Slashdot Mirror
Will America Ever Go Metric?
poixweryth asks: "Just reading an article pointed to by a recent story in which they refer to "an object bigger than 0.6 mile (1 kilometer) in diameter". This is obviously American journalism. What I want to know is this: is the American public ever going to convert to the metric system?"
Everyone seems to think metric is automaticly better for everything. In fact metric is often worse except for one point: everyone else does it. Americans don't always follow what everyone else does (despite how it seems sometimes).
Imperial is better for fractions. Most imperial systems were designed to support common fractions. 1/3rd a foot is marked on every imperial measuring device. A foot also happens to be a useful measure on a desktop. Of course something about that size would work too, but a foot is what we have. A decimeter is a bit small, but would work, and a meter is too big. (I wonder how many metric people know what a decimeter is without thinking...) Within a desktop area a third of your measure is a common thing to need. A quarter of a foot is useful, and the foot/inch system supports both rather well. Thirds are difficult in metric.
Converting between units is often described as an advantage, but in reality mistakes are made with both systems. If you order a large airplane (ie 200+ passangers) with metric units they build it, but every meaursement is milimeters, from the tollorances (which is .00xx mm) to the overall length (which varies depending on the tempature, but is something like 33000mm). Finially you rarely need to convert units. If I'm dealing with miles (or km) I don't normally need to know more then 1/4th a mile (1/2 km), anything more detailed isn't going to have an effect. (There are exceptions, but for most people and uses you don't need many significant digets.)
Speaking of tolorances most machinsts I know report that the thousandth of an inch happens to be a good tolorance, any metric measurement is either a not enough or more then needed for practical applications. I'm sure this is luck, but it is still a point.
> Right after the Federal Government repeals the
:^)
> income tax and a Libertarian gets elected
> president
And we'll all be typing in Esperanto on our Dvorak-layout keyboards.
Since the Metet was re-defined in the 50s to be some multiple of a wavelength of a specific electromagnetic emission, the definition of an inch to be exactly 2.54 cm or a foot to be .3048 meter changed the length of the foot. To maintain consistency with all the previous surveys that had been performed this was named the International Foot and a US Survey foot was created with a length to be 0.304800609602 (12 sig digits from the sources below).
Add to this difference the fact that some survey calculations are done in State Plane coordinates and even survey calculations done in plane coordinate systems can easily have 8 significant digits, the difference between the two definitions of Foot can be very significant.
Wisconsin Coordinate Systems Handbook Summary of Terms
Mentor Software FAQ
Bleh!
And we still drink in pints!
--
Can you even play MP3s on that thing?
The American public education system as well as scientists and engineers have been teaching almost entirely metric since the '70s. There is no debate what our schools should be and actually are teaching, and the effort at the educational level to use SI cannot go any deeper.
However, there is still a lot British Unit Standard is use. And reversing that is tough. Why? As someone mentioned, it has to do with engineering. Looking at the core three engineering disciplines, I will break it down:
Civil is probably the most entrenched area of British Units. A great majority of this country (at least the East and Midwest, where I've lived and worke) was surveyed and completed by the mid-1800s. Plats, surveys and all major reference points are still in British Units, although civil engineers have been using 1/10th of a foot (instead of an inch) to reduce confusion for the past century. All new submissions are required to have both in most federal and state mandates.
But there is a major problem with the entire conversion process. Remember all those tests on significant digits? Well, a number of people forget the basic concepts and use only 3 significant digits for conversion (e.g., 2.54cm = 1inch). When spread over several square miles, that lack of attention can lead to someone being cheated an acre of land! It's an entire mess, hence many surveyors and engineers still use British units alongside the required metric ones to keep the numbers correct.
This really makes you wonder if metric is a good choice for civil engineering yet, especially land surveying. The lack of attention to significant digits is really causing a backlash against those making these mandates (yet not caring about accuracy). I should know, my father is a land surveyor and I occassionally help him out.
Some of the greatest booms in the US' industry might came at the turn of the century and during World War II. Not surprisingly, all these machines are British standard. Changing this is slow task as nobody wants to chuck working machines, let alone possibly have to change to metrica suppliers who are harder to find. Furthermore, running with a dual-setup only adds confusion which, again, hurts their bottom line.
You can see the mechanical influence in just about anything, from American cars to computer enclosures (see Electrical below). You can always tell what parts are made in America (or North American) and which are foreign, the former are (usually) in British, the later in metric. With more and more American cars just assembled in the US, while parts are made abroad, the are becoming more and more metric. And as American machines wear out, you'll see entire companies switch to metric.
