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How Can We Convert the US to the Metric System?
thesolo asks: "Despite past efforts of the 1970s and 1980s, the United States remains one of only three countries (others are Liberia and Myanmar) that does not use the metric system. Staying with imperial measurements has only served to handicap American industry and economy. Attempts to get Americans using the Celsius scale, or putting up speed limits in kilometers per hour have been squashed dead. Not only that, but some Americans actually see metrication efforts as an assault on 'our way' of measuring. I personally deal with European scientists on a daily basis, and find our lack of common measurement to be extremely frustrating. Are we so entrenched with imperial units that we cannot get our fellow citizens to simply learn something new? What are those of us who wish to finally see America catch up to the rest of the world supposed to do? Are there any organizations that we may back, or any pro-metric legislators who we can support?"
About 4 kilogulags worth of forced punishment for not using the metric system would do it!
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Looks like *somebody* is about to get a visit from Homeland Security...
If you want to use the metric system in your research, then use the metric system. What's stopping you?
Why do you need the government to change the speed limit signs if your problem is interoperating with scientists?
Clear, Dark Skies
...nobody here uses metric. Everything is in miles rather than kilometres such as all of our traffic signs for distance and speed and I don't know anyone who uses metres and centimetres for measurements - it's always feet and inches when buying anything in hardware stores for example.
How many cubic inches make up a gallon?
:-)
Since he calculation using the metric system is really easy
It's a question of money. Soft metrification, like changing the labels on retail products, is easy. Hard metrification, which is redesigning everything to use standard metric sizes, is considerably more difficult and expensive.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
just like changing currency... Still using Fahrenheit is just plain weird. I just wish the USA wouldn't push that date format of m/d/y on the rest of the world .. now that is confusing (use y-m-d )
What is the reason for this change? As another poster has said, if you want to use the metric system, just use it.
Most, if not all of the problems I deal with (mechanical engineering) have systems and specifications that are in metric units now. Most (nearly all) national standards I deal with are already in metric units. CAD and analysis systems can switch units without problems.
What use is it to change units for the general population? Is there a need to buy apples in Kg? Or gasoline in Liters? Medicine is specified in Mg. Engine displacement is shown in Liters. Should 2x4's be 50x100's?
Well, I am an American living in the UK. The UK officially uses metric but all the road signs and speedometers in cars use Miles per Hour, all distances on signs are also in miles, people still count their weight in Stones, and I can still buy pints at the pub. I wonder if we should still count the UK as a metric using nation.
Whoops, make that Always.....
Penis size is bigger in centimeters than in inches.
Canada.
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
Were already half way there. You cant work on a car or anything without metric tools. Science class used metric measurements when I was in high school in the late 90s. Were getting there slowly, just a matter of time.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
I'm currently studying Physics in the UK but come from one of the most SI countries in the world, Luxembourg. When talking to people I discovered that even though the UK has officially gone metric most people still think in imperial units when it comes to body weight and height, liquid volumes, speeds and distances (long and short) and those who I asked said they found it hard to picture 170cm or 70kg, very common numbers which I find extremely natural, much preferring "feet/inches" and "stones".
I must admit however that the foot is a very appealing unit in that it can be easily measured using common body parts such as the hand-elbow distance or the foot.
I think the problem is that the parents who grew up with imperial units use them in day to day conversation, hence associating different benchmark sizes with specific words in their children's developing minds, making a natural transition to metric quite difficult, but certainly not impossible... i guess the situation will improve once britain follows ireland in getting the traffic system metricized.
1) Force all business to use metric whenever anything is sold or advertized (this doesn't really cost anything).
2) Only teach metric in the schools.
3) Wait 20 years.
4) Make it illegal to use the old units for anything at all.
Somewhere along the line you'll get profit:)
Until you get to step #4 we (world - United States, Liberia and Myanmar) can make fun of your contortions and strange conversion factors that need to be applied to do even the simplest thing:)
Quick, tell me how many miles per gallon 40 rods per hogshead is, if you can do that without looking anything up then you get to keep the old system, otherwise you will need to convert.
