Another English/Metric "Spacecraft" Problem

SuperDry writes "There's been another spacecraft failure that's been attributed to an English/Metric units problem, this time at Tokyo Disneyland's Space Mountain. An axle broke on a "spacecraft" (a.k.a. roller coaster train) mid-ride, causing it to derail (nobody was hurt). The final investigation report has been released, and the root cause has been determined to be a part being the wrong size due to a conversion of the master plans in 1995 from English units to Metric units. In 2002, new axles were mistakenly ordered using the pre-1995 English specifications instead of the current Metric specifications. Apparently size does matter, even if it's only a 0.86mm difference."

Comments

Proble?

[waitigetit]

It's more like an English spelling problem, no?

Re:Proble?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't that be a .0338582677 inch difference?

Re:Proble?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand this story - how many inches is 0.86mm?

A what?

[98jonesd]

whats a proble? ;-)

Re:A what?

[Anonymous Coward]

uh you know it should be "what's", right? I mean if you're going to blast someone for spelling....

Re:A what?

[famebait]

Proble just naive pronounciation-based spelling.

Re:A what?

[98jonesd]

he he, thanks for that.

Re:A what?

[Anonymous Coward]

That should be "hee hee".

The source of the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that the metric system is flawed. It is defined in terms of the size of 18th century railroad tie sizes, which is totally arbitrary.

Re:The source of the problem

[andy666]

I think the joke is that thing about how the space shuttle wheel base is the same as Roman carts..

Re:The source of the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, your's is.

Re:The source of the problem

[jalet]

in 18th century there were no railroads

Re:The source of the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

The meter is based on how far light travels in a vacuum in a certain number of seconds. And the second is determined by atomic transitions. But I can see how these two things can be totally arbitrary....

Re:The source of the problem

[andy666]

Actually, Einstein, if you want to know, the meter was defined originally as the distance from the north pole to the equator divided by 10000.

Re:The source of the problem

[andy666]

WRONG! See http://www.history.rochester.edu/steam/brown/chpt2 .html

MANY persons, otherwise well-informed upon general topics, believe that railroads were constructed especially for locomotives, as the best-adapted road for the accom- modation of that peculiar machine and its train of cars. They never call to mind that a locomotive is a modern invention, and, for want of access to works such as we have referred to, they are not informed that a railroad is an ancient institution (if we may apply such a term to such a subject). They never have dreamed nor ever imagined that this peculiar kind of road was invented and in use several centuries ago, but, like the great auxiliary, the locomotive, was very defective and simple in its primitive state, and since that time, like the latter, has been subject to vast and continued improvements. Before, however, we enter upon the subject for which these pages were designedN" the history of the first locomotives in America"Nit will not, we trust, be deemed inappropriate here to devote a small space in our work in describing the peculiar kind of road upon which the locomotive travels, now known universally as the railroad; and to such information as we have gathered of its origin and early progress. Various devices have been employed, from the period when wheelcarriages were first used, for facilitating the movement over the ground in transportation. These devices, however, were mostly limited to the smoothing, leveling, and hardening the surface of the way. The early Egyptians, in transporting the immense stones they used in the erection of the vast pyramids from the quarries, learned the advantage of hard, smooth, and solid track-ways, and the remains of such, formed of large blocks of stone, are said to have been found on the line of the great road they constructed for this purpose. The ancient Romans made also some approach to the invention of railroads, in the celebrated Appian Way. This was constructed of blocks of stone fitted closely together, the surface presenting a smooth and hard track for the wheels. In modern times such tracks or roadways were constructed in several European citiesNLondon, Pisa, Milan, and many others. The first instance on record of rails being used on highways was as early as the year 1630, over two and a quarter centuries ago. They were invented by a person named Beaumont, and built and used for the transportation of coal from the mines near New castle, in England. Old Roger North alludes to railways as being in use in the neighborhood of the river Tyne in the year 1676, and he thus describes them: The rails of timber were placed end to end and exactly straight, and in two lines parallel to each other. On these bulky carts were made to run on four rollers fitting these rails, whereby the carriage was made so easy that one horse would draw four or five caldrons of coal at a load. We read of railways existing in Scotland in 1745, at the time of the Scotch rebellion. These railways were laid down between the Tranent coal-mines and the harbor of Cockenzie, in East Lothian. Improvements were made on these roads and continued until 1765, 2 when they began to assume the forms of our present roads, even to the use of flanges upon the wheels; but up to this period no iron surface was ever heard of The mode of constructing a railroad at that period was as follows: After the surface was brought to as perfect a level as possibleNor incline, as the case might be Nsquare blocks of wood, called sleepers, about six feet long, were laid two or three feet apart across the track; upon these two long strips of wood, six or seven inches wide mod about five inches deep, were fastened by pins to the sleepers, and parallel to each other, but about four feet apart. Upon this wooden rail was spiked a projecting round moulding of wood, and the wheels were hollowed out like a pulley to fit upon the round surface of the wooden molding upon the rails. The fir

Re:The source of the problem

[FireFury03]

Errm... so 10000 metres is the distance between the equator and the North pole? (i.e. 10km). You live on a very small planet with a circumference of 40km then.

Re:The source of the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it is defined to be exactly the length of my dick. Which I can tell you from experience fits nicely into yo mama's ass.

Re:The source of the problem

[jalet]

Yes, yes, yes.

I thought about locomotives.

Re:The source of the problem

[kinnell]

Actually, it was a decimal fraction of the distance between the north pole and the Paris meridian.

Re:The source of the problem

[B'Trey]

No. The meter is currently defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299 792 458 of a second. (The definition has changed a couple of times as science has advanced to make the definition more precise.) The meter is based on the Earth's merideans (lines of longitude) - it is 1 / 10 millionth of one meridian.

Re:The source of the problem

[keith6689]

It was actually originally intended to be one 10 millionth the distance between the north pole and the equator.

In 1983 it was redefined as the distance traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.

If you are going to bitch at someone for getting it wrong, you could at least get it right yourself.

Re:The source of the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

No I don't think so. It is defined in terms of the wavelength of krypton 86.

Re:The source of the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

The Paris meridian ? Fuck that shit. The metric system was defined by the English, and it is the distance to London.

Re:The source of the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Well of you want to get specific, sure, it has to be based on something to start with. But what I was trying to say is that it is defined exactly and not arbitrary at all.

Re:The source of the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

but that's not what it was originally defined as idiot boy.

Re:The source of the problem

[imsabbel]

No, the wavelenght of krypton is used to define the second combined with the speed of light and the meter.

Re:The source of the problem

[Newtonian_p]

And you think the English system isn't arbitrary. At least the metric system is based on multiples of 10 just like are numeral system making calculations easier.

E.g.: 1/23 = 0.0435, so how much is a 23rd of 1 km? 43.5 m. But how much is a 23rd of a mile, that demands a bit more computation.

Re:The source of the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Or even nicer:
they're as wide as two roman era horses' asses

Re:The source of the problem

[lxt]

So they measured the distance between the equator and the North pole in meters right? Wait a minute...

Re:The source of the problem

[smittyoneeach]

meridian
1. An imaginary great circle on the earth's surface passing through the North and South geographic poles. All points on the same meridian have the same longitude.
2. Either half of such a great circle from pole to pole.

So, the distance between the north pole and the Paris meridian == 0

Aren't these standards-based posts just wonderful for brining out the pedant in all of us?

Possibly you meant 'Parisian latitude'

Re:The source of the problem

[kinnell]

Last time this was mentioned, I pointed out that it was related to the distance between the pole and Paris, and someone "corrected" me saying it was the Paris meridian. I think I can therefore be confident of the following:

1. The metre has nothing to do with the equator, and something to do with Paris.
2. Slashdot is not the place to look for enlightened discussion

Re:The source of the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Chorus:
My Metric Milkshake brings all the imperial engineers to the yard,
And their like "It's better than the US"
Damn right, It's better than the US,
I can teach you, but I have to charge (2x)

Vrs1:
I know you want it...
The thing that makes me,
What the scientists go crazy for,
They lose their probes, The way I calculate,
I think it's time...

Vamp:
(La-La-La-La-la)
Warm it up,
(La-La-La-La-la)
The rockets are waiting,
(La-La-La-La-la)
Warm it up,
(La-La-La-La-la)
The rockets are waiting..

Re:The source of the problem

[FireFury03]

Someone probably paced the distance :)

Re:The source of the problem

[B'Trey]

Have a look here.

Re:The source of the problem

[saforrest]

Is that the metric system is flawed. It is defined in terms of the size of 18th century railroad tie sizes, which is totally arbitrary.

Mmm-hmm. So, clearly, defining length in terms of the feet of a 1200-year old dead Frankish king is a better choice?

Re:The source of the problem

[andy666]

YES! I welcome our new dead Frankish king overlords!!

Re:The source of the problem

[Deflagro]

Please tell me that's now how the unit of measurement was actually created.... It's a total burn on that idiot above, but it's just hard to believe.

Re:The source of the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the joke is that thing about how the space shuttle wheel base is the same as Roman carts.

Yep, it's a joke.

Oh wait. Sorry. Not joke. I meant urban legend. That's the word. It's an urban legend.

Kind of like the thing about NASA developping a multi-million-dollar space pen while the russians wisely just used pencils. Fun for people to send chain e-mails to each other about, but not true.

Re:The source of the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

The meter is based on the Earth's merideans (lines of longitude) - it is 1 / 10 millionth of one meridian.

And the reason we say "based on" is because the French failed to measure the meridean correctly when they were figuring out the length of the meter, so it turns out to be a length which is every bit as arbitrary as the yard.

Re:The source of the problem

[Golias]

E.g.: 1/23 = 0.0435, so how much is a 23rd of 1 km? 43.5 m. But how much is a 23rd of a mile, that demands a bit more computation.

That would be 0.435 miles.

We use decimal fractions of miles all the time in the US when measuring long distances. We even have 0.1 mile markers on all of our highways.

Next question.

Re:The source of the problem

[jridley]

You have no idea what you're talking about. You're confusing urban legends with reality. In fact, you're confusing one urban legend with another.

Go do some research on what the metric system is based on.

Besides, I see no reason why making a meter this size or that size alters its legitimacy. It's a system based on intertied and base-10-divisible units of measure. What the original source of the measure was is irrelevant. But in any case, it wasn't railroad tie sizes.

Re:The source of the problem

[saforrest]

Please tell me that's now how the unit of measurement was actually created.... It's a total burn on that idiot above, but it's just hard to believe.

Well, like its name suggests, a foot was originally supposed to be the length of someone's (specifically some nobleman's) foot. In France before the revolution, the analogous unit was called pied du roi, "king's foot".

Who this king exactly was isn't known, I think, because there were probably many kings who went around breaking conventions and imposing their own measurements on the population, but Charlemagne is usually cited.

IIRC, the same goes for yards, I think.

More about foot as a unit of mesaurement is available here.

Re:The source of the problem

[B'Trey]

I'm not sure how far off the French were, but I don't think it's possible to "correctly" measure the meridian. The Earth is far from a perfect sphere, and the length of an actual meridian would not only vary depending on where it was located, but it would be fractal - it's distance would vary depending on the scale at which is was measured. It's possible to normalize the shape of the Earth, and come up with a reasonable value for the meridian, and I don't know how close to 10 million meters that would be.

Re:The source of the problem

[Valdrax]

We'll, it's close to the history such things -- the use of a foot as the standard of measurement dates back to prehistory. Sometime in the 13th century, King Edward I of England ordered a permanent yardstick of iron to be made for use as a standard by the whole kingdom and declared the foot to be 1/3 of that length and the inch to be 1/36. That yardstick is pretty close to today's measure of a yard. However, King Edward II reverted back to the more primative measure of an inch as "three barleycorns, round and dry."

I pulled this from an article that I found via Google. From the same article:

In spite of repeated requests in Congress, there was no legal length standard in the U.S. until 1832. More or less authentic copies of the British copies of the yard were used as length prototypes. In 1832, the Treasury Department decided to admit as a legal Yard the distance between the lines 27 and 63 of a certain bronze bar, 82 inches in length, bought in 1813 in England for the Federal Survey Department. When the British yard bar, which was destroyed in 1834, was replaced in 1855, a new bronze copy No. 11 was sent to the United States which became the legal American Yard Standard.

Also from the timeline:

"1959 - Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States adopted common standards for the inch-pound system in metric terms. One inch was made equivalent to 2.54 centimetres and 1 pound was made equivalent to 0.453 592 37 kilograms. (The Coast and Geodetic Survey, which had used a slightly different conversion factor previously, retained their established relationship of 1 inch equaling 2.540.005 centimetres because of the extensive revisions which would be necessary to their charts and measurement records. The resulting foot based on this retained conversion is known as the U.S. Survey foot)."

Re:The source of the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

"defining length in terms of the feet of a 1200-year old dead Frankish king is a better choice?"

Jeez, I hope he's dead. Frankish kings don't even live half that long.

Re:The source of the problem

[Uber Banker]

It is very alien to me why it is called 'the English system'. In England the system historically used is called the Imperial system, and there are some differences in Imperial measurement and what Americans call English measurement, AND in England they use the metric system (except old people who use Imperial). Very confusing.

Re:The source of the problem

[VickyNaylor]

according to this site the circumference of the earth measured through the poles is 40,008 km which fits pretty well with the equator theory.

Re:The source of the problem

[VickyNaylor]

or in DIY shops where it is common to see a sheet of wood 4ft by 3ft by 12mm for instance.

Re:The source of the problem

[VickyNaylor]

here is a page that shows just how different the English and American versions of units like gallons and tons etc. Even fluid ounces are different.

Re:The source of the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Easy! Put some really long sticks in the ocean bed spaced at intervals of d centimetres. Then tie a really long string to the sticks at sea level. Mark the end of the string using a pencil. Then cut the string into a suitable number of pieces. As the d -> 0, the length of one of those pieces is 1 metre.

Re:The source of the problem

[Mod Me God]

haha, that's really informative, I've not seen the differences head-to-head before. If I had mod points I'd slap them on you and the grandparent. Funny how the American measurements seem smaller than the Imperial ones.

Re:The source of the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

the metric system was defined in terms of the diameter of the earth, passing thru certain points.

it is now defined as some vibrations of some cesium atom or something.

US system supporters are stupid

Disney

[abh]

How come everything Disney does ends up so Mickey Mouse?

Re:Disney

[firstadopter.com]

Because Disney IS Mickey Mouse. This co is imploding while Pixar is rising.

Who's at fault here, really?

[ObviousGuy]

The Japanese who, like the rest of the modern world, switched to metric years ago?

Or the American designers who couldn't even do simple multiplication in order to convert from English to Metric?

Re:Who's at fault here, really?

[mgs1000]

Or maybe the conversion formula was a bit off?

Re:Who's at fault here, really?

[flewp]

Well, if you RTFA, you'd see that the parts were ordered using older specifications, and the parts delivered were consistent with the designs that were ordered. The problem was they put it in an order for the wrong size.

Consequently, two different drawings existed within our company after the changes were made and the old drawing showing the 44.14 mm diameter was used to order (in August 2002) the axles that were delivered in October 2002.

Re:Who's at fault here, really?

[agentZ]

So in other words it wasn't a metric/inches conversion problem, but rather just using the old blueprints instead of the current one?

Re:Who's at fault here, really?

[sacherjj]

The conversion formula isn't rocket science. 25.4 mm per inch. It's been that way for a LONG time.

Re:Who's at fault here, really?

[lone_marauder]

Hey, I like the metric system. I really do. But sticking to the english system has never caused an aircraft to run out of fuel at altitude, a roller coaster to break, or a spacecraft to crash. The zeal to enforce metric conversion, however, has caused all of those things.

Re:Who's at fault here, really?

[zontroll]

the multiplication isn't so simple. How many digits did he use in the conversion formula? You can calculate the area of a circle using Pi = 3.14 or using Pi = 3.14....(add a million digits here.) You have to be precise enough to the point of being safe when it comes to mechanical measurements and obviously that point wasn't reached here.

Re:Who's at fault here, really?

[mgs1000]

But is 25.4mm/in precise enough for this kind of calculation? The failure was caused by a .86 mm error!

Re:Who's at fault here, really?

[dastrike]

1 inch has been exactly 25.4 mm since 1959.

Re:Who's at fault here, really?

[slycer]

wow.. currently +3 insightful when it has been shown that it was NOT the conversion that caused the problem here..

Re:Who's at fault here, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

As has been said, an inch has been defined to be precisely 25.4 mm (no rounding) since 1959.

Re:Who's at fault here, really?

[Stalus]

The .86 error was because someone decided that they wanted round numbers, so when they changed the spec, they decided to round up. Well, in the process they forgot to throw out the old documentation. So, they ordered the correctly sized part for the old spec and got it wrong.

Probably a good example for software engineering class. "See, changing the specification, once released, may result in bodily harm!"

Re:Who's at fault here, really?

[Metryq]

Meanwhile PLENTY of errors have been made by people (admittedly with weak math skills) incorrectly adding fractions. I've seen decimal inch rulers; why couldn't that be the norm? But no, wacky fractions like 7/54 are so much more fun. In an effort to avoid metric I'm surprised no one has suggested binary rulers. Water freezes at 32F and boils at 212F -- who came up with that?

I'll take metric, thanks.

Re:Who's at fault here, really?

[Rhubarb Crumble]

Hey, I like the metric system. I really do. But sticking to the english system has never caused an aircraft to run out of fuel at altitude, a roller coaster to break, or a spacecraft to crash. The zeal to enforce metric conversion, however, has caused all of those things.

Hey, I like the imperial/english/mediaeval/whatever system. I really do. But sticking to the metric system has never caused an aircraft to run out of fuel at altitude, a roller coaster to break, or a spacecraft to crash. The zeal to make specifications understandable to people who think in terms of the size of kings' thumbs and the area of land that can be ploughed by an ox in a morning, however, has caused all of those things.

The simplest argument in favour of the metric system is that it's base-10... (or base-10^3 if you want to be picky...) Of course once all our civilisation is outsourced to India and China I guess we'd better get used to counting in 10^4 or 10^5... (wans and lakhs)

Re:Who's at fault here, really?

[hoofie]

Actually you are wrong !!!

In 1983 an Air Canada flight ran out of fuel mid-flight. Disaster was averted due to a long-enough disused runway being available.

Its now know as the "Gimli Glider" named after the abandoned air-force base where it landed. It was luck that one of the pilots was a glider pilot. Apart from the complete-cock up, it showed some fantastic flying and emergency management.

Re:Who's at fault here, really?

[potifar]

Ahhh, the story behind the Fahrenheit scale is kind of funny. Fahrenheit's idea was to let 100 degrees be normal body temperature, and 0 degrees to be the coldest temperature he coud achieve (with a ice/salt mixture). Unfortunately, things didn't go quite as he planned... For the 0 degree baseline, he used a ice/salt mixture that was not the best one known at the time -- he should have been able to get the temperature down another notch or two. As for 100 degrees being normal body temperature -- well, his test tubes were not perfect: small bumps on the inside of the tube caused the scale to be slightly off.

Re:Who's at fault here, really?

[kinzillah]

Bu there was a discrepency because the old ones were in English units, and the new ones were converted to Metric. So its sort of a hybrid fuckup.

Re:Who's at fault here, really?

[Hal-9001]

In your example, the near disaster was due to converting from imperial units to metric, which only reinforces the parent poster's point.

Re:Who's at fault here, really?

[hoofie]

Admittedly true.

But in that case the parent post is stupid. I can ask the same question - since when has sticking to the metric system resulted in such mistakes ?

Surely the issue (and one of the issues in the original post) is that the dual use of two differing measurement systems caused problems.

Re:Who's at fault here, really?

[jonathan_ingram]

I understood that 100 degrees F is indeed body temperature... but not *human* body temperature. Apparently he calibrated his themometers with the aid of his dog's rectum.

Re:Who's at fault here, really?

[Orion442]

The dumbass that did the conversion. When the engineer uses "eleventyteen" as a real number, time to burn him.

Re:Who's at fault here, really?

[sacherjj]

Pardon me. Perhaps I mis-spoke. How about 25.4000000000000000000 mm per inch?

Re:Who's at fault here, really?

[wjsteele]

One clarification... ALL pilots are glider pilots. All Airplanes are "by defualt" gliders. Some don't glide as well as others, but they all fly because they can glide. For example, the first thing a pilot is trained to do when an engine failure, etc, occurs is to get the plane into it's best possible glide speed. That way, they have the longest amount of time to figure out how (if possible) to correct a problem. The second thing we do is to find a ditch point, perferrably within the glide distance available to the aircraft. Then we work the problem to figure out if it can be corrected. If not, we ditch.

Bill

Re:Who's at fault here, really?

[wwest4]

yeah, but they still drive on the wrong side of the road.

Re:Who's at fault here, really?

[Deflagro]

If they knew that an inch is 25.4mm, wouldn't they realise that the decimal point is important? Hell, even if it were in inches, they would still hopefully include the decimal! Add enough bits up and you get a full inch, which does make a difference (regardless of what most women say ;)

Re:Who's at fault here, really?

[lone_marauder]

That's the event I was talking about. From the link you cited:

The metric changeover in Canada should have been accompanied by further education on the airline's part.

What was your point again?

Re:Who's at fault here, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hilarious!

Parent: "(argument X)"
You: "No! You are wrong! (Argument X)!"
Moderators: We must debunk the parent!!

Re:Who's at fault here, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut the fuck up, you semantic pisspot. The pilot Bob Pearson partially owned and flew an actual sailplane, so he had extensive experience gliding, as compared to your average pilot.

Re:Who's at fault here, really?

[Short Circuit]

That, and whoever made the conversion to metric from the old (English) blueprints didn't come out with the same answer as printed on the newer (metric) blueprints.

It could be that there was a conversion error, or the newer, metric blueprints could have designed a slightly differently-built machine.

Re:Who's at fault here, really?

[putaro]

It's not that they threw the decimal part away. They decided to make it "easier" by changing to a nice round mm figure (45.0). Presumably they redrilled all of the holes at the same time to the new, larger size.

Re:Who's at fault here, really?

[Bush Pig]

When I was a young bloke, I spent some years working in various machine shops, at about the time Australia was going through the conversion to Metric. I always thought it was pretty funny when someone would send in a request for, say, a bunch of 19mm Whitworth nuts and bolts. See what they'd do is think 'I need some 3/4" Whitworth bolts', then, because the Metric system was mandated, convert it to metric to order it. The boss would then convert it back to Imperial, and fill the order (taking care to _label_ them in mm, not inches).

The best part of the joke is, of course, that there's no such thing as a 19mm Whitworth thread - there is a metric standard thread which is quite different.

Re:Who's at fault here, really?

[adrianbaugh]

The units really ought to be renamed "American" units - no English engineer I know has used them for a long time. (Regardless, the proper term is "Imperial" units...)

Gotta ask...

[thatguywhoiam]

Another English/Metric "Spacecraft" Proble

I'm Canadian, so I have to assume that 'proble' is the... imperial spelling... of problem?

"I get five rods to the hog's head!"

Re:Gotta ask...

[mrdogi]

Just in case anybody's curious, Using 16.5 feet = 5 rods and 63 gallons = 1 hog's head, I come up with 4032 gallons per mile for Grandpa Simpson's car.

Re:Gotta ask...

[Anonymous Coward]

A hogshead is 54 gallons ...

Re:Gotta ask...

[fenix down]

So Grandpa's got an H2?

Re:Gotta ask...

[UserGoogol]

A hogshead of beer is 54 gallons. A hogshead of wine is 63 gallons. (Source)

See!!

[Anonymous Coward]

We need a one world government with one way of doing things! How many more people have to die because we have to hang on to old ways of doing things? Stop this madness now! Surrender your nationalist ideals. Borders exist in the minds of dimwitted politicians. Borders can't be see from space. We must unite and work together to advance mankind.

Support the New World Order now!

Re:See!!

[Savage-Rabbit]

Borders can't be see from space.

Not quite, this one can be seen from space.

- Did I just nitpick a troll?

Re:See!!

[Anonymous Coward]

And just which leader would you want to see running the planet?

Kodos or Kang?

Re:See!!

[relrelrel]

not quite 1) it isnt a border 2) it cant actually be seen from space

Re:See!!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's one heck of a wall.

If all of China's people were suddenly converted into dogs by a magician, they could head to The Wall and take a leak.

Re:See!!

[CastrTroy]

Actually, If you read correctly, nobody had to die in this case. Actually, if i remember correctly, nobody was even hurt.

Re:See!!

[Anonymous Coward]

A quote from your reference:

There is an untrue urban legend that the Great Wall is the only man made object that can be seen from space or from the moon. The Great Wall cannot be seen from the moon. It can be seen from low earth orbit, but so can many other man made structures.

You need to make this reference recursive!

Re:See!!

[Bigman]

I think it would be safest for all concerned if you just gave the job to me. Then I'd move to all the lawyers and owners of nonsense patents to an uninhabited isle, Send the CIA in to 'take out' Darl, give free overclocked supercomputers to all geeks and broadband into every home.
Oh yes, I'll instigate porcine aviation too!

Re:See!!

[mOdQuArK!]

And just which leader would you want to see running the planet?

I know this was meant to be funny, but why exactly do we need a "leader"? Shouldn't it be possible to design a distributed decision-making system which doesn't require a "leader" as a focus?

Re:See!!

[Ralph Wiggam]

The UN is an example of distributed decision-making. It runs like a well oiled hunk of crap.

-B

Re:See!!

[Tablizer]

We need a one world government with one way of doing things!

Okay, but replace the number system with one based on 12 instead of 10. 12 divides by more base numbers than 10. If we are going to start over, do it right. Base it on a logical value instead of how many fingers we have.

Re:See!!

[mOdQuArK!]

The UN is doing a lot of "little" stuff (distributing aid, fighting diseases, etc) just fine, given its limited resources.

However it isn't a good example of a distributed decision-making system, since 1) the people participating in it aren't really all that representative of the "common" people of the world, so the decision-making power hasn't really been distributed, and 2) a relatively small number of countries have the power to completely block any major decisions of the U.N. which they don't like. There aren't too many organizations which are going to look very competent or useful with such an arrangement.

Re:See!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoa, 12 !!!!!!!
How much is 745 divided by 12 ????
I know that 745 / 10 = 74.5 instantly....

Re:See!!

[BiggerBoat]

it cant actually be seen from space

Well, it can, but just barely. To quote shuttle astronaut Jay Apt:

"We look for the Great Wall of China. Although we can see things as small as airport runways, the Great Wall seems to be made largely of materials that have the same color as the surrounding soil. Despite persistent stories that it can be seen from the moon, the Great Wall is almost invisible from only 180 miles up!"

Re:See!!

[Pieroxy]

You can't because the average joe is too stupid/busy to see the big picture on all matters. That's why you have a government: To make it difficult for everyone to give their uneducated two cents. Otherwise there is to much noise to get anything out of the crowd.

Re:See!!

[Art Tatum]

Yeah, or maybe we just need to face reality: every culture and society has their own needs and should be left to make their own decisions. I don't want a bunch of Abduls telling me how to live, and I'm sure they don't want my opinion either.

Re:See!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering the tone of your post, you probably wouldn't even "get" the concept of bases if it was explained to you.

Re:See!!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the UN is more like a high school student senate.

Obligatory gilliam quote

[smoondog]

"Ma'am we never make mistakes"

-Sean

Miscommunication

[Anonymous Coward]

From the Article:

In September 1995, the design specifications for the size of the axle bearing for Space Mountain vehicles was changed from inches to the metric scale. Accordingly, the axle diameter was also changed, in this case from 44.14 mm to 45.00 mm. However, appropriate action to revise and maintain the design drawings was neglected. Consequently, two different drawings existed within our company after the changes were made and the old drawing showing the 44.14 mm diameter was used to order (in August 2002) the axles that were delivered in October 2002.

They actually changed the specs. The conversions were all done correctly but they failed to update everyone.

Re:Miscommunication

[pg133]

"....appropriate action to revise and maintain the design drawings was neglected."
Not "miscommunication" but more correctly a problem of change/configuration management.

Re:Miscommunication

[wkitchen]

Exactly. It was a version control/documentation control problem. Not a unit conversion error.

English units?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about you, but us English call the measurement system the Imperial system. Isn't the American version slightly different, in respect to fluid units, etc?

Re:English units?

[sugar and acid]

Its not just Imperial, its the British Imperial System of measurement. Which makes for some irony, as the last major country to use the system officially is the USA, the first country to break away from the British Imperial System of Government.

Re:English units?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about you, but us English call the measurement system the Imperial system

Living in the past, as ever...

Re:English units?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't the American version slightly different, in respect to fluid units, etc?

Only with respect to fluid units. And the base unit, the ounce, is the same. Measurements based on the pint are different: a US pint is 16oz an Imperial pint (the only legal Imperial measure left in the UK!!!!) is 20oz. A gallon is 8 pints, a cup is a half-pint, but a US gallon or cup is 4/5 of the British counterpart.

I thought the Brits moved glacially since the UK has been metric since 1971... officially (except for beers. I don't know how long road measure will remain Imperial). Then I found out that the US has been co-metric since Ben Franklin (http://www.nist.gov).

No system of measure is inherently better or worse than another. But, when everybody you trade with uses a different system, it might be time to reconsider (not that the UK should adopt the Euro....)

Re:English units?

[Anonymous Coward]

uhm, well, yeah, since you guys changed your gallon AFTER we adopted it from you.... so you are using some cracked out neo-english system.

Re:English units?

[Tibor the Hun]

The fluid units are the worst of all. I've been living in the states for about 12 years and I still have no fricking idea how gallons and pints and quarts relate.
The system is fascinated with 1/16ths and 1/32s which gets really hard to work with when one asks a question how many pints are there in 7.5 gallons of water.
But then again, I'm lazy and not very excited about math.

Re:English units?

[relrelrel]

the English nation does not exist, in the eyes of the world, you are infact considered "british," not "English", sadly.

Re:English units?

[benoitg]

You can't really complain about the english increasing beer pint size by 4 ounces can you?

Re:English units?

[Hogwash McFly]

The system is fascinated with 1/16ths and 1/32s which gets really hard to work with

Your Geek Pass has been revoked. You have one hour to clear your desk and leave the building. Thank you for your co-operation.

Re:English units?

[Oddly_Drac]

"I thought the Brits moved glacially since the UK has been metric since 1971... officially (except for beers. I don't know how long road measure will remain Imperial)."

Until they pry miles and pints from our cold, dead hands.

Seriously, I was never taught any imperial measures, and had to work out a lot of conversions myself, particularly as we have a hybrid system in place that mixes different units according to application. I'm long since out of the school system, but I was born in 1972.

The odd thing is that America still refers to them as 'English' units despite us not really using them.

Milk has moved over to metric without much fuss, but I think there was a bit of hoohar regarding licensing regulations in moving to the litre/demi-litre for beer measurement. So we haven't, although all glasses currently display the measuring line...glasses without a measuring line are sorta illegal if I can remember back to my barwork days.

Re:English units?

[Malc]

Oh yes? How tall are you and what's your weight?

Re:English units?

[FireFury03]

180cm and 75kg

Re:English units?

[drsquare]

What a load of rubbish, we use imperial almost exclusively in England. We use feet/inches for height, stones/pounds for weight, feet for length, yards and miles for distance, and pints and gallons for capacity.

Re:English units?

[ibpooks]

2 pints to the quart, 4 quarts to the gallon. There are 60 pints in 7.5 gallons. Seems pretty simple actually.

Re:English units?

[Dhalka226]

I've heard "English units" all of MY life and all throughout school. Whether or not it is technically right it is easy for people to understand since the US is one of few countries not using the metric system.

Re:English units?

[Carnivore]

No system of measure is inherently better or worse than another.

I disagree. You can truthfully say that no system is any more accurate than another, but since people have to work with the system and convert from unit to unit, some systems are inherently better.

Let's take an expmple from last night's Mythbusters episode:
The rowing 8 that Stanford used for the demonstration has a mass of ~ 1000 kg when loaded with crew. If you were to design one, what volume water would you have to displace to float the boat?
Since water is ~ 1 kg/l, we have 1000l, which is the same as 1 m^3.

The process is much more complicated in the imperial system.
We have ~2200 lbs.Water weighs ~8 lbs/gal, so that's 265 gallons of water. According to units, that's 35.42 cubic feet, which is, of course, pretty much the same as 1 cubic meter.

The difference here is that it took me 5 minutes and 2 different programs (calculator and units) to do it in the imperial system.

Besides this rather geeky calculation, people who use and defend the use of the imperial system don't know how to use it! I was talking to someone about DSL, and I said something like, "even if you're 15000 feet from the CO, and you're much farther, performance would suck." and she had no idea how far that is in miles (it's a little less than 3, for our metrified friends).

Re:English units?

[FireFury03]

On roads we use miles/yards, in the pub we use pints (and for milk we use pints). I honestly can't think of anything else I regularly use imperial units for - small distances are done in mm, cm and metres (that includes height), weights are done in grams and kg (when cooking I use grams, when I'm measuring my weight I use kg).

