally running over Baby Yoda, who, having broken free of his mother Yaddle, is trying to run across the dark two-lane country road 60 metres ahead of the vehicle...

If you've managed to avoid hearing about the unbelievably infantile twaddle surrounding the imaginary Baby Yoda and mommy Yaddle, know that Yodaism is yet another clear indicator that we're living on a planet on which many, many adults now suffer from retarded emotional and mental development, which leaves them with children's minds in adult bodies. Here you go, and try not to throw up: 30 Baby Yoda Memes To Save You From The Dark Side | Bored Panda

Bonus question for extra points: Do you suppose Yoda, Yaddle, and Baby Yoda ever took a cruise on Boaty McBoatface? 😱😀:headbash:


-Gnobuddy
 
I still remember back in the gas crisis in 1979 in Boston,Ma-USA, when gas prices briefly surged to
over $4.00 a gallon . One gas station posted on their big sign over rt128 that they sell gas for a little over a dollar ( in small print " A liter".)
There was a big line. Every one else was posting their prices in gallons.

Before that: gas pump prices only went to 99 cents. As gas rose from 29 to 36 and higher, eventually it could not be set in the pump mechanism (prurely mechanical). BUT the pump company had a Liter flow-meter. So the pump was set per liter and a big sign gave the price per gallon.

> Jack Daniels might be a better learning tool

Jack and friends have been bottled in liters for decades. Maine Spirits has a local monopoly so the prices/sizes are all on one site. Hard drink has been traded with Canada and Scotland so extensively that there was some reason; however I suspect the real reason is that a Liter bottle is 'the same size' but has 5% less hooch in it.
 

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... At any rate.
I've usually thought that there's all kinds of people, everywhere.
There's a few cultural and language differences, but people are mostly the same.
Everywhere you go there's smart people/not so smart, people who think they are clever/those that think they are stupid, hard working/not working/slow working etc.
I think this can be said about age as well. By all means, we are, at least in part, products of the surrounding environments and technologies that surround us. But we are still, in essence, people.
 
To answer the original question, does the fact that IQ rates have been increasing year on year for a century mean that youngers will always be progressively smarter than olders?

In the same way that the younger generations will on average grow taller than their parent's generation?

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What occurs to me vuohi, is that the tattooed lady looks as if she has a presence of mind and direction with what she has done, maybe even Da-Da ism, whereas the (what we would as hippies have called a 'straight'), man at C&A, just looks to me like a dork.

The lady is actually the first known American female tattoo artist Maud Wagner. Maud Wagner - Wikipedia

However... I would imagine the natives beat her to it a few thousand years earlier.