-- To dream a dream is grand, but to live it is divine. -- Leto ][
Oh so dumb.
From a link on the freedom2measure site:
Sexist
The metric system has been almost wholly created and standardized by male scientists and bureaucrats. At the time, during which women were considerably less liberated than today, woman had virtually no say in the creation and, in many countries, the imposition of these units. Perhaps, if they had, the value of the practical units used in those tasks undertaken by woman at the time would have been recognized.
I can understand trying to make a point against the metric system, but this!? Any other real arguments won't be taken serious anymore..
Not to mention that I doubt women had any say in the current system.
home
Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Start with the schools. It will require quite a bit of initial investment, but it is the only way to introduce a new mindset to the public. You'll need to replace a LOT of textbooks (maths problems will need to be posed in metric terms, same for science books, etc) and all of your measuring devices will need replacing with metric versions (throw out those yard sticks and replace them with metre rules). If the kids grow up learning metric terms, they'll see the benefits of simplicity, easier unit conversion, and so on.
Then comes the tricky part: legislation. The resistance from the lazy public and business will be incredible - it'll be seen as one extra unnecessary expense - but it has to be done. It must be a legal requirement that wherever an amount is shown in Imperial, it must also be shown in metric.
That should be enough to get the ball rolling, but it's a long process, and - as the poster above pointed out - it may not stick right away. The UK has used metric officially for many years now but go into a hardware store and they'll still sell you a length of 2-by-4.
It may take many years to kill off Imperial measurements, but I think those are the two most important steps to affect the change.
Read the good book. Did GOD tell Mosers to buld his arc 140 metears long? No HE did not, it was 300 cubics.
Keep the whitehouse white, vote Trump & Palin 2020.
Back in the 90s there was a big push for government agencies to switch to metric. At least one state was even planning on updating speed limit signs.
Personally, I think this conversion might have stood a chance at working if *everything* had been switched all at once. Instead what I observed were things like new construction projects were let specifying the use of metric units and old ones specifying the use of English units did not change. So you had people working with metric on one job and English on an other - and often getting them confused and mixed up. Eventually everyone gave up on the metric stuff, but I am fairly sure there are still a number of these "metric" contracts out there!
Or should that be a 5 x 10 ;-P
The UK is kinda a bodge at the moment. Road signs and speed limits are all in miles per hour but that's based more on the awkwardness of converting signs. Pretty much all other aspects are legally metric:
Price per kilo at the grocer's.
Filling up the car with litres of petrol.
Prices at the supermarket quoted in £s per kilo.
There's a few exceptions to this, namely buying a pint in a pub and road usage. I want roads to go metric, i grew up being taught metric and haven't a clue about most imperial units.
Your penis may only be five and a half inches long but thats 13.9 centmeters!
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Have varous weights and measures used in every day life reported in both metric and English measurements. In many cases, it already is and the practice just needs to be extended. People of the U.S. aren't nearly as shocked and confused at the presense of a metric system based measurement as we once were. The original push for the metric system (to my knowledge) happened when I was a kid. All the schools started handing out all these metric based measure devices and tables and the like. The vast majority of the U.S. has already been educated past shock. We just need to institute some more policies for "dual language" printing (another thing we're already accustomed to) and eventually, we'll be weened from the English measure system. We just need some nudging is all.
No one will ever know.
To force a switch to the metric system,first we remove all the u.s. standard nuts and bolts from vehicles and machinery,retap them for metric and replace with metric nuts and bolts.
Next, we bonfire all standard measuring devices,rulers,scales,moms measuring cup,and force people to buy new metric ones.Don't forget moms recipe book!
This must be done by force of law because integration,doesn't work as evidenced by foreign cars,speedometers,measuring cups,rulers,many scales which all have metric units alongside u.s. measure.
Sure,I'm a smartass,but I think you get the point.It's pointless.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Actually, I don't know anyone here who use cubic centimeters. We use ml (milliliters) which makes the conversion even more obvious.