Using kg to measure weight certainly makes more sense to me - I do windsurfing so measuring my weight in kg means I can work out what size board to use since kg == litres of water displaced.

Damned if I know how many pounds in a stone, etc.

And certainly in engineering, using anything other than metric would be unheard of in the UK.

Re:English units?

[simcop2387]

i could understand this if it was just 16's and 32's but 1/16 and 1/12 and 1/32 and 1/5280 can be kinda annoying, at least compared to .1 .001 .00001 and 100

Re:English units?

[Anonymous Coward]

All because your uneducated doesn't mean everybody else is wrong. Why don't you do some "bloody" research you fool, your country is switching to metric (although you've been in limbo for a few years due to dolts like yourself..). It amazes me how ignorant people are of there own countries...

Re:English units?

[sketerpot]

Hear hear. I find Imperial units extremely painful to do conversions with, so I propose that we go to the much easier Metric system! It's all for the better! You can do conversions in your head! Complicated conversions! We will CRUSH OUR ENEMIES WITH THE METRIC SYSTEM!

Besides this rather geeky calculation, people who use and defend the use of the imperial system don't know how to use it! I was talking to someone about DSL, and I said something like, "even if you're 15000 feet from the CO, and you're much farther, performance would suck." and she had no idea how far that is in miles (it's a little less than 3, for our metrified friends).

That's exactly what I'm talking about. I live in the US, and I couldn't for the life of me do that conversion without the aid of a reference and a calculator. With metric, it would be so easy that I could just say it in meters or kilometers without missing a beat.

Re:English units?

[sketerpot]

How many gallons are there in 23 cups? How many quarts are there in 65 fluid ounces? (The answers are 1.4375 gal and 2.03125 quarts, respectively). And how is this simple, compared to shifting the decimal point around?

Re:English units?

[Anm]

Tibor the HunThe system is fascinated with 1/16ths and 1/32s which gets really hard to work with

Hogwash McFlyYour Geek Pass has been revoked. You have one hour to clear your desk and leave the building. Thank you for your co-operation.

simcop2387i could understand this if it was just 16's and 32's but 1/16 and 1/12 and 1/32 and 1/5280 can be kinda annoying, at least compared to .1 .001 .00001 and 100

But it is just 0.0001 and 0.00001, in binary.

Of course a base 12 system would help on the 1/12 and 1/5280s:
1/12 dec = 0.1 duodecimal
1/16 dec = 0.09
1/32 dec = 0.4223
1/5280 dec = Doh! Where'd that factor 5 come from?

Anm

Re:English units?

[Golias]

More useful than changing our measuring systems to universal base ten would be to change our verbal language of numbers to base ten with a more consistant nomenclature. There's a great deal of evidence that words like "Thirteen" and a different name for every x10^1 increment (twenty, thrity, forty, instead of something like "two-ten, three-ten, four-ten," which is what we do for hundreds and thousands) cause English speakers to master basic math a lot more slowly than those with superior counting systems.

Re:English units?

[TheOldFart]

Don't waste your time. This has nothing to do with logic. Rather, an emotional response in the same way the French are anal about creating their own words for things the rest of the planet has a common word for. It amazes me one can call him/herself a geek when it is demonstrated clearly here how anal retentive, emotional backass this all is. I've been watching these same arguments since the 70's and it hasn't changed one bit. People just don't want to change. Change is scary and uncomfortable.

Re:English units?

[gnu-generation-one]

"But, when everybody you trade with uses a different system, it might be time to reconsider" ... said the consultant to his boss, looking at all the suppliers and customers using MS-Office...

Re:English units?

[gnu-generation-one]

"Milk has moved over to metric without much fuss"

Now sold in convenient multiples of 568 millilitres...

Re:English units?

[russotto]

Informative? The Imperial fluid ounce is not the same as the US fluid ounce. 1 fl. oz (US) = 1.0408 fl oz (UK)

Re:English units?

[VickyNaylor]

complicated still further by the fact that in England a gallon of water weighs exactly 10 pounds.

Re:English units?

[cicadia]

1/5280 dec = Doh! Where'd that factor 5 come from?

Hey! Someone put an 11 in there, too! What's going on here?

Re:English units?

[VickyNaylor]

Actually the English and American fluid ounces are different.

In England a gallon of water is defined as weighing 10 pounds. Dividing this into 8 pints of 20 fluid ounces gives a fluid ounce of 28.4 ml.

In America a gallon is defined as 231 cubic inches. Dividing this into 8 pints of 16 fluid ounces gives a fluid ounce of 29.6 ml.

This all comes about because the imperial system got forked by a major reform of weights and measures in England in the 19th centurary.

It's all explained on this fascinating page

Re:English units?

[sootman]

The english system is not perfect, but it's not without its merits, either. Try this test:

Draw a straight line of a certain length. Now, draw a perpendicular line at the halfway point. Then draw another to cut one of those pieces in half. And another. And another. And another.

Now, draw another line and try to cut it into ten equal pieces. See?

Re:English units?

[ToteAdler]

Maybe its just what you're used to? As an engineering student I have to use the "English" units all the time and can use them much quicker then when a prof throws a curveball metric problem in the mix. Also you could choose to use a different factor that wouldn't require the extra conversion, such as the density of water is 62.4 lbs/ft^3 fresh water or 64 lbs/ft^3 salt water.

Re:English units?

[coyotedata]

Jefferson was pushing for Metric-he lost by 3 votes. I don't know if those were 3 Metric votes or 3 Imperial votes.

Re:English units?

[Glove93]

And the base unit, the ounce, is the same.


Actually no, the ounce itself is different:

1 US fluid ounce in milliliters
1 Imperial fluid ounce in milliliters

an Imperial pint is then indeed 20 Imperial fluid ounces, and a US pint is 16 US fluid ounces.

I'll have a whatever pint of Black'N'Tan please! :-)

Re:English units?

[toby]

Although this country has been using the Systeme Internationale for decades, we Australians also refer to the other system as Imperial, which is increasingly appropriate these days...

Re:English units?

[SEE]

You're confusing the U.S. system of units and the Imperial system. In the Imperial system, a gallon of water is exactly ten pounds.

Re:English units?

[SEE]

The U.S. system of untis has a number of differences from the Imperial system, largely because the U.S. system is based on the English system, not the Imperial System.

The Imperial System was adopted in 1824 (effective in 1826) by the British Parliament, and was partly inspired by the metric system. For example, it was declared that, much like a liter of water weighed a kilogram, a gallon of water would henceforth weigh ten pounds, despite the fact that no unit of volume of fluid in the history of any consistuent part of the British Empire, including England, ever was equal to the volume of ten pounds of water.

The U.S., on the other hand, continued to use a collection of units imported from England back when a Kingdom of England and an English Parliament existed. In fact, the U.S. gallon today is the same as the last gallon ever approved by the English Parliament before its dissolution in favor of the British Parliament, dating to March 1, 1707, twenty-five days before the effective date of the 1707 Act of Union.

Imperial, not English...

[arafel]

Why do you call them 'English' units, when everyone else knows them as Imperial units? :-) We stopped using most of them some time ago.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[alexpage]

There is a difference between what the English call Imperial and the Americans call English, when it comes to things like pints (IIRC an Imperial pint is 18 fl. oz. while an "English" pint is 16 fl. oz.) and a few others.

To add confusion to the mix, "Imperial" to a Canadian is the same as "English" to an American - i.e. not the same as "Imperial" to an Englishman.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[hackstraw]

We (USians) adopted the metric system in 1893 (yes, thats the 19th centry), and actually Imperial (or English as their more commonly known) units have been _altered_ so that they more closely round to a metric equivalent. For example, the inch is now _defined_ as 2.54 cm, it has nothing to do with some king's thumb or anything.

Maybe, just maybe, we can start using the metric system? Isn't 100 years enough time to transition?

Re:Imperial, not English...

[sacherjj]

(IIRC an Imperial pint is 18 fl. oz. while an "English" pint is 16 fl. oz.)

But most of these were created due to the english affinity towards beer. With a little creative definitions, everyone gets 2 more ounces at the pub.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[91degrees]

IIRC an Imperial pint is 18 fl. oz.

I think it's 20 fl. oz.

This is important since one of the imperial measurements still rigourously enforced in Britain is the pint of beer.

The other interesting aspect is that this may have accelerated the adoption of the metric system, at least for groceries, since a 1 litre carton looks roughly the same size as 2 pints, but is cheaper to produce since it only contains about 9 tenths of the amount.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[deitel99]

For example, the inch is now _defined_ as 2.54 cm, it has nothing to do with some king's thumb or anything.

Personally I think 2.54cm is pretty arbitrary. Then again, cm are based on a fraction of a wavelength of a certain coloured light, which is, yet again, arbitrary.

The first attempts for standardising the inch were many hundreds of years ago, since it's so vital to have correct measurements for trade. Despite what most posts here seem to think, the Imperial Inch does not change every time the English monarch does.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[ender81b]

Oh yeah? So stones is a metric measurement? And pints? ANd miles, miles per hour?

You guys are worse than americans! we consistently ignore the metric system but you guys just use parts of it.. kindof.. sometimes.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[mccalli]

actually Imperial..units have been _altered_ so that they more closely round to a metric equivalent. For example, the inch is now _defined_ as 2.54 cm....

Yep. That'll round so much more easily now...

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Imperial, not English...

[daveewart]

an Imperial pint is 18 fl. oz.

Pretty sure it's 20 fl. oz., no?

Re:Imperial, not English...

[maelstrom]

I'll drink to that!

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Anonymous Coward]

The UK officially adopted metric in the late 1800s as well. It's only recently that it's become illegal to use imperial measurements. People (even market and street sellers) have been charged for advertising their wares in imperial, so they're now selling, e.g., milk in 1.137L bottles.

There's even a group who go around changing road signs back to miles:

http://www.bwmaonline.com/Transport%20-%20Direct %2 0Action.htm

Pete

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Malc]

I don't understand why they even attempt to reference the system the British use anyway. They use some bastardisation of it, for instance, a fl. oz. (just called oz. in N. America) has more ml in it; a pint has fewer fl. oz., with the knock-on effect of making gallons smaller; tons are lighter, etc. Then of course, telling an American what your weight is will confuse them as they haven't heard of stones - you might as well use kg as it will result in less confusion. And shots aren't measured in gills (although everywhere in the UK now seems to be moving to 35 ml instead of 25ml or 1/6 gill).

Re:Imperial, not English...

[arafel]

Miles/MPH is the only 'official' measurement left in imperial, as far as I can remember. People measuring weight in stones and so on is kind of a hangover, and as more people grow up who were only taught metric in schools, it's slowly growing more common to use kg, litres etc.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[deitel99]

So stones is a metric measurement?

No. All trade in shops in England is now done in kg. Stones are hardly ever used.

And pints?

A pint is a measurement of beer. It is simply tradition, and isn't a hinderance to everyday economic transactions (well, drinking probably is). All other drinks are sold in litres (wine, juice, milk etc).

ANd miles, miles per hour?

Yeah, I don't quite get why we still do this. I guess from an engineering point of view you'd want m/sec, so converting from miles/hour or km/hour doesn't make much difference.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL, I was just thinking "ummm, hello /. just to let you know England uses the metric system", so your article title is :

Another Metric/Metric...

How about:

Another /./English error.

You can tell by the title of this article that /. is American.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Dave2 Wickham]

Changing road signs back to miles? I've never seen a road sign in the UK in anything but miles - to be honest I wish they would hurry up and convert roads to metric.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[ender81b]

I was in england last semester and nearly everything was still refered to as stones. Nobody knew either kilograms or pounds, I always had to convert everything to stones for them.

Pints, I understand. It would be near-sacrosanct to get rid of pints.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Anonymous Coward]

how is a metric road different from an imperial road?

Re:Imperial, not English...

[N Monkey]

Why do you call them 'English' units, when everyone else knows them as Imperial units? :-) We stopped using most of them some time ago.

Especially since, IIRC, "Imperial" does not refer to the British Empire but to the Roman one.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[CastrTroy]

A lot of people here are saying that stones aren't really used anymore. I guess it depends on what you're measuring. Most of the Brits I've come across use stones as a measure when referring to their weight. It's a realy nice way of hiding your actual body weight, as 1 stone is about 14 pounds, IIRC. If you ignore decimals, as most do, you can pretty much hide how much you weigh. Maybe the Americans should stick to using this one.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Xophmeister]

Ooh, strong in you the dark side is. A true Jedi, this empire must resist. In X-Wings and Chewbaccas we measure, yes. Two Ewoks there are to a death star; but seven Amidalas be there to the dark lord Sith.

Inches and pints lead to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to the dark side.

</yoda>

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, *back* to miles. They follow the metrification teams around changing the signs *back* to yards and miles. Read the link.

Pete

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Dave2 Wickham]

Well, y'see, Imperial roads are made out of mint. This does not provide an ideal driving condition; hence the need for metric roads.

(yeah, I meant imperial/metric measurements)

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Dave2 Wickham]

When I noticed the ":", I did; I've still never seen a sign labelled in anything but imperial in the UK in real life though (and, fwiw, think the people changing signs they see to imperial are like the people who dispute things like double yellow lines when they aren't 100% in spec - being picky and annoying people. But that's just my opinion).

Re:Imperial, not English...

[N Monkey]

I was in england last semester and nearly everything was still refered to as stones. Nobody knew either kilograms or pounds, I always had to convert everything to stones for them.

You must have been in a strange part of the UK! The only time I've seen stones used is when measuring body weight.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Alan Partridge]

"Then again, cm are based on a fraction of a wavelength of a certain coloured light, which is, yet again, arbitrary."

Eh?

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Anonymous Coward]

In order for the metric system to take hold for the general public in America, it would have to be taught in school. Very little time was spent in public school, as I recall my childhood, studying the metric system.

Second, in order to make it memorable and second-nature to a person, it would have to be used frequently. When your gas, milk, candy bars, beef, body weight, height and everything else are all consistantly measured in Imperial units, you tend to become familiar with those. It would take a unified, across the board, simultaneous transition for it to take effect in America. And that just isn't ever going to happen.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Patik]

Then again, cm are based on a fraction of a wavelength of a certain coloured light, which is, yet again, arbitrary.

How is that arbitrary? We defined a set of measurements to describe the world around us. What better things to use as our basis than light and water which are plentiful and central to nature?

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Alan Partridge]

Stones are used in the same way shoe and dress sizes are used, they have no relation to anything other than people's body size.

As for retaining miles, ALL the road markings are in miles and MPH, it would cost a FORTUNE to replace them - though I rather think new speed limit signs should be bi-measure. In fact, a conversion from imperial to metric for the roads would give a great opportunity for a new speed limit system with higher highs and lower lows.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are kg ever used as *weight*?

Metric weight is in Newtons, not kilograms. Kg are a mass unit.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Malc]

You're correct from a scientific point of view. Try making that suggestion in normal society and you will come across as a prick. Everyday language doesn't make this distinction between mass and weight.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[kiwimate]

There are many, many, many posts by now discussing/ranting about who uses metric and who uses imperial measurements (and who uses both). For the record, it is generally realized that there are three countries in the world who are still on the imperial system:

* U.S.A.
* Liberia
* Burma

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Rogerborg]

An arbitrary wavelength, genius.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Bob Uhl]

Why should we convert to French units? Their only advantage is that the rest of the world uses 'em, and advantage overshadowed by the fact that they're next to useless for any kind of concrete manipulation. Heck, even the French switched back after nearly twenty years (and then back again, later on, for nationalist reasons). Face it: being base-10 is no advantage.

If the Frogs had really wanted to revolutionise things, they'd have switched counting to base-12.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[spearway]

May be you should revise your history lessons

The km is based on the circumference of the earth. It was designed to be the 100 part of a grade (there are 400 grades in a circle) i.e. the circumference of the earth is 40000 km.

Unfortunately the French geographer that measured the earth in the 18th century did not come up with an exact value so we had to redefine it twice since to have a more accurate value.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Anonymous Coward]

It may not change every time there is a new King, but how much is an Inch?

Right now it sounds like you have to know how much a cm. is to know what an inch is. Which is pretty stupid if that is the case.

What makes the metric system so good, is that almost all the important units can be found via science and are very constant.

They all base on time, space and distance. If you have any two you can calculate the third.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Detritus]

The meter was originally defined as 1/10E6 the distance between the North Pole and the Equator, based on questionable measurements of an arbitrary planet, that upon close examination, isn't spherical. Seems pretty arbitrary to me, especially considering that the concept of the meter was soon replaced for practical purposes with a platinum bar. All subsequent definitions of the meter have been improved replicas of that platinum bar. There is nothing "fundamental" about the basis of the metric system.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[srslif16]

Alas, the sun has set over the Empire! :)

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Anonymous Coward]

OKAY, well for starters 'centi-metres' are simply one hundreths of a metre.. the metre is the arbitary unit. And it was NOT based originally on the wavelengths of a frequency of light, it was initially defined as one ten millionth of the distance along the Earth's meridian from pole to equator, and recorded on platinum in a vault in France.... however it was later described using a frequency of light because that was reproduceable anywhere in the world.
For more info check out
http://www.irl.cri.nz/msl/training_&_resource s/His tory/history_metre.html
which describes what I just said quite nicely.

And while I'm here, its Imperial and Metric systems, 'English Units' are those which differ to the USA's measurements, and 'US units' for those which are different from the UK's measurements. Both countries the UK and USA largely use the Imperial System of measurement.
Internationally the metric system is THE 'standard' for describing anything.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Anonymous Coward]

Pints, I understand. It would be near-sacrosanct to get rid of pints.

I do not think that word means what you think it means... sacrosanct ("Regarded as sacred and inviolable").

Instead, I think you're looking for the word "profane, blasphemous or sacrilegious" or that you meant that beer being served in pints is sacrosanct.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[SnowZero]

A current estimate of the circumference of the earth is 40,075.16km. While it wouldn't have been arbitrary if they had gotten it right, but they didn't. This is perhaps a good lesson on why you shouldn't base measurement systems on something you can't measure too directly. The end result is that they decided to stop changing it and just fix it at one of the values they had come up with. The grades thing certainly didn't take off much, which makes 40000 kind of arbitrary now. Guess we're all still backwards for using degrees. FWIW 100F is the average temperature of human blood.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[gammoth]

No space craft crashed because the the pub down the road serves up bitter in pints.

Odds are, the Pommies use metric for all things engineering. You won't see the weight of a Bentley described in stones. (Perhaps pounds, but Bentley is all about tradition.)

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Anonymous Coward]

bah, as an Englishman i say Imperial for Feet and Inches and Metric for Metres and Centimetres. I also spell metres in a similar way to centre. all because... thats what they told me at school.

So how much is a billion anyway?
1000,000,000 or 1000,000,000,000 ?
depends who you ask! if its a billionaire i bet you can guess which it is.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[stridebird]

As for retaining miles, ALL the road markings are in miles and MPH...

Er, I beg to differ. UK Motorways have "mile"-posts along the side of either carriageway. OK I say milepost but they appear every 100m along the road and they are marked in a kilometre notation. Obviously the emergency authorities and construction crews use this system to identify specific stretches of road.

I use the posts to calibrate the tachometer - in fact, good geek credentials require me to be concerned that the instrumentation in a car in which I drive may not be reading accurately. And the various mental arithmetics required to convert seconds per post to MPH are most welcome on a long journey. That's when I am not playing the "box" game, but that's another, er, post...

Re:Imperial, not English...

[lazyl]

they're next to useless for any kind of concrete manipulation

Bullshit. Do you have an argument to back that up?

Re:Imperial, not English...

[avdp]

Being base 10 is a huge advantage. For whatever reason most people can easily perform divisions and multiplications in base 10. Multiplying or dividing by 100 is easy: move the comma by 2. Conversion between units in metric is incredibly easy, even without a calculator.

Converting inches to feet to yards (to whatever else weird unit) is not something most people can do in their heads (at least when you deal with big numbers)

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Bob Uhl]

Mathematically, ten is an ugly and useless number; twelve and two are far superior. The only ten is at all attractive is because our number system is based on it; it'd be much smarter to switch to another number system (duodecimal or hexadecimal) than to switch units.

Proponents of French units always bring up unit conversions--but how often do you convert between metres and kilometres? Almost never, I daresay: it's just not a common exercise in everyday life. OTOH, one often has to divide a foot into inches, or a pint into jills, or whatever: those are basic tasks, and quite easy to do by hand.

As for converting feet to yards: if one cannot divide by three easily, even in one's head, can one really be considered even semi-sentient? Don't the schools even teach long division anymore?

Re:Imperial, not English...

[TwistedGreen]

Mathematically, ten is an ugly and useless number...

Sorry, but that just strikes me as a really dumb thing to say. How can any number be ugly, or useless?

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Bob Uhl]

Of course I do. Let's say I wish to cut a foot-wide piece of wood into inch-width segments: I cut in half, then in half again, then in thirds. How would I cut a decimetre-wide piece into centimetres? In half, then into fifths? Ever try eyeballing a fifth? There are very easy ways to estimate a half or third quite accurately, but I am aware of none to estimate a fifth.

Let's say I have 1 gallon of beer and need to serve it in 1 pint measurements. Dead simple: I cut in half (yielding pottles), in half again (yielding quarts) and in half one last time, yielding pints. Doubling and halving are extremely easy with liquids and masses; anything else is a right royal pain in the ass.

Try dividing a decilitre into centilitres or millilitres. Good luck.

The standard system, used as it was for millennia, was optimised for use, for manipulation of concrete amounts. The French system was optimised for conversion between units. The one is needed daily; the other almost never (now that we have computers, practically never). Which would an unbiased observer prefer?

The standard system is, of course, imperfect and could use certain improvements. Its basis, though, is sound. The French system is also imperfect, but its sole basis is a silly attachment to 10 (a mathematically ugly number anyway). I'd rather spend effort on the system with a future.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[fdicostanzo]

it would cost a FORTUNE to replace them

I don't know about that. That same argument was used in the US about converting the speed limit signs to metric but when the 55 MPH speed limit was elliminated, all of a sudden it was no problem to replace all these signs.

All they would need would be a bunch of numbered stickers. I bet the whole US could be done for $100m if it was a priority.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[lommer]

OT: Um, there's no such thing as Burma anymore - it's called Myanmar (and has been called that since 1989). Actually, now that I do some googling it appears that you yanks refuse to officially recognize the name change and still call it Burma. I guess you can blame your ignorance on your government this time.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Hydrogenoid]

Actually no, the wavelength are used as practical measurements, but the metre is *defined* as 1/299792458th of the distance travelled by light in a vacuum.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Anonymous Coward]

A pint is a measurement of beer. It is simply tradition, and isn't a hinderance to everyday economic transactions (well, drinking probably is). All other drinks are sold in litres (wine, juice, milk etc).

While milk is sold in metric units, all the cartons I see are either 568 or 284ml, with "pint" or "half pint" written underneath.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[ttsalo]

How would I cut a decimetre-wide piece into centimetres?

Duh. Mark it in centimetre-wide intervals with a ruler and cut it. Remember to take the width of the cuts into account. You need inch-wide segments, and the saw cuts are 3/32 inch wide: how many segments do you get from a foot-wide board? Real easy, huh?

There are very easy ways to estimate a half or third quite accurately, but I am aware of none to estimate a fifth.

Divide by ten and then double. Now you know.

The standard system, used as it was for millennia, was optimised for use, for manipulation of concrete amounts. The French system was optimised for conversion between units. The one is needed daily

Now this is just nonsense. Dividing neat round measurements like 5 feet/meters or 3 gallons/liters in integer fractions is something I very, very rarely need. Whether I'm making a cake or a table, I have a recipe or a blueprint and set of raw ingredients. Of these ingredients I need to measure the parts needed for the finished product. Almost never have I needed to divide the raw materials with some integer fraction. Instead I measure and then cut. Units of measure not being related by a factor of ten is nothing but a nuisance here.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[avdp]

"You are 3A miles away " - oh yeah, that sooo much easier than to switch to metric. Are you out of your mind???

OK then, meters to km maybe not that often. But meter to centimeters - all the time (just as often as you'd do inches to feet). Like it or not, it is still easier for the vast majority of people (even in the US) to divide by 100 than by 12. But more important to that, is the lack of consistency - if everything was base 12, but it's not. For example, 16 ounces to a pound. Metric conversion units are simple, and don't require memorization of conversion factors. All you need to know, it's the universal prefixes (vocabulary, not math skills): Mega-, kilo-, deca-, centi-, milli-, etc (and really for everyday life you only really ever use 3 of them: kilo-, centi-, milli-).

Re:Imperial, not English...

[kiwimate]

Yes, thank you so much for your kind comments. I actually knew it was called something else now, but couldn't remember what the new name was and was too lazy to look it up.

As to the rest of your fascinating retort, I might point out that, although I live in the U.S., I have another 26 years to go before I've lived here as long as any other country, so it's a tad premature to call me a yank. And, as I'm not a U.S. citizen, it's also rather a stretch to call them my government. But, then, it's not just the U.S. that doesn't accept the name change; everyone seems a touch up in the air about it at the moment.

Which, of course, doesn't excuse my laziness to look up the new name that I knew it had, but, on the flip side, it rather conveniently also does not excuse your arrogance in automatically assuming I'm an ignorant yank. Ergo, I feel justified in taunting you as a right git. Nyah.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Bob Uhl]

When, unlike many other numbers, it has no--or very few--interesting properties. Some numbers (e.g. twelve, one, three or two) have loads and loads of near properties and uses; others (e.g. ten) don't. Basing any number system on a number with few useful properties seems awfully silly, no?

I suppose that calling ten 'useless' was a bit over-the-top, but it does get awfully old when French unit proponents blather on and on with the same hackneyed old saws: 'Look: one can convert from gigametres to millimetres just by moving the decimal point!' (to which I query: who wants to?); 'Look, it's all based on 10!' (which raises the question of what would be a better basis) &c.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[SnowZero]

Why is it stupid? It doesn't matter what the units mean, only that everyone agrees on what they mean. A fixed multiplier guarantees that. To know what a cm is, you need to know what a meter is. 100 is certainly a nicer multiplier, but 2.54 struck a balance between agreement and backward compatibility.

How many metric people out there run x86 machines, an obviously inferior machine language compared to the much more consistent (like metric) RISC. x86 just had a lot of compatibility, and nobody wanted to throw that out. Internally, modern x86 chips have RISC-like cores. American imperial units are much the same, they make less sense, but were kept around for compatibility, and are defined off of the more consistent metric "core".

I use both units regularly, and I'm glad as hell I can convert between them easily. The vast majority of American scientists use metric in their calculations and publications. Engineers are coming around, albeit more slowly in the older disciplines with more inertia.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all the Imperial system is not standard (the US is the only significant country that uses it) and is not even a system. The standard system is the metric system: every single fscking country in the world uses it except the US. That's what "standard" means. As a Frenchman living in the US, I have a lot of first-hand experience with both measurement systems, and let me tell you, the Imperial system SUXXXX. May be you can easily split a gallon in half, but you can split 4 liters in half just as easily. You don't get a pottle (who the hell has heard of a pottle anyway) you get TWO FSCKING LITERS. What's wrong with that?

Let's take a simple problem: a balcony is 6 feet, 5 inches and 3/8 wide. You want to place 4 regularly spaced fence posts. How far apart should they be? It will take a while to figure out that the answer is 1 foot, 3 inches and (approximately)
61/128th. Then you have to multiply this by 2,3,and 4 to get the positions of all the posts (inaccurate at that).

Now for the metric: a balcony is 196.5 cm wide, how far apart should the 5 fence posts be?
39.3cm (you don't even need a calculator for this). The other posts are 78.6, 117.9 and 157.2,
which you can all find on your (metric) tape measurer.

Get it?

Don't get me started with TOTALLY FSCKED UP American non-system for screws, threads, drill bits and taps, or I'll go for hours.

- Anonycous Moward

Re:Imperial, not English...

[SnowZero]

I went to school in the 80s and 90s, and we spent a fair amount of time on it in high school. It probably was much less the furter back you were in school. That was in New York State too; I guess it may be different depending on the state.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Anonymous Coward]

You are so clueless, it's not even funny. The point with the metric system is that YOU NEVER HAVE TO CONVERT feet into inches, pint in jills, ounces into pounds, yards into miles, pounds into tons, gallons into fluid ounces, etc.

In the metric system THERE IS ONLY ONE UNIT FOR A GIVEN QUANTITY, then it's only a matter of how many zeros and decimals you want to write, or whether you want to fold them into a prefix (milli, micro, kilo, whatever). NO CONVERSION WHATSOEVER.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[lommer]

Heh, alright. You called me fair and square, and what's more, politely. You just gained a fan.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[tie_guy_matt]

I am from the United States but I am not sure if I am a "Yank." You see I am from Maryland. Maryland is south of the Mason Dixon line which means that it is often considered to be in the south. However, Maryland never joined the Confederacy during the Civil War. At the time Maryland was very pro-South and probably would have left the union if given the chance; the federal government didn't let Maryland leave because if they did then Washington DC would have been totally surrounded by southern. In the united states a "yankee" usually refers to people in the north, particularly New England. At least people living in the South usually refer to northerners as Yankees. And in fact the first two definitions of the word Yankee in my "Webster's New World Dictionary" are someone living in New England, and someone living in the North. I am not from New England and to be honest I am not sure if I am from the North or not. People in New England would probably say that Maryland is in the South but people in the Deep South would probably say that Maryland is in the North. So I usually don't consider myself a Yankee. It doesn't help that the most evil team in all of American sports happens to call themselves the Yankees.

Anyway, my point is that calling everyone from the US a Yank is a little like calling everyone in the UK English. When you call me a yank in my mind it just shows how ignorant you are of the history of the US.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[cyt0plas]

> Isn't 100 years enough time to transition?

No.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[dublin]

All you need to know, it's the universal prefixes (vocabulary, not math skills): Mega-, kilo-, deca-, centi-, milli-, etc (and really for everyday life you only really ever use 3 of them: kilo-, centi-, milli-).

Your post hits the nail on the head - the Metric system (SI for the pedantic) is anything but consistent!

You cite "deca" - there's NO SUCH PREFIX. In fact, the entire deci/deka mess turned into such a morass of ISO incompetency that the official prefixes are now wildly inconsistent even within the SI system. (I discovered this recently when I looked it up and realized they'd "changed" the metric system since I learned it in the late 1970s):

The prefix for "deka" or "deca" (even the spelling is inconsistent!) is deplorable - it's listed as either da or dk, depending on where you look, and I'd argue *both* of these are wrong, since they break the otherwise inviolable rule of SI prefixes being a single character.

Thus the poor Metric-loving product of European public school education who sees 3.24 dkm may (quite reasonably) wonder what other metric-loving fool would specify a distance in "decikilometers"! (Oddly, some metric preferences would make this an acceptable if quite confusing usage, since they discourage the use of less-commonly used prefixes like "hecto" in favor of more common ones like "deci" and "kilo". Only if the user understands that magnitude prefixes should never be compounded can he avoid this mistake.)

When I learned the Metric system, "deka" was recommended to be represented with an upper-case "D" to distinguish it from the lower-case "d" representing "deci". Apparently, European outcomes-based educators thought this was too confusing to teach, and so lobbied to have it changed, although apparently they failed to expunge the far-too-commonly-used prefix overloading of using the letter "M" to represent both "mega" and "milli" based on case-sensitivity. (The formerly upper case "K" for "kilo, apparently also fell at this time, replaced by the now-standard lower-case "k", breaking the at-least-sort-of-sensible former property of SI prefix symmetry, which at that time held that upper case prefixes represented a positive exponent of the 10, while lower-case ones represented a negative exponent.

So instead, they decided that "deka" would stand alone in all of SI nomenclature, and use a two-character prefix, but apparently, in true ISO fashion, they couldn't agree on even what those two characters should be, "da" or "dk"? (Look around, and you'll find both, even in "official" publications from a number of countries that have adopted the SI as "standard".

(And then of course, there's the pathologically broken use of the lower-case Greek mu as the prefix for "micro". This results in a unit that cannot be typed directly on the vast majority of the world's keyboards, and which is at the mercy of extended character maps that often do not successfully carry the character across different applications, operating systems, or displays, thus rendering yet another prefix at least halfway useless.)

Now Metric-bigots will respond, "But no one uses deci much or deka at all, so who cares?" Those same metric-bigots should, because the bureaucratic bungling that has surrounded SI politics since the beginning is what has has rendered them unusable. If you can't actually use all those decimal prefixes, because doing so creates more confusion than it resolves, then how can you possibly claim that the Metric system is easier, more logical, or more consistent than the English system. You can't - the Metric system is every bit as arbitrary and capricious as the English system, but much harder to use in the real world, because 10 is such a difficult number.

Why do you think hours are 60 minutes, or circles 360 degrees? Because 60 is evenly divisible by 2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15,20, and 30! Try plotting your ship's course in radians sometime and see how long you can sail before running aground - talk about a stupid measurement!

