Place Holder

[james_davis_nicoll]

I was going to put a rant here but I think it would be prudent for me to wait a month until the book that triggered it sees print. Even if I friends-lock it, that doesn't mean the publisher might not get wind of my comments and take offense.

So, to fill the time until then:

Is writing Heinlein young adult novel pastiches primarily a male occupation? I can't off-hand think of a female writer who tried her hand at a Heinlein young adult novel, at least not in the centenary wave of Heinlein pastiches.

[This might be a stupid question but if it is mainly a guy subgenre, why would that be?]

In a unrelated comment, metric _or_ American imitation of Imperial, people. Not both or at least not both in the same sentence.

Comments

[secritcrush.livejournal.com]

tease!

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

On your unrelated comment -- maybe the "American imitation" covers it; but last I looked, highway distances and speed-limits were marked in Imperial in England (and the units involved are the same as the American imitation). So right now, and for at least some time into the future, one could construct a situation where using both systems in a sentence made perfect sense -- particularly sentences involving "miles per liter".

And I find myself using both when writing in LJ and email lists sometimes, knowing people of both flavors will be reading; and a character in a book might possibly get away with that as well (though of course Twain's Dictum applies).

[redbird]

Are actual imperial units verboten, then?

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

What do you mean by a Heinlein YA novel?

[ellarien]

Didn't NASA have a metric/imperial mixing accident with a Mars probe a few years back? (And have you looked at a US food label lately? Grams per "half-cup serving" seem to be standard.)

[auriaephiala.livejournal.com]

Re Heinlein YA: Psion by Joan Vinge could be considered a counter-example. And the latest Vatta series by Elizabeth Moon has a definite Heinlein influence.

But I would agree that there's certainly more Heinlein YA pastiches out there written by male writers.

Yes, but here's a counter-example

[dsrtao]

Connie Willis, _D.A._, Subterranean Press 2007.

It's definitely a Heinlein juvenile, complete with a twist ending that you'll spot from thirty pages out.

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

I'm currently playing an online game where distances are measured in km, speed in kph, acceleration in kph/s, thickness in mm, fuel in l, and weight in lbs. And the values for weight are entirely arbitrary, made up solely for game balance.

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

James, you're Canadian. By now you should be bilingual :-)

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

I'm reasonably familiar with using metric from science classes, but having grown up in the U.S. the whatever-system-the-U.S.-uses is still the instinctive one. For instance, if someone tells me the outside temperature in Celsius, I have to mentally convert to Fahrenheit to get an idea of whether that's warm or cold. Same thing with weights and distances; I have a "feel" for the U.S. units that I never developed with metric.

Metric is, of course, infinitely more sensible and easier to use. I'm not defending the U.S. system, I'm just saying it was the one I absorbed.

(Speaking of abuses of unit systems, when I was in college I worked out the conversion factor for measuring gas mileage in inverse-nanoacres. Also someone pointed out to me that a "barn-yard atmosphere" is a unit of energy.)

I remember when the U.S. did make a push to switch to metric; for a while, all the road signs gave distances in both miles and kilometers. It never caught on, unless -- as Dave Barry pointed out -- you count the increasing popularity of the 9mm bullet.

There was also a brief period when a lot of gas stations were dispensing gas in liters; but that was because the price of gas had just gone over $0.99 for the first time, and the older pumps weren't capable of charging more than 99 cents per unit of gas measured out. But apparently you could change how much gas was measured out per what-you-charged, so a lot of stations adjusted their pumps to liters temporarily and posted conversion charts so people could work out how many gallons they'd just bought. Why they didn't go to measuring gas by quarts I don't know; but in any event as soon as everyone had bought new pumps capable of charging higher prices, everything went back to gallons.

[(Anonymous)]

You are obviously better adapted than I am. I always think of mileages in miles/gallon, but I will give you the number while discussing my fueling in litres before a trip of X hundred kilometers.

Temperatures inside the house, on thermostats and so on, are uniformly given in Farenheit. Temperatures outside the house, on the other hand, are always Celsius.

It sounds like if you and I ever had a conversation with numbers in it, I would wind up beaten to death with a shovel. :)

- Ken

[redbird]

I keep getting things at work that have, say, an example table of lab instructions that uses millimeters, grams, and cups.

Also ones that make it obvious that whoever wrote them has no feel for the metric system but this they do: they keep referring to numbers of grams for actual physical objects such that it's clear that someone decided that, just as a liter is close to a quart, and a yard is close to a meter, a gram must be close to an ounce (!). *sigh* If they just had no feel for metric and knew it, it wouldn't be a problem--it's easy enough to look up conversions and use a calculator, or nowadays, ask Google.

[rgovrebo.livejournal.com]

In a unrelated comment, metric _or_ American imitation of Imperial, people. Not both or at least not both in the same sentence.

I see you've never bought car tyres. Or tires.
For example, take the dimension 225/50-VR16
225 mm width, height 50% of said width
16 inch diameter...

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

I think there are more women who don't like Heinlein than men who don't like Heinlein.

And now for something completely different....

[okumarts.livejournal.com]

I can't believe I stumbled across this webcomic today.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1083

[daev.livejournal.com]

James Tiptree, The Starry Rift.

[oldsma.livejournal.com]

I was once in sn ISO (technically ISO/IEC JTC1) working group that had to define a term for the number of printing dots per linear unit. All the participants worldwide actually used dots per inch, of course. We anticipated that all possible parties who applied the standard or used its results would actually use or want to know DPI. And yet, because of ISO rules, that was utterly defendu. Nothing could be defined using non-mks units.

Because we were technical people, we knew that "resolution" was not technically accurate. We thought that the term "dottage" (parallel to existing terms like "grammage") was ugly and confusing. After quite a long struggle to find something that made sense and that met the ISO requirements, we settled on naming the item "dots per inch", defined as "dots per 25,4mm", but ISO was canny and stomped on it hard.

MAO