Metric Quotes

Money is just like the metric system:
you work more, you earn more
and there's always an extra zero to be added.
It's only a zero, though. ~ Luca Pesaro

It was a harbinger of the metric system. ~ Imraan Coovadia

Of course Evil's afoot. If it had switched to the metric system it'd be up to a meter by now. ~ Jim Butcher

Both space and time are metrically amorphous, i.e. they do not have - despite how strongly we believe so - an inherent metric which would allow us to measure them without any definitions. In this sense, thus, neither space nor time is absolute. ~ Felix Alba-Juez

The most lasting and universal consequence of the French revolution is the metric system ~ Eric Hobsbawm

I think going from doing TV and straight plays to Shakespeare is weird enough because you have this heightened language, and you are telling a story through metric poetry. But I think music is that place beyond poetry. ~ Tamsin Greig

Canadians can easily 'pass for American' as long as we don't accidentally use metric measurements or apologize when hit by a car. ~ Douglas Coupland

To live the lives we truly want and deserve, and not just the lives we settle for, we need a Third Metric, a third measure of success that goes beyond the two metrics of money and power, and consists of four pillars: well-being, wisdom, wonder, and giving. These four pillars make up the four sections of this book. ~ Arianna Huffington

Any metric that gets you thinking too near-term ~ Dusty Schmidt

At the moment, our society's notion of success is largely composed of two parts: money and power. But it's time for a third metric, beyond money and power - one founded on well-being, wisdom, our ability to wonder, and to give back. ~ Arianna Huffington

If god had meant us to use the metric system he would have given us ten finger and ten toes. ~ Judith Stone

Serving humanity intelligently is held up as the "gold standard" of AI based systems. But, with the emergence of new technologies and AI systems with bio-metric data storage, surveillance, tracking and big data analysis, humanity and the society is facing a threat today from evilly designed AI systems in the hands of monster governments and irresponsible people. Humanity is on the verge of digital slavery. ~ Amit Ray

It's never a metric, it's where the person is going or not. Metrics are used to make things work better, but don't necessarily make a business better. ~ Keith Rabois

In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade - which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to 'How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?' is 'Go fuck yourself,' because you can't directly relate any of those quantities. ~ Josh Bazell

Playlist 1. Wild Honey - U2 2. Like Real People Do - Hozier 3. Colorblind - Counting Crows 4. Oh Darling - Gossling 5. Breathing Underwater - Metric 6. Let It Die - Foo Fighters 7. I'm Sorry - Imagine Dragons 8. Fools - Troye Sivan 9. Don't Mess Me Around - Clare Maguire 10. Heal - Tom Odell 11. Unbreakable - Jamie Scott 12. I'm The Man Who Loves You - Wilco 13. Creep - Radiohead ~ B.L. Berry

Trending topics helped make Twitter a more relevant metric of what the world was talking about at any given moment. Google has worked for years in the space, most notably with Google Trends and Hot Searches, but Google+ offers the search giant the ability to see what is truly trending in real time. ~ Ben Parr

[T]he degree of confirmation assigned to any given hypothesis is sensitive to properties of the entire belief system ... simplicity, plausibility, and conservatism are properties that theories have in virtue of their relation to the whole structure of scientific beliefs taken collectively. A measure of conservatism or simplicity would be a metric over global properties of belief systems. ~ Jerry Fodor

You're never going to get the amount of CO2 emitted to go down unless you deal with the one magic metric, which is CO2 per kilowatt-hour. ~ Bill Gates

The thunderstorm she's wearing, the clouds, the lightning flashing down her legs and the sound effects are no big deal. But the 1G rain is a serious engineering problem. For all of us, when we have experienced rain, it has been during a Direct Interface Lifetime, in subjective conditions of 1-Gravity. Lunar rain, at 1/6th Gravity, just doesn't look real. Therefore, her dress has a hollow cylindrical 5K spin-2 graviton Field, to make the rain fall at 1G without weighing her down a metric ton. If it's engineered right, she shouldn't feel a bit heavier. That's almost 6990-megawatts right there. The other 10-megawatts or so is mostly rain choreography. ~ @hg47

1.5 billion people lack proper access to electricity. Many buy kerosene, which can cost 30 percent of their income. It sends millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. And often the lamp will fall over and catch the house on fire. So mothers hate it, but it's their only option. ~ Jacqueline Novogratz