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Baki]

In the 1970's most european countries made the switch to SI units. All had to go through this process which is not easy but very beneficial in the end. I find it incredible and very irritating that most of the US, even sensible people such as physisists, just were too lazy to do the same.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[avdp]

If the best you can come up against SI is some inconsistency about a prefix (which never bothered me growing up in Europe - I now live in the US and have lived both sides of the coin), then I don't think you have much of an argument... But I am amazed that you managed to write so many words about it anyway.

The "10 is a difficult number" argument is one I am familiar with, but I don't buy it. Simply put, we think and calculate in base-10 (ever seen a 12% or 16% sale at the mall?) with noteable exception such as time and angles - both of which are probably the most challenging for people to do basic math with (try asking someone how many minutes in day and see how long it takes to get a response), which only reinforces my point.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Anonymous Coward]

There are two men employed part-time in the US, whose job it is to promote the Metric system. When one was asked his height in cm, he could not tell the interviewer...

"...who keeps the metric system down...we do, we do..."

Re:Imperial, not English...

[drsmithy]

Mathematically, ten is an ugly and useless number; twelve and two are far superior. The only ten is at all attractive is because our number system is based on it; it'd be much smarter to switch to another number system (duodecimal or hexadecimal) than to switch units.

I'd say that's a pretty big reason for it to be "attractive". When you live somewhere that's had the metric system for ages, most of the numbers you want to divide, and divide by, tend to be "right".

Proponents of French units always bring up unit conversions--but how often do you convert between metres and kilometres? Almost never, I daresay: it's just not a common exercise in everyday life. OTOH, one often has to divide a foot into inches, or a pint into jills, or whatever: those are basic tasks, and quite easy to do by hand.

Did it ever occur to you that dividing a foot into inches *is* a "unit conversion" ? How else would you describe it ?

As for converting feet to yards: if one cannot divide by three easily, even in one's head, can one really be considered even semi-sentient? Don't the schools even teach long division anymore?

Hell, no. Just like the TV and spelling/grammar checkers have destroyed the English language, calculators have destroyed mathematics.

Having said that, three is an "ugly number" number to divide by IME, because most of the numbers you want to divide aren't easily divisible by three (caveat: I live in a metric-ised country).

Re:Imperial, not English...

[NCFlipper]

Which meter is that? A water meter? A distance meter? Or perhaps you meant a "metre". ;)

Re:Imperial, not English...

[fbform]

the concept of the meter was soon replaced for practical purposes with a platinum bar. All subsequent definitions of the meter have been improved replicas of that platinum bar

WRONG!

Straight from the horse's mouth: definition of the metre ; evolution of the standard and practical implementation.

They still have the platinum-iridium bar though, but it hasn't been used to set standards for the last 43 years.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Scrameustache]

based on questionable measurements of an arbitrary planet, [...] There is nothing "fundamental" about the basis of the metric system.


The meter is not the basis of the international units system, the number 10 is. And the planet is not arbitrary, it was choosen because its the one that all human beings have been born on, lived on. Its the one thing that all of humanity has in common, and the point of an international unit is to be international.

The questionnable measurements, yeah, but how accurate was that measurement of that guy's foot? That's why they've been refining the definition over time, in order to have something more reliable.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Guppy06]

"Why do you call them 'English' units, when everyone else knows them as Imperial units?"

Because everybody knows that SI = French and we can't think of a better antonym.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Antibozo]

I'm disappointed to see this post modded as flamebait, considering how insightful it is. It is decidedly not flamebait.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[sootman]

Light only travels 299792458m in a vacuum? What does it do then, stop? Or is that the largest vacuum there is? :-)

Just giving you a bad time. You just forgot an "in a second" there somewhere.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Antibozo]

I think you need to look up the word arbitrary in a dictionary. All fundamental constants are arbitrary, unless you can show that a divine creator derived them from something external to our universe, in which case that external thing is arbitrary, as is the creator's decision to base the speed of light upon it. If the speed of light is a fundamental constant, it is arbitrary. And regardless of that, 299792458 is certainly arbitrary.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Guppy06]

"Personally I think 2.54cm is pretty arbitrary."

The "inernational inch" number of 2.54 was arrived at as a compromise between the relatively insignifigant discrepancies between inches as defined in the US, UK and Canada. For the record, 2.54 was first used by the Canadians, with the US version slightly bigger and the UK slightly smaller.

As far as surveying is concerned, instead of resurveying the third-biggest country on the planet the USGS still uses the older number of 1 inch = 10 000/3937 cm (i. e. 1 meter = 39.37 inches) that was chosen by Congress in the late Nineteenth Century. The US was the first inch-using (and English-speaking) country to agree upon the standards that are now known as SI. This is where "statute feet" and "statute miles" come from. True, these are the same number to five 9's, but people who worry about 1/12ths of inches (called a "line" and is abbreviated with three apostrophes to contrast with feet and inches) tend to be picky like that.

"Then again, cm are based on a fraction of a wavelength of a certain coloured light,"

The centimeter is 1/100 of a meter. The meter is currently defined as the distance EM moves in 1/299 792 458 second in a vacuum, which in turn defines c as exactly 299 792 458 m/s. The inch, like the centimeter, is also defined in relation to the meter, so you can express c exactly in US customary units as well.

The "frequency of light" you're talking about was an older definition.

"The first attempts for standardising the inch were many hundreds of years ago,"

Not really. Every European country had it's own measurement system which were quite different from everybody else's (consider the French "toise" and "arpent," which the USGS still has to deal with in the Louisiana Purchase and Canada in Quebec). The only real standardization came in the Twentieth Century as other inch-using countries other than the US came into the SI fold.

The only real reason feet and pounds survive to this day is the Industrial Revolution. Reciprocating steam engines were developed and perfected by the British, who used their own measurement system at the time. They filled out their steam tables using feet, pounds and Farenheit/Rankine, which everybody else (read "the US") used to build their own reciprocating steam engines. This also gave us things like "BTUs" and "horsepower."

At any rate, These people are in charge of SI globally, these people are in charge of SI within the US, and they maintain a list of conversion factors to, from and within the US units here.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Detritus]

ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTARIANISM!

Your references simply reinforce my point. I wasn't using replica in the literal sense. Whether the meter bar is made of platinum, platinum-iridium, 1650763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red line of krypton-86, or the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum in the time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second, it's still an arbitrary base unit. The kilogram is still defined by a lump of platinum-iridium in a vault in Sevres, France.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[jotaeleemeese]

What a load of rubish.

You don't need to convert between meters and kilometers because eveidnetly they measure things of differents orders of magnitude. It ls like asking why the distance between Houston and NY is not given in inches. Well, doh!.

Nevertheless, when the conversion is necessary, it is dead simple: move the decimal point 3 places.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Bob Uhl]

Your solution requires a ruler; mine does not. Which one of us will do quicker work?

Units of measure not being related by a factor of ten is nothing but a nuisance here.

Explain the nuisance. All I know is that when I cook, I quite commonly take advantage of equivalences like 1 1/2 = 2x3/4. When I brew, it's very common to play with fractions--sometimes I'm brewing partial batches; sometimes I subdividing my wort to experiment with different things; sometimes I'm just bottling part and kegging part. In my cooking and brewing, the standard system works awfully well.

Considering that it was tested in the fires of thousands of years of cooking and brewing, this is not surprising.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Bob Uhl]

My point was that switching to duodecimal would have given a genuine advantage; switching measurements to decimal had none.

Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds; different bases make sense in different places. There used to be twelve ounces to the pound (the word inch and ounce are cognates), but it was too small, so four more were added. For liquids, anything other than base-2 is stupid; for lengths, it doesn't matter, so using base-12 is awfully handy (and yes, I'd revise the length of the mile--the nautical mile is better); weights are somewhere in between, and arguments may be made either way.

But note, I'm talking about crafting the units to their purpose; this attitude is foreign to users of French units, who spend their lives trying to fit square pegs in round holes, all the while crying out how much easier it is to stack square pegs.

Quick, without looking: what's the multiplier for yocto- or pico-?

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Bob Uhl]

Bravo! You make another very important point: French units have been sold to us on the basis of their consistency--but that's a lie. Excellent post.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Bob Uhl]

When you live somewhere that's had the metric system for ages, most of the numbers you want to divide, and divide by, tend to be "right".

Not really. One sees it all the time in this country: the sheep never divide by aught but 5 and 10, which are ugly. One is seeing fewer and fewer fractions nowadays--too difficult for the unwashed masses to comprehend such a difficult thing as 3/4, I suppose. There's even a decimal traffic sign in Dallas, Tx.

Did it ever occur to you that dividing a foot into inches *is* a "unit conversion"?'

My point was that concrete conversion is easy in the standard system, while abstract conversion is easy in the French system, and that while concrete conversion is pretty common, abstract conversion is almost unknown outside of grammar school.

Having said that, three is an "ugly number" number to divide by IME, because most of the numbers you want to divide aren't easily divisible by three.

In base-12, 1/3 is non-repeating, which is nice. And if one's using fraction, then division by three is easy: 8,674/3 = 2,891 1/3 (random number, divided by sight--no calculator used). Pretty easy. Fractions, of course, have the advantage being able to exactly represent any rational number, and are hence superior to decimals.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Bob Uhl]

Exactly. And since conversion between measures of varying magnitudes is uncommon, why optimise for it? Why try to cram the real variety of magnitudes into a base-10 straitjacket? The metre's not a bad size, but the decimeter is silly, and the dekametre absurd. The centimetre's not entirely bad, and the millimetre's actually decent. On our side, the inch, the foot, the yard and the mile are all quite nice units, well-suited to human-sized measures, striking a nice balance between exactness and concision (i.e., a human is never 2 digits of feet tall, but tends toward the high single-digits).

Why not optimise for the common case? French units are a classic case of premature optimisation.

I'm not opposed to reworking standard measures--it'd be nice were there 16 cu. in. in a cup, and if a fl. oz. of water weighed exactly 1 oz. (of course, that does no good for anything other than water, but still...). But throwing out the baby with the bathwater is ridiculous. And neglecting our true advantage in favour of something less likely to be useful is insane.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[avdp]

Switching to SI DOES have a significant advantage. The US would finally be using the same units as the rest of the world. I am sure it would it be an easy task, but it would be worth it in my opinion.

I get your point (yet still disagree) about crafting units to their purpose (base-12 for some, base-2 for others, etc), but the english system does not even bother to keep it consistent within the same kind of units. inch, feet, yard, mile, etc.

The reason I disagree is simple: somehow the rest of the world gets along just fine with SI. I've never felt that I was "fitting square pegs in round holes" back when I still lived in Europe. From my various engineering classes in college (in the US), I vaguely remember one formular/calculation (don't remember which, it's been a while) that was a lot harder with SI, while the rest was significantly easier with SI.

Re:Imperial, not English...

[drsmithy]

One is seeing fewer and fewer fractions nowadays--too difficult for the unwashed masses to comprehend such a difficult thing as 3/4, I suppose. There's even a decimal traffic sign in Dallas, Tx.

That's because schools don't teach fractions anymore (at least here in .au). Heck, you'd be lucky to find a *teacher* under 30 who could do more than extremely basic manipulation of fractions.

My point was that concrete conversion is easy in the standard system, while abstract conversion is easy in the French system, and that while concrete conversion is pretty common, abstract conversion is almost unknown outside of grammar school.

Personally, I'd call going from metres to centimetres or centimetres to millimetres at least as "concrete" as going from feet to inches. Again, it's about the types of measurements that are regularly used - and in metric-ised countries, centimetres are used a lot more than inches :).

Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean by "concrete" and "abstract" conversions.

In base-12, 1/3 is non-repeating, which is nice.

Trouble is, we use base 10 :).

And if one's using fraction, then division by three is easy: 8,674/3 = 2,891 1/3 (random number, divided by sight--no calculator used). Pretty easy.

I should clarify, by "ugly" I meant it wouldn't divide evenly - ie, you'd have remainders left over.

I'd propose to you that a significant chunk of the younger population would have a great deal of difficulty doing that sum in their head - not because of the 1/3 left over, but because few of them would know the tricks of in-the-head division. How often do you see young people divide or multiply something by 1 on a calculator ?

Fractions, of course, have the advantage being able to exactly represent any rational number, and are hence superior to decimals.

That depends entirely upon what you're doing. For estimations and in-the-head calculations, no argument - but it's a heck of a lot easier to measure out 3mm on a ruler with 1mm divisions than try and eyeball 3/10ths of a centimetre with centimetre divisions. And that's before getting into things like engineering and manufacturing, where measurements have to be exact.

Also not forgeting that decimals *are* fractions, just with base 10 denominators :).

Re:Imperial, not English...

[Bob Uhl]

Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean by "concrete" and "abstract" conversions.

I think so. What I mean by a concrete conversion is taking x of unit Y and cutting it into x' of unit Y', e.g. taking a gallon of beer and dividing it into pints, or a dekalitre and dividing it into decilitres. What I mean by an abstract conversion is simply doing unit conversion on paper, e.g. writing 1 gal = 8 pts or 1 dekalitre = 100 decilitres. The standard system is optimised for the first and (admittedly) not nearly so good at the second; the French system is optimised for the second and (I contend) not nearly so good at the first.

I further contend that in normal life one performs a lot more concrete conversions than abstract, and thus that a system optimised for concrete conversions is more useful than one not.

I'd propose to you that a significant chunk of the younger population would have a great deal of difficulty doing that sum in their head - not because of the 1/3 left over, but because few of them would know the tricks of in-the-head division.

No tricks involved, just standard long division, keeping track of the result digit-by-digit; the sort of thing I learned in second or third grade (7 or 8 years old). Although yes, you're probably correct that a large number of people cannot do that anymore.

For estimations and in-the-head calculations, no argument - but it's a heck of a lot easier to measure out 3mm on a ruler with 1mm divisions than try and eyeball 3/10ths of a centimetre with centimetre divisions.

Of course--but the world is not always ideal. And remember my earlier point about the concrete conversions: it's really easy to eyeball 1/12, 2/12, 2/13, 4/12, 6/12, and only slightly more difficult to work out 8/12 or 9/12. 10/12 is a bit more difficult, and 5/12 and 7/12 are not all that much worse. Meanwhile, 1/10, 2/10, 3/10 &c. are all a uniform pain (well, except for 5/10:-). Likewise the rest of the system.

Also not forgeting that decimals *are* fractions, just with base 10 denominators

Of course--but they are a limited subset and IMHO not nearly as useful as they could be.

The standard system is imperfect, but is in several regards superior to the French system (e.g. concrete manipulation, philosophical flexibility), and inferior in few (e.g. abstract manipulation, use internationally). Moreover, the strengths of its superior characteristics outweigh the strengths of its inferior characteristics. I would like to reform the system we've got (and it could certainly use reformation), not toss it out.

Standard system

[thom2000]

Hmm, maybe it would be a good idea to always use a standard international system of units, to avoid these kind of problems...

Re:Standard system

[TheScogg]

Yes. We could call it "metric"!

Re:Standard system

[Anonymous Coward]

> standard international system of units

The SI units are the responibility of the French, and because they didn't back us in the war on Iraq, we refuse to use their units.

Freedom Units anybody?

How many Rods to the Hogshead?...

[Anonymous Coward]

It wasn't mentioned in the article, but for my own reference, I'm wondering how many Rods to the Hogshead this ride gets?
Or if that info. isn't available, how many stone per fortnight this ride has in lifting capacity.

TDz.

Re:How many Rods to the Hogshead?...

[flewp]

how many stone per fortnight this ride has in lifting capacity.

That depends if the ride is European or African.

Re:How many Rods to the Hogshead?...

[NotQuiteReal]

Sigh

It is in Japan, so it is Asian... no wait, blue... aaaaargh!

Re:How many Rods to the Hogshead?...

[davew666]

That depends if the ride is European or African

Or if you tie two of them together.

0.86mm? That's a HUGE difference!

[cnelzie]

In the automotive industry being off by that 'gigantic' mile of a discrepancy can be the difference between an entirely safe system or a potentially dangerous event just waiting to happen.

Anything from rubbing away the lining of important wires or hoses, different stress locations resulting in tear apart pieces that shouldn't be tear apart can happen by being off by that much...

0.86mm might at well be 3 feet off. A part that comes out that far off is nothing but scrap material. (Well at least in our area of automotive work.)

Re:0.86mm? That's a HUGE difference!

[c_oflynn]

0.86mm might at well be 3 feet off.

Actually you'd be WAY better off it was 3 feet off. Even if it was say 10mm off, then the axle probably wouldn't fit or would be VERY noticably loose.

Instead you get the situation of something just fitting enough that it seems OK to the mechanic...

Re:0.86mm? That's a HUGE difference!

[Gordonjcp]

Well, 1mm of play in something like a trailer coupling probably won't make a difference. 1mm of play in a wheel bearing would make the wheel and hub wobble appreciably (on a car it would make it very unpleasant to drive), and that same 1mm in an engine's main bearings would cause the engine to hammer itself to bits in minutes.

Re:0.86mm? That's a HUGE difference!

[zulux]

Lemmeee tell 'ya....

Here at Hyundai - .86mm is barely noticible. It just means you have to push harder to get the part to fit.

Our cars can take it!

Re:0.86mm? That's a HUGE difference!

[GigsVT]

We're not talking about machining tolerance specs here. They machined it exactly to spec, just the wrong spec. :)

Re:0.86mm? That's a HUGE difference!

[Fulcrum of Evil]

and that same 1mm in an engine's main bearings would cause the engine to hammer itself to bits in minutes.

Closer to home, the engine in my car (1ZZ-FE) has had problems with the cylinder bore being off by about that much (maybe a bit less). You find out if it happened with your car when you use lots of oil, which clogs the pre-cats, which collapse, which eats your engine. The fun part is when the replace the engine without touching the headers and it eats another one.

Re:0.86mm? That's a HUGE difference!

[LostCluster]

Especially when dealing with a 45.00mm part. The errant parts were off by close to 2% of their proper size.

Proving once again...

[Kenja]

Proving once again that the average person has a hard time coutning to ten.

Re:Proving once again...

[E10Reads]

Average A-M-R-I-C-A-N..cough...cough. but just for the record: 1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9.10

Re:Proving once again...

[Kenja]

"Average A-M-R-I-C-A-N..cough...cough. but just for the record: 1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9.10"

See, you did it wrong as well. 0.1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9

Re:Proving once again...

[mhesseltine]

Average A-M-R-I-C-A-N..cough...cough. but just for the record: 1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9.10

Yes, but the average American can spell.

Re:Proving once again...

[FroMan]

And proving once again that the below average person has a hard time spelling "counting to ten."

Re:Proving once again...

[plams]

0 1 10 that's not hard!

Re:Proving once again...

[TwistedGreen]

I get the feeling that more people modded you funny for your "unique" spelling of counting than for the actual joke. ;)

Re:Proving once again...

[Anonymous Coward]

Score -1: Redundant

int i;
for (i=1;i=10;i++)
{
cout i endl;
}

There... I am coutning to ten!

Old system

[Popageorgio]

Should have measured everything in nautical miles.

English/Metric

[Ianoo]

Please don't say English/Metric units. The UK is effectively metric now, all schoolchildren are only taught metric units and everything has to be priced in metric units. I don't even have intutitions about how long feet are or how heavy a stone is. Pretty much everyone under the age of 25 only deals with litres, metres and kilograms. The only exception is vehicle speed, which is still measured in mph (and hence all our road signs are in mph). You won't, however, catch any British Engineers or scientists using Imperial units.

Better ways to describe them would be "Imperial" (what we call them), "American" or "Archiac". I think it's about time the US caught up with the rest of the world and ditched these stupid and difficult-to-remember units once and for all.

Re:English/Metric

[mirio]

Hmm...

I think it's about time the US caught up with the rest of the world and ditched these stupid and difficult-to-remember units once and for all.

That is exactly what they were doing! Space mountain is also a very old ride, I have no idea as to the age of that contraption, but it's probably safe to assume it is older than 25 years.

Re:English/Metric

[whizzard]

I think it's about time the US caught up with the rest of the world and ditched these stupid and difficult-to-remember units once and for all.

Also, since C is more difficult to remember (and use) than Visual Basic, I propose that C be outlawed once and for all.

Re:English/Metric

[quigonn]

I think it's about time the US caught up with the rest of the world and ditched these stupid and difficult-to-remember units once and for all.

Actually, they did, around 1972, but they also introduced a virtually unlimited transition period so that people aren't confused with the new units. But so far, hardly anybody has switched to the better, scientific, superior, European SI units!

Re:English/Metric

[Evl]

Whats so difficult to remember? Units are nothing but contants, you need to look them up anyway. I have a hard time thinking that metric is "better", its just different. This becomes especially obvious when you talk time and temperature. Why don't you see people telling you the'll meet you in 3 kiloseconds, or that the heater is broken and it won't keep the room above 285 kelvin?

Re:English/Metric

[ender81b]

Hey! You can try to lie to us americans but I know better, I just spent a year in england doing study abroad and you guys are more fucked up than americans when it comes to measurements. At least we consistently ignore the metric system.

Let's see here. Ok, distance is in miles and miles per hour. Liquid measurements are liters except when talking about beer, then it's a pint. Weight is in *stones* for christsake, a person's height is talked about in feet but a building/mountain height is usually in meters. A football field is yards though. Tempature is in celsius I suppose.

So, while you can be a self-righteous snob to us, some of us know better - england isn't really any better than the US.

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

Might as well go a step further and call them "Archaic" ;)

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they're called "English" units simply because they *came* from England, irrespective of what you are using now?

In a museum with 16th Century English weapons, would you also complain that "no one is using those anymore, so call them imperial weapons"?

Re:English/Metric

[drinkypoo]

I thought imperial and american english measurements weren't all the same thing anyway? I've learned to call them SAE, and Metric/SI. These are explicit and leave no room for imagination, which should help to mitigate murphy's law.

Re:English/Metric

[kinnell]

You won't, however, catch any British Engineers or scientists using Imperial units.

Integrated circuit pins and PCB track metrics are still measured in thousandths of an inch. Whether this is an americanism, or because of the difficulty in switching enough components simultaneously to drive demand, I don't know. But don't underestimate the power of Legacy - I'm sure this isn't the only example.

Re:English/Metric

[thedillybar]

I think it's about time the US caught up with the rest of the world and ditched these stupid and difficult-to-remember units once and for all.

Should we throw away everything with an English thread away?
We need to replace ALL of our sockets & drivers (yes, even the metric ones, because they're still 3/8", 1/2", or some other English drive size).
Want me to tear down my house because it's built to English specs too?
What about my water pump that's rated in psi?
My computer case needs to go because it's English dimension and has English threads.

I could go on a very long time, the fact is we can't just ditch these stupid and difficult-to-remember units. It will take a very long time.

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, we do have a fair number of exceptions. You mentioned miles, but we also buy beer in pints. I was under the impression most people measured their weight in stones (I have no idea how heavy I am in kg).

I think the next thing to ditch is stupid time and date formats. How long is a month? What do you mean it depends on what month it is?

Re:English/Metric

[poszi]

Whats so difficult to remember?

Well, our numerical system is based on 10 as a base. It make more sense to have the same base in units. If you think there is nothing to remember, tell me without looking to google, how many gallons are in one cubic foot?

Re:English/Metric

[chocotof]

I am not sure about that ... C is EXTREMELY simple (Compare the thickness of a C-programmers guide and the tomes of VB books) The problem is that hardware is not easy. Visual basic does not care about the hardware (runs only on intel anyway)

Re:English/Metric

[BJH]

This was Tokyo Disneyland, remember. It's only been open for 20 years.

As for the units, Japan's been metric for ages - I daresay the plans were brought over from the US and converted to metric in 1995 to allow easier use of local suppliers.

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

> Better ways to describe them would be "Imperial" (what we call them), "American" or "Archiac". I think it's about time the US caught up with the rest of the world and ditched these stupid and difficult-to-remember units once and for all.

Uh huh. You're forgetting who's in charge here aren't you? You know, we spend billions of dollars to keep the world safe and what does everyone do? Let the French establish engineering standards. Sheeesh!

Re:English/Metric

[relrelrel]

everyone in the world measures penis size in inches still though... apart from the french.... ;)

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

Not difficult to remember? I bet you don't even know how many cubic inches there are in a cup.

Re:English/Metric

[Cerv]

Pretty much everyone under the age of 25 only deals with litres, metres and kilograms. The only exception is vehicle speed, which is still measured in mph (and hence all our road signs are in mph). You won't, however, catch any British Engineers or scientists using Imperial units.

As a Brit under the age of 35 I deal with pints on a regular basis.

Re:English/Metric

[CaptainAlbert]

The UK is effectively metric now, all schoolchildren are only taught metric units

Except by their parents, who will teach them the Imperial units anyway.

My experience is at odds with this assertion that all the youngsters talk metric. Although when at work, just about everything is metric (except if it's American :)), everyone I know (including those younger than me) measures their weight in stones and pounds, and their height in feet and inches. And, more importantly, their beer in pints!

I much prefer units I can relate to, personally. If the metric system has given us nothing else (which it hasn't), at least we have the Centigrade scale. I'm all for keeping the old-fashioned units alive, but really! Who thought water freezing at 32 and boiling at 212 was a sensible scale?

I know the significance of 0F as being the lowest acheivable temperature where salted water remains liquid, but can anyone explain the rest? It still completely baffles me!

P.S. Slashdot ate my &deg; markup, sorry!

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

No, those small numbers you see are French penis sizes measured in inches!

Re:English/Metric

[loconet]

And that is how it should be! , ever since I moved to Canada (10yrs ago) I've lost notion of what a Kilogram is and I hate it. I need to start forcing myself to re-learn metric. I still refuse to use feet/inches though.

Re:English/Metric

[swordgeek]

Actually, nothing outside the US is in meters or liters. The official units are litre and metre, and it's ONLY in the US that anyone believes differently.

Stones are still used by the older generation, but no longer taught. Same with feet for height. (People are usually described in centimetres.) And a pint (of beer) is an entity unto itself, a piece of sacred anachronism.

Re:English/Metric

[inode_buddha]

Oddly enough, I don't have any intuition about metric units, even though I'm only a few blocks from the Canadian border. That said, the US Gov't has traded in "hard" metric for some time now; the "average Joe" on the street (such as myself) still uses Imperial for day-to-day life.

So actually, the US *has* caught up with the rest of the world; you won't trade or get any Gov't contracts in Imperial units. Oddly, I never found the Imperial system all that hard to remember or manipulate; probably because I grew up with it.

My conclusion? Its probably more of a social/cultural issue than anything. It won't surprise me if my kids have no clue that the Imperial system ever existed. It might make talking about the weather interesting, though.

Re:English/Metric

[Joseph Vigneau]

I bet you don't even know how many cubic inches there are in a cup.

Google knows all:

14.4375001

Re:English/Metric

[Malc]

C to K and vice versa is a very easy conversion. The same can't be said for converting between F and K or F and C.

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't even have intutitions about how long feet are or how heavy a stone is.

I know the feeling. Spend all your time on the computer, and you forget the color of the sky or the smell of flowers. Do what I do: my paperweight is a stone and I program with bare feet, so I don't lose my intuitions about these things.

Re:English/Metric

[Malc]

What are you talking about? The only time non-SI units are used in Canada are when it comes to a persons height or weight, or at Home Depot (too integrated with the US market).

Re:English/Metric

[WIAKywbfatw]

Uh, for temperature, most of the world uses Celcius. A one degree change in Celcius is equal to a one degree change in Kelvin.

In fact, the Kelvin scale is based on the Celcius scale. 0 degrees Celcius = freezing point of water, 100 degrees Celcius = boiling point of water. How hard is that?

The only reason why the Fahrenheit scale used a non-zero value for the freezing point of water was that people of the time didn't have a strong grasp of the concept of negative numbers. So, for simplicity's sake, the freezing point of water was set at 32 degrees.

The concept of negative numbers isn't too difficult for people to grasp now, so is there any reason to stick to such an antiquated temperature scale?

Metric (or SI) units better on so many levels, especially in science. For example, you can convert from one SI unit to another easily: eg, 1 Newtons = 1 kilogram metre per second squared.

Also, Imperial measurements aren't standard: some of them vary from country to country, which is equally ridiculous.

Your "kiloseconds" example is ridiculous, as the second is the SI unit for time. For simplicity and historical reasons we use hours and minutes (because those are easy to comprehend and interpret divisions of a day), but if you were going to perform a time-critical experiment or calculation then you would measure in just seconds. Of course, at the end of your calculation you might convert those seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds so that your result can be more easily interpreted but you'd never do the mathematics in anything other than an SI-based unit.

Just because you were raised with Imperial measurements it doesn't negate the intrinsic "clunkiness" of them or the significant advantages SI units possess over them.

Re:English/Metric

[Oddly_Drac]

"I just spent a year in england doing study abroad"

You have my condolences. Hopefully it wasn't London. Was it London?

"Ok, distance is in miles and miles per hour."

The second one is a speed measurement. Velocity, if you prefer.

"Liquid measurements are liters except when talking about beer, then it's a pint."

In the UK, the legal measurement is engraved on the sides of the glass. That's a lot of glasses to replace, and the relevant difficulties connected with flattening the prices, not to mention the changes to the taxation rules, but I suspect that it'll change eventually. Did you notice what was written on the side of cans and bottles?

"Weight is in *stones* for christsake"

Not anywhere official, but that's fighting a level of social inertia. I personally have no clue what a stone is (Yes, I could look it up) except I possibly have too many of them.

"a person's height is talked about in feet"

That one is an oddity, but again, officially, you'll see centimetres used.

"building/mountain height is usually in meters."

You'll see feet used there as well...again, social inertia.

"A football field is yards though."

Tradition, although the FA has regulation sizes in metres.

"Tempature is in celsius I suppose"

Both, usually, although I have no sense of fahrenheit. Kelvins would be just nit-picking.

"while you can be a self-righteous snob to us"

Ah, that's genetic, but usually called something along the lines of 'trying to smack down stereotypes of the British'. ;o)

Re:English/Metric

[swordgeek]

He didn't say ditch the stuff already made, he said ditch the units. You should have quit using them decades ago like the rest of the world, and by now you wouldn't have any problems. However, start making the switch NOW, instead of complaining about how hard it will be and how long it will take.

When your water pump dies, get one that measures pressure in kPa. Computer case dimensions are neither particularly important, or likely to be manufactured in Imperial units anyways. I'll be that they've all been made metric, and measured in inches for the US market. At least the ones made overseas (which is nearly all of them).

The point is, start changing now! Come join the rest of the world!

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be a larger number in the metric system, as you'd use centimeters for it. 20 sounds bigger than 8, doesn't it?

Re:English/Metric

[Paleomacus]

I don't know about you but I measure mine in meters.(Transplanted from a blue whale)

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice to read the parent post, asswipe

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

fuck the metric system

Re:English/Metric

[gowen]

So, while you can be a self-righteous snob to us, some of us know better - england isn't really any better than the US.

We can seemlessly deal with any number of non-commensurate units and systems, and not get out panties in a wad. I'd say that was pretty damn good.

Not as impressive as all those multi-lingual continental Europeans like the Dutch, but still pretty cool.

Re:English/Metric

[Oddly_Drac]

"Maybe they're called "English" units simply because they *came* from England, irrespective of what you are using now?"

Does this mean that you're actually claiming that you're European because you probably came from here?

"In a museum with 16th Century English weapons, would you also complain that "no one is using those anymore, so call them imperial weapons"?"

With a debating style this good, you should really be in politics. Congress wouldn't know what hit them, and would possibly introduce random drug-testing just to make sure. No wonder you're anonymous.

'Imperial' is the term we use for 'Imperial measurements'. Note that imperial measurements weren't limited to the UK, mainly because they were used in the empire. You can see how this is shaping up already. It's not down to the fact that nobody uses them anymore that they're called imperial, but the fact that they came from the empire.

Cunning, eh?

Re:English/Metric

[WIAKywbfatw]

Both my partner and I are in our early thirties. We both use metric measurements and "think" in metric. The other day, we were looking at a sofa from a company that doesn't include metric measurements in its brochure, so we performed the conversion from inches to centimetres before visualising the dimensions.

I think it's fair to say that it's only people of our parents generation and older (say, 50+), that think of inches before they think of centimetres.

Re:English/Metric

[irokitt]

It is interesting to note that, by now, every young person being educated by higher education (particularly in the lab sciences) in America is strictly using metric measurments. I would expect that our generation is probably the last one to put up with the English measurements for daily use. It will take a long time, their will still be artifacts from our colonial overlords, but it will happen soon enough. What's everybody's hurry anyway?

Re:English/Metric

[Oddly_Drac]

"Let the French establish engineering standards."

Sometime you ought to visit the Statue of Liberty, just to check out where it came from. Then go lookup General Lafayette.

*I* have thousands of years of ancestral claims towards taking the piss out of the French, while you lot got a bit miffed because they wouldn't join a fairly recent bomb-fest, and they've been your staunch allies since the word go.

Re:English/Metric

[gatzke]

I think 100 F was the temperature of the human body (as accurately as they could tell at the time).

