MY THEORY

By Jim Ringelspaugh

Preface

In my 5 or 6 years as an undergraduate chemical engineering student, I have come to realize that there are many, various, and even redundant ways to say the same thing. I am speaking of the magical and enigmatic world of units and unit conversions, wherein it is my sincere hope to alleviate some of the inherent problems of today's system.

Why are units bad?

How many times have you said the following:

Is that weight or mole percent?
Farenheit or Celcius?
What the hell is a Torr?
Golly, 500,000.2 Angstroms really isn't that long, after all.
Why do Avagadro and Reynolds get a number and I don't?

If your brain works anything like mine, these annoying little questions, especially the last one, nag incessantly at you on a daily basis, depriving you of time that could be better spent carrying out useful calculations, running vitally important processes, or buying groceries. My solution is simple yet elegant: The Ringo. The nub of my gist is this: used properly, The Ringo will solve all of your unit conversion problems, leaving you free to do the things in your life that really matter.

The Ringo?

The Ringo is a unit, like any other, except that The Ringo is completely different. Let's take a minute to go over the painstaking process I used to come up with this wonder-tool... I began my quest for simplicity by having The Ringo take into account every conceivable form of measurement, both direct and indirect, theoretical and applied, both implied and fictitious. For the layman, this means that I decided that one Ringo would be equal to one of everything else. With this as a starting point, I made a few hundred (or 1.666666667 x 10 ^ 7 Ringos) brash assumptions and simplifications, using everything in my cognitive power from quantum theory to astrology, from fluid dynamics to entrail prophesy, to simplify The Ringo to:

1 Ringo = = 1 (kg ft^3 erg ohm quark Pa L mol F league sec imperial quart Btu)/ (dyne cal mmHg lb(mass) K gal day micron (metric ton/cm)^8)

Gosh! you may say, that isn't very simple at all!!! This guy's an idiot! I heard that the only reason he's still in school is that he's got some pictures of the dean in a mini-skirt... Well, your skepticism and hostility may seem justified by the complexity of The Ringo, but after a few more unit conversions and manipulations, it turns out that The Ringo simplifies to:

= 5.55556 x 10 ^ 4

The important thing here is that the quantity is dimensionless! To the layman, this means that there are no burdensome tags or labels to stick on the end of my number: it just is. Now you are probably saying to yourself: Gee, that's pretty neat: simple yet elegant... This guy's really got it together! Wait a minute... I've been mislead by so called 'convienient' units before. What's the catch? Well, the truth of the matter is that there is a slight inconvienience to the ... The fact is that is a strong function of pressure, temperature, impedance, time, viscosity, kappa number, and capacitance; therefore, it is necessary to define a reference state. No, I don't mean a state like Idaho! Here, a state of reference simply means a set of conditions where holds true, one of them being, interestingly enough, a space-time coordinate in pre-colonization Idaho. I'll cut to the chase: = 5.555556 x 10 ^ 4 at 25.37 atm, 4.394 x 10 ^ 612 degrees K, 1 ohm-meter, 8:32 PM, March 4, 1726, 2542 Barnes st. Liviston, Idaho, apt. b-3 (eastern daylight time).

I don't like your reference state... Why should I use it?

At the reference state, if you had 18 apples, that would be equal to 1,000,000 -apples (say: one million Ringo-apples)! Boy, that's a lot of -apples! When not in the reference state, say, in 4th century Anarctica, where it was really cold, you would have around 3.51 -apples. That doesn't seem like much, but consider this: why would you want to be in Anarctica with a bunch of frozen apples in the first place? I'd rather be in Idaho with lots of apples amidst a growing demand for fruit, wouldn't you? This year alone, Idaho has sold more apples than any non-apple-producing state in the country.*

*Source: usually a place where you get data.

This exercise just shows one of many cases where you would be much better off using the reference state.

That's great! How do I use The Ringo?

It's simple! Just take the quantity you want to use, and multiply it by ... it's that easy! For example, if you're at your wits end trying to convert those pesky Celcius degrees into easy to understand Farenheits and you can't remember whether to add or subtract 32 before or after multiplying 5/9 or 9/5 or whatever... who came up with this crap system, anyway!?! Well, the solution is simple when you use The Ringo. Just take the number, say, 18 degrees F, and multiply it by , giving you 1,000,000 -F! Wow, you might say, that sure sounds hot! Don't worry, you won't spontaneously combust, it's really just 18 F, which you'd probably need to wear a coat for! But wait... I still don't know how many degrees Celcius that is... So what! With the standardization of The Ringo, there won't be any need for Celcius. Besides that, old man Celcius is long dead and gone, and this is America, for god's sake; we've no care for those interloper euro-units-- screw SI, I say!

But I like how SI units are grouped by factors of 10...

I thought of that, too. So I've also come up with multiple-Ringo-prefixes. If you want one million to sound even more impressive, you can change it into little Ringos, where one Ringo is equal to one thousand little Ringos. Your one million Ringos is now one billion little Ringos! Boy, thats a lot of Ringos. Conversely, I present the aptly named big Ringo, which equals 1000 Ringos. If you have 1000 Ringos and feel like you just can't keep up with them all (and gee-whiz, who can?), just change them to big Ringos, of which there would be just one. You can use these multiple-Ringo prefixes as much as you like, as the next example illustrates: Lets say you have 18 children. First, multiply them by The Ringo factor of 5.55556 x 10 ^ 4. You now have 1,000,000 -children. Whoa! you say, How in the heck am I going to keep up with so many kids???? Who's going to pay for their food, clothes, and college education, which if it's anything like this screwball author's, could take decades?!? Hey, relax, you won't have to pilfer Bill Gates' wallet, just use The Ringo! 1,000,000 -kids = 1,000 big -kids. That's still a lot of mouths to feed! No it's not! Just use the big factor again, and you'll have 1,000 big -kids = 1 big big -kid! Boy, what a relief! Hey, now, a minute ago I had 18 kids... where did they all go? Who knows? I can't control The Ringo any more than you can. If you start to get lonely, just make some more kids, something you're obviously rather good at.

You're beginning to scare me... I want my kids back!

Change is good. Lots of people are frightened of change, but you shouldn't be. If you went to the store and bought a loaf of bread that cost $2.00, and paid with a twenty, you'd expect $18.00 in change, right? Wrong! Tell that pimply faced clerk to convert your change to Ringos, and you'll get back a whopping $18.00 x 5.555556 x 10 ^ 4 = -$1,000,000.00!! Looks like you'll make out like a bandit if you use The Ringo.

Hey, now I get it.... this is all a flim-flam! You're an idiot! How can you write this crap?!?

I genuinely don't know, but so far I've had 5.5555556 x 10 ^ 4 -copies of it published!

p.s. if you want a nice utility to convert any units to Ringo-units, check out the main page...

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