Judges don't get to choose their cases. When a case goes to court, the judge assigned to it did not commit the crime, was not a witness to the crime, and was not affected by the crime, but he or she is still responsible for the crime. The judge must then choose the consequences; he or she must identify the metric against which the crime will be measured and make sure that the chosen metric is carried out. We ~ Mark Manson

Over the past 100 years, there have been three major periods of tax-rate cuts in the U.S.: the Harding-Coolidge cuts of the mid-1920s; the Kennedy cuts of the mid-1960s; and the Reagan cuts of the early 1980s. Each of these periods of tax cuts was remarkably successful as measured by virtually any public policy metric. ~ Arthur Laffer

Your potential, the absolute best you're capable of - that's the metric to measure yourself against. Your standards are. Winning is not enough. People can get lucky and win. People can be assholes and win. Anyone can win. But not everyone is the best possible version of themselves. ~ Ryan Holiday

Roughly speaking, the greater the value of the metric tensor, the greater the crumpling of the sheet. No mattet how crumpled the sheet of paper, the metric tensor gives us a simple means of measuring its curvature at any point. If we flattened the crumpled sheet completely, then we would retrieve the formula of Pythagoras. ~ Michio Kaku

The key metric of whether you've succeeded is what fraction of your employees use that dashboard everyday. ~ Keith Rabois

Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success. ~ Clayton Christensen

The metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet. ~ Dave Barry

One of the problems with the kill-or-capture metric is that it has often been to the exclusion of having a deeper, richer understanding of the movement, its origins, and our adversaries' mindset. The nuances are absolutely critical. Our adversaries are wedded to the ideology that informs and fuels their struggle, and, by not paying attention, we risk not knowing our enemy. ~ Bruce Hoffman

Nobody in the United States knows what either a "meter" or a "kilogram" is. The whole reason why we fought the Cold War was so we wouldn't have to learn the metric system. ~ Dave Barry

So: What is the world made of? Subject, as ever, to addition and correction, here is the multifaceted answer that modern physics provides:

1) The primary ingredient of physical reality, from which all else is formed, fills space and time.

2) Every fragment, each space-time element, has the same basic properties as every other fragment.

3) The primary ingredient of reality is alive with quantum activity. Quantum activity has special characteristics. It is spontaneous and unpredictable. And to observe quantum activity, you must disturb it.

4) The primary ingredient of reality also contains enduring material components. These make the cosmos a multilayered, multicolored superconductor.

5) The primary ingredient of reality contains a metric field that gives space-time rigidity and causes gravity.

6) The primary ingredient of reality weighs, with a universal density. ~ Frank Wilczek

Matthew? "Finn, what was Matthew like before he left? Did he bring supplies with him? Food?" He was always hungry.

"A metric shit ton of food."

"Did he tell you good-bye before leaving?"

"Kinda. You know Matto. He said a bunch of weird stuff."

"Like what?" Weird stuff from him could be critical.

Finn peered at the tent roof. "He told me, 'I see far' and 'the gods mark us all.' And something like 'All is not what it seems.' I thought he was kind of joking around, but he didn't laugh."

"Anything else?"

Finn snapped his fingers. "Oh, oh, and right before he rode out, he caught my eye and said, 'I've made peace with it.'"

With what? ~ Kresley Cole

I think innovation as a discipline needs to go back and get rethought and revived. There are so many models to talk about innovation, there are so many typologies of innovation, and you have to find a good innovation metric that truly captures the innovation performance of a company. ~ Indra Nooyi

I've tried really hard to care about things that were very different from my parents. I was curious if I could care about [money] on some fundamental level, and I couldn't. That wasn't the metric of success I wanted in my life. I've talked about this to my friends who are doctors and whose parents are doctors, or who are lawyers and their parents are lawyers. It's a funny thing to realize I feel called to this work both as a daughter and also as someone who believes I have contributions to make. ~ Chelsea Clinton

Do what you love, and do it well - that's much more meaningful than any metric. ~ Kevin Systrom