F makes more sense for temperature (not scientifically). 0 is damn cold, 100 is damn hot, and you can feel a change of a degree or two.

In C, you have to go to something like -10 is cold and 30 is hot and you may change the thermostat by half a degree. I agree, C is better for science, but in the real world who cares where water boils or freezes.

Re:English/Metric

[dattaway]

The metric system may be great for scientific measurements and entry level CAD operators. There's a reason why machinists like thousanths of an inch and fractional measurement. That just happens to be the cutting rate of steels and other metals.

Everything is cut in increments of a few thousanths. Metric requires a pencil and manipulation of numbers. Fractions are a shortcut method and eliminate a point of failure.

Move to metric and you would be better served by a machine that can do floating point calculations flawlessly.

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

> Your "kiloseconds" example is ridiculous, as the second is the SI unit for time.

It's not ridiculous, actually it's exactly how it should be done according to SI: measure time in seconds and if the number is too large, use kilo, mega, etc. So you tell your friend you'll meet him in 1.8 ks instead of in half an hour :)

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

"but in the real world who cares where water boils or freezes."

If cooking or the weather are not important to you.

Re:English/Metric

[Smelly Jeffrey]

It's a dreadful good thing that I did this on paper first, rather than looking to google. Its calculator is a bit hosed. When you type in "gallon cubic foot" for the query The following result is what I got:

1 US gallon (cubic foot) = 0.000107190925 m^6

So, I guess that google thinks 1 US gallon = 1 cubic foot. (The correct answer is that 7.47 US gallons = 1 cubic foot.)

Over and above that, somehow google has meters in the sixth dimension.

Re:English/Metric

[CastrTroy]

Actually, It runs on AMD too. Oh, you must've meant x86. Well, yeah. But last I checked, so did windows, and well, I don't think Microsoft cares to make a compiler for any other type of hardware. It wouldn't be impossible. And if Microsoft did decide to make a compiler for some other platform, i'm pretty sure it wouldn't require any changes to the code to get it to compile for that hardware.

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

Ehm, what's your point here? Is it easier to describe something in thousands of an inch instead of in micrometers? To convert between micrometers and meters I multiply by a million. I think even you can do that in your head. To convert between thousands of an inch and a foot I multiply by what?

Re:English/Metric

[Rich0]

Whoa! I can't believe that you just made that comparison!

First - either compare VC++ to VB (good luck getting into that - the MFC is great for writing a word processor, but if you just want a simple 1-window application that doesn't have documents, good luck). Or, compare C to BASIC - not VB.

Also - most C books are written for people who already have knowledge of programming in some other language, so they don't spend a whole chapter describing how an if() statement or for() loop works, or the trick of embedding printf's / Msgbox's in your procedures to debug when they're being called. BASIC books tend to be written towards somebody who knows how to use a word processor, and that's about it.

The best counterexample to C being simple is when you have to master pointers. In BASIC and Pascal they're an advanced concept that many casual programmers never bother to learn. In C you can't even read a line of input without one. Ask a programmer back in the DOS days how many times they had to reboot their computer while debugging a BASIC program vs a C one... (Linux/unix is far nicer since segfaults just cause a core dump.)

If performance is critical, by all means optimize SOME routines in C. However, using C across the board is generally unnecessary, and just adds possible security issues (buffer overflows), memory leaks, and lengthens development time. For the linux kernel it might make sense, but for most applications it should be used sparingly...

Re:English/Metric

[CaptainAlbert]

How strange! I'm only 25, and yet I measured up my flat in units of feet just yesterday. If I were buying furniture, I'd have to convert centimetres to feet and inches before I could visualize it. I order meat from the butcher's in pounds, and measure the thickness of snow and the length of grass in inches.

Help! I think I'm some sort of freak!

Re:English/Metric

[Kidbro]

I agree, C is better for science, but in the real world who cares where water boils or freezes.

When water freezes is extremely relevant in "the real world". Whether there will be rain/wet or snow/ice outside is extremely relevant - at least where I live.
Having 100 as the boiling point of water isn't quite as important, but still pretty sensible. Usually, one degree C is small enough to be sufficient in accuracy (I have really never seen anyone change the thermostat by half a degree, as you claim), and having two points on a scale that sort of relates to the same thing (water, in this case) is pretty intuitive...

Re:English/Metric

[Tingler]

"I know the significance of 0F as being the lowest acheivable temperature where salted water remains liquid, but can anyone explain the rest?"

If I am not mistaken, 100 degrees Fahrenheit was set at the internal body temperature of a healthy human. Later advances showed that the actual average internal temperature to be 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Oh well.

I only wish that they set the temperature of boiling water at 200 degrees Celsius rather than 100. That would make the resolution of degrees to be twice as fine as they are now. In Fahrenheit temperatures, you can more easily judge the weather. You can ask what the temperature will be today & you will get an answer like "in the 70s." That is far more useful to me than "in the 20s" (Celsius). The difference in 20 degrees C & 29 degrees is much more than 70 & 79 degrees Fahrenheit.

Re:English/Metric

[ender81b]

Nope, wasn't london - lancaster university in lancashire.

I understand the reasons, I just find it.. somewhat hypocritical when the english make fun of americans for using imperial units.

Re:English/Metric

[mekkab]

Question, when you (or anyone, really) goes to the pub, do they get a pint? Or do they get a litre?

And by your own admission, you still use miles.

However, I agree. I think its time the US went bi-modal, allowing a gradual transition to metric.

Re:English/Metric

[Eon78]

Google replies in m^6, NOT cubic foot. Try "gallon in cubic foot" and see the result: 1 US gallon = 0.133680556 cubic foot.

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

Being from New Zealand (metric) and having lived in the UK for 3 years now I can tell you your idea that the UK has converted to metric is rubbish. When I tell people I'm 183cm tall they look like confused puppies trying to figure out where the tennis ball went. People's weights are discussed in stones.. which I have no idea about (I use kilograms). And despite the law saying metric units must be used when selling items by weight or volume there are plenty of examples where adherence to this law is lacking.

Re:English/Metric

[jaf]

As some people mention, both systems are good for different uses.

I do feel that the "metric is base 10 because there are 10 fingers on a hand" explanation is wrong. Metric units are base 10 because we all write numerical values in base 10!

Example: I have some boxes I'm stacking on top of each other, each 14 cm in height. I've got 20 of those, that's 280cm, or 2.8 meters. So easy.

My car is 15 feet long (or whatever). If you put 40 cars after each other, how long would that row of cars be?

I'm metric, and I've been that all my life since I'm Danish, but I can appreciate how difficult it must be for people converting. Lots of resistance. Of course it will take a few generations before the conversion is all complete. And yes, more planes will crash, etc. but that's not the metric system at fault!

Re:English/Metric

[chocotof]

No changes ? Yes probably. That is why you need those 'far pascal __decl and about a gazillion options if you want to compile something on windows. If it was not impossible why then do they only support intel CPU's. Intel was correct because I referred to Arm/x86 at the same time. I also remember that nasty habit of VB not having to declare variables. I.e every Capital letter typo delivers nice hours of debugging (yes : it is very hard to remember if the variable was Counter or counter ...)

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

..and people from Czech Republic. They use cm.

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

This becomes especially obvious when you talk time and temperature.

The modern world uses Celsius instead of Fahrenheit, temperature can range from 5c to 35c in central and southern europe.
Water evaporates at 100c and freezes at 0c. Your natural body temperature would be 37c.

We still have 24 hours a day just like you, and kilo is only used for weight.
(Kilo stands for a thounsand)
tonne = 1,000 kilograms
gram = 1/1000 kilogram
milligram = 1 thousandth of a gram

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilogram
just read it

Re:English/Metric

[thelasttemptation]

Try a real query string
1 cubic foot in gallons

1 (cubic foot) = 7.48051945 US gallons

It's all about how you ask...

Re:English/Metric

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

So you're saying thousands of an inch are good units because people have made equipment to cut in units of thousands of an inch. Well I really can't fault that logic at all, not one bit.

Re:English/Metric

[Unregistered]

Except Standard (English) units are more useful. They're divisible by more things. ex: a half foot is 6 inches a third of a foot is 4, a quarter is 3. In the real world metrics aren't really as pretty as people say. The only common conversion out there is volume to mass and for anything but water, metrics are no easier than Standard. And Celsius degrees are too damn big for lab use, imo. For some purposes Standard is better and for some purposes metric is. Its not tht hard to learn both.

Re:English/Metric

[TomV]

I should add here, though it makes us look even sillier, the following:

I used to work in railways. Railways are still measured in chains and quarter-miles (20 chains to the quarter mile).

Actually, a chain's really easy as any fule kno that it's the length of a cricket pitch from wicket to wicket ;)

The railway example actually gives a pointer to why we retain certain units - it's at least in part about installed infrastructure. To re-do the railways in km rather than miles would require the replacement of tens of thousands of mileposts (one every 20 chains, roughly), re-marking of speed restrictions all over the place, probably reassessing safety calculations from scratch rather than just recalculating the final figures, since the safety rules are very strict like that.

To re-do the road speeds would be anightmare for the millions of cars with no km markings on the speedometer, and might well need either the re-designation of speed limits all over the place or re-grading the limits to much harder-to-remember figures like 48km/h in a current 30mph zone or 64km/h for a 40 zone.

The pint's just an emotive thing, I'm pretty certain of that.

Re:English/Metric

[jrumney]

Should we throw away everything with an English thread away?

It would make life much simplier if you did. When I was working on the shop floor of a factory, all the engineers had to keep two sets of everything. One set for working on the US and older British machines, and another set for working on European and Japanese machines. It'll take a while to phase out all the old equipment, but I wish the US would just hurry up and start phasing it out already.

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck off you bunch of homosexual boffins.

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, a simple walk over to wikipedia would have shown this to be full of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit

Re:English/Metric

[inode_buddha]

True; I'm on the *cough* "older" side of Gen X. My HS didn't have computers until a few years after I graduated, and I remember well having to take Engineering Drawing (drafting) on both paper and AutoCAD in college. The thing I think is *really* weird is that I have no problem with thinking in scientific prefixes/suffixes from both systems. Even in the same sentence. For example in Analog Electronics it was common to mix Imperial fractions with -base10 and metric in the same sentence, and everybody understood anyway. Go figure... *shrugs*

Re:English/Metric

[Ianoo]

Yeah, and why do you think the only surviving commonly used base in the world (outside of computing) is 10? Because we have 10 fingers. So effectively (ten fingers) -> (ten numerical digits) -> (base 10 number system), so the reason metric is based on 10 is still because we have 10 fingers.

The only really important historical exceptions I can think of are the Romans who used base-5 (but the way they wrote numbers was so horrendous that it didn't survive) and the Babylonians, who used base-60 (because their mathematicians were all pretty smart!).

Re:English/Metric

[chocotof]

True comparing VC++ to VB is bad but comparing C++/Qt with VB that is a whole other ballgame Rebooting because of C ? Yes in the DOS days you could have problems. However using Turbo-C was really nice (and you did not have to put printfs in your program to debug it) Also having to reboot your computer has nothing to do with the language but with the quality of the underlying OS and hardware. Pascal is JUST LIKE C expect for a nice syntax and some more explicit rules about pointers. However Pascal was never intended to become more that a demo language. In fact pascal in the beginning only had 'support' for sequential file access (tape like access to data) BASIC does not compare to pascal. Basic is nothing more than an enhanced scripting language, Tokenized and interpreted just like many other languages. Of course you do not have things like pointers in Basic (well you do but nobody really uses them) because basic is ... well basic. Yes it is easier to build a simple window in Basic ... because Basic is about the only thing that MS wrote on their own and since they control the language they could built in enhanced support for GUI and not because Basic is such a superior language. I always find it strange why pointers are considered such a bad thing. I remember that book 'algoritms+data=programs' which desribes a whole lot of data types which (lists, trees, graphs, ...) which cannot be described without pointers. Performance is not that critical (anyway not on current PC hardware but perhaps on other) but when you mix two languages or systems together then you are in trouble especially under windows because the each have different calling conventions, memory models etc. Hopefully .Net will solve this.

Re:English/Metric

[jrumney]

No, you don't need to "look them up" with metric. How many inches in a mile. Yes I would need to look that one up, or at least calculate it if I could remember the number of feet or yards in a mile. How many millimetres in a kilometre? Easy, a million no looking up or calculation required.

Re:English/Metric

[Mikkeles]

"... at least we have the Centigrade scale. I'm all for keeping the old-fashioned units alive, but really! Who thought water freezing at 32 and boiling at 212 was a sensible scale?

I know the significance of 0F as being the lowest acheivable temperature where salted water remains liquid, but can anyone explain the rest? It still completely baffles me!"

Fahrenheit originally picked the normally coldest and hottest temperatures that were likely to be encountered in his area of Europe. It was later, so as to use convenient reference points, that he pegged the 32 and 212 degree points; those being slight adjustments to his original scale.

Also interesting is that Celsius' original scale was inverted (to what we now have): 0C = boiling point of water and 100C = freezing point of water! It was Linnaeus (of binomial classification in biological taxonomy fame) who suggested that Celsius' original scale be reversed.

Re:English/Metric

[spungo]

>>Kelvins would be just nit-picking.

Hm - irony. Temperature is measured in _Kelvin_, not Kelvins. No plural, dude. :-)

Re:English/Metric

[jrumney]

That said, the US Gov't has traded in "hard" metric for some time now; the "average Joe" on the street (such as myself) still uses Imperial for day-to-day life.

That must be because they use metric in Columbia. But to be honest, it isn't just the Govt that buys their recreational substance of choice by the gram instead of the ounce. Just depends what you're into.

Re:English/Metric

[adamofgreyskull]

*Hint* If you measure it in centimetres, it sounds like more ;)

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

According to my Earth Science teacher in high school, the freezing point of water was originally based on the freezing point of water in the (salty) mediterranean sea, which was measured at zero farenheit. I dont know if this is in any way accurate or not though.

Re:English/Metric

[SenseiLeNoir]

Not quite true..

There is a software called Appforge (i think) that allows you to create Applications for the Symbian/EPOC OS (running on RISC ARM) hardware using Visual Basic.

Ok applications developed using this was a DOG, and installing the runtime (Appforge Booster) gave no end to stability issues, which may be "ok" for a computer.. but having my Sony Ericsson P800 crash often thanks to that has effectively banned Appforge from my phone. Phones are NOT supposed to crash.. grrrrrrr

Re:English/Metric

[Bigman]

everyone I know (including those younger than me) measures their weight in stones and pounds, and their height in feet and inches

You know, I've noticed this... At weekends I often do karaoke at a local bar (hey, I've got to meet people sometime!) and consequently meet a lot of people in the 18-24 bracket. (This is in the UK, so we can drink at 18). On occasions that height comes into the conversation they all give their height in feet and inches. But otherwise, people talk in terms of metres and kg etc.
I think the attachment to 'stones' for weight is that 10st 5lb sounds less than 145 pounds or 66kg.

Re:English/Metric

[Bob Uhl]

French units are allowed here in the US. In fact, just about everything is marked using them. And yet we don't bother to actually switch. Why? Because we're just about the only people who realise that there is no useful advantage to the damn things. It took dictators and tyrants (Lenin; Hitler; the original French savages) to force people to switch to the inferior (in practise; on paper, of course, French units appear far superior) units. Not that our system is perfect, of course. There are some equivalences which would make life nicer.

But still, for direct manipulation, nothing beats the standard system (a system, I should note, used by most of the world, ebfore most of the world switched to French units): 12 has twice as many divisors as 10; powers of two are much better for weight & liquids than powers of 10; the distribution of units fits men better (tell me, does anyone still use steres or dekametres?); and we're remarkably free of the sort of doctrinaire spirit which refuses to recognise that a kilobyte is 1,024 bytes and not 1,000 bytes.

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

The second one is a speed measurement. Velocity, if you prefer.

Miles per hour is a speed, not a velocity. Velocities include the direction.

Oh, and I don't see why pints of beer should change, they happen to be just the right drinkable size. Which would you rather do - go to the pub and ask for a pint of beer, or go to the pub and ask for 0.568 litres of beer?

Re:English/Metric

[CastrTroy]

mmmmm..... KFC... (drool)....

Re:English/Metric

[WIAKywbfatw]

Don't be childish. Nobody said that SI units had to be rigidly observed in every sense. Do we measure everyday sound volumes in bels? No, we use decibels, because bels are too large a unit for that purpose.

The second is an adopted SI unit, it wasn't "invented" for that purpose. The second is the base SI unit of time because it's always been the base unit of time: the only thing that's changed over the years is how it's defined.

Just because we don't use decimal progressions to measure large increments of time it doesn't make the second any less valid as a SI unit and it doesn't mean that refering to 4,200 seconds as one hour and 10 minutes rather than 4.2 kiloseconds is unacceptable in an SI world.

Re:English/Metric

[Politburo]

Your cars don't have km/h on the speedometer as well as mi/h? Just about every car I've seen in the US has both units on the speedometer. Older cars, obviously, may not have this feature.

Re:English/Metric

[bucky0]

Uhh, I think this space mountain is in Japan, which wouldn't make it that old. Also, they mentioned that they had the new auto-failure-detecting-track system, which was a fairly recent development.

-Andrew

Re:English/Metric

[Hieronymus Howard]

I don't even have intutitions about how long feet are or how heavy a stone is. Pretty much everyone under the age of 25 only deals with litres, metres and kilograms.

I'm British, 36 and weigh myself in kilograms. My girlfriend is 23 but can't understand kg, so weights herself in stone. I have to keep switching the bathroom scales back to kg.

Yes, I know, 36 y/o geek with 23 y/o g/f - don't quite understand it myself.

HH
--

Re:English/Metric

[Oddly_Drac]

"somewhat hypocritical"

Again, mostly genetic.

"english make fun of americans for using imperial units."

It's not so much, just the insistence on calling them 'English' units, much the same as 'English' muffins. This is why the French have been so uptight about McDonalds...calling them 'French' fries had more to do with trying to tap into the idea of haute cuisine coming in small, medium and large rather than any inherent frenchness to the humble potato-based fast food.

And it's not the only thing we make fun of Americans about, but it's all fairly good natured, and has been for quite a long time, which is one of the reasons we tend to grin a lot and headscratch when someone starts talking about something or someone being 'anti-american', like it's an ideology rather than a geographic anomaly.

Re:English/Metric

[Malc]

You're disgusting. I always assumed KFC stood for Can't effin' Cook. I found out recently that they can't call it chicken anymore either. The chickens they rear are treated worse than those battery hens that caused an outcry in the 80's.

Re:English/Metric

[angle_slam]

So 20*14 is somehow more intuitive then 15*40?

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be childish. Nobody said that SI units had to be rigidly observed in every sense. Do we measure everyday sound volumes in bels? No, we use decibels, because bels are too large a unit for that purpose.

What are you trying to show with this example? Decibels are exactly according to SI, check your table: deci = 10^-1.

Re:English/Metric

[slim]

Oh, and I don't see why pints of beer should change, they happen to be just the right drinkable size. Which would you rather do - go to the pub and ask for a pint of beer, or go to the pub and ask for 0.568 litres of beer?

I agree: a litre of beer in one glass is too much (although the Germans seem to manage), and a half litre is too little.

I remember a news item about a landlord who went metric for a short while (sort of a reverse "Metric Martyr") -- he posted the volumes of "a swift" and "a half" (working from memory) at the bar, and explained the deal to anyone who asked for a pint... ... weights and measures shut him down in little time.

Re:English/Metric

[avdp]

You know, you can use fractions in metric too. There is nothing that stops you from saying 1/10 of a centimeter is somehow you think it's easier to remember than 100 millimeters.

As far as machinists, I have no idea what the "cutting rate of steel" is supposed to mean (eventhough I work in a steel mill). But it sounds like you're just saying that their equipment is calibrated to deal best with english units. Well, recalibrate! Change the equipment! I assure you, machinists in Europe do not have to make any conversions to the english system to do their work, and they don't have "metric steel" either.

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

"Ten litres o' bitter and a packet of crisps please barman!"

just doesn't have that same ring to it does it.

be a sad day when USA forces the British to stop drinking proper pints because they don't like the funny numbers we serve our beer in. For the 4% of them who even own a passport maybe this could be quite distressing upon landing on our shores but perhaps those who are truely disturbed by this should stick to cans and bottles while in the UK, these you may notice are served in litres.but just to truley confuze you some drink manufacturers provide both 500ml cans of lager AND 1 pint cans of lager (Stella do this).

The thing is you see, they fit in all those pint glasses aquired from pubs nicer than 500ml which always looks likes someones had a swig of your beer before you even opened the tin if you pour it in a pint glass.
*cough* True.

But really, the rest of you 96% who have never left your country and don't want to, please shut your whinging and leave me to my pint in peace.

cheers!

Re:English/Metric

[WIAKywbfatw]

I am pointing out that we don't have to be slaves to SI units. Duh.

Re:English/Metric

[TwistedGreen]

Anyone can develop a sense of measurement with any unit; it just takes practice. It's not that big of a deal.

Re:English/Metric

[TwistedGreen]

...england isn't really any better than the US.

I don't think that was ever an issue here. Grow up.

Re:English/Metric

[dattaway]

You can't recalibrate the laws of physics. No matter what machine you use, you still have a cutting bit. And that cutting bit will cut steel at about two thousanths of an inch at most. A heavier cut gets messy and can break the bit, lighter cuts give higher tolerances. But one thousanth of an inch is a perfect measuring stick for cutting. Not one millimeter, not one micron, but a thousanths of an inch. Other measurements work out well with an inch too. Its just convience of scale, and the inch works well.

Re:English/Metric

[WIAKywbfatw]

Yes, they can. I'm not totally uncomfortable with yards, feet and inches. I know my height in feet, etc, but, as i said, I "think" in centimetres, hence I'm more comfortable thinking about sofa lengths in that unit of measurement.

Re:English/Metric

[calidoscope]

Umm.

Converting C to F is simple: F = 1.8*C + 32
C = (F - 32)/1.8

Both units are based on an abritrary physical constant, the boiling point of water at what is supposed to be the atmospheric pressure at what is supposed to be sea level. Much better would be measuring temperature in either terms of electron-volts or (ahem) joules.

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

> I am pointing out that we don't have to be slaves to SI units. Duh.

But in your example we're exactly following SI...

Re:English/Metric

[avdp]

Again, how do machinists do their work in Europe? If and only if the answer to that was "they do it in english/imperial" I would believe you. But it's not. They can and do cut things in one millimeter or one micron, or their job is not sloppier or looser than an American machinist.

You know, as an engineer, who happens to work in a steel mill, I am quite familiar with physics and the properties of steel. And I can tell you with a high level of confidence: you are full of it. The "thousands of an inch" is a convienience factor based on training and the equipment they use. It has nothing to do with physics.

Re:English/Metric

[tumbaumba]

I agree, C is better for science, but in the real world who cares where water boils or freezes.

You have not lived in a country which uses metric system, have you. Centigrade scale is much more relevant to humans than Fahrenheit.

Re:English/Metric

[T-Punkt]

But there's also a shift to metric/SI units. Many of the "new" very small SMD-packages are already designed with metric/SI dimensions in mind, e.g. the "very thin shrink small outline package" (VSSOP) uses a pin-to-pin distance of 0.5mm.

Re:English/Metric

[doktor-hladnjak]

Actually, nothing outside the US is in meters or liters. The official units are litre and metre, and it's ONLY in the US that anyone believes differently.

Actually... in German speaking areas, Dutch speaking areas, and probably other areas where Germanic languages are spoken, these official units are the meter (der Meter/de meter) and the liter (der Liter/de liter).

Re:English/Metric

[Herkules]

Well it is legacy! The only time i se mill (inch/1000). Is on old work. Nothing new is in inches today. (Well not in Sweden)..

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

You've got to be joking. Machining is stupendously easier in the metric system. So much so that it's not even funny.

You are so clueless that I'm sorry for you.
Watch all those manufacturing jobs go to metric countries.

Re:English/Metric

[jaf]

The multiplication is just simple scaling, but arriving at 280 cm mena I can quickly decide that it won't fit into my room (or whatever) since 2.8 metres is too tall..

15 feet times 40.. that's 600 feet. Is that an intuitive value for lengths?

The point I'm trying to make is that it's very easy to divide and multiply with powers of ten.

Duh. Thanks for listening :)

Re:English/Metric

[poszi]

It took dictators and tyrants (Lenin; Hitler; the original French savages) to force people to switch to the inferior (in practise; on paper, of course, French units appear far superior) units.

Nice troll but Germany made metric as compulsory in 1868 and both Germany and Russia signed the Metre Convention in 1875 long before Lenin and Hitler.

Re:English/Metric

[SnowZero]

As a scientist in the US, I can too. I'll take two measurement systems any day over the 11 official spoken languages of the EU. For a scientist, multiplying by 2.54 is a lot easier than translating something to a different language. Now if only we could convert all the US engineers...

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

> Should we throw away everything with an English thread away?

No, just not design anything new with it.

> We need to replace ALL of our sockets & drivers

Yes. Ask the Canadians and the Brits, they have done that in the past few years. Besides, you already have those for your car (most motors are metric).

> (yes, even the metric ones, because they're still 3/8", 1/2", or some other English drive size).

What the hell are you talking about?

> Want me to tear down my house because it's built to English specs too?

Who is talking about tearing things down?

> What about my water pump that's rated in psi?

Yeah, so what? Your next one will be rated in bars (which is 10^5 Pascals AKA Newtons per square meter).

Re:English/Metric

[Malc]

Oh yes, I can multiply by 1.8 (or multiplying by 0.5 recurring) in my head very quicky and very accurately. I can do it as quickly and accurately as adding or subtracting 273.15, which is the difference between C and K.

Sarcasm aside, I find converting between C and F in my head easier if I multiply by 5 and divide by 9 (or vice versa), but that's still not as easy (i.e. quick) as subtracting or adding a number that is close to a simple round 300.

Re:English/Metric

[SnowZero]

Later advances showed that the actual average internal temperature to be 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

That's somewhat of an urban legend. 100F is the temperature of blood in the cenral body, while 98.6 is the temperature in your mouth under your tongue. Your mouth is not as hot as the core of your body, though obviously the difference is not that large.

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey man, welcome to the 21st century.
The world standard is the metric system. What you call "standard" is just an obsolete system used by the uneducated populace in one single industrialized country (the US). Even the US government uses the metric system.

As a European living in the US, I have yet to find a single situation for which the American non-system is better.

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

Although you all say that 'English' measurements came from England, an American Imperial pint is still a different size from an English imperial Pint.
16 FlOz verses 20 FlOz, but a Gallon is Still 8 pints in both, 128FlOz and 160FlOz respectivly, So I can't see how they can be Called English units, cos English Imperial units are different

Re:English/Metric

[SnowZero]

Ok elsewhere it seems he may have meant the body temperature to be 96, but got it wrong and it was recalibrated later after his death. I guess its just messed up then, with lots of conflicting histories that disagree. Perhaps its time to switch to Celcius :)

Re:English/Metric

[SnowZero]

The Mayans used base 36.

Re:English/Metric

[SnowZero]

err I mean Celsius.

Re:English/Metric

[dublin]

I much prefer units I can relate to, personally. If the metric system has given us nothing else (which it hasn't), at least we have the Centigrade scale. I'm all for keeping the old-fashioned units alive, but really! Who thought water freezing at 32 and boiling at 212 was a sensible scale?

This is one place where English units *definetely* make much more sense than Metric/SI units, *especially* for everyday use:

Tha problem is that a cEntigrade/Celsius degree is just too damn big to really be useful, especially for temperatures that really matter to *people*.

For instance: I used to own an Alfa Romeo 164S that, like many "metric" cars, had a climate control system that "thought" in Celsius degrees. The problem is, they're just too big to allow fine enough control for comfort: setting an AC system at 72 degrees and letting it try to stay within a degree of that works fine with Fahrenheit degrees, but doing the same thing, with a one-degree tolerance in Celsius degrees results in a temperature swing that is almost *twice* (9/5, actually) as large, so the system cannot really keep things comfortable.

Any sort of reasonable thermostat in Celsius has to resort to using half-degrees.

Who the heck cares where water boils? Especially since pretty much everyone (even metric bigots) knows that it boils at 212 degrees F.

Fahrenheit degrees are just more useful in the real world. (And they also make having to deal with negative degrees fairly rare, unless you live someplace unsuited for human habitation anyway...)

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

You can ask what the temperature will be today & you will get an answer like "in the 70s."
Hm. Try "23 deg Celsius" or something like that?

Re:English/Metric

[Libertarian_Geek]

I think Kelvin would work better for weather reports. It would be harder to confuse, since 102 deg. F = 312.038885 Kelvin. It would help those still confused by negative numbers (small children). It just fits better, since it's a measurement of heat energy (which is all positive). We would just have a little y2k type issue of more digits on thermometers. Plus, I can say, 104 in the shade when grandpa was a kid, hell, it's 313.149996 now, he had it easy!

Re:English/Metric

[dublin]

Your cars don't have km/h on the speedometer as well as mi/h? Just about every car I've seen in the US has both units on the speedometer. Older cars, obviously, may not have this feature.

Actually, I hadn't thought of it before, but a "MPH-only" speedometer is not a bad criteria for buying a car. And you avoid all that spyware/monitoring crap that's built in to all the new ones. (Not to mention, if you've got any sense, you'll make sure you get something with that unmistakable big V-8 rumble...)

Re:English/Metric

[CodeBuster]

We Americans like pumping our gas in gallons, measuring our speed in miles per hour, and thumbing our collective noses at the rest of the world for using the metric system. Actually there was a law passed here in the United States in the mid 1970s that mandated that the government switch to metric but everyone ignored it and it just went away. Imagine telling those corn farmers in Iowa during an election year that it is illegal to measure their corn in bushels and you will have some idea as to why we will never change.

Re:English/Metric

[dublin]

But one thousanth of an inch is a perfect measuring stick for cutting. Not one millimeter, not one micron, but a thousanths of an inch. Other measurements work out well with an inch too. Its just convience of scale, and the inch works well.

What's the matter with you? Are you trying to tell me that it's easier NOT to work in units of a some odd amount more than 2 and a half centi-millimeters? :-)

Seriously, the thousandth of an inch, like the degree F, is one of those units that is just a lot more inherently matched to the what people use them for in the real world than the metric alternatives.

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, the Kelvin scale is based on the Celcius scale. ...and the Rankine scale is based on the Fahrenheit scale. What's your point?

Fahrenheit degrees actually have a slight benefit as far as weather is concerned though, as you can cover a wider range with only 2 digits. That in itself isn't really a compelling argument to me, but then I don't see much benefit in using Celcius for everyday temperatures anyway.

32F = freezing. 100F = a really hot day. 350F = medium oven temperature. What more to I need to know?

It's not like inch, foot, mile, where there's other units you need to convert to at some bizarre ratio.

Re:English/Metric

[adavidw]

I found out recently that they can't call it chicken anymore either.

Wrong.

You've fallen for a very old urban legend. http://www.snopes.com/horrors/food/kfc.htm

Re:English/Metric

[dublin]

The Chinese used 16 as the base for their measurement systems. (I know this is true of their system for weights used in commerce, is it true for other units as well? Anybody know?)

This can be easily demonstrated by traditional abacuses, which have 2 five-beads and 5 one-beads, as opposed to "modern" abacuses (a fairly recent invention) with one five-bead and 4 one-beads.

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you mean partner as "business coworker", "sinful live-in girlfriend", or "confused ass-banging gaywad" ?

Re:English/Metric

[spearway]

May be you should revise your physics

The SI tempature unit is Kelvin not centigrade.

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

I know the significance of 0F as being the lowest acheivable temperature where salted water remains liquid, but can anyone explain the rest?

Since you must know, Ferenheight[sp] scale is standardized at 0F for a full saline and 32 for pure water ~ 1 atm pressure (I don't recall the exact pressure). The boiling point is measured.

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

Australia did a smart thing and did an overnight change to metric/SI. I'm 35 and still have a bit of imperial left in me (still think of height in feet/inches) - but our children have no idea at all about the old system.

USA will get there, they're just taking the slow route.

As a triathlete, the funniest thing I see with people from USA is when they describe the race in mixed units. eg. I was 3 miles into the 10km run!!

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. That goes for Scandinavia, too. We speak Germanic languages, so your assumption it correct, as far as I can tell.

Re:English/Metric

[WIAKywbfatw]

It's morons like you who don't even have the balls to post under their own accounts that really put the "coward" into "Anonymous Coward".

Re:English/Metric

[G-funk]

Ah, but you forget.... For americans, "doing it are way" and "they won't tell us what to do" is much more important than using sensible measurements, or being able to share information with the rest of the world and not crashing probes into mars.

Re:English/Metric

[UserGoogol]

A "pint" isn't really a unit. It's more of a name for a certian amount of beverage. By that I mean that ordering a "pint of beer" is no different than ordering "a large soda" or "a shot of whiskey." A pint is an order of beer that is 568 mL large. A "large soda" is an order of soda that is 710 mL large. A "shot of whiskey" is 45 mL. But you don't measure volume in shots. That would be stupid. You measure it in liters.

