3 ms·
The most annoying thing about the thousandth of an inch is while it’s often called a ‘thou’, it’s also called a ‘mil’ which sounds exactly as the common slang f
by stephen_g 4y ago
The most annoying thing about the thousandth of an inch is while it’s often called a ‘thou’, it’s also called a ‘mil’ which sounds exactly as the common slang for millimetre (mill) here in Australia at least (used more often in construction, but it’s still common so makes it confusing).
Luckily we don’t really do PCB design in imperial anymore at any of the companies I’ve worked with (I hear even US companies are moving away from it since so much of the manufacturing is offshore)
- sitzkrieg 4y agoguess who didnt read the link :-) but agree, i did pcb design w a few old hands who said mills and got me a few times
- TheSpiceIsLife 4y agoYou're not going to say 20 mil and the context not be clear if you mean 0.508mm or 20mm, are you?
- SlickNixon 4y agoA machined feature could be either.
- deathanatos 4y agoNow's where one needs the Wikipedia article titled something like "Engineering Failures Caused By American/Metric Confusion". There's at least https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter and TBH I was hoping there'd be a link to such a list on that one. I seriously hope I'm Poe's Law-ing your post too, and there's an implied /s on there, because if you could see the level of communication effort I see at work … yeah, I'd absolutely believe that someone would use it in a confusable context.
- BerislavLopac 4y agoOh this is my cue to share my favourite story stemming out of this confusion, the story of the Gimli Glider [0]. It is full of incredible events, each of which would be a good story in its own right - and it still has nothing to do with our favourite Dwarf. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider