A myriad of Qyriad

International standards are neat. A bunch of nerds from all over the place look at a situation where there's multiple ways to do something and it would be better if there were one way, and they do what they can to make there be one way. Learning about these standards, what was standardized and why, ends up with me learning little tidbits about all kinds of areas of engineering. So I decided to start a page for them.

Since 1947, we've had the International Organization for Standardization, or ISO, and you can tell how international they are from the intentionally mis-ordered English acronym. What was the first standard they published? It's ISO 1, of course.

Anyway, ISO 1 standardizes standard temperature, which is 20 degrees Celsius. That's it, that's the standard.

You probably heard about in chemistry class, as part of standard temperature and pressure. It turns out to matter to all kinds of measurements.

Wikipedia: "Among the reasons for choosing 20°C was that this was a comfortable and practical workshop temperature and that it resulted in an integer value on both the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales." Wikipedia mentions that some measurements were previously taken at 0°C, and that had to suck for the measurers.

ISO 1 was standardized in 1951 and revised in 2022. I have absolutely no idea what they changed.

oh, wow. we never thought to wonder about ISO 1, but we clearly should have.

i finally watched the pokemon anime episode where riolu hatches and its so goofy. dude comes out of the egg and instantly is like “time to murder!!!! time to do violence!!!!”

And they suffer immensely for it!

everyone’s being so MEAN to me and all i did was ATTACK them with VIOLENCE and MALICE for NO REASON

if UTF-8 is so good how come there's no—

wait what the fuck