(Of course, I'm American and underage, so you should take that into account.)

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

I:m sure using Imperial units was an ingenious anti-terrorist measure by the US admin all those years back. How could terrorists work in the country if they couldn't work out all the measurements and conversions?

That's foresight!

Re:English/Metric

[UserGoogol]

No, You just entered it wrong. gallon cubic foot means a gallon times a cubic foot, just like a newton-meter is a newton times a meter. That's why it gave the answer in meters raised to the sixth power.

If you enter it correctly, Google gives the right answer.

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

... and kilo is only used for weight

...kilobyte.

Re:English/Metric

[mst76]

> F makes more sense for temperature (not scientifically). 0 is damn cold, 100 is damn hot, and you can feel a change of a degree or two.

Well, in Celsius, 0 is freezing cold, 100 is boiling hot...

> In C, you have to go to something like -10 is cold and 30 is hot and you may change the thermostat by half a degree.

Normal room temperature here is around 20 C, which is 68.0 F. Increasing this to 20.5 C is an increase to 68.9 F. Can you feel the difference between 68.0 and 68.9 F ?

Re:English/Metric

[UserGoogol]

Well yes, Ideally, but the Metric System (a system of measuring time) has to coexist with the "Gregorian Calendar with 86400 Second Days" system which we use to identify specific time periods. (Like right now: 7:22pm of the 26th of January, 2004.) There are no such problems with the rest of SI.

Various different Metric-style Calendars have been proposed, but none have really caught on. The Gregorian Calendar, with all its weeks, days, months, and years provide a wide variety of time cycles which match up nicely with society. It's one thing to change the units of volume or mass. That's minor. But time is a bit of a thornier area.

Re:English/Metric

[Smelly Jeffrey]

Ah yes, thanks... I need to RTFM.

Re:English/Metric

[beerits]

This is why the French have been so uptight about McDonalds...calling them 'French' fries had more to do with trying to tap into the idea of haute cuisine coming in small, medium and large rather than any inherent frenchness to the humble potato-based fast food.

They are called french fries because the potatoes are Frenched(cut into lengthwise strips) before they are fried.

Re:English/Metric

[loconet]

Exactly, read the post.

Re:English/Metric

[Rasta Prefect]

I think 100 F was the temperature of the human body (as accurately as they could tell at the time).

No, 96 was. It works out very nicely for calibration of the thermometer - 96 - 32 = 64. hence, you can take two easily obtainable temperatures, and mark all of the remaining degrees by dividing in half. Or at least this is what I've been told.

Re:English/Metric

[Scrameustache]

I just spent a year in england doing study abroad [...] Tempature is in celsius I suppose.

So, one year and you never once checked the weather? No one complained about how cold/hot it was? In fact, they had a very long deadly heat wave last summer...no one mentioned anything huh?

- england isn't really any better than the US.

Well, can't argue with that...

Re:English/Metric

[Guppy06]

"When water freezes is extremely relevant in "the real world"."

But salting your roads throws the freezing point off, bringing the freezing point closer to 0 F than 0 C.

"Usually, one degree C is small enough to be sufficient in accuracy"

When predicting the weather perhaps, but anything that involves anything invented during or after the Nineteenth Century can be surprisingly picky.

"and having two points on a scale that sort of relates to the same thing (water, in this case) is pretty intuitive"

In Farenheit/Rankine, the boiling point of pure water is 180 degrees above the freezing point. This means that 180 is a signifigant number no matter what kind of "degrees" (temperature or angle) you're talking about. This is why SI dropped "degrees" outright and just says "Kelvin."

Re:English/Metric

[Antibozo]

Move to metric and you would be better served by a machine that can do floating point calculations flawlessly.

Uh, no. Computers that do floating-point operations flawlessly also introduce roundoff error whenever converting to and from base 10.

Try this:

#include <stdio.h>

int main (void)
{
double x = 0.1;
double y;

printf ("%.20g\n", x);

x *= 17.3;
x += 1.1;

printf ("%.20g\n", x);

y = (x - 1.1) / 17.3;

printf ("%.20g\n", y);

return 0;
}

You get:

0.10000000000000000555
2.8300000000000000711
0.0 99999999999999991673

Try it again with x initialized to 0.125, and you get:

0.125
3.2625000000000001776
0.125

So what have we learned here today, kiddies?

Re:English/Metric

[Nexx]

About 20 years, if they were built in the same year the park was opened.

Actually, all the rides in .jp are built and operated by different vendors than in the US.

Re:English/Metric

[bucky0]

Eep, I thought I remembered Japan Disneyworld being build just recently, but I guess I was wrong.

Re:English/Metric

[Malc]

I did read the post.

"ever since I moved to Canada (10yrs ago) I've lost notion of what a Kilogram is"

I'm an ex-pat Briton who moved to Canada a few years ago. I have more concept of a kilo now than I did before.

Re:English/Metric

[Timbotronic]

Pretty much everyone under the age of 25 only deals with litres, metres and kilograms.

Not quite. I lived in the UK for a couple of years and I was always amused at how people described temperatures in both Celcius and Fahrenheit - without realising that they were mixing the two!

If it was snowing they'd say "It's below 0". If it was "hot", they'd say "It's over 80 degrees".

I've also never understood why the Poms describe the age of a car by the first letter on it's license plate...

Re:English/Metric

[nathanh]

For instance: I used to own an Alfa Romeo 164S that, like many "metric" cars, had a climate control system that "thought" in Celsius degrees. The problem is, they're just too big to allow fine enough control for comfort: setting an AC system at 72 degrees and letting it try to stay within a degree of that works fine with Fahrenheit degrees, but doing the same thing, with a one-degree tolerance in Celsius degrees results in a temperature swing that is almost *twice* (9/5, actually) as large, so the system cannot really keep things comfortable.

Hah! But we only have to press the button half as many times to change temperature! Efficiency. Efficiency. Efficiency. This is why we're beating the Americans in production!

Re:English/Metric

[achurch]

You can ask what the temperature will be today & you will get an answer like "in the 70s." That is far more useful to me than "in the 20s" (Celsius).

Yes, well that's why nobody says "in the 20s"--they say "upper 20s", or "lower 20s", or even "around 23". Or at least that's what they do in Japan, and I find it more than adequate.

Re:English/Metric

[CastrTroy]

Two words for you man

Options Explicit

also, using some standard naming procedure, like starting all variables with lower case would have helped.

Re:English/Metric

[CastrTroy]

As the previous poster mentioned, yeah, they can still call it chicken. They call it KFC because they can't use the word Kentucky without paying royalties.

Re:English/Metric

[Bob Uhl]

Interesting; I had ever read otherwise. Of course, considering that Germany didn't exist in 1868, that's somewhat difficult to believe (looking, I see that the independent German states agreed to use French units should they ever unite). And it's far from obvious why, two years after defeating the French, Germany would sign on to using French units. Still, stranger things have happened.

Re:English/Metric

[Anonymous Coward]

"Which would you rather do - go to the pub and ask for a pint of beer, or go to the pub and ask for 0.568 litres of beer?"

Ask for 1 liter of beer, duh.

Unless you're amerikan, then you want 12oz of beer.

Re:English/Metric

[Oddly_Drac]

"They are called french fries because the potatoes are Frenched(cut into lengthwise strips) before they are fried."

Yeah, Europeans call this 'julianne', dude.

Go find out where it was coined, because it isn't used over here.

Oh, does this mean that carving things into thin strips is now called 'freedoming'?

The horror

[netfool]

>Apparently size does matter, even if it's only a 0.86mm difference. At this very moment there are hundreds of geeks around the world trying to think of a great punchline for this.

Re:The horror

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up +0.86, Funny.

Re:The horror

[spitzak]

En1argee yurz Axlles n0w! Addz up2 .86 mm! Ordr t0day!

Re:Disney = Evil

[thung226]

nobody was hurt.

It had nothing to do with the conversion directly.

[bluprint]

If you had read the article, you would know that the problem was, while converting to metric, they also changed the specification of the axle size, but didn't record the new axle size correctly. So, the problem really had nothing to do with any mathematical error, just an error in incorrect documentation.

omg someone RTFA! MOD HIM UP

[Anonymous Coward]

omg someone RTFA! MOD HIM UP

Mod points

[Popageorgio]

And suddenly the mods realized that "Problem" was fixed and they'd blown all their mod points on two-minute jokes.

Re:Mod points

[Dlugar]

So then they post a silly comment to the story and get their mod points back! Proble solved :-)

Dlugar

Re:Mod points

[Popageorgio]

Hahaha, if I had points to give you... Proble. That's gold.

Hmm, size does matter

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I'll check my e-mail, I read something that now seems to be interesting.

Google's Cache

[Anonymous Coward]

Google's Cache is here.

The US needs to catch up

[Listen Up]

The US needs to catch up to the rest of the world. The entire world uses Metric people. And it makes an infinite amount more sense to use Metric than the US system. If we don't, trade will continue to suffer as well as accidents such as this one.

Re:The US needs to catch up

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that this problem had NOTHING to do with unit conversion. RTFA!

Re:The US needs to catch up

[mirio]

Hmm...the Space Mountain engineers were doing precisely that! They were converting Imperial to English units (i.e. playing catch-up).

Re:The US needs to catch up

[drinkypoo]

The entire world uses Metric people.

So do we! When we say how many children the average family contains, it's always like 2.4, not "two and two fifths".

Re:The US needs to catch up

[BJH]

Not only was this not a conversion problem, but the Disneyland they're talking about is the Tokyo one, and Japan's been metric for years.

Re:The US needs to catch up

[onyxruby]

This is easy to do. All you have to do is convince the NFL that football should no longer be a game of yards and inches. Get them to convert and everyone else will fall right into line. Prepare for a very messy conversion though. Our cars all come with KPH stamped on the speedomoters, and we see metric in many other places, even if it's not what we intuitevly know.

Funny thing is, metric is taught here in the US, and from what I understand most school kids test better on it than the old English measurements. See, we know metric well enough, we just don't use it for a lot of things. The result is that while everyone is well capable of knowing the result without being able to visualize it. In other words we know a meter = 100 cm's, but don't ask us to explain how tall someone is in metric.

The real fun though comes in things like our cars. This is where you get to experience cars built with both SAE /and/ metric sizes for bolts and fittings. All that being said, it would be a good idea for the US to convert to metric though.

Re:The US needs to catch up

[Malc]

Funnily enough, the biggest driving force moving Americans to SI units is global trade. Amercian companies that do business overseas often find it cheaper to convert all their products to metric - even those sold in their domestic market.

Re:The US needs to catch up

[ZipR]

We've tried. Reagan committed us to the metric system years ago. Unfortunately, his plans went awry due to the powerful lobbying efforts of the fraction special interest groups.

Re:The US needs to catch up

[RobertB-DC]

And it makes an infinite amount more sense to use Metric than the US system.

I disagree that there's an automatic advantage in using .1 - 1 - 10 vs. 1/2 - 1 - 12. There's the entire issue of what it's used for.

In these days of digital scales and laser measuring, it's easy (in fact, easier) to measure distances in decimal parts of a meter, and weights in multiples of a gram. But these technologies have only been around, what, a few dozen years? :)

Putting aside the arbitrary notions of "the length of the king's foot" vs. "1x10-6 of the equator-polar distance through Paris", the issue is how to measure lengths in terms of the base unit. And base 12 is simply better -- for practical reasons.

I've got a bunch of eggs, and I want to sell them to people without calculators. If I group my eggs by the dozen, I can split a dozen it into two, three, four, or six equal pieces without having to sell any half-eggs. Feet (12 inches) are similarly divisible, and yards (3 feet) have similar properties. Half a yard = a foot and a half = 18 non-fractional inches.

Admittedly, using an all-decimal system may make you feel smarter than the average simian. But don't forget that the whole Metric thing came about because a particular country wanted to be non-standard in symbolic defiance of their oppressive arisocracy.

Gotta run... I've only got a millifortnight to get ready for the next meeting.

Re:The US needs to catch up

[russellh]

The US needs to catch up to the rest of the world. The entire world uses Metric people. And it makes an infinite amount more sense to use Metric than the US system. If we don't, trade will continue to suffer as well as accidents such as this one.

Nobody is suffering due to English or Imperial units here in America. You want suffering? Then force everyone to change. How European that would be. We have much bigger problems than inches and miles.

BTW, you misread the article. It wasn't the conversion that caused the problem.

Re:The US needs to catch up

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got a bunch of eggs, and I want to sell them to people without calculators. If I group my eggs by the dozen, I can split a dozen it into two, three, four, or six equal pieces without having to sell any half-eggs.

Or why not just sell them one by one? Then you can sell 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 or even 2647 eggs without selling any half eggs... And multiplying a price 6 is far easier than dividing it by 6...

Re:The US needs to catch up

[graniteMonkey]

Don't forget the real sinister figures here - the "representatives" of the font/extended-ASCII mafias. There are some powerful people who want superscript/subscript and those high ASCII characters for 1/2 and 1/4 to stay around a while longer.

Re:The US needs to catch up

[poot_rootbeer]

And it makes an infinite amount more sense to use Metric than the US system.

Don't kid yourself. A liter is as arbitrary a reference point as a pint; a meter as arbitrary as a yard.

If we don't, trade will continue to suffer

The United States suffers from poor trade with other nations? I never would have guessed. Really, I had no idea. I just kind of assumed we were an economic superpower, perhaps I was wrong.

Re:The US needs to catch up

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, a liter is an arbitrary point of reference. What you missed though is that the metric system is one whole system, not lots of arbitrary measures grouped together. 1 liter = 1000 cubic centimetres, 1 meter is defined in terms of one second (with lightspeed as translator), pressure is defined by kilograms per square meter, and so on. There are a few (less than 10 I think) basic units which all other are measured in. How many cubic inches in a pint? How long time do you need to decompress before getting to the surface after diving? Quick now, or you're dead...

Re:The US needs to catch up

[Grishnakh]

There's a big problem with using the SI system in America: We didn't invent it. Therefore, we can't use it.

America has a huge case of NIH syndrome.

Re:The US needs to catch up

[slew]

Metric vs US Customary measurement units seems to me just to be a semi-religious debate.

I really see no difference than the VI vs EMACS, English vs French (substitute your favorite language here), Euros vs Pounds, C vs Java (or C#), Perl vs Python, Floating point vs Fixed point, paper vs plastic...

If the world was so homogeneous, would anyone want to travel anywhere or meet any new people or try to understand their point of view?

What a boring place that would be...

Re: The US needs to catch up

[marcomarrero]

Here in PR we went halfway the conversion, only the liquid stuff. In fact maybe we're the only spanish speaking country dealing with the absurd imperial/english system. Ok... Except drug shipments, they are weighted in kilos.. >:)

My solution to solve all these incosistencies on the world is to talk to a child. After seeing them all struggling with the same stuff you'll quickly find out how illogical most things are. My 7 year old niece still struggles visualizing that 12 inches, is a foot and 3 of them is a yard.

The Japanese did the conversion.

[mookoz]

Bob Gurr (ex-Disney Imagineer) tells the story of the Tokyo Disneyland conversion here:

http://www.laughingplace.com/News-ID108300.asp

Great set of columns, by the way. I've always been a fan of how some of the disney technology was invented and implemented.

Just use google calc

[beej]

10 meters = 98.4251969 hands

HAHAHAH! No one uses hands anymore to measure distance! How ARCANE!

We use feet.

Re:Just use google calc

[Performer Guy]

Actually they do still use hands to measure the height of horses.

Re:Just use google calc

[Anonymous Coward]

Horses are measured in hands.

Re:Just use google calc

[gotem]

so that's why a girl slapped me when I tried to take her measures in hands?

About time America left the stone age

[GileadGreene]

Sigh. When is America going to ditch its archaic measurement system and use the same standard as everyone else? I work in the space industry, and I see this idiocy going on all the time: half the team works in metric, the other half in english. Most of the time everyone manages to keep it straight. But every now and then, a mistake happens. Scientists all use metric. Most engineers are trained in metric. Let's just switch to metric for everything and be done with it.

A side note: in New Zealand (and possibly other Commonwealth countries - I haven't checked) they don't even refer to "English units". Their term is "Imperial units". Which tells you how long it's been since they made the switch...

Re:About time America left the stone age

[Tumbleweed]

Another reason to vote Nader for President! :)

What's the phrase, "this will happen about the same time we're all typing in Esperanto on our Dvorak keyboards, talking about the new Flat Tax"? Yeah, sounds about right. *sigh*

Re:About time America left the stone age

[Rucker]

An American's experience with the metric system in Belgium. It has some good points.

Re:About time America left the stone age

[Anonymous Coward]

Converting the USA to metric was a Reagan campaign promise, way back in the 1980s. Yet another political lie, eh?

Re:About time America left the stone age

[Rick Richardson]

The metric system is going to seem pretty silly when evolution does away with the pinky and pinky toe.

-Rick

Beat the rush, switch to base 8 now!

Re:About time America left the stone age

[bandy]

Vi tajpas QWERTY?

Re:About time America left the stone age

[Anonymous Coward]

Calling them "English units" is only what the US do to console themselves that someone else got them into this mess.

Re:About time America left the stone age

[Rob Simpson]

The pinky toe I understand, but the pinky? However will I touch-type, or learn to play the piano? I can't see evolution doing away with fingers. Quite the opposite.

No, going to base 12 would be much more sensible (Who counts on their toes, anyway?).

Re:Disney = Evil

[Anonymous Coward]

Not like it hasn't happened before. http://www.snopes.com/disney/parks/deaths.htm

lattitude

[Anonymous Coward]

why do they make stuff with the specs so close to the requirement ? that too such a small difference in this case ? why cant they just make things extra strong :P.

Re:lattitude

[Smidge204]

Cost, space and weight are typically the limiting factors. Though I did think to myself: "What kind of safety factor were they using?"

Then again, if they put a axle into a bearing and that axle was 0.81mm too small, that's a BIG gap, which can cause all sorts of wear and scratches. Even a small scratch in a high strength steel shaft can cause it to snap like a twig under normal loading because that tiny cut can amplify the stress in the material ten or twenty times easily (Depending on the situation, of course).

You'ld think they'd use a SF of at least 2 (200% of the strength the design requires). But as I said, a small scratch and that axle it gone.

The guy putting it together shold have noticed that, too. Chances are not only did the bearing not fit, but the seals probably didn't fit either!
=Smidge=

English units?

[FireFury03]

Conversion from English units to metric units? That would be multiply by 1 then since we use metric almost exclusively in England? (Except for miles, which are still used on the roads)

Using Google...

[Hogwash McFly]

24.13 centimeters

About the same time /. posters actually RTFA?

[bluprint]

The problem had nothing to do with eglish->metric conversion.

Also, there is nothing inherently better about the metric system of measurement, vs. the english system of measurement vs. any other standardized system of measurment. If something is measured at 1.5 inches or 38.1 mm, it's the exact same length. The only advantage is commonality and not having to do conversions (which is an advantage, I admit). But there is no inherent advantage as to how well one system can perform over the other.

Re:About the same time /. posters actually RTFA?

[radja]

then quickly tell me:

how many inches in a mile?

Re:About the same time /. posters actually RTFA?

[Anonymous Coward]

63360.

Now how many inches in a kilometer! Metric my ass!

Re:About the same time /. posters actually RTFA?

[subspacemsg]

Well try this in a non metric system...

1 litre of water weighs 1kilogram and 1000 litres of water will occupy 1 cubic meter of space.

Metric system links the dimensions so very well. The above mention case is for water for other fluids it's simple too...just use the specific gravity number as a modification number. Makes thinking about physics a lot easier.

Re:About the same time /. posters actually RTFA?

[dcordeiro]

I don't agree with you.

For me, converting 38.1mm to kilometers is just a matter of adding 0's: 0.00000381km

Converting 1.5 inches to miles gives you the nice result:
1 inch = 1.57828283 x 10-05 mile

rouding results can become problematic, no ?

Re:About the same time /. posters actually RTFA?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, there is an inherent advantage. Consistency.
Compare:
1000 grams (g)= 1 kilogram (kg)
1000 kg = 1 tonne (t)
with
16 ounces (oz) = 1 pound (lb)
14 lb = 1 stone,12 stone = 1 hundredweight (cwt)
20 cwt = 1 ton (t)
(even the abbreviations are easier to remember!)

or compare
1000 mm = 1 m
1000 m = 1 km
with
12 in = 1 ft, 3 ft = 1 yd
1760 yd = 1 mile

Or think about areas. The common metric unit of area,1 hectare = 100m x 100m = 10,000m^2 and I know this without looking. The common Imperial unit, 1 acre = 43560 ft^2. No way could I have known that figure without looking it up.

Of course the very worst people of all are particle physicists, who measure everything in GeV regardless of dimension, and astrophysicists, who use parsecs, AUs, light-years, solar masses, solar luminosities, etc.

Re:About the same time /. posters actually RTFA?

[bluprint]

I know that the metric system makes memorization easier. But I think that's rarely relavent to any actual applied sciences. When someone is designing a new , they aren't doing it all in their head.

Now, while the easy relation of dimensions is a slight benefit, does it outway the hardship associated with, say, if every company were (starting tomorrow) forced to use SI only? Suddenly people wouldn't have much idea of what they were buying (or at least not as good an idea).

Ironically, the US adopted the English measurment system in the early 1800's. I think it's reasonably safe to say that the reason for that was to "get in line" with what was probably the most widely used system at the time (not forseeing how the metric system would grow).

Re:About the same time /. posters actually RTFA?

[Overzeetop]

Okay, try this one:

Metric world: you're vibration modes don't look right, they're off by about a factor of ten from where you think they should be, where did you make a mistake?

English world (Imperial): you're vibration modes don't look right, they're off by about a factor of twenty from where you think they should be, where did you make a mistake?

Though it seems trivial, I have had to troubleshoot these types of problems for junior engineers. The first situation would require a complete reevalution of the mathematical models used - there are lots of combintions of factors of ten which result in the answer being off. The second is easy: using lbm instead of slugs for mass. SQRT(386.4)~20. 386.4=32.2ft/s x 12in/ft.

A mistake you probably wouldn't make using SI, admittedly, since you (almost) never refer to the weight of an object (Newtons) and instead use the appropriate defining unit of mass correctly.

As for English/Imperial: Heck, here in the states we say we speack English, though to just about anyone else in the world the difference between speech here and in England clearly differs.

Re:About the same time /. posters actually RTFA?

[mks180]

The problem with the metric system in the US is that the conversion process would be incredibly pricy and lets's face it, companies will do anything they can to avoid additional costs.

Another issue that results in the english/metric unit problems is lack of intuition by engineers. Working with english units most of my life, until recently, I never had to design anything with metric units. Length and mass, I can deal with that. But when you throw stiffness, preasures, damping, etc., I can't look at the numbers and say "that seems right" or "that's physically not possible."

The US will have to make the leap eventually, but it will take a major change in political and economic environment to make that happen.

Re:About the same time /. posters actually RTFA?

[Rich0]

Ignoring the fact that the density of water is not exactly 1 g/cc you still need a slight correction:

1 liter of water weighs 9.8 newtons (though it does have a mass of 1 kg).

Even metric has its shortcomings when it comes to weight - mainly because the length of the meter was not based on the average strength of the Earth's gravitational field.

Remember, weight is NOT equal to mass...

Also - for any serious calculation you need to correct for the density of water - you could easily be off by 1% by using 1 g/cc, and 1% is a pretty significant difference.

Still, I'd be the first advocate of America switching to the metric system...

Re:About the same time /. posters actually RTFA?

[JaredOfEuropa]

Also, there is nothing inherently better about the metric system of measurement, vs. the english system of measurement vs. any other standardized system of measurment.

Actually there is.

Imperial measures are handier in practical applications of weights and measures, ie. when you are dealing with a lot of halves and quarters. The Imperial system was devised to make division of units easy; which was rather handy on a market or a construction site. Especially in medieval times: most people didn't know much arithmatic, but they could deal with halves, thirds and quarters very well, and the imperial system of weights and measures helped them.

The Metric system is less suited to such situations, but it is far easier to calculate and convert metric measurers, especially if the calculations are very complex. I was under the impression that the American scientific community already uses the metric system for this reason.

So each system has its merits. The difference seems to be that, while people eventually become used to dealing with Metric units in everyday life, doing complex calculations in Imperial units remains hard no matter how much you practice.

Re:About the same time /. posters actually RTFA?

[mindriot]

Well, the problem didn't directly have to do with conversion. But after all, it still was the fact that everything had to be converted which led to the communication problems later.

Now, in this case, humans just made dumb mistakes. But we don't need stupid things like unit conversions to cause even more problems, do we?

Oh, and before I forget... maybe 1.5 inches or 38.1 mm are both just numbers and no one should really have to care. But you miss the point that imperial units don't 'fit'. For example, what does a gallon have to do with an inch? According to this page, "the standart gallon of the Unites States contains 231 cubic inches, or 8.3389 pounds avoirdupois of distilled water at its maximum density." Or this is what it says about a quart: "In imperial measure, a quart is forty English fluid ounces; in wine measure, it is thirty-two American fluid ounces. The United States dry quart contains 67.20 cubic inches, the fluid quart 57.75. The English quart contains 69.32 cubic inches."

WTF? A liter, OTOH, is simply 1 dm^3, or 10x10x10 cm (though you would simply express volumes in m^3 of course). In SI you have meter, kilogram, and second. The point is simplicity, completeness, and the comfort of the decimal system.

Re:About the same time /. posters actually RTFA?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually there are items which make the metric system inherently better. Differences between units is standardardised, where cent implies a hundredth, kilo a thousand and so forth, and the units used (100, 1000 etc) are easy to work with - you can do it in your head.

Thus a centimetre is 1/100 metres and a kilometre is 1000 metres

However an inch is a twelveth of a foot, which is a third of a yard, 1760 of which make up a mile! So we have twelve, 30 and 1760 and then we factor in 1/32 and 1/16 measurements used to break down inches in smaller units. This leads to one immediate problem, the system is quite hard to remember and uses numbers which involve difficult arithemetic (difficult in the can't do it in your head sense).

Also the Imperial (or "English") system isn't standard, it varies slightly from country to county.

On the other hand the SI metric system is standardised internationally and features trivial arithmetic for conversions (e.g. metres, kilometres, etc.). It IS better, deal with it.

Re:About the same time /. posters actually RTFA?

[jrumney]

Imperial system was devised to make division of units easy.

Interesting. I always wondered why there were 14 pounds in a stone. Or 142.857143 stones in a ton.

Re:About the same time /. posters actually RTFA?

[IainMH]

WTF?

You forgot your switch/case statements:

Also, there is nothing inherently better about the metric system of measurement, vs. the english system of measurement vs. any other standardized system of measurment.

Firstly, as been said up there ^, it's Imperial. Secondly as you say yourself:

The only advantage is commonality and not having to do conversions(which is an advantage, I admit).

But then in_the_next_sentence:

But there is no inherent advantage as to how well one system can perform over the other.

I think Withnail would state this as "A state of chronic indecision".

There is a clear advantage to metric/SI units. You know this yourself as you mentioned it.

Re:About the same time /. posters actually RTFA?

[.!. (0.o) .!.]

12 * 5280 = ???

Re:About the same time /. posters actually RTFA?

[droleary]

how many inches in a mile?

Funny thing is, that's not the parity question you think it is. You should have asked "how many inches in a kiloinch?", but that isn't nearly as clever as you'd like. The truth is, units are mostly arbitrary for non-scientists regardless of which you choose. I mean, if you're driving across town, how significant is it really if it is X miles or Y kilometers or Z foobars?

The biggest complaint people seems to have is that there is no standard imperial name+magnitude combination (inch/mile) where there is in metric (centi/kilo+meter). The related complaint is that imperial "orders of magnitude" (between arbitrary measures, mind you) are all over the place where metric goes with 10.

I think those simply aren't overwhelming good reasons that you should expect the US to eagerly adopt the metric system. It makes sense to standardize in Europe, where there are a lot of different cultures/languages moving products around. That's just not case in the US, and likely won't be until they lose their superpower status.

Re:About the same time /. posters actually RTFA?

[bluprint]

To put it another way, the advantage I did mention (working with other) is not inherent in the system itself. If everyone was using SI, then we gain that advantage. If everyone was using Imperial, we still gain that advantage.

My point was to counter a general perception that SI has inherent abilities that exceed those of Imperial, it doesn't. Mistakes can be made using both systems (assuming an environment where everyone is using the same system).

Re:About the same time /. posters actually RTFA?

[IainMH]

The inherent advatages/abilities of metric/SI units:

Temp: C 0 = Freezing point of water 100 = boiling

Kelvin: 0 = absolute zero, borrowing the increments from celcius (i.e. 1 degree temp rise in K == 1 degree rise in C).

Mass.
1M^3 H20 = 1000 KG = 1 ton.

Velocity = M per second.

I could go on. The basis of SI is like having primary colours. We have taken colours to the bare minimum, red, blue and green. We can't make red, blue or green from anything else. Every other colour we know can be made from red blue and green. Those colours are derived. SI does the same thing. They boiled it down to the primary units, and everything else is derived.

Add to this that SI is decimal, and the argument is compeling.

Why is there 14 pounds to the stone, but only 12 inches to the foot? Because someone said so. It's a rubbish system. My dad loved Imperial measurements, he grew up with them. As an engineer, he saw the distinct advantage of metric.

There_is_no_other_reason to use Imperial units other than that's what (a small number of) people are used to. My Mum was used to her typewriter, but she couldn't email on it so had to upgrade.

Re:About the same time /. posters actually RTFA?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can never remember that stupid 5280. That's why I do this Google.

Re:About the same time /. posters actually RTFA?

[bluprint]

I'm not arguing agains SI. It has it's place. The thing is, we don't need to ALL use the same system all the time. For example, when I go to the store, I know I can buy a pound of ground beef. I know about how much of that I will eat, and I can make a judgement about prices, because I have a good visualization of what it is. The fact that some other pound in another place (such as the gallon being different in US and England) is irrevelant, because I'm not buying pounds of beef in other places, I only do it right here locally. I'm not buying gallons of gas in England, and if I were, I wouldn't really care what the difference was, when my tank gauge approached 'E', I would fill up (sooner depending if I was in the city or out in the country where I might not see a gas station for a while).

On the other hand, if I were an engineer (which I'm not), and I was working on a project with international implications, I would almost certainly use SI.

My biggest problem is with people who seem to think we (in the US) NEED to start using SI in our everyday lives (and no doubt many of those people would even support a compulsory action to do so). That's absurd. I assure you that all the houses built around here (using feet and inches) are just a good or bad quality as houses built elsewhere using SI.

There is nothing wrong with SI. There is also nothing (inherently in the system) wrong with Imperial measurements. They both work equally well for measuring things.

And as for the argument that SI makes it so much easier to convert from, say, cm's to km's, as opposed to converting inches to miles it's rubbish for a reason to convert everyday things to SI. Sure, it a lot easier to do, but honestly, how often (in everyday life) does one need to do that? I certainly never have. So, the net benefit to me (and most people in the country) approaches zero in that regard. I use measuring devices when I want exact (or close to) measurements. If I had instructions to measure out 5 gallons, I would get something that at least measured a gallon. If my instructions were 5 liters, then I would get something that measured (held) at least 5 liters. I would not get a mL measuring device and use it 5,000 times (because that would be so easy) any more than I would get a 1 oz. measuring device and use it how ever many of times I would need to use it to make a gallon. The fact that I don't know off hand how many ounces are in a gallon is irrelavent.

On the other hand, if I was doing something very precise, like designing a building, I would use a calculator, because as easy as converting 1 mm to .000001 km is, it's just as easy to make a mistake and convert it to .0000001 or some such.

This is just a way overblown "problem". I use things that measure miles when I'm interested in miles, I use things that measure feet when I'm interested in feet. It works for something like 270 million people, and used to work for much more. So, while I'm happy knowing that I drove 'X' miles, everyone in Europe can enjoy know that not only did they drive 'X' Km, they also drove 'XXX' mmm. I don't care. I didn't want to know how many inches it was from my house to some city I drove to, I just wanted to know about how many miles.

Re:About the same time /. posters actually RTFA?

[IainMH]

On the other hand, if I were an engineer (which I'm not)

Clearly ;-)

You keep on making my point for me.

You are saying that you can use one system for work, and one system at home. Why bother? I have no idea what someone is saying to me when they say "oooh! it's 90 outside". I think that's hot but I'm not sure. Now if someone said "oooh! it's 30 outside". I instantly have a frame of reference. BUT WAIT. My first degree was in Chem, so we used C or K. No need to learn another system! Also, we live in a global economy. Even if Imperial measurements were better, it might be an idea for any one country not adhering to the international standard to change so mistakes like the parent article didn't happen anymore.

We are going to have do disagree on the point that metric isn't far superior to imperial.

However:

They will never take away the pint. If you ask someone in the UK about a 'pint' they will almost always assume you are talking about beer. I don't know when it happened, but they don't seem to sell milk in pints anymore (but 0.5 litre ~= pint).