And yes, it convenient to be able to compare the price of four containers with 500 ml each, with one container with 2 l, without having to use a calculator.
I will leave it as an exercise to the interested student how to convert between cubic centimeters and milliliters.
Imperial is here to stay. I hate to say it, but in things like construction, where a 2x4 is standard, you're always going to use imperial measurements. Old houses don't go away. Having said that, everything that's "serious" aka, science and NASA ought to be done in metric.
Canada switched to the metric system decades ago. Being a British commonwealth for such a long time, of course most of us were well accustomed to Imperial units. I still remember as a kid, how my Mom was one of the holdouts for the Imperial system for a long time. She would tell me to get a quart or gallon of milk, and I would have to ask her how many liters that was.
The thing is that the metric system is officially used everywhere. Road signs, groceries, public schools, the works. The only basis that we have for even knowing the Imperial system is our parents. I've used the metric system my entire life. I know my height and weight in feet and lbs, but couldn't tell you what it is in metric units. But I can guess fairly accurately how much something weighs in kilograms, but I'm not so good with pounds. Likewise, I'm more comfortable with measuring things in meters, rather than feet.
A rather amusing story though. I am currently living in the US, trying to get by without using the old ways. I am not always successful. But I try. Anyways, I was on the phone with my Mom the other day, and she asked how warm it was here. I googled the answer, and got it in Fahrenheit (46F). I laughed, and said she would be right at home here, and gave her the answer in Fahrenheit without doing the conversion. I was rather amazed at her response. She told me that it's been so long since she's used the Imperial system that she's forgotten it. She honestly didn't remember what 46F was.
Anyways, my point is that it doesn't matter if the older people don't use the metric system. Teach it to the young, and switch the entire country to the metric system on all official items. It will all sort itself out in time.
Change the country's name to 'France'... oh wait... prior art...
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
I find it very telling that, noone here has wanted to be first in welcoming their metric using overlords.
You don't.
No matter how much of an advantage you can get from Metric, there will always be resistance for change from people who are more comfortable with what simply works.
I'm 39 years old.
When I was in elementary school, it was time to panic: 'The metric system is coming!!!!!!1!!one!!eleven!'
So they tried to teach a bunch of kids how to convert between inches and meters and yards and kilometers and... A whole bunch of conversions involving multiple decimal places... As well as lookup tables, because who's going to remember all of the conversion factors?
Only that's utterly useless as a teaching device. If you want people to work in millimeters, you give them a metric ruler and ask them to measure things, duh.
Decades later, street signs still read in Miles per Hour, cans of soda are 12 ounces, but at least big diabetes-inducing bottles are measured in liters.
Finally, on the inch: It's not such a bad system of measurement. I've gotten into machine tools (lathe, mill, etc) recently, and machinists use their own system. The inch is the basic unit, and is essentially divided up in a metric fashion. When a machinist talks of 'tenths', he or she means tenths of a thousandth of an inch. That's plenty calculable and intuitive and very very precise indeed. Oh, and screw thread measurements make a *lot* more sense in the Imperial system than with the metric millimeter pitch measurements. That's not due to the measuring system of course, but due to the definitions of the standard sizes, which are far more intuitive. I can see why (back when hand-machining was far more important in the USA) there would have been considerable resistance from the manufacturing sector, and I'm not even stopping to consider re-equipping all the machines with updated change-gears, lead-screws, and dial wheels.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
In Britain we use both systems. But you might be interested to know that some imperial systems are alive and well but under a metric camoflage. Pipes are measured in imperial, a world standard, (BSP) as is the thread on pipes imperial and both are accepted even in France! Unfortunately we can only buy pipes in metric here in the UK but in France you can buy in imperial. It is a mad mad world.
Hey asswipe, just because you're too inept to use fractions doesn't mean the rest of us have to suffer a conversion expense. If I had a yard stick I'd ram it down your throat.
Changing to the Metric system wouldn't mean dropping the Imperial system entirely. In Australia, inches and feet are still used by tradies (carpenters, shipwrights and the like) as a quick and easy way of guestimating the amount of materials they need, and etc. Also, practically everyone here knows their height in feet and inches as well as centimeters.