Now under mechanical is aerospace. And I'm personally sick of the ignorant bashing of NASA and contractors here on /. NASA and contractors are filled with metric spewing engineers -- I know, I worked in the aerospace field for 3 years. But the machinists and technicians are usually older gentlemen with quite a number of British-based machines and techniques. "Balast" (arbitrary weight used to modify center of gravity, etc...) is a very important in aerospace and while the engineers might do all the math, we don't assemble the rocket. Again, another issue in conversion.
Electrical technologies are relatively new in the engineering discipline scheme. As such, by the time electricity came about (late 1800s), use of the metric was widespread among the American scientists who helped inventor or cultivate those technologies. Although British units were used at the time, most of the basics of electronics were set in stone at its infancy (volts, amps, watts, etc..>). From By the 1950s, most electrical engineering, technology and well as end-user usage programs focused on using only metric.
Now getting back to my previous mention of computer enclosures, ever look at a spec sheet? Note how the dimensions of the enclosure are in British, yet the dimensions of the power supply are in metric! And it's not just because a good number of electronics come from outside the US, the US engineering industry has been metric for a long time. Sure, PCBs are still referenced in "mills" (thousands of an inch), but most of the time the mills spec is actually just an conversion approximation of the actual size in milli or micrometers (aka microns).
As an engineer with a degree in electrical and computer engineering and one who currently works in the semiconductor industry, when accuracy matters, metric is always the standard (using mills for only quick representation in size of larger, lesser important dimensions).
Again, the issues are deep. I've personally seen them working in all three major engineering disciplines over the past 13 years. Anything electrical is basically metric here in the US. But there are still deep investments in British machines and other mechanical field equipment that will take time to change (but will). And as far as I am concerned, moving any civil standard away from British standard is not a good idea at this time, and given the reinvestment in re-surveying the country, I'd say it's not going to change for awhile (unless satellites can fully replace land surveyors, which is not happening for various reasons).
I appreciate everyone who took the time to read this. Most /.'ers postings on NASA and other engineering firms have been leaving bad tastes in my mouth.
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
-- Bryan "TheBS" Smith
Independent Author, Consultant and Trainer
As a 17 year old uni student in the US, I can tell you exactly why my general peer group doesn't accept the metric system: we have no real experience with it. I think that's why most people don't accept it, in fact. It's very easy to understand (powers of ten, consistent relation between units via multiplication and division), but it's very difficult to apply if you grow up with english units. For instance, I can judge people's height in feet/inches very easily. Doing the same with meters is nigh impossible. Or worse, hefting something and determining its weight in kilos.
That's why I think it'll take a lot more than a just a few generations going by. I think it'll take putting the metric units in big print and the english in small. I think it'll take students being taught metric before english. And, most importantly, it'll take time. The US has shown great reluctance to even try to use metric units (the token effort with food and car spedometers is about it), so it'll probably be 3 or 4 generations before the english system is phased out.
Of course, looking at Canada, I see a middle stage where a lot of things are still english, despite it being a 'metric country,' so we're not the only backwards place in the world. :)
The funny thing is that (even leaving aside the fact that the UK now uses mostly metric units) what Americans call 'English' units aren't anyway. For example, UK pints contain 20 fluid ounces. And UK fluid ounces are 28.4ml not 29.6ml, and thus weigh almost exactly an ounce, unlike the American ones!
11.0010010000111111011010101000100010000101101000
Though that is true according to Oxford, there's still a lot of textbooks that haven't grasped that.
Maybe I should start a campaign to rid the English language of all words that end in 're', but that would end up quite silly, with such sentences as "I heer you've been over theer" (though in some accents, this wouldn't be distinguishable).
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
First: all systems are arbitrary. As long as you're clear on the conversion units, everything's kosher. 5280 feet in a mile is no more inherently bizarre than 1000 meters in a kilometer.
... of random, meaningless, individual relationships between all of your measurements.
.555 degrees C
The original mile was defined by the Roman Legions. A thousand Legionnaire paces became a mile. This makes perfect sense in an era where most people traveled by walking from place to place. The original foot was defined by the length of an English monarch's foot--okay, that one's silly.
Insofar as why water freezes at 32 and boils at 212, you can thank Fahrenheit. His temperature scale was originally conceived of for medical purposes, not scientific ones. He defined the nominal body temperature as 96 degrees (both to allow high fevers to be an even 100, and because 96 was evenly divisible by a lot of numbers). For the zero point, he decided the freezing temperature of salt water would be the coldest anyone would need to measure, so that became the 0.