Just like you can take my 1210s from my cold, dead hands and most guitarists would pick a Fender over something Ibanez has ever made. Some old things are good. Sometimes we pick the older thing for less than tangible reasons. Some have seen better days, why are people emotionally attached to a whole system of crap measures?

Re:About the same time /. posters actually RTFA?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're arguing against the use of metric why would you need to know how many inches there are in a km?

Re:About the same time /. posters actually RTFA?

[bluprint]

On the other hand, if I were an engineer (which I'm not) Clearly ;-) And neither are most people....which I'm not sure you are getting. This isn't just about science, engineers or international business, hopefully those people have been using SI for years now. This is MORE about everyday people doing daily tasks. They shouldn't be forced to have to re-educate themselves on all units. And by "reeducate", it's not simply a matter of knowing what the relationship between a Km and a mm is, but how much does this chunk of meat weigh (and by extension then, what is it worth to me), or how far is it from here to the next city. I don't think it's emotional reasons at all (at least not in my case). I've got a CS degree, and as such, had to take plenty of science in college. So, it's not like I don't know anything about SI, or can't work with it. It's more an issue of convinience. Working with numbers (as in, solving problems) in one system or another is a bit like choosing one base over another, as long as you understand what you are working with, I can express a value in base 10 as readily as base 16. While there are certainly some things about SI that make it a bit easier to work with (I'm ok with that), it is quite another thing to start using it (given that you have used another system your entire life) on a daily basis for mundane things. Really, off hand how many people are there that know how many liters are in a gallon? (few outside scientific/engineer communities) And what is the point of really learning? Most people will never do business on an international level. Sure, I know that 100 C is 220 F (and the correlating freezing points), but I can't tell you at first look if 65 C is comfortable or not, and I don't need to, I have F. Maybe it would be prudent to start teaching both methods in schools, but it seems kind of stupid to come to some forced method of change (like was done in Europe) where labels are restricted from having Imp units. They work in life.

Re:About the same time /. posters actually RTFA?

[radja]

mainly, that's a problem of carrying over your units. This was drilled into us for hours and hours by our physics teacher. At all times write down the units. 10N * 5m = 50Nm. this doesn't change between SI or imperial.

MINE EYES!

[Anonymous Coward]

(-1, Lack of Formatting)

US Conversion to Metric

[swoebser]

What do you think would be the biggest hurdle in the US conversion to the metric system? I, at first, thought it would be automobile manufacturing/repair, but all auto shops already have to deal with foreign cars already with metric parts. My vote now would have to be for gas pumps and speed limits. I think it would take people a long time to adjust to liters and kilometers per hour.

Re:US Conversion to Metric

[DeathScythe21143]

Actually, American cars already show km/h. Its just smaller, usually a different color, than the
Imperial/English/whatever-you-want-to-call-it system.

Re:US Conversion to Metric

[slim]

What do you think would be the biggest hurdle in the US conversion to the metric system? I, at first, thought it would be automobile manufacturing/repair, but all auto shops already have to deal with foreign cars already with metric parts. My vote now would have to be for gas pumps and speed limits. I think it would take people a long time to adjust to liters and kilometers per hour.

I remember when UK pumps went to litres. From the consumer's point of view at least, it was a breeze: who looks at the volume anyway -- I always just watch the price display... and it doesn't take long to get used to a price per litre when comparing.

UK speed limits and road sign distances are still in miles, and will probably stay that way. The only problem I have with that is GPS setups where you only choose between Imperial and Metric -- where what I want is Miles for long distances and metres for short distances...

Re:US Conversion to Metric

[faaaz]

I don't think it would take very long at all. I've been to the US a couple of times and it never took me more than a day to get used to MPH. Drive a couple of different distances and you get a feel for the units. When it comes to gas pumps the only concern is the price for one full tank of fuel and how far it will get you.

The biggest hurdle is in peoples minds, they think it's going to be hard when it's really simple.

Re:It had nothing to do with the conversion direct

[Anonymous Coward]

an error in incorrect documentation

This does not sound good ;-)

Embarrassing

[Cranx]

This is one thing that really embarrasses me as an American. How fucking hard is the metric system, really? I mean, really. A fucking meter is almost exactly the length of one fucking yard. Jesus H. Livingston.

Re:Embarrassing

[jdog1016]

> A fucking meter is almost exactly the length of one fucking yard.

Yeah, thats apparently what the disney people thought too...

Re:Embarrassing

[Cranx]

>> A fucking meter is almost exactly the length of
>> one fucking yard.

> Yeah, thats apparently what the disney people
> thought too...

You know, I catch the humor you're pointing at in my semi-gaffe, but in all seriousness it's not even as intelligent as mistaking a yard for a meter. If the U.S. used fractions of a yard, then it might be understandable because the measurements would be so similar between U.S. Standard and metric (who could eyeball the difference between a 1/100 of a meter and 1/100 of a yard?). But we don't use fractions of yards! We use feet and inches for fuck's sake! The difference between something measuring half an inch and half a centimeter is PROFOUND! You can see that mistake a mile away! Gah!!! Our roadside signposts don't even TRY to demonstrate distances in kilometers to people; everything is 100% U.S. Standard (miles). It's truly, truly pathetic.

Re:Embarrassing

[Anonymous Coward]

U.S. Standard, eh? You mean "UK standard" if anything.. It's called "Imperial".. Why not read a little before shooting off your mouth about how stupid everyone is, you do _not_ seem so witty yourself..

Re:Embarrassing

[Cranx]

What the hell are you talking about? What the hell is "U.K Standard?" "U.S. Standard" refers to the weights and measures system used in the U.S., of which feet, inches, yards, rods, etc. are all units.

Talk about needing to hit the books.

Happend before...

[Anonymous Coward]

An ESA/NASA spacecraft went into the wrong direction, becouse NASA just HAD to juse the retarded system! :-P

When will they learn?

Question:
Is startrek in the US also using metrics, or the retarded system?

Just wondering... :-)

Re:Disney = Evil

[thung226]

Those are like the Darwin Awards filtered for Disney Resorts. Can't blame Disney for their customers being idiots. You can blame them, however, for their roller coaster developers being retards.

Re:Metric?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares why the system came about? The point is, it's easier to use and not ass-backwards. Instead of 12 inches in a foot with 3 feet in a yard and God only knows how many yards in a mile, you get 10mm to a cm, 100cm to a meter, 1000 meters to a km. how many inches are in a mile? I know right off the bat that there is 100,000cm in a km. And also what's the equivalent of, say, 550nm wavelength of light? like 1/10000000 inches or something? How would you ever do anything related to physics other than auto-mechanics with this retarded system?

Noticable difference ?

[Alain Williams]

• "Apparently size does matter, even if it's only a 0.86mm difference."

I don't think that the average girl would notice that small a difference.

Re:Noticable difference ?

[keith6689]

I don't think the average slashdot reader is going to get near enough to a girl to find out!

Re:Noticable difference ?

[The Other White Meat]

Yeah, keep telling yourself that...

You don't ride horses, do you?

[wiredog]

'Hands' are used to measure the height at the withers of a horse.

Re:You don't ride horses, do you?

[JaredOfEuropa]

'Hands' are used to measure the height at the withers of a horse.

Which makes perfect sense. Why be boring and use 'feet' to measure a horse's height, when you can come up with a different measure just for the purpose! All in favour raise your 'hands'!

But in much of the rest of the world, horses are measured in centimeters.

Re:You don't ride horses, do you?

[FroMan]

No, we drive cars now. :-)

Re:You don't ride horses, do you?

[MouseR]

'Hands' are used to measure the height at the withers of a horse. ...must... refrain... from... jockey... hand... job... joke...

Re:You don't ride horses, do you?

[wiredog]

Advantages of horses over cars:

Horses can create more horses, by themselves, through relatively unskilled labor. Cars haven't mastered this yet.

Horses are fueled by renewable resources which are commonly available at little or no cost.

Horses produce fertilizer, cars do not.

Re:You don't ride horses, do you?

[FroMan]

Oh come now. Smile.

- Horses require daily maintenance whether they are used or not.
- Horses do not get you from point a to point b when the distance is > 60 miles (950400 hands) nearly as quickly under normal commuting conditions.
- You have to do something with the fertilizer the horses generate.

I'm not saying horses are not wonderful animals (useful under the right conditions), but they do have their failings. But that wasn't even my point. I think it was more or less to add a touch of humour to the conversation about people being so serious about using metric / english(imperial) / etc units to measure with.

ISO

[mirko]

I kinda like the way the "proble" was found : probably by harvesting the company's info database in order to track down the problem's root.
I am confident that it has now become even easier to find out such failures at all and within a decent time...
Of course, it'll soon be time to extend the ISO standard in order to take more things into account but I am already impressed.

Imperial measurements rock...

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously. Metric is base 10, Imperial units are base 12.

Now, the cool thing about this is that 12 can be divided by 2, 3, 4, 6 - giving you the ability to easily measure a third for instance. It's why it's still used in the building trade. Metric only lets you divide by 2 and 5 - and is not as flexible.

Anyhows, totally off topic, but kinda interesting, and one reason why Imperial mesurements aren't going to disappear any time soon (no jokes about TIE fighter blueprint errors please).

Re:Imperial measurements rock...

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, there should be 144 pennies per dollar, and bank notes values should be $1, $3, $4, $12, $36, and $72.

Re:Imperial measurements rock...

[jorlando]

That made sense when people didn't had calculators. It was easier to use a base 12 system. The other problem is the change of units. 12 inches perform a foot. So John is 5foot6", or 5.5 foot, or 66"... another inheritance of time when calculators weren't available. You can say that John is 1.6764m tall, or 167.64cm or 1676.4mm, the measurements are more consistent.

the metric system isn't advantageous in itself by being base 10. The advantage comes from the fact that the unit is constant all the time. You don't change names or add new units in the measurement, nor use fractions.

It's hard to cope with different units in the same measurement. The imperial system was good once... it had it's time, time to move on.

Re:Imperial measurements rock...

[WernerStormcrow]

Now, the cool thing about this is that 12 can be divided by 2, 3, 4, 6 - giving you the ability to easily measure a third for instance. It's why it's still used in the building trade. Metric only lets you divide by 2 and 5 - and is not as flexible.

I give you the 3, but 4=2*2 and 6=2*3 don't really count. Hence, it's a tie in this category.

But metric units rock, as soon as you want to do more than divide something by 2, 3, 4 or 6. How many sqare feet are 30 sqare miles again? ...you get the point.

So, the metric systems wins the bikini contest hands down. In my opinion, at least.

Re:Imperial measurements rock...

[puppet10]

Another reason that English/Imperial units are more suited to the building trade is that the fractional units are of an appropriate size for the level of precision needed.

For a wooden building a centimeter is a bit too sloppy and a millimeter is a bit too precise a measurement for the task.

That said, for machining where the precision is more important meteric makes a good system, although Imperial/English knew this and measurses precision measurements in thousandths or hundreths of inches to gain the advantage of decimal conversions and the increased precision, but metric is quite good for these types of fabrication.

Re:Imperial measurements rock...

[Anonymous Coward]

What if I am dividing by oh, say, five?

Where is your superiority then?

Re:Imperial measurements rock...

[slim]

Seriously. Metric is base 10, Imperial units are base 12.

Some of them are, some of them are not.
1 pound = 16 oz
1 stone = 14 pounds
1 foot = 12 inches
1 yard = 3 feet
1 US pint = 16 US fl oz
1 UK pint = 20 UK fl oz
1 Gallon = 1 pint

You're deluded if you think this mess has any value beyond familiarity (and, being unfamiliar with it, I had to look up all those conversions with Google Calculator...)

Maybe you'd like to go back to Imperial coinage too? 12 pennies to the shilling, 20 shillings to the pound, two shillings to the florin, 2 shillings and sixpence to the half crown...

Re:Imperial measurements rock...

[Anonymous Coward]

> For a wooden building a centimeter is a bit too sloppy and a millimeter is a bit too precise a measurement for the task.

Yep, you are right. Lets just stick with inches instead.

Although of course all joiners or builders use the magic measurement of "a bit" as in "6 foot 3 and a bit" or even "154 cm and a bit".

Re:Imperial measurements rock...

[mubar]

Yea, like everyone didn't know that already. I mean seriously, do you think base 12 is the reason America still sticks to imperial system? It isn't, tradition is.

Besides, the system's hardly base 12 when you look at all the units. Imperial weights are not at least: pound is 16 ounces, and 1 stone is 14 pounds. Fourteen indeed, now how do you divide that by three? No, 12 is a nice number but American system isn't based on it.

Besides, even if it was, it'd still be harder to use and figure out than metric system. You see, we've been using base 10 for centuries. Number 10 is what we all learn to use, even though it might not be the best base number of them all. But when you've learned to think in powers of then, wouldn't it be nice to have a measurements system that takes advantage of this feat?

And this is the beauty of metric system. This is why it was originally developed, and later made the SI standard. Everything works in powers of ten, and the basic units relate to each other nicely and logically, because they've been specially adjusted to do so. Hence we can safely say, that as long we use base 10 mathematics, we'll be using metric system for measurements.

Re:Imperial measurements rock...

[Anonymous Coward]

Can open, worms everywhere!

I should've made it clearer that I meant Imperial measurements of length, specifically inches, feet and yards. I'd certainly not advocate going back to imperial for fluid measurements or currency though, but Imperial still has its place in the construction industry because of its easy divisability.

Re:Imperial measurements rock...

[Zangief]

This is only because historically the best machines were built by englishmen who measured in inches and all the other crap.

Are you going to tell me that computer geeks should use the Imperial system because it is a better measurement for diskettes and screens?

Fact: The numeric system we use, Indian, is based in powers of ten. So it is the SI. It is easy to multiply by ten, you just add/sustract zeroes.

Fact: The Imperial System is loosely based in powers of twelve. As much as you can divide by 2, 3 and 6, it is far more complex to do so than to multiply by ten.

Re:Imperial measurements rock...

[Peridriga]

That made sense when people didn't had calculators

You ever seen a framer (wood working contractor), a plumber, a mason use a calculator?

Maybe when going over building plans or writing out orders but, when you have a nail gun in one hand an a 2x4 in the other most arn't reaching for their pocket calculator.

They simply know that this board is supposed to be 1/4 the length of that one and that one is 24ft so this one should be 6 feet.

So... For example your a builder w/ a board that is 7.3152 meters long and you want a board 1/4 the size of that one... How long do you cut it?

So every cut you make you need to throw it into your calulator when I can do simple math in my head.

The imperial system is still good for certain jobs.

Re:Imperial measurements rock...

[SavingPrivateNawak]

BaaaAAAaaad examples...
Consider these:
"They simply know that this board is supposed to be 1/4 the length of that one and that one is 24m so this one should be 6 meters.

So... For example your a builder w/ a board that is 7.3152 feet long and you want a board 1/4 the size of that one... How long do you cut it?"

You do not prove anything by choosing round vs not-round values...

Re:Imperial measurements rock...

[sharkey]

1 Gallon = 1 pint

Not where I live, it doesn't. 1 gallon = 8 pints (4 quarts) here in the US.

Re:Imperial measurements rock...

[slim]

Not where I live, it doesn't. 1 gallon = 8 pints (4 quarts) here in the US.

Mea culpa. Typo.

Incidentally, 1 gallon = 8 pints everywhere, except that a UK pint != a US pint, and (obviously) a UK gallon != a UK gallon.

Incidentally my B&C and I went to a brewpub in the States once, and because we were driving, considered their half gallon take-out deal.. but Imperial illiterate Brits that we were, we had to ask how many pints that was. The waiter had to think about it, and eventuallyu worked it out via quarts "Hmm, well, a quart is two pints, and there are four quarts in a gallon, so half a gallon is 2 quarts and..."

Lucky we had Dr. Seuss to help us out...

Re:Imperial measurements rock...

[dublin]

That said, for machining where the precision is more important meteric makes a good system, although Imperial/English knew this and measurses precision measurements in thousandths or hundreths of inches to gain the advantage of decimal conversions and the increased precision, but metric is quite good for these types of fabrication.

Actually, inches are far superior for ordinary machining tasks, too. Most machine tools can hold a tolerance (determined by physics, not thier designers) of a little less than a thousandth of an inch. A hundredth of a millimenter (a centimiliimeter) is way too sloppy - more than two and a half times that size. A millimillimeter (a micrometer) is really too small though. The thousandth of an inch is extremely useful, and one of the reasons why we in the US are not going to give up useful units just because the rest of you decided to follow the French into a system guaranteed to create floating point math errors. Like pretty much all French ideas, SI can't stand any sort of scrutiny in the real world...

(See my other post here about the deca/deka-da/dk cockup for more information - the SI isn't even consistent with *itself*!)

Re:Imperial measurements rock...

[bkocik]

You do not prove anything by choosing round vs not-round values

So say you have a 1-meter board and you need it cut into thirds. Punch that into your calculator...and try to find 0.33333333333333333333 meters on your measuring device.

Okay, so even that is a little contrived (though, not really that much), but you get the point. =)

Re:Imperial measurements rock...

[Anonymous Coward]

Say you have one yard and you need it in quarters.... what are you people trying to prove? When you build something you never exactly get lengths divisable by 2, 3, 4, etc.

Re:Imperial measurements rock...

[Anonymous Coward]

How is a um to small if it's less than 1/4th of your magic 1/1000 of an inch... can't the machines just measure in increments of 2 um's?

Re:Imperial measurements rock...

[Anonymous Coward]

I meant: 'greater than 1/4 of 1/1000 inches'

Imperial system indirectly responsible

[Anonymous Coward]

In this case, the Imperial system isn't directly to blame : the article states that it's a communication problem that provocated the troubles.
I applause the initiative taken by engineers in this case : they did switch the plan to the metric system, and that's a good move. I just wish the whole US country would do the same.

Unfortunately (this is where I start drifting toward offtopicism), frenchs are the initial designers of the metric system. I wonder if this refrains US to switch completely to it, and keep the imperial system.

Still, doing the switch would be the most reasonable thing to do (widely used in the rest of the world AND simpler to manipulate), and could perhaps even have some beneficial political repercussions at the international level (and you can't deny US badly need some these days).

Re:Imperial system indirectly responsible

[Tarwn]

Errr....riiiight.

In all seriousness, I think it's rather insutling to both countries you have nmentioned to think that switching measurement systems would solve all of their problems. Minimizing current tensions much?

I do agree on the communications issue though. But taken from a differant angle this is exactly what many of us have to deal with everyday with software and design and development projects, except when we are slightly off in our communications with the customer we can't hold a ruler up to it...

Re:Imperial system indirectly responsible

[Anonymous Coward]

I never said that it would solve all problems, but just that (besides simplifying their citizen life in the future) it could benefit the US political situation right now, since it would be a symbolic move toward openness.

Another poster said that every American product exported must already be labeled with both systems, so it's not like it would change anything in practice.

Re:Imperial system indirectly responsible

[Anonymous Coward]

Contrary to popular belief, France did not invent the SI system {don't call it the "metric system" -- that's a pejorative term -- you wouldn't refer to Irish people as "paddies", would you?}

Most of the work in creating the SI system was done by the British, with our experience of keeping accurate measuring standards {but in unfortunately undeniably unwieldy denominations} around the world. All the French really did was suggest names for the units. For example, one proposed definition of a metre was the length of a pendulum whose period is two seconds -- but the value of g is not constant all over the Earth. While this is a good rough approximation, if you're on a desert island and need to time something for example, it's not good enough for serious scientific work. Anyway, a compromise deal was reached under which we let the French think they invented SI, in return for being allowed to claim a French invention for our own.

The favour was paid off in 1959, when France let us pretend that we invented front-wheel drive cars. In fact, putting the power to the right end {under the weight of the engine to improve roadholding, and pulling as opposed to pushing along} was originally a French idea.

America versus the rest

[Anonymous Coward]

Some things that would be nice to standardize (but will probably not happen in my lifetime)

- imperial - metric
- Letter paper - A4
- Fahrenheit - Celcius
- AM/PM - 24 hr notation
- month/day/year - day/month/year

Anything I left out?

Re:America versus the rest

[damgx]

Yes, it might sound stupid, but a simple things as to how many holes there are and where you put them on a noteblock, or a piece of paper.

To name a few we have:
two (2) in Denmark,
three (3) in US, and
four (4) in Sweden.

Am I the only one with this problem?

Oh, and what about when to say: 'Good morning/day/afternoon/night' is there a standard time interval for this?

Re:America versus the rest

[gotem]

actually I prefer year-month-day
makes ordering easier

Re:America versus the rest

[jc42]

- month/day/year - day/month/year

No, no! That's year/month/day (ISO standard format). And the year MUST be four digits. Any competent programmer understands why.

Actually, that's mostly for internal computer dates (and even the, a pure second counter is a lot more practical). You can always convert to random output formats for the benefit of those weird humans.

The problem that I keep running into is that my software has to parse "user-friendly" input data and decode dates formatted as dd/dd/dd, where 'd' is a digit. We used to only have the problem that the first two fields could be day/month or month/day. Now that computers have existed during two centuries, we also have the problem that an input date like 01/02/03 can be in 2001 (if it's ISO standard format) or 2003. Well, of course 2001 is a violation of the ISO standard, but my programs DO see it.

One of the real weirdness is that HTTP headers specify dates in non-ISO formats. What were they thinking? Back when HTTP was invented, we already knew enough about timestamps on the network to know that the ISO format was the only logical one to use. Correctly parsing HTTP header dates from random machines around the world can get really weird. Especially with the spelled-out months. I mean, native English speakers sometimes can't spell the names of the months correctly. You get some very inventive spellings from people who aren't fluent in English.

(And think how much better everything would work if we could just get people to use Kelvin rather than that arbitrary Celsius scale. ;-)

Re:America versus the rest

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as America != USA, the title should be USA versus the rest. Other countries in America uses the metric system.

Re:America versus the rest

[Anonymous Coward]

No. The ISO 8601 standard specifies YYYY-MM-DD. No slashes. And the proper time format is HH:MM:SS (:SS can be omitted, of course).

Re:America versus the rest

[mst76]

- 1.000.000,00 - 1,000,000.00

Re:America versus the rest

[lommer]

Oh, and what about when to say: 'Good morning/day/afternoon/night' is there a standard time interval for this?

Um, It's quite simple. Using local times -
Good morning: dawn, or just predawn until noon
Good day: when it's daylight
Good afternoon: noon 'til dusk
Good night: dusk 'til early the next morning

Admittedly, there is some overlap between G'afternoon and G'night, and the distinction between g'nite and g'morning generally just depends on the circumstances (i.e. did you just wake up or are you going to bed?).

However, since we're not using Good morning/day/afternoon/night to measure parts for spacecraft (or anything else) I'm willing to live with these ambiguities.

Re:America versus the rest

[mewi]

let's not forget about the dangers of a monoculture here! having imperial and metric around might save us if someone manages to crack the metric system...

Re:America versus the rest

[jc42]

Yeah; you're right. And, of course, all those funny separator chars can be omitted, except for the sign before the time-zone offset.

I have seen comments that '/' and '.' may be used in the date, but I'm not sure the ISO specs say that. This may come from people who try it and find that it seems to cause no problems. Probably because most software just strips out all the separators.

Anyway, it is fun to bring up the ISO date/time standard, and watch as people look at you like you're some sort of really strange weirdo. Even techies often show this reaction, though you'd think they'd know better. So, even though it's a Good Idea, there isn't the slightest chance of it being widely adopted in the forseeable future.

These days, date/time problems are a much bigger cause of problems and lost time than metric/imperial measures. And, even with the big fuss over the Y2K event, we aren't even close to getting this problem solved.

Re:America versus the rest

[imaginate]

Cool sig.

Re:America versus the rest

[artdodge]

HTTP/1.1 requires you to always produce dates in a single format: a fixed-length subset of the format defined in RFC1123 (see section 3.3 of RFC2616). You're also required to be able to parse two other formats for backward-compatibility reasons.

Of course, not everyone plays by the rules. But standardizing on an ISO format doesn't fix that. Changing human nature (or at least the free-wheeling, rule-hating culture of many network hackers/programmers) fixes that.

Re:America versus the rest

[gotem]

thanks,
but can you believe the first time I used it I was moded down "-1 Overrated" while my post hasn't been moded up?

Re:America versus the rest

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Celcius - Kelvin. Celcius is a useless, dated standard that can be dropped now that we have a real metric of temperature.

Re:America versus the rest

[fifirebel]

• imperial - metric
• Letter paper - A4
  
• Fahrenheit - Celcius
• AM/PM - 24 hr notation
• month/day/year - day/month/year

Add to that:

• President George W. Bush - Former President George W. Bush

Re:America versus the rest

[NeMon'ess]

The world should adopt month/day/year, or year/month/day. The problem with day/month/year, is that the first piece of information doesn't give enough context. 12 March and 26 March are both likely to be about the same temperature. March 12 and August 26 are probably going to be different temperatures, and the seasons are different. Reading the month first is more informative.

Since most dates people need to keep track of are within a year of the present date, keeping the year at the end makes sense.

Do most people keep track of dates in their heads based on the month? Or do they have a list in their head that looks like:
1: March (dinner with Andre), April (spring break)
2: February (anniversary), March (Janet's birthday)
3: ETC

I suspect most keep track based on the month. Therefore the month/day/year format makes more sense. When I read a date like 12 March, I set the 12 aside in memory before learning I should file it under March.

Re:America versus the rest

[SamSim]

May I suggest

- month/day/year and day/month/year

both be converted to

- year/month/day

because then we can tag on your time of day and keep the "descending-order-of-units" thang going:

- year/month/day hh:mm:ss

And while I'm at it, ditch Celsius, go for Kelvins. No more negative temperatures.

Re:America versus the rest

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, cause then if you want, you can add; hours, minutes etc.

Why Imperial (NOT english) Sucks.

[Anonymous Coward]

Upon careful examination it is clear that the Imperial system is at least indirectly responsible for most of the world's problems, including but not limited to:

* Government conspiracy
* Microsoft Windows
* Rap Music
* Hondas and their drivers
* Transistors
* Pokemon
* Jerry Springer
* Televangelism
* Toxic waste
* The Republicans
* The Democrats
* Defective and bogus hardware
* Wrenches that dont fit
* Starbucks coffee
* Communism
* Soccer
* The Dollar.

No mod him down for reading the article

[Anonymous Coward]

This is slashdot. The point here is to read the headline and make quick inane statements and hope of +5 mods.

Imperial is actually better.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? Because it's not base ten.

Using imperial measurements, you can accurately cut a third of a yard, half a yard etc. And I don't mean none of this 33.333333 recurring crap either. You can cut a perfect third.

It's one reason why Imperial is still used on the building trade. Ten divides by 2 and 5, yet 12 divides by 2, 3, 4 and 6 without the need for additional measuring gear. Great if you're cutting planks or copper tube.

Sometimes, base 10 isn't the best solution.

Re:Imperial is actually better.

[N Monkey]

Why? Because it's not base ten.

Using imperial measurements, you can accurately cut a third of a yard, half a yard etc. And I don't mean none of this 33.333333 recurring crap either. You can cut a perfect third.

Brilliant! Can I have a fifth of a yard of timber, please?

Re:Imperial is actually better.

[axxackall]

3 is no better than 7. Imperial system doesn't help to devide by 7. Neither by 11, 13, 17 etc.

The problem with 0.33333333 is not in a metric system, but in a way how it is used, like how software is using it. If you use program languages with unlimited words like Python, or even better with symbolic computation like Lisp or Haskell, then you don't have such problem.

Re:Imperial is actually better.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? Because it's not base ten.

Yes, 12 is superior as a number base because it has more integer divisors. Unfortunately our number system is decimal, in the end going all decimal is still easier.

Using imperial measurements, you can accurately cut a third of a yard, half a yard etc. And I don't mean none of this 33.333333 recurring crap either.

That's why, along with decimal notation and measuring, kids are taugh rounding at school.

You can cut a perfect third.

No you can't. If your blade 1 mm thick,it makes no sense to measure much more precise than that.

Re:Imperial is actually better.

[Ed Almos]

Seven and two tenths of an inch. That will be three groats to you good sir !!

Ed

Re:Imperial is actually better.

[radish]

I guess you've just explained why there are no buildings anywhere in Europe - because it's impossible to build using the metric system. Thanks!

Forgot to update the drawings, eh? Been there.

[aduthie]

I worked in automotive engine factories in Detroit for two years. We had a problem with a cylinder head casting from a South American supplier once that was a direct result of them not updating their tool drawing when they fixed the problem the first time. Since the print was never updated, when they built a new tool to cast the heads, they left in a certain ejector pin. Once again, the pin wore out, sand built up around the pin, and we ended up with a little hole in the cylinder head after we machined it.

We caught the hole on the assembly line via the standard air pressure testing, but the mistake ended up costing the supplier an entire warehouse full of scrap parts that they had shipped (by ship) to the U.S.

Moral of the story: Update the damn prints, people!

Pre-emptive rant reply

[utahjazz]

Before everone rants about why 'America' hasn't changed to the Metric system...

Note that:

-Virtuall all US University engineering and science education is done using Metric units.

-The US Federal government is required to use the Metric system for doing business (Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act)

-The US FDA requires all consumer products be labeled in Metric units (actually dual labeling)

I guess some Euros wonder why the US doesn't pass laws saying like "You're not allowed to sell gas in gallons, you must sell it in Litres". Well, the US just doesn't work that way. If someone wants to sell gas in Litres, they are free to. Mostly, businesses choose not to.

Dare I say at the risk of downward moderation and flaming, that the US 'hands off' approach to business is working quite well in comparison to EU countries, where the recent recession hit much harder, largely blamed on overly beaurocractic governments that ensure companies are inflexible in changing economic times.

On the other end, starting this year, the EU will ban dual labeling. So, not only will Europe require US products to have metric labeling (the already do) they will not allow Imperial units to appear on the labels! That's just spiteful.

Re:Pre-emptive rant reply

[FroMan]

On the other end, starting this year, the EU will ban dual labeling. So, not only will Europe require US products to have metric labeling (the already do) they will not allow Imperial units to appear on the labels! That's just spiteful.

Are you serious? Well, that's freedom for you. Label it this way or its illegal!

Yes, yes, go ahead euro-lib, mark me -1 flamebait cause you support freedom.

Re:Pre-emptive rant reply

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup the hands off system is working great for the 41 Million people without health care.

Re:Pre-emptive rant reply

[mks113]

Um, I think you are being rather presumptive in your assertion that the US approach to business has been responsible for a "not as bad" recession.

Those of us to your north (or east, in my case) are somewhere between the european beurocracy and the american laissez-faire approach, but we haven't been hit with the recession in the same way. We do blame SARS and BSE with slowing the growth, but metric!?

And to state what a few dozen engineers have thought but not spelled out in the English vs. Imperial rants --- It isn't metric, it is SI.

Re:Pre-emptive rant reply

[MKalus]

Dare I say at the risk of downward moderation and flaming, that the US 'hands off' approach to business is working quite well in comparison to EU countries, where the recent recession hit much harder, largely blamed on overly beaurocractic governments that ensure companies are inflexible in changing economic times.

Dare I say that you are comparing apples with oranges once more and that at the end of the day both economies are roughly at the same footing?

The reality is that business is more an art than a science anyways, despite what all the MBAs are trying to tell you.

Re:Pre-emptive rant reply

[trout_fish]

Yet there are advantages to a more interventionist attitude from government. There has been a general recognition that a standard measurment system is a good thing[TM]. Similarly, it has been recognised that metric is better than imperial. The only bar to change is the cost of conversion. In the longer term everyone will benefit from governments forcing change by a significantly improved measurment system and a decreased change over period. For the US, the change will take much longer, and be much more costly - given all the inevitable conversion mistakes - but the result will be the same.

Re:Pre-emptive rant reply

[gammoth]

...that the US 'hands off' approach to business...

Please do not perpetuate this fantasy. US businesses love 'hands on' as a market is first developed, then howl for 'hands off' when the market is safely divided among two or three mega-corps.

Re:Pre-emptive rant reply

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone in the US has access to top quality healh care. No one is ever denied needed health care for any reason.

It's true that some people are uninsured. In this case, they are sometimes billed for the care. For the very poor, or permanently disabled, medicare and/or social security will usually cover the costs. In other cases, churches will often pay. If someone does end up stuck with the bill, their credit will suffer, but not their health.

Re:Pre-emptive rant reply

[brucmack]

Actually, businesses could do better if they sold gas in liters instead of gallons, since it would be such a lower number on the sign.

I know plenty of times when Americans have commented in Canada about how cheap the gas is because they didn't realize the price was for about a quarter of a gallon.

Medieval not Imperial ....

[Anonymous Coward]

NT (as in no text)

When will this stop?

[photonic]

First of all i want to applaud the Japanese culture. The press report seems to originate from the company that made the error: A public statement about the how and why of the error, with apologies and even in english. I wish more companies were like that.