The announcement yesterday follows Obama's 2011 agreement with automakers to build cars that average 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025. But as important as fuel efficiency in automobiles may be, power plants are the largest concentrated source of carbon dioxide emissions. The EPA's new power-plant rules will reduce overall emissions by at least 80 times more metric tons of carbon than the regulations for cars. Almost all credible reports suggest the world is passing the point where it can reverse, or eliminate, global warming. But that only means it's more urgent than ever to push for historic carbon reductions. Nonetheless, many politicians - including the usual global-warming deniers and those from both parties in fossil-fuel-producing states - rushed to claim the new rules would cause steep economic damage. ~ Anonymous

I was having dinner…in London…when eventually he got, as the Europeans always do, to the part about "Your country's never been invaded." And so I said, "Let me tell you who those bad guys are. They're us. WE BE BAD. We're the baddest-assed sons of bitches that ever jogged in Reeboks. We're three-quarters grizzly bear and two-thirds car wreck and descended from a stock market crash on our mother's side. You take your Germany, France, and Spain, roll them all together and it wouldn't give us room to park our cars. We're the big boys, Jack, the original, giant, economy-sized, new and improved butt kickers of all time. When we snort coke in Houston, people lose their hats in Cap d'Antibes. And we've got an American Express card credit limit higher than your piss-ant metric numbers go. You say our country's never been invaded? You're right, little buddy. Because I'd like to see the needle-dicked foreigners who'd have the guts to try. We drink napalm to get our hearts started in the morning. A rape and a mugging is our way of saying 'Cheerio.' Hell can't hold our sock-hops.
We walk taller, talk louder, spit further, fuck longer and buy more things than you know the names of. I'd rather be a junkie in a New York City jail than king, queen, and jack of all Europeans. We eat little countries like this for breakfast and shit them out before lunch. ~ P.J. O'Rourke

Don't just climb the ladder of success - a ladder that leads, after all, to higher and higher levels of stress and burnout - but chart a new path to success, remaking it in a way that includes not just the conventional metrics of money and power, but a third metric that includes well-being, wisdom, wonder and giving, so that the goal is not just to succeed but to thrive. ~ Arianna Huffington

I can taste one sugar crystal, just like I can feel one Cupid (the metric unit of measurement for love). ~ Jarod Kintz

He would never be comforted by the adage "God doesn't give us more than we can handle" after that. Because what is the metric of handling something? Not killing yourself? ~ Taffy Brodesser-Akner

I don't discount that in the end, everything I do, say, write and am will amount to a whole lot of not much; I just don't think it's a relevant metric. The relevant metric is: Have I constructed a life that gives me happiness, allows me to give happiness, and allows for this life to have meaning within its admittedly limited context? If I am succeeding in this particular metric, I think I'm doing pretty well. ~ John Scalzi

'Hound Dog' took like twelve minutes. That's not a complicated piece of work. But the rhyme scheme was difficult. Also the metric structure of the music was not easy. 'Kansas City' was maybe eight minutes, if that. Writing the early blues was spontaneous. You can hear the energy in the work. ~ Jerry Leiber

The top bag popped, and a metric ton of old lasagna spilled onto my pants. The stench of soured spaghetti sauce washed over me. Ew. Of all the trash from this whole giant building, I had to step on a bag from the food court. Damn it. ~ Ilona Andrews

If someone like Karl Rove had wanted to neutralize the most creative, intelligent, and passionate members of his opposition, he'd have a hard time coming up with a better tool than Burning Man. Exile them to the wilderness, give them a culture in which alpha status requires months of focus and resource-consumptive preparation, provide them with metric tons of psychotropic confusicants, and then ... ignore them. It's a pretty safe bet that they won't be out registering voters, or doing anything that might actually threaten electoral change, when they have an art car to build. ~ John Perry Barlow

If God wanted us to use the metric system, He would have given us ten fingers and ten toes. ~ Judith Stone

At HubSpot, VORP means evaluating the difference between what you are paid and the least amount the company could pay someone else to do your job. It's a vicious metric, with only one goal, which is to drive the price of labor as low as possible. ~ Dan Lyons

The metric system was designed to get people to enter charity runs.Do you think you would go run a 3.1 mile race? No, but if somebody says, hey, 5 km. You go, 5km sounds pretty impressive. ~ Greg Gutfeld

Drugs have taught an entire generation of kids the metric system ~ P. J. O'Rourke