We also still use holdovers from imperial measurements in everyday speech. For example: "Terrigal is miles away from here." It would not mean radically changing the language. America already uses the base 10 system of counting with their currency, which is very efficient, so I don't think changing would be that big a deal.
However, once again, the main factors in delaying the implementation of the metric system will be peoples ignorance and apathy, as well as a feeling of "We've always done it this way." I can understand the feeling, it is a law of physics that matter generally wants to keep doing what it is doing already (inertia I believe). Unfortunately, just because you CAN use your fingers and toes to count doesn't mean that a calculator isn't a better device for quick addition and subtraction. (That was just an example, albeit a crude one, I hope I don't get modded down by the dreaded Math Nazi's)
Ninjas use italics.
...it's about National Security (TM) and mention something about how your brave, young men and women are leading the way. Make sure your flag is on display in the background, and explain how this is truly an American thing to do.
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
There are a number of ways to respond to this question...
1) "I personally deal with European scientists on a daily basis, and find our lack of common measurement to be extremely frustrating."
So? USE THE METRIC SYSTEM, then. *Nobody* is stopping you. I work for a European-HQ'ed paper company, and corporate is constantly dealing in square meters, while our customers are asking for things in thousand-square-feet units. Should I wring my hands and moan piteously about how complicated this is? Or is it perhaps easier just to learn the conversion rate(s) and become skilled at quick mental conversions?
There are hundreds if not thousands of industries in the US that commonly and regularly use Metric system units every day.
2) In a larger view, the difficulty in getting people to switch is symptomatic of our long-BROKEN educational system. We've had a system that accepts the production of stupid adults for a half-century; is it a surprise that much of the American electorate is, well, stupid? For 40 years, 'enlightened' social-promotion educators have insisted that there is no educational canon, no set of knowledge that's necessary to be a functional adult. Every time someone would say "look, maybe it's useful if we insist that all children must know X or must perform at Y level of aptitude before graduating", a chorus of voices (generally from the Left) would claim that was merely being classist, ethnocentrist, racist, or somehow a vague assault on the inherent value of whatever child didn't get it.
Couple that with the capitalist overreach into the educational system (going after the Right now), from corporate sponsors pumping millions of units of sugar-pop and crap-snacks into nutrition starved teens, up to the ability of college athletes to skate through education because of their financial contribution to the school, and you have a recipe for disaster.
We need to return to elementary schools that teach the basics, and REQUIRE a certain level of aptitude before graduation.
We need to have a post-secondary system that doesn't require the first 2 years to be remedial college-prep education.
We need to have colleges insist on a specific canon of educational requirements for all students, and dispense with the boutique specifics that suit some tenure-protected professor's ideological goals.
Then, perhaps, in 20-30 years we can rebuild a working democracy, with an enlightened electorate capable of making intelligent choices.
-Styopa
I'm 28 years old and British. My teachers at school taught no imperial measurements at all, it was a 100% metricated education. The only imperial measures I use are miles, mph and mpg for planning long road journeys.
and since you can't drive more than about 800 miles in this country without falling into an ocean, that's hardly a concern.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
It's all metric but for a couple of cases. Cars and roads being the notable ones. given the cost of changing all the signs at once it's easy to see why. The UK government should just begin introducing km signs to replace old ones.
Everybody here uses metric daily (including you) and it works just fine.
Deleted
My wife tells me she can't feel the big 25.4 cm, but she can feel the big 10 inch.
It's left blank because I have nothing to say to you punks!
The distance-to-the-next-town and speed limit signs within 10 km of Montpelier, Vermont on I-89 are listed in km and km/h. It doesn't seem to have caused a collapse of society or an epidemic of people driving 105 MPH on that section of road, so perhaps Americans can figure out that sort of thing after all.
Forcing todays workforce to switch exclusively to the metric system would have a huge impact on productivity, an impact I don't think corporate America is ready to foot the bill for.