This incident (although caused by a transition TO the metric system) leads us to the question how many more years until we finally get rid of the imperial system. The US standard bureau has a page that describes their effort in the conversion. They quote the metric conversion act of 1975, but i don't know how much has happened since then. How many years do I have to buy US stuff here in Europe that is half metric and half imperial? For god sake, even the UK has switched! Does anybody know a real time-table for the transition??

Obligatory Pulp Fiction quote:

Vincent:
And you know what they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris?
Jules:
They don't call it a Quarter Pounder with Cheese?
Vincent:
No, they got the metric system there, they wouldn't know what the fuck a Quarter Pounder is.
Jules:
And what'd they call it?
Vincent:
They call it Royale with Cheese.

If you ever run into a imperial system freak ask him to calculate how many square inch there are in a square mile ... without blinking.

Re:When will this stop?

[pclminion]

If you ever run into a imperial system freak ask him to calculate how many square inch there are in a square mile ... without blinking.

So, you're saying you feel proud that you don't know how to multiply numbers which aren't powers of ten?

Re:When will this stop?

[saforrest]

They call it Royale with Cheese.

I got the chance to confirm this for myself when I was in Paris this past summer. Here's a photo of the interior of a McDonald's beside Place de la Bastille in Paris.

Note that the burger's name is actually spelled "Royal" with cheese, though a French speaker would pronounce it Royale.

Re:When will this stop?

[Anonymous Coward]

5280 * 5280 * 12 * 12

Re:When will this stop?

[srvivn21]

Also approporate is a Rising Sun quote:

"The Japanese have a saying: fix the problem, not the blame. In American organizations it's all about who messed up. Whose head will roll. In Japanese organizations it's about what's messed up, and how to fix it. Nobody gets blamed. Their way is better."

Re:When will this stop?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I recall seeing a road sign in dual units, on I-71 listing the mi and km to Marietta or somewhere. One road sign. Probably placed when the highway was built, perhaps sometime around 1975... and probably gone now besides.

So, yeah. America's progress on this metric deal: possibly one road sign... and soda comes in n-liter bottles, for some reason. whee.

not quite...

[Anonymous Coward]

the English nation does not exist, in the eyes of the world, you are infact considered "british," not "English", sadly.

If by "in the eyes of the world" you meant the US, then yes, you are correct.

Re:not quite...

[relrelrel]

no, every country in the world, 'cos england admits it does not exist, and that it is Britain.

Not a metric/imperial drawing

[nuggz]

The problem has little/nothing to do with it being metric/imperial.

Someone ordered the wrong part. That's it.

This is why drawings should be controlled. Only current known valid drawings should be used for anything.

This problem is as basic as someone using patches for linux kernel 1.2.13 on a 2.6 series kernel

for those of you that can't see the light....

[dcordeiro]

1m = 1000 mm
1km = 1000 m
1kg = 1000 g
1 Ton = 1000 kg
1 liter (water) = 1kg
1 hectare = 10000 m2
1 km2 = 100 hectares

Do you see the similarity with our numeric system ?

You only see 1's and 0's.

Re:for those of you that can't see the light....

[Anonymous Coward]

So what you're trying to say is the metric system is binary? /american that will never use metric

Re:for those of you that can't see the light....

[mst76]

> 1 Ton = 1000 kg

In SI this would be 1 Mg.

Re:for those of you that can't see the light....

[Splunge]

2 gills = 1 cup
2 cups = 1 qt
2 qts = 1 pottle
2 pottle = 1 gallon
2 gallons = 1 peck
2 pecks = 1 bucket
2 buckets = 1 bushel

Do you see the similarity with the binary system?

You see only powers of two which could be easily encoded with 1s and 0s.

Re:for those of you that can't see the light....

[boogy nightmare]

for gods sake its Litre and Metre......

Re:for those of you that can't see the light....

[rayrob]

I believe that, in metric, it is Tonne. Ton being an imperial mesurement.

Re:for those of you that can't see the light....

[Anonymous Coward]

And while we're at it, it's the CENTRE tag, not CENTER. Bloody Americans, no wonder my HTML never looks right. :)

In Australia everything is metric, with a few exceptions, such as penis length (inches), and car wheels (inches).

One thing that I don't understand is why car tyres are measured in inches for diameter, millimetres for width, and a percentage of width for height ratio. Argh!

Didn't some US state "standardize" pi to be equal to "3". Don't your circles look funny? :)

Re:for those of you that can't see the light....

[Rob Simpson]

1 Ton = 1000 kg

I prefer megagram.

And 1 mL = 1 cm^3 = 1 g water
makes some calculations nice and easy. Who needs a calculator?

Re:for those of you that can't see the light....

[Anonymous Coward]

Would that make you a Wankre?

Those darn English measurements!

[jazman]

> attributed to an English/Metric units problem
> new axles were mistakenly ordered using the pre-1995 English specifications
and from RTFA:
> appropriate action to revise and maintain the design drawings was neglected

Riiiiiight, so what you're trying to tell me is that if the pre-1995 specs were metric instead of imperial this mistake wouldn't have happened? Also why does a problem with Imperial measurements have to be an English problem? Americans use Imperial as well.

Re:Those darn English measurements!

[achurch]

Riiiiiight, so what you're trying to tell me is that if the pre-1995 specs were metric instead of imperial this mistake wouldn't have happened?

Well, given that the reason the specs were changed was that the measurements were changed from Imperial to metric units, I don't think that that's at all an unreasonable claim.

English units?

[Tomah4wk]

Don't you mean imperial. They actually stem from an arabic measuring system (as does our numbering system of base 10, we were roman until 17th century). Ive never heard of 'English units' and ive lived here practically my whole life.

The right term is "U. S. Customary"

[dpbsmith]

(And the right term for "metric" is "SI").

SI units are legal in the United States and have been for a very long time. The inch was set at precisely 25.4 mm _by definition_ in July 1959.

The additional units, such as inches, miles, quarts, pounds, etc. which I believe are all legally defined by reference to SI units, are officially and properly referred to as "U. S. Customary" units. They have, of course, a strong historical connection to English units.

Unofficially, "Metric" and "English" are the U. S. customary designations for "SI" and "U. S. Customary."

Re:The right term is "U. S. Customary"

[EmbeddedJanitor]

The inch was set at precisely 25.4 mm _by definition_ in July 1959. But remember too stat some state, I forget which, defined pi to be _precisely_ 3!

Re:If the U.S. hates the french so much

[Progman3K]

If the U.S. hates the french so much, they should dynamite the Statue of Liberty, because that was a gift from the french to the U.S.

It would serve the french and the americans right!

See how stupid all this french or american bashing is?

Grow up, people.

That's funny...

[bluprint]

You got the metric conversion wrong (off by one zero) and the other one right.

Re:That's funny...

[dcordeiro]

hmm... you wasily found out a "bug" in my calculation... but,
did I wrote the conversion from mile to inch correctely ? (you do know have the number printed in your head don't you?)

Re:That's funny...

[bluprint]

Not in my head. I used a calculator. Perhaps that's one advantage of the english system over the metric...fewer "simple" mistakes, since you almost always think to yourself "hmmm...I better actually check this".

hairsplitting

[Anonymous Coward]

>1 litre of water weighs 1kilogram and 1000 litres of water will occupy 1 cubic meter of space.

Thats not really true, because the dimension of water depends on the temperature.

1l water weighs 1kg if there are 4C

Ok, the difference is not big, but at disney it wasn't too:)

greets from Germany

prohibit US technology imports

[peter303]

US technology is a safety hazard until ALL of it uses the International Units System. I believe most of it does comply.

Re:Bandwagon

[Rhubarb Crumble]

[waits for mod points]

[gets modded redundant]

[???]

[no profit for you!]

Americans are to blame

[csoto]

We should be using the metric system (better yet, SI) by now. Any half-retarded grade school kid understands base 100.

It's amazing the weird looks I get whenever I refer to shit in meters or liters, unless it's 400 meter dash or 2 liter Coke.

Problem/Proble

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, metric... because everything's slightly smaller in metric...

Inch/Centimeter, Mile/Kilometer, Gallon/Litre, Fahenheit/Centigrade, Pounds/Kilograms...

Re:Problem/Proble

[zakath]

Uuhhhhh...a little over 2.2lbs in 1kg dude...

Re:This is far too confusing

[Dave Beta]

The 'English' system used in the USA isn't even the same as the Imperial system in Britain. If I ordered a pint of beer in a pub and got a US pint, I would complain. A British pint is more than 20% bigger!

But has the rest of the world really converted?

[glorf]

What about the OPEC nations who sell 42 gallon barrels of oil? Or how about Volvo, BMW, Honda, Toyota etc. whose automobiles measure performance in horsepower? And what about your furnaces that are probably rated in BTUs. And there are probably a bunch of other units I am forgetting. If you think your country has gone totally metric you are fooling yourself.

And then of course there is time. Is there a single country that has converted to metric time?

Re:But has the rest of the world really converted?

[jrumney]

Or how about Volvo, BMW, Honda, Toyota etc. whose automobiles measure performance in horsepower?

Maybe when they're marketing to the US market, but for the rest of the world they use kW.

obBrazilQuote

[slim]

Obligatory Pulp Fiction quote:

More apt Brazil quote:

nabbed from here...

When the internal security policy arrive to
arrest terrorist suspect Mr. Buttle - himself
an innocent citizen wrongly fingered due to a
mechanical problem in a computer system - the
Department of Works who come in after them to
clean up the mess have brought along the wrong
size repair kit to fix the hole in the floor
that they drilled to facilitate a surprise
entrance.

JILL: There must be some mistake ... Mr. Buttle's harmless...

BILL: We don't make mistakes.

(So saying, he drops the manhole cover, which is
faced with same material as the floor, over the
hole in the floor. To his surprise it drops
neatly through the floor into the flat below.)

CHARLIE: Bloody typical, they've gone back to
metric without telling us.

Size does matter

[Unregistered]

Apparently size does matter, even if it's only a 0.86mm difference.

Yes! I'm longer than that.

The conversion has bugun

[rs79]

On Hawthorne Blvd, coming out of Palos Verdes going into Torrance in the sunny state of California there is a single speed limit sign that has both miles per hour and kilometers per hour. Frmom what I saw in the 10 years I lived there it's the only inperial/metric speed limit sign in the LA area.

Are't all liquor and wine bottles metric in the US now? And what about those 2 litre soft drink bottles?

Re:The conversion has bugun

[Politburo]

There was a movement in the early 80s to switch to the metric system. Many road signs placed during that time were in dual units. One of these signs exists on Interstate 78 Westbound, just after the interchange with Interstate 287. On the first line, the sign reads: "Phillipsburg 29 miles", and underneath it says "47 kilometers". Also, I was glancing through one of the highway standards manuals here at work (I work at a civil engineering firm) and there are actually sign standards in New Jersey for road signs in metric. The speed limit signs have a large yellow banner across the top which says "METRIC" to alert people that it's not 88 mi/h!

Re:The conversion has bugun

[Anonymous Coward]

SPEED LIMIT 88MPH - DELOREANS EXEMPT!

(Hey, don't tell me you wouldn't put at least 1 Back to the Future reference on your DeLorean if you had one -- Maybe someday...)

Re:The conversion has bugun

[SnowZero]

The US officially switched (again) in the 1970s. There was a public backlash to a quick switch, so they backpeddled. As a result we're mixed now, but another result is that school students were taught both. High school Physics, Chemistry, and Biology classes are entirely in metric for example. Thus I can use either, and I think metric will eventually gain enough in popularity to take over. There's just a lot of inertia with factories, parts, designs, signage, what people are used to, and so on. Therefore I don't expect it to be overnight.

Sadly, that road sign is probably just an old one from the 1970s push.

Re:The conversion has bugun

[jadavis]

One somewhat interesting aspect of the english system is that in some common cases it actually does make calculation easier. When making a journey greater than 10 miles, assuming moderate traffic, you usually make about 1 mile per minute.

Granted, it's only one example. I think that the world would be better off if everyone converted to metric. However, we must acknowledge the advantages of the English system to understand why people are resistant to change. For one thing, english units are a little easier to imagine: feet can be somewhat accurately paced off, a cup is about how much water you might drink (at least closer than a liter), etc. The measurements are inherently more natural.

Re:The conversion has bugun

[rossdee]

"One somewhat interesting aspect of the english system is that in some common cases it actually does make calculation easier. When making a journey greater than 10 miles, assuming moderate traffic, you usually make about 1 mile per minute."

That works if the speed limit is 60mph. I think some states have higher speed limits like 70 or 75.

" a cup is about how much water you might drink (at least closer than a liter)"

Cups come in so many diferent sizes, it seems silly using them as a measuring standard.

Re:The conversion has bugun

[jadavis]

That works if the speed limit is 60mph.

I said "assuming moderate traffic". Even in places with speed limit of 65, many people obviously drive 75 or more. But the average usually works out quite close to 60 (in my experience) when you factor driving through LA during rush hour, for instance. If you have clear sailing and don't mind driving fast, you can drive 90mph, which is still easier to calculate than some kph amount (90mph = 1.5 mi/min).

You can argue about the systems all day and not get anywhere because there's no easy way to prove it.

One thing I don't like about the push for the si system is that it seems like a way for people to conveniently ignore units in a measurement. They crunch the numbers and then put whatever units they think belong at the end. It's convenient if you know what you're doing, but dangerous if you're guessing about a measurement for some component that humans are relying upon for survival.

Messes up my own projects too

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

I'm busy working on some robotics projects at home. So I go off to Ace hardware this weekend to get some measuring equipment as I need to do stuff acurately. Now I'm writing code that uses these real world measurements and most of the library calls for I/O of numbers (e.g. scanf, printf) support only the use of decimal to represent floating point numbers. So clearly it makes sense to use metric for measurements as I'm so lame I can't remember what a number like 3 7/32 looks like in decimal. Goddamnit! Do you think I could find any metric equipemnt anywhere in Ace? Maybe one steel ruler. And it was just a ruler. Stuff like levels, set squares and protractors all have rules on them marked in inches. It's pathetic. It's like waking up and suddenly finding myself in a medieval city measuring out my drinks in gills.

Fahrenheit's reasons

[medscaper]

The only reason why the Fahrenheit scale used a non-zero value for the freezing point of water was that people of the time didn't have a strong grasp of the concept of negative numbers.

Bzzzzt. Thanks for playing!

From boson.physics.sc.edu :

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Danish astronomer Ole Roemer (famous for making the first measurements that showed that the velocity of light is finite) devised a temperature scale of his own for use with the alcohol-in-glass thermometers that he constructed. His thermometers attracted the attention of Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686-1736), a manufacturer of meteorological instruments in the Netherlands. In 1708 Fahrenheit traveled to Copenhagen to meet Roemer and see his thermometers, which were based on two reference points. For one reference Roemer used a mixture of ice, water, and salt to reach the lowest temperatures then attainable in the laboratory, which he called zero. His other reference was the boiling point of water, which he arbitrarily designated as 60 degrees.

Fahrenheit returned home to make thermometers like Roemer's. In 1714 he overcame technical difficulties with alcohol thermometers by substituting mercury as the expanding liquid. The use of mercury extended the range of temperature measurements from well below Roemer's zero to well above the boiling point of water. Furthermore, mercury expanded and contracted more uniformly than the other liquids then in use. As a result, Fahrenheit could mark his mercury thermometers more accurately and with finer divisions.

By 1724 Fahrenheit had adopted a new scale, similar to Roemer's but with much finer divisions. For the zero point he chose the same reference as Roemer. However, since his thermometer was intended for meteorological observations, he wanted a second reference point that would be nearer the maximum observed temperature for weather. He chose the normal temperature of the human body as the upper reference point, which he called 96. Fahrenheit gave no reason for his choice of 96, but it may have been due to his desire for a finer scale and because 96 is evenly divisible by 2, 3, 4, 8, and 12.

Why didn't Fahrenheit choose the freezing point of water for his zero reference, as Newton had done before him and as Celsius did later on? Perhaps Fahrenheit was influenced by Roemer, or he may have wanted to avoid the inconvenience of repeatedly using negative temperatures during winter. Also, in the early 1700s it was widely believed that water did not always freeze at the same temperature. Soon, using his newly calibrated thermometers, Fahrenheit learned that water always froze at 32 on his scale. He immediately added this third reference point to his instruments.

Re:Fahrenheit's reasons

[jrumney]

Body temperature varies, and wouldn't make a good reference point. The other story I have heard is that he deliberately chose a 180 degree gap between the freezing point and boiling point of water to come up with the increments.

Re:Fahrenheit's reasons

[Anonymous Coward]

I've heard it was also a 180 degree gap, and the coldest it ever got wherever they came up with this was set as zero on the scale. That's why the freezing point of water is at 32. At least this is what I heard from my eccentric thermodynamics prof.

Re:Fahrenheit's reasons

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok.. Semantics and pedantry here...
While Roemer may have been the first to have made a proof that light has a finite speed (I don't know for sure, either way), the Arab scientist Al Hazan (Common English version of the name) postulated that light has different speeds through media such as water and air (given difraction) in the 10th century. He also demonstrated how a camera obscura functions, and pretty much laid the groundwork for modern studies in optics.

Re:Fahrenheit's reasons

[Anonymous Coward]

According to my memories of things, another good reason for 32 and 96 would be that it is easy to divide the scale between them (into halves...)

Re:Fahrenheit's reasons

[Rob Simpson]

96? 32? Way to make your temperature scale intuitive, Fahrenheit.

Though water does freeze at different temperatures depending on the atmospheric pressure.

Re:Fahrenheit's reasons

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard that he picked the "0" point on a day in the winter that he couldn't imagine it ever being colder than. I guess He hadn't been to Minnesota yet.

Re:Fahrenheit's reasons

[cagle_.25]

where did you get your sig? The only other person I've ever heard say that was at an acapella concert at Princeton in 1988 ... you aren't a former Footnote, are you?

Jeff Cagle

Re:Fahrenheit's reasons

[le duf]

Slightly different account from Cecil.

Re:Fahrenheit's reasons

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, not a Footnote. Not sure where I picked it up - somewhere in the annals of the net, I spect. When I run into not-too-trite sayings, I usually copy them into a sig file somewhere.

That's not the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is not quite the teaching of the metric system. The problem is getting the American Public to think that this conversion will be (1) easy, and (2) A Good Thing.

I won't even start on how people can't even master the Imperial system here out of High School. However, I think a lot of people see kilometers, liters, etc. and just shy away. The American Public is lazy. Scary given our political system.

US does use metric

[Prince Vegeta SSJ4]

The Military uses metric, at Georgia Tech (civil engineering) we used both (however, they emphasized metric), I believe most in the scientific community use metric. I think the problem is with trying to teach the general population.

Ditch the English system.

[stealth.c]

Seriously. Enough's enough.

Why not adjust the Imperial system?

[Splunge]

The US (and the UK) has repeatedly adjusted the sizes of various units over the years (as has the metric system in defining the meter, second, etc).

At any rate, why doesn't the US simply redefine various units to match more evenly with standard metric units?

For example:

1 pound = 453.59 grams. Why not make 1 pound = 450 or, better, 500 grams. Then 1 lb = 1/2 kg. Easy to convert back and forth!

Similarly, everyone knows 1 meter ~= 1 yard. So redefine the foot to be 1/3 of a meter. Once again, it'd be easy to convert.

And last, 1 qt = 0.946 litres. So change it to be 1 litre. Then a 2 litre bottle of soda would be a 1/2 gallon.

After that, the unit names "ounce", "mile", "inch" become mnemonic terms. People would still use inches because it's more convenient to say than "1/36 of a meter".

Re:Why not adjust the Imperial system?

[thomasdelbert]

1 pound = 453.59 grams. Why not make 1 pound = 450 or, better, 500 grams. Then 1 lb = 1/2 kg. Easy to convert back and forth!

A wise man once told me that 28 grams of prevention is worth 454 grams of cure.

Re:Who's at fault here, really? Not Ninnle!

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem here hasn't so much to do with what system is used, so much as the American inability, or just plain unwillingness, to get on the global standard! It's as simple as that! Why it extends into the realm of flight, I'll never understand. Also, if they had used Ninnle for all their calculations, things never would have been screwed up!

Blah blah US economy blah blah

[Imperator]

Don't give me that crap about how much better the US economy performs than the EU. The median standard of living in the EU is higher than in the US. The US economy is great at producing wealth at the top, but conservative Americans have an aversion to using the economy to solve social problems ("communism! class war!"). I think this is a major reason why Europeans view the US as "backwards". Yes, both the US and the EU have economies that have solved the problems of food, shelter, and medicine. But the US has not seen to distributing those solutions to the people.

Many Americans have an ingrained sense that the only job of the economy is to grow. Things like social nets and environmental protections interfere with the ability of the (total) economy to grow at the fastest rate possible, so they must be inherently bad. This is the unifying economic philosophy of the conservative Republicans: government itself is inherently bad precisely because it siphons money (taxes) away from investment and consumption. If you believe in Reaganomics ("a rising tide lifts all boats") this makes some sense. But in the real world, it leads to a morally bankrupt society obsessed with money.

</rant>

So in conclusion, there are 36 inches in a yard.

Re:Blah blah US economy blah blah

[Guppy06]

"The median standard of living in the EU is higher than in the US."

Out of curiousity, by who's standard?

"I think this is a major reason why Europeans view the US as "backwards"."

Is it well-deserved, or is it simply hearsay? From what I've read and heard recently, for example, it sounds like a lot of Europeans would be surprised to hear that the "backwards, conservative" US has the largest percentage of college-aged citizens enrolled in university (heard at end of link) and is on the verge of becoming the first country in history where the majority of adults have a college degree (heard elsewhere).

(By the way, a warning to fellow USA-ians: Be prepared to want to throttle any nearby Britons upon hearing the above radio article. Seriously.)

"Yes, both the US and the EU have economies that have solved the problems of food, shelter, and medicine."

Again, are citizens of EU members really better off in these areas, or are you basing this on comments made, for example, by politicians (US or EU) trying to paint a nightmare scenario in the US to justify their own positions?

"Things like social nets and environmental protections interfere with the ability of the (total) economy to grow at the fastest rate possible, so they must be inherently bad. This is the unifying economic philosophy of the conservative Republicans: government itself is inherently bad precisely because it siphons money (taxes) away from investment and consumption."

First off, you haven't been paying much attention to the Republicans in Washington in the past few months.

Secondly, there's a disconnect between these two sentences. You seem to automatically assume that "social safety net" = "government" by definition. Must altruism be government-mandated, where humans are so inherently selfish that they must be forced to help others? If so, how is a government that is "of the people, by the people, for the people" somehow better at being altruistic if those very same people that vote for them are so selfish? Divine right of Congress?

And, if so, why must it be the national government instead of state/provincial governments?

"But in the real world, it leads to a morally bankrupt society obsessed with money."

There's more to the US than Wall Street and Hollywood, though I can easily understand your confusion...

Re:Blah blah US economy blah blah

[G-Man]

Distributing solutions to the people? 15,000 French elderly died last summer because of a heat wave and it's the US that doesn't distribute solutions to the people?

Re:Blah blah US economy blah blah

[mc6809e]

Where did you get your information from? Really, I've spent a lot of time trying to confirm what you said, but there doesn't seem to be much support for it. Maybe you can supply a reference.

The only thing I was able to find was a table here.

Reproduced:

Country's median income (US=100)

Belgium = 106
Denmark = 105
Canada = 95
France = 95
Germany = 80
UK = 76
Spain = 73
Average EU + Canada = 90

This would seem to contradict what you've said. Can you point me to your source of information?

Re:Blah blah US economy blah blah

[HacTar]

This year's United Nations' Human Development Report has ranked six European countries - several of which are EU Member States - as being in the top ten countries with the highest 'quality of life' - a broad measure that aims to go beyond per capita income to include such factors as health care, education and life expectancy in measuring a nation's well-being.

The top ten places in the index, measuring relative living standards in 175 countries, went to Norway, Iceland, Sweden, Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium, the USA, Canada, Japan and Switzerland.

EUROPA - Research - Headlines - Europe is the place to live, report shows

Re:Blah blah US economy blah blah

[hanssprudel]

Yeah, the standards they used to measure "quality of life" are completely engineered, and ENGINEERED to make the scandinavian socialist "paradises" looked good. Read it, it contains stuff like "plus ten points for easy access to pine forrests".

Quality of life is subjective, wealth isn't. I would rather be a median American, then a median Swede any day.

Re:Blah blah US economy blah blah

[utahjazz]

Yep. EU governments do things like put tons of money into Opera and then factor that in to "why our standard of life is than the US", when it really meas, "Europe does a better job of being European than the US does".

Here's my bonus system:

Rodeo: +20
NASCAR: +40
Cheerleaders: +2000

Re:Blah blah US economy blah blah

[G-Man]

Funny that a statement of fact is considered a 'troll' F.O.A.D., asswipes

Re:Blah blah US economy blah blah

[Anonymous Coward]

Wealth is certainly subjective. If you have to pay for health services and good education, having more money than someone who lives in a country that gets those for free is not automatically better.

Moan, moan moan... The metric is alive in the US.

[Hackie_Chan]

Around Universities in the US every roadsign in kilometers. My father works for a vitamin company in the US, and he use the metric system anyway. Big deal if it's not official in the country, if enough many people start to use it, it's going to catch on -- just like the word THRU.

Karma Whoring Info Post

[Aidtopia]

A friend of mine in college in the late 80's did an internship with Disney Imagineering. At the time, they were redrawing plans for several attractions that were to be copied almost exactly from California and Florida version for use in Euro Disney. There was great concern that the Imperial to metric round-off would be a problem. The contractor's union in France mandated that they only use metric units in the blueprints, which is reasonable. But if you're trying to duplicate a ride that was originally designed in Imperial units, you need to keep in mind quite a few significant digits when you're measuring. For example, a section of track in a given ride might be 10 feet in the US. In metric that's 3.048 m. Would the French contractors really measure to that precision? Or would they round off to 3.05 or event 3.0? They were concerned that roundoff might be systematic causing the errors to accumulate in one direction. This was a big concern, and there were debates over whether some rides needed to be redesigned in metric from the start and possibly give up economies of standardized parts.

That this happened in Space Mountain is also interesting, because Space Mountain was the first rollercoaster to have ATIS (automated track inspection system). Since it was a tightly wound coaster in a confined space it was difficult to do visual inspections. ATIS uses two techniques to detect problems with the track. The rails are actually tubes and they're pressurized in sections. When small cracks start to develop, the pressure drop is detected. Sensors also time cars through different sections of the track. If there is a trend of cars slowing through a section over time, it indicates that the ties between the rails are starting to give. ATIS is so much better than visual inspections at detecting problems early that it's used on most modern roller coasters.

Re:If the U.S. hates the french so much

[Anonymous Coward]

It wasn't about hate or love, it's about politics. French governement doesn't like or dislike the US one, It just need to have a stance in the international political field. Same goes with the US one.

For the US country to switch system, it must be first be decided by its _government_. I seriously doubt the citizen could by themselves make the switch on a large scale.

Besides, each decision that either government take can be used by the other one in a way or another. Seeing how tensions exist between the two countries (governments) right now, you can legitimately ask yourself : would the US (government) choose now to switch to the metric system, given all the history tied to the subject ?

You proposal to dynamite the Statue of Liberty would exactly fit a scheme of plain french hate (or plain american bashing), but politically it would just ruin all US credibility for many years to come. OTOH, not switching doesn't make the situation worse or better than it is.

I just wanted to say that whatever the issues that might exist between US and french (government), switching to the metric system would be wise. It might even be politically profitable.

Perhaps my wording was poor enough for you to misunderstand the point I'm trying to make. If so, please accept my apologies. I hope I've made myself clearer with this post.

American, English, Imperial and Metric.

[rssrss]

Statutory definitions of the American customary system (if you want to call it a system) of weights and measures are explained in the note to 15 United States Code Section 205.

The United States National Institute of Standards and Technology has published a more detailed explanation of the American British, Imperial and Metric (SI) System in its Handbook 44 - Specifications, Tolerances, And Other Technical Requirements for Weighing and Measuring Devices. Appendix C to the Handbook gives detailed tables of conversion among the various systems, and Appendix B explains a good deal of the history of the systems. Section 2.3 of that appendix gives an explanation of US/UK differences:

2.3. . . After 1959, the U.S. and the British inch were defined identically . . . A similar situation existed for the U.S. and the British pound, and many relationships, such as 12 inches = 1 foot, . . . , were the same in both countries; but there were some very important differences.

In the first place, the U.S. customary bushel and the U.S. gallon, and their subdivisions differed from the corresponding British Imperial units. Also the British ton is 2240 pounds, whereas the ton generally used in the United States is the short ton of 2000 pounds. The American colonists adopted the English wine gallon of 231 cubic inches. The English of that period used this wine gallon and they also had another gallon, the ale gallon of 282 cubic inches. In 1824, the British abandoned these two gallons when they adopted the British Imperial gallon, which they defined as the volume of 10 pounds of water, at a temperature of 62 EF, which, by calculation, is equivalent to 277.42 cubic inches. At the same time, they redefined the bushel as 8 gallons.

In the customary British system the units of dry measure are the same as those of liquid measure. In the United States these two are not the same, the gallon and its subdivisions are used in the measurement of liquids; the bushel, with its subdivisions, is used in the measurement of certain dry commodities. The U.S. gallon is divided into four liquid quarts and the U.S. bushel into 32 dry quarts. All the units of capacity or volume mentioned thus far are larger in the customary British system than in the U.S. system. But the British fluid ounce is smaller than the U.S. fluid ounce, because the British quart is divided into 40 fluid ounces whereas the U.S. quart is divided into 32 fluid ounces. . . We can mention again the common use, for body weight, in England of the stone of 14 pounds, this being a unit now unused in the United States, although its influence was shown in the practice until World War II of selling flour by the barrel of 196 pounds (14 stone). . .

margin of error?

[Simonetta]

You need to ask yourself WHY you are risking your life on an amusement park ride that has less than a 0.86mm margin of error on a critical life-supporting part?

Re:margin of error?

[Golias]

So, you're saying that all of the parts of your car's drive and steering systems should have about a third of an inch of loose play on them at the very least?

Sometimes it makes sense for things to fit tightly.

Re:margin of error?

[DAldredge]

0.86 millimeters = 0.0338582677 inches
That is 3/100 of an inch no 33/100 of an inch.

Re:margin of error?

[Golias]

My bad... I thought it was .86 cm.

Another demonstration of how much clearer metric is than standard. Fail to notice a single letter, and you are off by a factor of 10. Much easier than inches, you betcha.

Re:margin of error?

[Niksie3]

yeah, Like the american system is like clearly superior, I mean like, no one has like ever confused ' with ", you know?

Re:margin of error?

[spike hay]

I am still continually amazed that the English System is still used at all. I can somewhat understand NASA needing to use some english measures for old lathes and such. But for our entire country to still use the english system for all applications is ridiculous.

I was getting a haircut the other day. I didn't want a whole inch off. So I asked for a centimeter taken off. The stylist had to ask me how long a centimeter was.

Re:margin of error?

[Golias]

I was getting a haircut the other day. I didn't want a whole inch off. So I asked for a centimeter taken off. The stylist had to ask me how long a centimeter was.

So? Being somebody with a better education than a hair stylist, you could have politely told her that you wanted a little less than half an inch taken off, and moved on with life.

The amazing thing is not that the English System has lasted so long in the US, but that Napoleon's system was adopted so quickly in Europe. The reason is simple: until the early 20th Century, most of Europe was ruled by dictators and monarchs, who could tell you to use their chosen measuring system and like it. In the US, the system which would get used is the one which the most people were using, and nobody really had enough power to change it.

The English still use pints to measure beer for much the same reason... there's only so much that even people under a monarchy will put up with. Drop inches in favor of cm if you must, but don't you dare mess with the beer. :)

Re:margin of error?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently all it demonstrates is that you require some reading comprehension tutorials. The difference between a 'cm' and a 'mm' unit seems quite clear to me.

Re:margin of error?

[Golias]

More likely, it demonstrates that I paid closer attention to a previous post, which called it about a third of an inch, than the original article.

Re:margin of error?

[spike hay]

So? Being somebody with a better education than a hair stylist, you could have politely told her that you wanted a little less than half an inch taken off, and moved on with life.

I assumed that she knew how long a centimeter was. I clarified it as about a half an inch.

The amazing thing is not that the English System has lasted so long in the US, but that Napoleon's system was adopted so quickly in Europe. The reason is simple: until the early 20th Century, most of Europe was ruled by dictators and monarchs, who could tell you to use their chosen measuring system and like it. In the US, the system which would get used is the one which the most people were using, and nobody really had enough power to change it.

Good point, but the only the U.S. and some country in Africa still use the English system. All other societies have switched.

Re:margin of error?

[Rasta Prefect]

Good point, but the only the U.S. and some country in Africa still use the English system. All other societies have switched.

If everyone else jumped off a bridge....

Re:margin of error?

[Anonymous Coward]

what's truly amazing is how often Europe is aparently wrong "because they had dictators", and also "Wrong because they're Socialists"

I notice you seem to have adopted Napolean's side of the road...why not his measurement system too?

