4 ms·

The post is about a specific point in time, not for all time. So there's nothing wrong with taking advantage of a temporary alignment in the data.

• skissane 3y ago
  > The post is about a specific point in time, not for all time. So there's nothing wrong with taking advantage of a temporary alignment in the data The choice of quads as a unit was not made by the post author (John Walker), it was made by a US government agency (the EIA) and a US government-funded research lab (LLNL). Walker appears to have only chosen quads because of the use of quads by the convenient graphics those agencies have produced. The idea that they are using quads due to a “temporary alignment in the data” seems like a post hoc rationalisation - what unit were they using before this temporary alignment? Probably quads; and if not quads, then likely something else equally non-metric. It is unlikely the US government would have already been using SI units (or even a non-SI metric unit), then suddenly switch to a non-metric unit just because of a temporary alignment in the data; much more likely they use quads because that is the US government’s standard unit for this purpose, and already was long before this. And to be clear, I’m not criticising Walker for choosing a convenient freely-usable graphic to illustrate his point, even if it is in weird units; I’m criticising the US government for its continued clinging to weird units like “quads” that almost nobody else in the world uses, when there is no good reason for them to do so.