Today, better thermometers than Fahrenheit had tell us the body temperature is 98.6 degrees. Salt water still freezes at zero, though.
Imperial is only "clear and consistent" if you don't mind a bushell [sic]
As it turns out, the relationships are not random nor meaningless. As I said earlier, as long as you've got a decent memory for constants, conversion between the two is very straightforward.
1 mi = 1.609344 km
1 in = 2.54 cm
c = 186,282.3979 miles per second
1 pound = 454 grams
1 kilo = 2.205 pounds
1 quart approx eq. 1 liter, to 3% accuracy
1 calorie = 4.1868 joules
1 degree F =
England is a subset of Britain, just as Wales and Northern Ireland are. Therefore, it's as fair to say the Imperial system is Scottish as it is to say it's English.
:)
Any attribute of a set belongs equally to all elements of the subset.
Why not? Because it's a complete nonissue. If you talk to a scientist, they're going to be comfortable with the metric system. Whether it's 20mi or 32km, I don't care; it's all the same to me.
That leaves the conventional world as the last holdout, and even there it doesn't matter very much. What matters is that the people understand what the measurements are. If I were to tell someone asking for directions, "Sure, just go a klick down the road, take a right, and it's a half-klick on your left" it would make no sense at all to them--but if I were to say "sure, it's about six-tenths of a mile down the road, turn right, and about a third of a mile on your left", it'd make perfect sense.
Why should they change? They've got measurements they're happy with. Now, admittedly, if they're going to travel in foreign countries they'd better learn the metric system--but since you can get by perfectly fine in America without knowing the metric system, the conventional wisdom seems to be "why bother?"
As for me, I'm happy with either system. Doesn't matter to me which system of measurements you use, as long as you're clear and consistent.
It seems pretty certain that eventually the US will go metric. I think that the country is basically waiting for a couple of generations to kick off first.
All school age students in the US learn the Metric system in addition to the English system. It is used exclusively in science classes and often in math as well.
The problem is that older people are not comfortable with it. They don't understand it and don't want to learn. Eventually, everyone will know both and I think that you will start to see a phase out of the old system in favor of the metric system as has already been the case in the rest of the world.
I believe it is simply a matter of time. Counter to conventional wisdom the US is a slow mover on a lot of things. The metric system is just one of many issues. But its inherent superiority will no doubt have it prevail.
Bingo. The US is perfectly comfortable wallowing in british units forever. Left to inertia, it will take a thousand years. Metric won't take hold without a hard kick in the public's collective ass.
A simple first step would be for the federal government to require all-metric measurements on government documents and contracts. Big industries would have to use metric. Their workers would have to learn metric. And so on.
Except that Dubya certainly would never do such a thing, just like he'd never install solar panels on the White House roof. Guess metric will have to wait for another decade...
Mostly? Hardly!
Radio reporter: "Witnesses report that the offender was approximately 183 centimetres tall..." (approximately?)
The media aren't exactly the smartest bunch of people, they say stupid things all the time...
Milk comes in 600 and 300 ml cartons, not 500 and 250 ml.
No, Milk comes in 1 and 2 lt cartons, with 600 and 300 ml available. 600 are 300 may be a throw-over from Imperial, but they are still round metric units.
A standard student's ruler is 30 cm.
1 in = 2.54 cm
12 in = 30.48 cm
That is almost half a centimetre off! We are hardly forcing the ruler to be an Imperial size. 30 is just a logical length, as 25 does not make the length of most school books (and you can't try to put logic into lopping 5cm off the size of a book so it fits 'the system')
Speed limits in parking lots are often marked as 8 or even 17 km/h.
These are private properties, and are VERY rare. All official streets are 'round' numbers (100 km/h standard of freeways, 60 km/h [and becoming 50 km/h in some areas for safety reasons] standard speed in residential areas.)
And of course, beer, oysters and eggs are sold by the dozen and half-dozen. When these items are sold in 10's and 5's, maybe then our conversion will be complete.
Tradition in sale. There is no point in selling less product just to conform to a system. Eggs hardly need to be sold in such a way they easily divide into 10.
This is the stage we are at 25-30 years after adopting metric units? It seems like the whole process is gonna take maybe 4 or 5 generations.
I am the next generation on from adopting metric, and I don't know Imperial AT ALL. I assure you, Imperial is dead to anyone under 25. Within 1 more generation, Imperial will be totally gone. And that is a very good thing.