About the same time /. posters actually RTFPTR?

[GileadGreene]

The problem had nothing to do with eglish->metric conversion.

I never claimed it did. Perhaps you should re-read my post. My gripe is that the use of two different systems of units leads to lots of communications problems, and inevitably leads to errors when those communications channels fail. Now in the case of the Space Mountain mishap it seems that the problem was mostly related to poor configuration management, but it was exacerbated by the transition from one system of units to another which was poorly handled - i.e. a broken communications channel.

I don't want to get into a (pointless) argument about which is the "better" system. I happen to find metric easier to work with, and it seems to be the global standard system for science and engineering (except for some American throwbacks in fields like rocket engineering). So I'd like to see us standardize on metric. But frankly, I don't think it really matters whether we standardize on Imperial or on metric. I just wish we'd standardize on something.

Then surrender to the Germans again Frenchy

[Anonymous Coward]

And all your women can "greet" their Teutonic conquerors.Just like in WWII!

Canada: the metric, imperial and american systems

[procsyskernel]

Hello, I live in Montreal, Canada. Here we use three different systems; officialy, we use the metric system, for example: - road signs and cars are in kilometers - the pumps calculate gas in liters - outside temperature is indicated in Celcius by the medias - only the metric system is shown in school But, we also use the imperial system, which is the system of the English empire that we used previously (Canada is part of the Commonwealth as being one of the oldest english colonies). For example, lots of my uncles and aunts (I'm 25) will talk to you about their cars doing miles per gallon, miles per hour, etc. They will also buy stuff at the store in pounds. I personnaly weight myself in pounds and mesure myself in feet. That is not close to change... even if then babies are weighted in kilos at the hospital, and measured in centimeters, they also indicate the conversion on the official papers, otherwise the parents don't have a clue. Also, I personnaly have trouble reading the inside temperature in Celsius... I know exactly how warn I like it, but it's in Farenheits... (even if we only calculate the outside temperature in Celsius, and nobody converts them to understand, not even my grandfather). Also, I have never seen someone calculate the temperature of the pool or spa in Celsius... Don't ask me if 25 Celsius is hot or cold for a pool, I really don't know ! And finally, we also use the American system. The american system is different that the imperial for some measures like "gallons". For example, an imperial gallon is almost exactly 4 liters, while an american gallon is 3.78 gallons... this is why it's always frustrating when you put windshield washer fluid in your car, and they sell you the fluid in 4 liters containers, but the damn US car's ww fluid container is only 3.78 liters ! You always have to carry the damn container because they is always some left... Also, all the contruction is done in feet and inches. We produce the materials, lots of them, but none of it is produced in meters, because the main market is the US, so they just don't bother with our small market and produce everything in feet. This means that architects and engineers, even if they only learn the metric in school, must learn the english and american systems when in university. The same applies for a lot of people that do plumbing, mecanics, and even furniture. However, the people here always use the same terms as before, even if the units have changed; for example, we will say "a pint of milk", even if nore it's no more a pint, but it's a liter... Which system I prefer ? Well, I don't really care... I find the metric system the best, but I would certaintly have problem purchasing furniture in centimeters when all my house as been constructed in feet. I do like the feet and inches, because I find them conveniently easy to estimates, but when you start evaluating distances that are longer than the terrain my house is built on, I will say "300 meters further, turn left"... and will calculate in kilometers. The thing is, if the damn US could convert to the same thing as the rest of the world (which will never happen, or perhaps never before China is the new superpower), we will be stuck with the three systems in Canada...

It will cost more...

[gammoth]

...the longer we wait to convert.

Gawdamm--Looks like Jimmie Carter was right.

Hey, Mr Neocon Cant-bash-the-UN-enough: a global economy needs a global system of weights and measures. The Imperial system ain't up to it, so quit the kittens and get over it.
</rant>

Hooopla! that was nearly as good as coffee.

Want some cheese with your whine?

[Deputy Doodah]

Just another chance for Europeans to whine and snivel about how Americans won't do things their way. When you clowns learn to bathe regularly and stop acting like a bunch of women, maybe you'll gain some respect and we'll listen to you. Otherwise, kiss my cowboy boots.

Mixing paradigms

[slim]

I can live with people insisting on using Imperial measures.

What bugs me is when they then only halfway use the Imperial paradigm.

Case in point: when the iPod Mini was announced, I went to the web page to check out the specs. 2" x 3.6". Not having any intuitive feel for what that might mean, I wandered around the office trying to borrow a ruler, and once I'd found one, started to draw an iPod-sized square on a piece of scrap paper.

A 2" line across the bottom was easy. Then I set about drawing the vertical. 3", then another 6 gradations... oh, wait a minute, each inch is subdivided into 16ths. Tricky. Grab calculator.

So please, either use mm, or go the whole hog and state 3 inches and (10/16)".

Re:Mixing paradigms

[gnu-generation-one]

"A 2" line across the bottom was easy. Then I set about drawing the vertical. 3", then another 6 gradations... oh, wait a minute, each inch is subdivided into 16ths. Tricky. Grab calculator."

Look on the other end of the ruler (where the higher inch numbers are), and there should be a section with 1/10 inches. Specially designed for americans I believe, and for PCB designers (spacing between pins on an IC = 2.54mm or 1/10 inch)

Re:Mixing paradigms

[Anonymous Coward]

A trick I was taught:

Bend your thumbs. Their ends are then, to a first approximation, an inch. Start from the corner of a piece of paper / book / keyboard / whatever, and you can quickly count up however many you want to measure.

3.6"? About 3 and a half. How accurately do you need to visualise it, anyway? If you're *really* insistent on using the ruler then consider that 16/10 is about 3/2, 6 and half-of-6 is 9, and measure 3 and 9 16ths. I make that easily within 0.05" of what you're looking for.

If you're looking at numbers of decimal places, designed-around-base-10 metric easily wins. On the other hand, Imperial dates from times when you don't *need* that accuracy, just conveniently sized units that can be divided into whole numbers - and that's where it does a good job.

No, It's 40 rods to the hogshead...

[SoupaFly]

So, 32,256 gallons / mile.
or, ~3.1e-5 miles / gallon (which is about 2 inches).

obligatory simpsons quote

[gnat_x]

"The Metric system is the tool of the devil. My car gets 40 rods to the hogs head and that's the way I likes it!" --Grandpa

Imperial units came from the UK

[mikehunt]

I've seen some relatively smart comments here so far, but most people don't seem to realise that the USA inherited the imperial system from the UK. (Imperial....)

It would be really good to see the USA abandon Imperial units, especially when they have changed some of them so that they are not the same...for example, how many of you know that a US gallon is 3.8 litres and a UK gallon is 4.5 litres?

Who's being cheated in petrol price comparisons?

Whitworth

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe next time they should try whitworth units instead.

and since the metric system is so great..

[tuj]

..we should use metric time too!

Oh wait. That would be fucking retarded.

SI and CGS units

[Anonymous Coward]

(And the right term for "metric" is "SI")

Not always. SI is the metre / kilogramme / second system. The centimetre / gramme / second system is also metric, but not SI.

Re:English/Metric - Greenwich

[spectras]

'The UK is effectively metric now'

Yes. In fact, this was an agreement between UK and France that took place in 1875. UK accepted to use the metric system as the official one, while on the other hand France accepted to use Greenwich as the prime meridian (France was using Paris before).

http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/info/prime-meridi an.htm

how fucking hard is it

[BoneFlower]

to throw together a 5 minute app in Visual Basic to do this stuff? Ok, maybe an hour to include a heavy test phase.

If they need more precision than an x86-32 box can give them, there are plenty of 64 bit systems that they can hack together a quick C or C++ or really any language- a conversion program doesnt' require any complicated math, and simple math such as that is trivial to code in any language I've seen. Hell, they could create a UDT fairly easily to represent floating point with an integer to represent each side of the decimal if the issues with binary floating point will throw it off too far.

I don't get it... what the hell is their problem?

Or screw the conversions outright, and make the entire project, from the most trivial piece of gear to the planning and execution phase use metric. Or all use American measures. There is no way in hell these goofs are acceptable mistakes.

0.86 mm

[Anonymous Coward]

...in any car engine bearing is more than the margin between smooth running and catastrophic failure. A 0.86mm misalignment in any number of aircraft parts is the difference between a successful flight and crashing into a cornfield. Really, aside from buildings, there are few critical life-supporting parts where the margin of error is more than a millimeter.

Re:If the U.S. hates the french so much

[Progman3K]

Your wording is clear enough.

You're right about these things being political issues.

The only problem is that it has spilled out of the political arena into the public arena and as you alluded, the public don't have a history of deciding what is best (long-term) for themselves. I suppose that's why government is a necessary evil.

I used the Statue of Liberty to highlight your point before you even had a chance to make it in a way:

What good is it for peoples to hate each other because of their government's decisions?

In closing, I'd just like to say that I truly feel that waging war is the greatest crime governments can perpetrate against their own people.

I'm not saying there are no just wars.

Just that in a lot of cases wars are used by governments to manipulate their own population. We've certainly seen examples of that in the last few decades.

Thanks for taking the time to read and respond so thoughtfully.

Metric in real life

[wing03]

Life in a metricized country.... (Canada to be specific) and with someone born in the 70s and grew up metric.

Distances when travelling are measured in metres and kilometres.

Distances when you're moving something around requiring some precision (like hanging a picture) are done in feet, centimetres and in rare very precise instance, millimetres.

You go to the convenience store to buy a 350 mil (ml), 750, 1 or 2 litre pop (as in fizzy sugary drink... soda being simply carbonated water). Likewise, milk comes in millilitres or litres.

You go to a bar or pub and still order a pint or a half pint of beer. Wine is served in a metric decanter but on menus, it's done by the oz.

Overall, I'd guess it's part tradition and whatever unit of measurement you can get away with using the smallest number infront of it.

Re:Bandwagon

[Popageorgio]

I'm just unlucky.

Mod Parent Up - Insightful

[dublin]

Re:Imperial, not English...
Re:Imperial, not English... (Score:1)
by Bob Uhl (30977) on Monday January 26, @12:03PM (#8089873)
(http://latakia.dyndns.org/blosxom/blo g)
Of course I do. Let's say I wish to cut a foot-wide piece of wood into inch-width segments: I cut in half, then in half again, then in thirds. How would I cut a decimetre-wide piece into centimetres? In half, then into fifths? Ever try eyeballing a fifth? There are very easy ways to estimate a half or third quite accurately, but I am aware of none to estimate a fifth.

Let's say I have 1 gallon of beer and need to serve it in 1 pint measurements. Dead simple: I cut in half (yielding pottles), in half again (yielding quarts) and in half one last time, yielding pints. Doubling and halving are extremely easy with liquids and masses; anything else is a right royal pain in the ass.

Try dividing a decilitre into centilitres or millilitres. Good luck.

The standard system, used as it was for millennia, was optimised for use, for manipulation of concrete amounts. The French system was optimised for conversion between units. The one is needed daily; the other almost never (now that we have computers, practically never). Which would an unbiased observer prefer?

The standard system is, of course, imperfect and could use certain improvements. Its basis, though, is sound. The French system is also imperfect, but its sole basis is a silly attachment to 10 (a mathematically ugly number anyway). I'd rather spend effort on the system with a future.

Someone with mod points please mod up parent. He raises some *very* valid points that are far too often overlooked. This is one of the most important reasons why the engineering community her in the US will continue using Englinsh units for the foreseeable future. (I fully expect the US to remain primarily on English units through this century, and possibly far beyond...)

My company just designed a new mechanical product, and it was decided that English rather than Metric units were preferable for many reasons including ease-of-use, marketing considerations (even though half the unit volume will be international), and availability/selection and lower cost of hardware.

Re:Mod Parent Up - Insightful

[lazyl]

This is one of the most important reasons why the engineering community her in the US will continue using Englinsh units for the foreseeable future

Really? Well, his argument was that the Imperial system is easier to eyeball. That's fine for casual use, but if you have Engineers who eyeball measurements then they should be fired.

Robin Williams time.

[EaTiN cOfFeE bEaNs]

If you're a pot smoker, you can never be a rocket scientist--or maybe. If you've seen some of the things they've done recently. ...Here's a good one. I built the mars rover in feet, but I programmed it in meters. Instead of landing, fucker buried! $185 million WHOOPSIE!

Thats nothing!

[Anonymous Coward]

Here in Puerto Rico body temperature is measured in Celcius and environment temperature in Farenheit. Roads are measured in Kilometers while speed is measured in Miles per hour.

Its a good measurement of how stupid the people who made the compromises were or how smart we have to be only to manage with the daily commute. ;-)

Re:Thats nothing!

[fbform]

My sympathies. India has a similar problem: body temperature in Fahrenheit, environment temperature in Celsius, distances and speeds in km and km/h, and height of a person in feet and inches BUT heights of buildings in metres! The worst part is that there apparently is no official agency that mandated this weird choice, so there's no one to blame!

airplanes too

[spectasaurus]

Back in the early '80's, an Air Canada 767 made an emergency landing because it ran out of fuel.

The reason: The fuel was specified in kg, but was loaded in lbs. Needless to say, they plane only got 0.45 the distance it should have.

Base 12. Right.

[Rupert]

A hogshead, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, is 54 gallons (3 kilderkins). Unless you're measuring wine, in which case it's 63 gallons (you get an extra firkin).

A yard is 3 feet. A rod is 5.5 yards. A chain is 4 rods. A furlong is 10 chains. A mile is 8 furlongs. A league is three miles. A cable is damn nearly metric, at 10,000 links, or a bit more than 12 miles.

A pound is 16 ounces. A stone is 14 pounds. A hundredweight is 8 stone. A ton is 20 hundredweight. I would break the ounce down into drachms and grains, if I could remember them, but I'm pretty sure no factors of twelve are involved.

It's what I've been saying all along [humor]

[blate]

:::begin humorous remarks:::

These damned foreign countries. Don't you understand that the US run's the world. If the metric system were so great, wouldn't we be using it by now? Of course.

But we're not. Resistance is futile. You know why we don't use metric? Because it was invented by the French. Now, I love France -- cheese, Bordeaux wines, wonderful cusisine, art -- don't get me wrong. But the Froggies should stick to what they're good at and not try to mess with basic units of measurement. If your units were so great, why were you invaded by Germany twice in the last century? And who bailed you out? The Americans. And what units do we use? Not metric, mes amis, but good old SAE.

Convert to SAE. The lives of space probes, amusement park patrons, astronauts, and la France depend on it! :::end humor:::

No Longer "English" units.

[Gonoff]

In the UK, nothing requiring any degree of accuracy is measured in inches, pounds or any of the other weird medieval(sp?) units that come with them.

I buy beer in pints but I know that 1 pint is approximately 568ml (except in the US where pints are only 0.8 "English" pints). There are probably other things that we still measure in the same way that pre-industrial Brits did, but I can't think of any. The only other situation where pre-metric units have any relevance is in speed limits. Many tourists think they are "quaint".

I expect I am older than many people here - I can remember Neil Armstron walking on the moon. My wight is 114kg and my height is 1.82m. I could not care less about what it is in units of measure that would have been familiar to Henry VIII.

The English, and the rest of Britain are managing to move much of their units into the 20th/21st century. It is curious to see the USA stuck in the 19th...

0.86mm

[giminy]

Apparently size does matter, even if it's only a 0.86mm difference.

Don't you mean 0.034 inches?

*badum crash*

Yes, but which system?

[gillbates]

Which system should we use to convert? IIRC, an American inch is 2.55 cm, where a British inch is 2.54 cm.

So when we convert our measurements in inches, do we assume that we are using British or American conversions? After all, in engine parts machined accurate to one ten-thousandth of an inch, .01 cm makes a big difference.

Re:Yes, but which system?

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC, an American inch is 2.55 cm, where a British inch is 2.54 cm.

No, an inch is an inch. 2.54cm by definition. Otherwise feet and miles would be different as well.

I think some of the more esoteric (ie, I don't use them) weight or volume measurements are different in US vs British though.

metric too hard...

[stickery]

i tried the metric systems but it was just too hard. what comes after one sixteenth of a centimeter?

Re:metric too hard...

[dizzyduck]

two sixteenths of a centimetre

Have You SEEN The Size Of A Millimeter?

[cmholm]

If you'll take a look at a metric ruler you're sure to have close at hand, you'll see that 1mm (or 8/10 mm) is more than adequate for a good air gap. Trains, planes, automobiles, and virtually all other machinery uses MUCH closer tolerences than that, life-supporting or not.

A 1mm gap/variance leaves bearings, seals, valves, and gears unusable in most situations.

The whole discussion is off-topic...

[Antibozo]

because everyone is keen to argue about metric vs. U.S. units, and apparently no one has noticed that the cause of the problem was not anything to do with how broken the U.S. system is.

This accident was a version control breakdown, not a unit conversion problem. When the units on the drawing were changed, the dimensions were also changed, deliberately. The specified axle diameter was changed from 44.14 mm to 45 mm. Parts were then ordered from the wrong drawing, but if the unit conversion had been the only change, those parts would have worked correctly.

Lovers of the SI system (which is fundamentally broken in a number of ways) love to crow every time something like this happens. The last time was when the Mars Orbiter failed because of a unit conversion problem. Again, people blamed it on SI/U.S. unit conversion, when the actual problem was that the wrong units were used, not that U.S. units were used. If the teams had been working in meters and kilometers, respectively, instead of miles and kilometers, the problem would still have occurred, because they would still be using differing units. In this case, the solution would have been to designate the units used in all specified measures.

Now I'll be a hypocrite and go off-topic like the rest of you. Why SI is broken:

1. Two words: base 10. Try putting 0.1 into a computer in IEEE floating point format and notice that you immediately get roundoff error. Crank on measurements taken in SI and pretty soon you have significant roundoff accumulation. Given that science is done with computers these days, making calculations easy to perform by hand while inherently inaccurate when performed by computer is just dumb.
2. SI calculations cannot be performed easily using real objects. Measurement systems are more useful if defined in a base that can be calculated in reality. Try deriving 1 deciliter from a 1 liter volume using 10 containers of equal volume. It's practically impossible. Try dividing a unit length or area by a factor of 10 using your visual cortex. No, your brain was not designed for that, but it does factors of 2, 3, or 4, trivially. Try dividing a weight by a factor of 10 using a set of scales. No, sorry, you have to weigh it first using standardized counterweights and then divide the result. Try doubling a recipe in SI; it's much easier in the U.S. system. The simple fact that 10 is the wrong base is evident in the sale of many products in quantities such as 750 milliliters. Gee, where do you suppose 750 came from?
3. Some SI units are not intelligible to the senses. The meter is too long to measure visually or by hand, and doesn't have a visceral meaning -- hence people measure height in centimeters; a base unit on the order of the centimeter or decimeter would have made the system more natural for casual use. The gram is too light for anyone to sense, so everyone uses kg in daily life. If the base units were easy to comprehend, learning the system would be easier.
4. Deci vs. deka. The choice to use two so similar prefixes creates confusion, especially when the abbreviated forms are used. This became especially apparent when the new infix system for base 2 measurements was introduced, and debibit and debibyte became ambiguous terms, by definition.

Every time this issue comes up it turns into an opportunity to bash the U.S. It would be nice if lovers of SI would open their eyes and see the problems in the system that make it unattractive to a society that is getting by just fine with measures that are based, for the most part, on factors of 2 and 3. A new system that resolved the problems listed above would be much more useful, but the SI users are just as entrenched in their broken system as the U.S. is in its own.

SI Units

[man_ls]

What's the problem with using SI units for everything?

They're standardized in the scientific community and have units for *Everything imaginable.*

No real reason to not use them except people don't want to change.

I'm quite comfortable using metric for lengths and semi-comfortable with temperatures...weights and masses however, I don't have a great grasp of.

Interesting history of those axles...

[arfonrg]

The old axles were Nash car axles/bearings. Disney bought them from Nash & American Motors and standardised all their rides using those axles and bearings. Disney finally bought the tooling from AMC to make thier own after AMC quit making them.

They have worked well for about half a century.

Funny how problems always occur AFTER metric conversions. :)

Daylight Savings Time

[camt]

The world can abolish Daylight Savings Time please. I was shocked and horrified to learn that the USA was not the only country to do this. I think we have it worse here in the US since there are pockets of the country that don't participate, making it really difficult to determine what time it is in any given location at any given time without consulting some sort of guide.

I personally think we should do away with time zones (and DST) entirely. Everyone should just use GMT.

Costs of the Imperial system

[shamir_k]

This is just one more among the many costs of having more than one system of measurement.

1. Cost of learning -> americans who travel anywhere in the world have to learn how to use SI units. And its an unpleasant shock for foreigners when they are confronted with the Imperial system in the US. How many hours of useful productivity are lost as a result?
2. Cost of manufacturing -> Global manufacturers of equipment such as thermometers and speedometers have to maintain more than one setup, so that they can sell in the US and other countries. Think of how your cars could be cheaper if the US used kmph instead of mph.
3. Cost of errors -> By having more than one system, we introduce the possibility of errors while converting. Human nature being what it is, somebody will eventually goof up. How much do these errors cost?

Offset against these costs is the cost of converting from Imperial to SI. This is a one-time cost that can be achieved relatively painlessly, as Britain showed in the 70s. By avoiding it for so long, the US has only wasted more time and money.

Re:Costs of the Imperial system

[Antibozo]

I see. So let's take that logic a step further. Are you ready to learn Esperanto, along with the rest of the world? Just think how many problems we could solve by forcing everyone to use the same language. Or maybe Esperanto isn't a good choice -- maybe we should standardize on Mandarin, since so many people speak it already.

One of the advantages I believe Europeans have over U.S. citizens is that they almost universally learn a second, and often a third, language. I admire this. Similarly, I also think it's nice that U.S. citizens learn more than one system of measurement, as we all do in grade school. And it's not a big deal, you know. Both systems are pretty easy.

Practically speaking, nearly everyone in the U.S. gets by with inch, foot, yard, mile, ounce, pound, fluid ounce, quart, gallon. Those who cook need teaspoon, tablespoon, cup, and sometimes pint. Those who farm need rod, furlong, and acre. Some people need bushel. In the end, it amounts to fewer terms than gram, meter, liter, hectare, femto, pico, nano, micro, milli, centi, deci, deka, hecto, kilo, myria, mega, giga, tera, peta, exa.

Re:Canada: the metric, imperial and american syste

[MachDelta]

I'm Canadian too, so I share your pain in dealing with 2.5 measurement systems.
I'm a bit young though (20), so I rely on metric more than my parents (for example). I think of most things in metric, like litres for fluids, meters/kilometers for distance, and Celcius for temperature (honestly I find Fahrenheit to be confusing because it scales differently. Also, I can't spell it. Always seem to be looking it up :P). But I still measure people in Imperial. I'm 5 foot 8, and 165lbs. Whats that in metric? I have no fucking clue. If someone told me they were 172cm and 75kg, i'd be thinking "Goddamn you're tall. And skinny." even though they're identical to me in height and weight.

Fortunatly (or unfortunatly, depending on your perspective), I've had a lot of exposure to Imperial units too. One of the most noticible things (for me), was playing Warhammer, and other Games Workshop games. All the tabletop distances were measured in inches, so I became VERY good at estimating short distances in inches. You had to be to understand troop mobility and guess artillery ranges. Especially artillery - once I got good with my distances, I was so f00kin deadly with artillery that my friends started banning artillery-heavy armies for me. They didn't much like being hammered into the ground by 3 Earthshaker Cannons, 5 Deathrockets, and 3 HG Bolt Throwers. (Bonus points for Warhammer geeks: Can anyone name the army I played? ;)).
But I also had repeated exposure from other places to, especially my father. He worked as a cabinet/furniture builder for several years, so any time I went to his shop or watched him in the garage, it was *always* imperial. Feet, inches, 3/16th drill bits, etc. Even now, when I walk into the garage (he builds boats in his spare time), I have to switch my thinking from Metric to Imperial. Sometimes I get screwwed up, but mostly i've managed.
The third place of exposure was working in an oil warehouse. Now THAT was a shock. Canadian warehouse, with Canadian customers... supplied by an American distributor. I got so fucking confused, dealing with litres and gallons and crap. It took me a couple weeks before I really actually understood all the measurements that were being thrown around. But for the first little while, it was just weird... I mean, we had 55 gallon drums that would hold 208 litres, and 5 gallon buckets that we'd put 19 litres into (all our pumps were metric). And then you'd get 5000 gallon bulk shipments from the US that'd you'd have to pump into a 30,000 litre holding tank that had 8,000 litres in it. Will it fit? Pull out the calculator.. yeah, ok, it fits, start pumping. It got pretty wild sometimes, especially when someone screwwed up. Anyone in the room ever had an ATF (automatic transmission fluid) shower? I have. Not fun :P. Hell, even our screw ups were confusing! I overfilled a 55 gallon barrel by 18 liters once, and it shot oil 25 feet up the wall and all across a 120 inch, 10,000 litre tank. "Huh?"
The other damned confusing thing for me is farming. I've got good ol' redneck roots in Saskatchewan, and most of my grandparents, aunts and uncles are either farmers or used to be farmers. So when you get them talking you've got to flip your thinking over to acres and buschels and square miles and townships and tons, etc. ACK!

All in all, its just a giant pain in the arse, and I really wish the US would just up and start the switch now (it takes a few generations), because I really don't want to go through the same crap with my kids.
"Daddy, how long is 3 feet?"
"Well ya see mommies butt?... *ducks incoming lamp*"
Could be painful trying to explain to my kid how heavy a US ton is! ;)

As an American expat in London...

[Anonymous Coward]

No offence meant, but bullshit...
I can work in either Imperial or Metric units w/o problem, but on the fly conversions kill me. And the UK is stuck in the most disturbing hybrid system one can think of. Most road signs still list distances in miles, however petrol is purchased per litre... Um... Ok, how many miles to the litre does the car get? This is nonsense. Pick one system and USE IT GODDAMMIT!!!!
How many UK publications do I see referring to weight in stone?
Doesn't Tesco or Sainsbury's list Imperial weights/volumes, as well as SI?
While I must admit that the U$ is backwards in its use of Imperial measurements, in contrast, the UK is downright schitzo.
I've given up trying to figure out whether or not my local measures lager by pint, or litre... I know that the latter is more beer, however...
I don't need any extra conversions.

One time zone.

[Duhavid]

Who needs all these different time zones anymore.

Lets just move to one all encompassing time zone and have done with it.

Oh, yeah, no more daylight slavings time either.

Decimal inches are actually quite commonly used...

[mbessey]

In any industrial or commercial setting where accuracy is important, you'll always find decimal inches (i.e. 123.456"). I've never seen a blueprint for a machined or manufactured part or assembly dimensioned in anything but inches, and decimal fractions of an inch.

For some reason, the true Imperial system of feet, inches and fractions is still used in building construction and architecture. Perhaps they're just more conservative. Or, maybe it's simply because contractor's measuring tapes are still made with feet, inch, and fraction markings.

-Mark

Re:replying once is enough

[VickyNaylor]

In your case it's too much.

Reasonable Imperial Units...

[thecountryofmike]

The top speed of my truck is around 10,000 furlongs per fortnight. And the fuel economy is about 1000 chains per dram. Pretty slick, eh? A perfectly cromulent system, to be sure.

Wear Patterns

[Anonymous Coward]

The issue isn't the gap itself, it's the effect that new variable has on the system, and the way things wear differently under different circumstances. Something that has the space to move when it is supposed to be a perfect fit in a system will weaken faster, and be unsafe as a result. Things like estimates on safety, performance, and the life of the part are thrown off big time.

This is bad, because it usually means that people will die due to something failing when it was under less than it's max load. They were lucky in this case.

- jwigum

Over at Hyundai

[bartyboy]

It's funny because it's true.

Bad rap for English units

[frink_exp]

Why do English units get such a bad rap? 1 pound mass (lbm) weighs 1 pound force (lbf) on Earth - simple. 1 kg weighs 9.81 Newtons on Earth. Why do people think 9.81 more simple than 1?

This really isn't the problem. The problem with the English system is derived units. For example, energy:

metric: 1 J = 1 N*m

English: 1 Btu = 778.169325 ft*lbf

If English units defined derived units in terms of its basic units, I'd find both systems equally appealing.

Re:Bad rap for English units

[Anonymous Coward]

The standard mass in Imperial units is a slug. There are 32.2 lbs in 1 slug.

wrong

[GCP]

There are non-metric units in common use all over the world. I think you confuse the declarations of various gov't bureaucracies with real life. "Societies" are not the same as their gov't agencies.

Re:Who's at fault here, really? Not Ninnle!

[cft_128]

Now by 'American' do you include Canada? That plane was an Air Canada flying from a Canadian city (Montreal) to an other Canadian city (Edmonton) and was fueled by Canadians and only occurred because they were switching from imperial to metric. If they had kept the metric system they would not have had the incident in the first place.

Has to be said...

[achurch]

'Hands' are used to measure the height at the withers of a horse.

And now we see why the unit of measurement `hand' has withered away . . .

*rimshot*

Re:Who's at fault here, really? Not Ninnle!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes -- Canada is in North America.

There you go again, confusing weight with mass

[imtheguru]

Sorry to pick on this...

1 litre water ... has mass of 1kg at 4degreesC

the weight will vary depending on where you measure on this planet's surface (9.81 at poles and 9.79 at equator) which is a function of how far the 1 litre water is from the core of the planet.

Ciao

Metrics still bad

[pAnkRat]

So, if the problem occured after they switched from the english to the metric system..
How come the english system is bad, and the metric system is supposed to be good?
</reply>

Myanmar, Burma.

[jotaeleemeese]

Myanmar is not recognized by many nations for good reason: it is the name imposed by the ruling military junta (SLORC, google for it, it is truly Orwellian) that amongst some niecites have keeped Aung San Su Yi, the democractic leader of the winner of the last clean elections, on house arrest for most of the past 15 years.

In countries using the metric system...

[jotaeleemeese]

You always have a rules with centimeters and millimeters marked, it is not like we live in ancient Greece and thus we need to refer to Euclides.

You need to serve pint measures? Why? In places using the metric system you serve half liters, quarter of liters if required.

All the "problems" you see in the metric system are just nonsense made up. When it comes to precise calculations made with ease there is no doubt which system is superior.

Now that is funny.

[jotaeleemeese]

For example, when I go to the store, I know I can buy a pound of ground beef. I know about how much of that I will eat, and I can make a judgement about prices, because I have a good visualization of what it is.

Alas, in places using the metric system you buy half a kg of ground beef and you know how much you would eat. Or one kg, or whatever.

You are beyond redemption, but there is no need to subject young children to a life of pain and misery.

In a place using metric you use metric for everything, it is not uncommon for merchants to handle figures and measurements in their heads with ease, the scientist uses the same frame of reference when he goes to the supermarket or when he is designing the latest WMD.

Nice way to sidestep the issue.

[jotaeleemeese]

The point is that people proficient with the SI system can make a calculation of similar complexity with easy.

People familiar with the English (Imperial, whatever) system will struggle in many instances because it lacks any logic whatsoever.

Re:Moan, moan moan... The metric is alive in the U

[misterarizona]

I live in Arizona. Interstate 19 between Tucson and the Mexican border mileposts are in km and the speeds are in km/h. There are plans to convert I10 I8 and I17 to metric as well. When was the last time you went to Safeway and bought a half gallon of Coke?

Re:Moan, moan moan... The metric is alive in the U

[Hackie_Chan]

What a coincidence! When I was talking about roadsigns in kilometers I was thinking about Tuscon! I guess this mostly has to do with the university and that foreign students come there.

I hate Fahrenheit's guts!

[Poligraf]

As a foreighner living in the US, I have had some pains getting used to the non-Metric system.

I can use gallons for volume, miles and feet for distance, but the temperature is a bitch.

Even after eight years here I still need to convert into Celsius each time.

US - Stealth Conversion

[Poligraf]

US is getting there - slowly but steadily.

First of all, all packaged groceries have both Metric and American numbers printed on the package.

Second, some corporations who want to sell their goods internationally have to move to Metric internally. I have heard of Boeing doing that.

Also, US Geological Survey and some other government organizations that international in their essence have moved to Metric.

Still, it would be really hard to convert the entire country.

And What About Electricity?

[Poligraf]

IIRC, North American grid system differs from the entire world. The entire world uses 220/50, and not 127/60. Hence the waste of a switch in most of the power supplies.

And what about different electrical outlet' shapes?

I have had a girlfriend from Sweden visiting me, and she brought a converter that had about 6 or 7 different forks. Only that allowed her to recharge her cell phone and digital camera that would otherwise be incompatible.

Heh

[Pope]

Don't forget the difference between avoirdupois ounces and troy ounces...

Re:replying once is enough

[VickyNaylor]

It doen't take much to loose your karma around here does it!

Mod Parent +Funny

[handy_vandal]

It's like waking up and suddenly finding myself in a medieval city measuring out my drinks in gills.

Made me laugh!

-kgj