http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/09/12/shrinking.kilogram.ap/index.html
hmm, perhaps an ill-defined gravity vector over the mass?? 
I told them. I said “you can’t go assuming that gravity is a universal constant just because it behaves that way for the duration of the experiment.” But did they listen? Of course not.
Perhaps you should have said it more authoritatively.
Reading the article, I think you read it wrong Dale, your rulers should be fine, though dated with most of the rest of the world. But if you were to weigh yourself in kilo’s you might not have an accurate figure for your weight.
Anstapa
Reading the article, I think you read it wrong Dale, your rulers should be fine, though dated with most of the rest of the world. But if you were to weigh yourself in kilo’s you might not have an accurate figure for your weight.
Which might have implecations for fuel capacity on Dale Force One over time.
Anstapa
And that’s why fire engines are red.
djm
I used to work for a local blood bank, going out on blood drives to collect donations. We used a balance scale to measure the appropriate amount of blood which used a brass weight. The FDA requires measuring devices be calibrated every year, including the weights. I thought it was ludicrous that metal weights be sent in to get checked to see if they remained the same weight. Not so crazy, I guess.
The guy in the article said 50 micrograms was the weight of a fingerprint. Did the clean the weights they brought in for comparison???
Dale’s rulers are inaccurate because of the expansion of the universe due to dark energy. They’re not keeping up.
Tony
Being that the newly discovered “discrepancy” is so small, this finding has virtually no effect on anything.
50 micrograms out of a kilogram is 50 parts per million. It most definitely does have an effect. To pick a really extreme example, go into a room with 50 ppm of hydrogen sulfide and see how long you live. Even in mass, errors of this level will have an impact on commerce and science and technology.
It’s known that the American kilogram, which is probably 20 years younger than the French one, has lost about 60 micrograms due to sublimation of the constituent atoms over the last 90-100 years. If the kilograms the French are comparing theirs to are younger, that could explain part of the difference, but I suspect the people who are puzzled by the loss are pretty smart and they’ve eliminated this possibility.
I believe the kilogram is the last standards artifact, that is a physical thing that’s taken as the standard for a measurable quantity. The meter has been supplanted by the cesium clock (it’s a certain number of vibrations, related to the frequency of the clock by the speed of light). I’m a little surprised that the kilogram is still defined by the artifact. There are movements afoot to define it either as a certain number of silicon atoms or to relate it to electromagnetic quantities.
And Dale, your rulers aren’t 11-7/8 inches, they’re 30 cm.
That’s what I’m getting at. You need really extreme examples to see major effects. It’s a very small number. It’s puzzling, but still very small.
Beware the effect of the ‘virtually no effect’! 
All measuring schemes are relative. Even light in a vacuum has been shown to slow down when it passes through sufficient interference. And what was that quantum physics maxim of how the act of measuring a thing changes the very nature of the thing studied? I use this to explain why the boards I cut never quite end up at the length I intended. Quantum mechanics are quite outside my realm of control (but not outside my sphere of influence). 
djm
But people really do die from hydrogen sulfide and (much more often) carbon monoxide poisoning. I just picked H2S because I’ve been evacuated from a building due to a leak of a few micrograms of it. Another example I know of is a microbrewery that was fined thousands of dollars and almost put out of business because they were filling their bottles up a few hundredths of an ounce too full. Okay, that’s more than 50 ppm, but it was their inability to measure it that cost them so much money – your measurements need to be about 10 times as good as what you need to measure.
This is real terror!
Sure. You should have seen the line this morning at Weight Watchers.
Is it just me, or it is .0004 degrees hotter in here?
I was .0004 cents out of tune on my dulcimer this morning. I knew there must be an explanation.
laugh all you want..
But try shorting the IRS .0004 cents and see where it gets you.
This actually effects every government-regulated balance in the world. Here’s how it works: All regulated balances (used in pharma industry, government weighing bridges, grocery shops etc.) must be calibrated anything from once per year to once per day depending on criticality and use. They would be typically calibrated using an in-house weight set or an external calibration contractor. The weight set used would be typically sent out for calibration to a national laboratory once a year. The weight set used by the laboratory is calibrated against the national kilo cylinder. This is one of the cylinders mentioned in the article as being “shipped in periodically from around the world.”
This weight drift throws the whole thing out by 50 micro-grammes.
Make no mistake people, this is a calibration engineer’s definition of Armageddon.