Points are a weird and inconsistent unit of measure

ddanborn26 2 days ago 21 commentsRead Article on buttondown.com

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PopAlongKid•about 1 hour ago

From the title I thought this was going to be about basis points, as used in finance. (A basis point is one hundredth of 1 percentage point).

RexM•about 1 hour ago

I thought it was going to be about story points.

sevenseacat•about 1 hour ago

I thought it was going to be about story points and I was going to wholeheartedly agree with the premise

NooneAtAll3•39 minutes ago

what do story points measure?

clickety_clack•25 minutes ago

It’s an imperial measure of the number of sentences in a story. The metric version is the “Gilgamesh”, a reference to a prototype story maintained by ISO in Paris.

syncsynchalt•25 minutes ago

Nothing, except a story's size relative to other stories estimated by the same team.

cheschire•43 minutes ago

EMUs always seemed weirder to me. Like an unnecessary compromise instead of just using metric outright.

https://startbigthinksmall.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/points-i...

zetanor•about 1 hour ago

That's why my favorite unit is the px, a.k.a., 1 centiinch.

JimDabell•about 1 hour ago

CSS pixels are weirder:

http://inamidst.com/stuff/notes/csspx

fluidcruft•about 1 hour ago

I thought px was an abbreviation of pixel which doesn't have a dimension?

Tagbert•17 minutes ago

Pixels have pitch, which is the distance between pixels. That is what is usually meant when talking about px as a measurement. It is analogous to dpi or ppi or the metric version.

tariky•40 minutes ago

As someone from european continent. Those US measurements units look and feel so hard to work with.

Instead metric system is predictable and easy to work with.

Real question is why US just don't move to metric system?

cityofdelusion•19 minutes ago

The U.S. uses metric pretty much everywhere that is important, in most science, engineering, and medicine. Specific trades and common household things remain imperial due to inertia and no one really caring. It is much more accurate to say the U.S. has a dual system. We learn metric in school like everyone else.

reddalo•32 minutes ago

> why US just don't move to metric system?

They've been trying for a long time, but apparently it's not an easy task.

georgemcbay•21 minutes ago

> Real question is why US just don't move to metric system?

Because we live in a land of liberty!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYqfVE-fykk

endofreach•about 1 hour ago

I don't know what happened in my brain but i expected a piece about points as in keeping scores. Maybe about how we evolved from binary results (alive/dead in early human competitions) to more complex systems. I'd say humans played games long before being able to count. Of course competition is inherent to human nature. But i'd say, without getting into any philosophical debate, a certain amount of compassion and empathy is as well. Which must have resulted in early ideas of fairness. Especially when respect and status seem to be crucial to society.

So, how and when did points come into play? ...

Well, ok. I stop procrastinating for now (i hope). I hate my brain.

butvacuum•39 minutes ago

Not sure, but typefacing/fonts is absolutely cursed with this stuff. I'd be shocked if there isn't a true type font that runs DOOM. There's a reason Microsoft pushed font rendering out of the kernel in Vista. (Technically, they started the work on it)

agus4nas•19 minutes ago

taht`s perfect 4 europeans

WillAdams•about 2 hours ago

TLDR; folks should just use PostScript (Big) Points.

The mention of

https://frinklang.org/

is kind of interesting --- hadn't heard of it before --- may need to revisit the "ProportionBar" tool which I made ages ago....

JoshTriplett•39 minutes ago

> TLDR; folks should just use PostScript (Big) Points.

The distinction ends up being important if you need compatibility with some document format, or with common typesetting expectations. But if there weren't a concern of surprising people with certain expectations of font-picking widgets, I'd argue that the better choice would be millimeters.

4mm is a great default font size, and going up by one integer mm at a time is a reasonable step size (it's just under 3pt).

dsevil•1 day ago

Just posted the following poorly-fleshed-out comment there:

So disappointed that this document, as much as it obsesses over obscure physical quantities no one cares about, makes no mention of THE FUCK.

1 fuck is equal to the amount of concern you have about something below which you cannot achieve without having no concern at all, as which giving "zero fucks" is defined. "Absolute zero fucks" would be the formal terminology.

For preliminary purposes, we can assume 1 fuck = 1 shit = 1 damn, but must account for the possible existence of a big-point-vs-printers-point style situation. Also they could be drastically different, like if 1 shit given about global warming would be equivalent to 299_792_458 fucks or something like that.

I have very little knowledge about the *real* machinations behind the standardization of measures (a tinfoil conspiracy kook would call it an Agenda 21, or 21 Agendas One, but I'm not going there), I want this to be discussed.