Whereas marketing was once brand-based, with growth hacking it becomes metric and ROI driven. ~ Ryan Holiday

some 365 billion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere. ~ Elizabeth Kolbert

Energy-momentum tells the metric fluid how to flow.
The metric fluid tells energy-momentum how to flow.
Electric charge tells the electromagnetic fluid how to flow.
The electromagnetic fluid tells electric charge how to flow.
Weak charge tells the weak fluid how to flow.
The weak fluid tells weak charge how to flow.
Strong charge tells the strong fluid how to flow.
The strong fluid tells strong charge how to flow. ~ Frank Wilczek

What I like about Sapphics is the music of a non-iambic metric in English. ~ Marilyn Hacker

WITHOUT GRACE, MINIMALISM IS ANOTHER METRIC FOR PERFECTION. Chasing ~ Erin Loechner

A startup can focus on only one metric. So you have to decide what that is and ignore everything else. ~ Noah Kagan

There's might too in the incomplete. In feeling fractional. A failure to carry out is perhaps no failure at all, but rather a minced metric of splendor. The ongoing. The outlawed. The no-patrol. The act of making loose. Of not doing as you've been told. Of betting on miscalculations and cul-de-sacs. Why force conciliation when, from time to time, long-held deep breaths follow what we consider defeat? Why not want a little mania? The shrill of chance, of what's weird. Of purple hats and hiccups. Endurance is a talent that seldom worries about looking good, and abiding has its virtues even when the tongue dries. The intention shouldn't only be to polish what we start but to acknowledge that beginning again and again can possess the acquisitive thrill of a countdown that never reaches zero. Groping ~ Durga Chew-Bose

Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

in the future, the defining metric for organizations won't be ROI (Return on Investment), but ROL (Return on Learning). ~ Salim Ismail

Compassion has more to do with the attitude we bring to our encounters with other people than with any quantifiable metric of giving. ~ Sharon Salzberg

I frequently compose out the entire metric structure of a piece in modified cyclic form, where each cyclic revolution undergoes some form of 'variation' much as if measure lengths were concrete musical 'material.' ~ Brian Ferneyhough

The weightlifting competition I saw was the women's 63 kg class. I'm not sure whether this means the actual women weighed 63 kg or the weights they lifted weighed 63 kg. Or possibly the temperature in the weightlifting hall was 63 kg. There's no way to know for sure without finding out what a "kg" is, and my belief, as an American, is that if I have to start understanding the metric system, then the terrorists have won. ~ Dave Barry

The Center for Energy and Climate Solutions determined in 2000 that the Internet saved 1.5 billion square feet in retail space and 2 billion square feet of office space and reduced the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere by 35 million metric tons. ~ Richard Stim

People who use the number of friends they have on Facebook as a metric of their social standing are fooling themselves. You can share videos of fainting goats with hundreds of acquaintances and thousands of followers, but you can trust a secret only with a handful of true friends. ~ David McRaney

The single best machine to measure trust is a human being. We haven't figured out a metric that works better than our own sort of, like, 'There's something fishy about you.' ~ Simon Sinek

But when we become aware of how the school system is a conditioning agent to instill in children obedience to authority, passivity, and tolerance to tedium for the sake of external rewards, we begin to question school performance as a metric of well-being. Maybe a healthy child is one who resists schooling and standardization, not one who excels at it. Then I ~ Charles Eisenstein

I realized that I needed to code this thing in a new way, so to speak. Jokingly at first, and then more seriously, I said I needed a metric for measuring what I was achieving, so that I would be able to take stock at the end of my life.
I chose one that seemed rather silly, but that I've actually taken to heart. I've developed a list of toxic chemicals that are generally agreed to be environmental health hazards of a very significant magnitude. I've decided that the world isn't big enough for them and me. So they have to go. I have dedicated myself to the removal of this series of chemicals from commerce. That way, I can mark my success not only in terms of this passion, but also in very clear behavioral terms. ~ Ken Geiser

God invented man, and man invented the metric system. ~ Salvador Dali

One buzzphrase that arose was 'sustainable development', which was used in two very different senses by opposing groups, because it left vague by what metric sustainability might be measured. Environmental groups meant by 'sustainability' a holistic approach by which life as we know it might be sustained. Scientists talked about 'sustainable cities' to mean cities that would not be destroyed by flooding in the wake of global warming. But to others, 'sustainable' meant a financial approach by which the oil industry as we know it might be sustained: sustainability was the minimum amount of environmental care that was affordable by those whose activities harmed the environment. ~ Steven Poole