Every time this comes up, labor unions squawk that they need vast sums of government money for their members to retool and retrain, and conservatives say "in your dreams pal. Buy your own tools and education." Also, our present system is so deeply entwined in our everyday life (walls are 8 feet high, paper is 8 1/2 by 11 inches, nuts and bolts are in fractional inches, etc.) that a conversion would be wrenching indeed (pun intended).
Of course, looking at Canada, I see a middle stage where a lot of things are still english, despite it being a 'metric country,' so we're not the only backwards place in the world.
Speaking as a Canadian citizen who grew up *after* Canada went Metric in 1976-1977, yeah, it's screwed up.
Metric is wonderful. It's easy to cope with, it's the measurement system embraced by science everywhere, it's clear and logical and not based on a dead king's body parts.
I never learned the English system in school. Never. It was briefly discussed, primarily in history classes, but that was it.
And yet, I'm 6'4" tall. I weigh 180 lbs. I have a 33" waist. I have *no idea* what those are in meters, kilograms and centimeters.
Nor can I look at someone and estimate their height in meters. In fact, whenever I estimate the length of something, it's in inches and feet. My 1976 Dodge Ram is about 21 feet long. My penis... Well, let's just say that it's proportional to my height.
Yards escape me, and meters I just can't eyeball.
My old Dodge is a Canadian model of the Ram. The only difference between it and an American Dodge Ram is that my '76 was one of the very first vehicles in Canada to have a Metric speedometer and odometer.
Now, even though my speedometer is in kilometers an hour (with little numbers for MPH, it's just the reverse of an American speedo), I think of speed in miles per hour. But to really mess things up, I think of distance in kilometers.
When I'm working on a car or truck (one of my favorite hobbies), I can always look at an SAE bolt and grab the right wrench to fit it. 7/16", 1/2", 9/16"... no problem. And yet, while with Metric bolts you don't have to do that "which is bigger" fractional conversion in your head, I still can't look at a valve cover bolt on a Chevrolet Cavalier (all recent cars are built with Metric fasteners) and say "that's 12mm" or "that's 13mm".
My truck has a 400 cubic inch engine. To convert that to liters so that I can really intimidate the jackass in the whiny little Honda with the tinted windows and the puny 1.5L engine, my 400 CID V8, converted to Metric, has a displacement of 6.6L.
Fluids? I think in liters. I know what 8 ounces looks like, but I pour gasoline into my truck by the liter. It takes 70L to fill my tank. Divide that by four (approximately), that's almost 18 gallons.
And finally, despite all that, I have no idea how many L/100km my truck takes. But I do know that my truck get about 8 miles per gallon.
So, I'm a mess. Do I feel handicapped by the fact that I mix the two measuring systems? No.
One of the few compelling Canadian politicians of all time, former Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent, was perfectly bilingual. He spoke English and French with equal ease. And he was once asked by a reporter which language he thought in. Mr. St. Laurent's reponse was that he thought in whichever language he best knew the subject.
And this is a fairly good approximation of how I switch back and for between measuring systems.
How do I feel about the Metric system?
I love it. I wish I used it for everything. It *is* legitimately easier.
But if there's *anything* that has to be remembered about this is that while it seems like an easy switch on the surface, I'd still plan that it will take several generations to make the switch.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Metric countries often have metric sports --Aussie Rules Football uses meters (as far as I've ever seen it), ditto most Rugby & Soccer.
:)
American & Canadian Football. Yards. 'Nuff said.
Baseball. Those numbers on the outfield wall? Feet. Except in Toronto & Montreal where they have smaller numbers underneath in meters.
Boxing. I have a hard time picturing Michael Buffer calling out: "In this corner, standing 191 cm tall, weighing in at 103.2 kilos*...."
Whenever I hear Pat Summerall & John Madden say something like "...and Brett Favre is sacked for an 8 meter loss", then the US will be officially be metric.
* - In America, a "kilo" is a measurement of illegal drugs.
Thus sprach DrQu+xum, SID=218745.
DrQu+xum: Proof that the lameness filter doesn't work.
As for the food packaging...
A five pack of beer is shaped really funny, and takes more effort to pack multiple units together. Ten packs aren't so bad, but if a case turned into 20 instead of 24, we'd have a lot of upset people...
And also, why are hot dogs sold in packs of 10, when hot dog buns are sold in packs of 8 or 12!!! it just never adds up 8^)
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Give 'em 2.54 centimeters, they'll take 1.6 kilometers :>.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.