When it comes to units, we disagree to a certain degree

30 - Age ain't nothing but a number.

That's what Aaliyah sang back in my days, in the early nineties, and strictly speaking, she's right of course. But even if a number is just a number, we can only work with it once we know what we're counting, and with what, and how we're measuring it. Only then does a number get context and meaning.

Age, after all, can be expressed in years, months, days, hours, or even minutes.

And man, was I young back then.

That was over 30 years ago. But hey, it's just a number. So: over 360 months ago, that was.

Oh. That's a different number.

I meant roughly 11,000 days. Or about 15 million minutes.

Hm. Age is apparently not just one number.

The same span of time, and always completely different numbers.

So let's all sing along:

"Age ain't nothing but a number and a unit."

102 - Do You Know a Boy Named Schatz?

If not, you haven't read your Hemingway. Or it's been a while. I had to google what the boy's name actually was for this blog post too.

Ernest Hemingway's short story A Day's Wait is, for me, a perfect example of a misunderstanding that can arise from different uses of units. I had to read it in junior high, and I think it was my first encounter with this peculiar thing called Fahrenheit.

So, Schatz is a nine-year-old boy with a fever. The doctor measures a temperature of 102 degrees.

For the boy, who only knows body temperature in Celsius, this sounds like a death sentence. He knows that you don't survive 44 degrees. So he waits for the approaching death. Quiet and remarkably stoic, he comes to terms with his fate. He doesn't want to sleep, barely listens as his father reads to him, and finally asks matter-of-factly in the evening how much longer it will be.

Only then does the misunderstanding resolve: the doctor had read 102 degrees Fahrenheit.

That's just under 39 degrees Celsius. Still a proper fever, and staying in bed was definitely not a bad idea, but nowhere near reason enough to make peace with one's life.

The number was correct. The doctor had measured correctly. Schatz simply had a different idea of what that number meant.

The number was never the problem. The unit was.

451 - Knowledge Is Power

What bothered me most about Fahrenheit as a student was the offset. I understood that different units exist, but 0 liters are 0 gallons - so why aren't 0°C also 0°F? That only clicked later in physics class.

But even before I understood that, and long before Fahrenheit became an everyday thing in America, the word had been burned into my brain. Fahrenheit 451! Paired with totalitarianism and the question of why knowledge is power and the powerful want to keep the many dumb and uneducated. Before Newspeak and Winston's struggle for truth, I met the fireman (Newspeak!) Guy Montag and learned the value of books.

In Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451, a unit of temperature had made it into the book's title. And once again we encounter a number that seems arbitrary and useless without context and without a unit.

In the novel, 451°F marks the temperature at which a book catches fire. So actually it is arbitrary, because it also depends on other conditions like the material. In this case it's more of a symbolic number, but one that, combined with the unit, makes for a memorable title.

And the fact that it's a title rather than a technical value also explains why Bradbury dropped the degree symbol. It's not about the unit or the numerical value, but about what this combination means in the dystopia he describes.

20,000 - And How Deep Is That Exactly?

Another misunderstanding from my youth I owe to the somewhat unfortunately translated title of Jules Verne's book "Vingt mille lieues sous les mers."

Alongside Karl May, Jules Verne was one of the first authors whose "real books" I loved as a kid. Yes, I know, cynics claim that young people today don't even know what a book is. My standard joke goes something like this:

Oh right, you don't know what a VHS cassette is."

But back to Jules and his Nautilus.

In German the book was, or still is called "20,000 Meilen unter dem Meer." And I, as a witty little boy, multiplied miles by about 1.6 kilometers and wondered how that was supposed to work. Those must be incredibly deep seas. After 6,000-odd kilometers you'd surely have to come out the other side of the earth.

Assuming, of course, that the earth is still a sphere. The tinfoil hat brigade on the internet tells us something different, after all.

No.

It wasn't about how deep the Nautilus could dive at all. The 20,000 refers to the distance traveled under the seas.

And there's another gremlin hiding in "miles" too. The French original says "lieues." The English made "leagues" of that, and in German that became "Meilen." Only a lieue is not a mile in the sense of the 1.6 kilometers I was calculating with back then.

In Jules Verne, the distance of one lieue is closer to leagues, and those are far more than my 1.6 kilometers. So it's one hell of a long journey for a submarine.

But not a depth.

The number was, once again, not the problem.

It's worth remembering the era these translations come from, though. Book translations from over 150 years ago were something different from what we understand by it today. That was still craft, feel for language, and handwork. And not every wordsmith was also technically versed enough to correctly untangle this unit confusion for their readers.

Today of course we no longer have this problem.

We have the internet. We have smartphones and Google knows the answer. We have access to more information than Jules Verne could probably have imagined.

And so over the weekend I built a small tool with the help of an AI. With the Unit Converter you can convert numerical values from one unit to another.

As always, my browser tools work without an internet connection and without forced ads and trackers. Maybe someone will find some value in it. Let's not let Big Tech milk us dry - or to put it another way:

16 - and what do we get?

Well, whether it's 16 tons of coal or over 600 lines of code and 1,000 words of blog post, and what do I get? One day older and no further along. As a soundtrack for this read I recommend Tom Morello's version of Tennessee Ernie Ford's "Sixteen Tons," stream it at your favorite Big Tech overlord, or get hold of it by other legal means.

Peace Out Alexander