Here is a bold embrace of internationalism. Let's join the rest of the world and go metric. ~ Lincoln Chafee

Jeter's work ethic, kneaded into the dough and manifesting itself in the leavening of his metric loaf, has already nourished the dossier with which his contracts are negotiated. ~ Lonnie Wheeler

Write as you like, use the rhythms that come out, try different instruments, sit at the piano, destroy the metric, shout instead of singing, blow your guitar and ring the horn. Hate mathematics, and love eddies. Creation is a bird without a flight plan, that will never fly in a straight line. ~ Violeta Parra

G.D.P. is not a measure of how much value is produced for consumers. Everybody should recognize that G.D.P. is not a welfare metric. ~ Erik Brynjolfsson

In the heavens we discover [stars] by their light, and by their light alone ... the sole evidence of the existence of these distant worlds ... that each of them is built up of molecules of the same kinds we find on earth. A molecule of hydrogen, for example, whether in Sirius or in Arcturus, executes its vibrations in precisely the same time. Each molecule therefore throughout the universe bears impressed upon it the stamp of a metric system as distinctly as does the metre of the Archives at Paris, or the royal cubit of the Temple of Karnac. ~ James Clerk Maxwell

(The secret of unification, we will see, lies in expanding Riemann's metric to N-dimensional space and then chopping it up into rectangular pieces. Each rectangular piece corresponds to a different force. In this way, we can describe the various forces of nature by slotting them into the metric tensor like pieces of a puzzle. This is the mathematical expression of the principle that higher-dimensional space unifies the laws of nature, that there is "enough room" to unite them in N-dimensional space. More precisely, there is "enough room" in Riemann's metric to unite the forces of nature.) ~ Michio Kaku

Sorry, hang on, I still don't speak metric," I interrupted.
"You nonconformists are so tiresome," he said. ~ Heather Cocks

Goals are for losers. Your mind isn't magic. It's a moist computer you can program. The most important metric to track is your personal energy. Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success. Happiness is health plus freedom. Luck can be managed, sort of. Conquer shyness by being a huge phony (in a good way). Fitness is the lever that moves the world. Simplicity transforms ordinary into amazing. ~ Scott Adams

One quarter of a mile is, in metric terms, about 400 metres. I believe the world record for a man to cover this distance by use of his legs is about forty something seconds. At that time, I would have bet any amount of money that I would have beaten the world record at that distance as I sprinted like a tornado across the open farmer's fields. ~ Stephen Richards

You can tell all that about me from your measuring tape?'
'Well, I use the metric system, It's the only way to get really exact numbers. ~ Catherynne M Valente

Tile is going to the landfill by the metric ton. All we have to do it gather it up, glue it down to the floor and grout it. Then you have a tile floor, and not just any tile floor: it's a mosaic of your own choosing. ~ Dan Phillips

With a metric you can really go to town, otherwise it is just abstract nonsense. ~ Jennifer Tour Chayes

The robotic fly that we actually make the most use of in our laboratory is actually not a small thing, it's a giant thing. It has about a meter wing span, and it flaps in three metric tons of mineral oil. And it is a so-called dynamically scaled fly. ~ Michael Dickinson

Most consumers don't have a good metric for deciding on whether the dictionary they want to use is a good one ... so they flip the book over, then go to the back, and it says, 'Over 250,000 entries.' And they go, 'Great, this dictionary must be awesome!' ~ Erin McKean

Europeans hate the way Americans talk. They think we're loud and uncouth and they don't like our jokes, except for Michael Moore. Plus, they resent the fact that they've had to learn our language because if they didn't we wouldn't buy their stupid metric widgets or visit their overpriced ruins. ~ Denis Boyles

One metric catches people. We prefer businesses that drown in cash. An example of a different business is construction equipment. You work hard all year and there is your profit sitting in the yard. We avoid businesses like that. We prefer those that can write us a check at the end of the year. ~ Charlie Munger

The total efforts of the last 20 years of climate policy has likely reduced global emissions by less than 1 percent, or about 250 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. ~ Bjorn Lomborg