This isn't like asking everyone not to wear shirts with naked women on them to work, this involves requiring people to forget what they've been taught & have practiced for years.
I started working construction jobs when I was 16 years old, I know first hand how much chaos would come if everyone was required to learn how to use a tape measure differently.
The only feasable way to convert the US to the metric system, would be to exclude the imperial system from being taught in schools, produce assembly robots/ect that use the metric system, & get everyone the ability to quickly get conversions anywhere via services like that which Google provides.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
I'm in Canada, we made the switch when I was a kid, and I went through school learning only metric. My parents don't know metric, and continuously convert in to imperial, since thats what they grew up with. So from personal experience I can say that the change takes a full generation, and leaves a divide between young and old in its wake.
As long as there are people around who didn't learn metric in school, there will be resistance, so the change will actually take that long. Highway speeds will have to be posted in both for 10 years or more, and even after that, every highway speed sign here has "km/h" under it as a reminder. America needs to start the switch, and then go 20 years without electing a backwards, reactionary government that will reverse the switch. Is such a thing possible?
Reality has a liberal bias
If you can find a chart of the old terms of English units of measure, you'll find everything was half or twice the the next unit of measure, i.e. 2 cups equal a pint, 2 pints equal a quart, etc... Most of the units have fallen out of usage so it's not as obvious anymore. The only advantage of metric is everyone is used to decimal fractions vs. binary fractions. I have a digital caliper which automatically converts between english and metric but it's difficult to whether a decimal measurement in english corresponds to a corresponding standard english size. E.g. is something closer to 15/64 or to 1/4? I have fractional caliphers which give an analog readout in english fractions and it's a lot easier to guess from that than from the digital calipher.
The big problem is mixing standard sizes from english and metric when some of them are close. Most pc's use a mix of M3 metric and #6 english screws which are different enough to keep straight. Once in a while you find some odd component with #4 which might look like M3 if you're not careful and you get some nice cross threading there.
"especially at GM with their ubiquitous pushrod 3.8 L V6 engine."
That engine pretty much sums up everything wrong with GM. It doesn't require any words, you just look at it and you know why they're getting their butts beat for the last few decades.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Why bother? Seriously -- why bother? What real, practical value is there in forcing the general public to use one arbitrary (to them) set of measurements versus another arbitrary set of measurements? What does the public's use of miles, Fahrenheit, pounds, and acres have to do with business or government? Sure, sometimes there are mishaps when using mixed units, but they're rare enough that their widely-published details stick out in your mind because it's so rare. A good engineer realizes that units are arbitrary and can work with whatever measurement system she's given. Besides that, whether my car gets 22 mpg or 7.2 L/100km doesn't have an impact on people in the laboratory or the layout room. The scales, force gauges, and AutoCAD all switch back and forth effortlessly. Businesses already use the metric system when it suits them (it usually does). In fact our American units (they're not imperial units) are officially defined by the NIST in terms of metric units. Our land surveying system west of New England is irrevocably tied to the use of feet and acre systems.
I'm working in Canada now. Despite the fact that their government forced metric units on them, do you realize that virtually everyone (well, immigrants from metric countries notwithstanding) continues to use Imperial units (in this case, they are Imperial units -- 4.4L/gallon, etc) in their daily life? It's 82 outside, not 28. I weigh 190, not 86. I had a fever of 101, not 39.
What's really strange is working in Mexico, where they never officially use US units. Milk is sold in galones (gallons, yup, right on the label). Talking about small measurements is quite often done in pulgadas (inches). They don't use millas (miles) in normal conversation, but they all seem to have a general sense of what they are. Yardas may be well know because of American football, and Fahrenheit makes no sense to them, but they're fairly well versed in libras (pounds).
Me? I like the metric system, and use it where it makes sense to use it. But going through the expense of wholesale conversion to the metric system makes no sense and will cause more problems than it solves. Think of the sheer amount of measurements that would have to change. There's the mundane -- 37" TV's will have to change. But what about construction materials? Plumbing? Lumber? Fasteners? What about highway sytems? Exit signs, mile markers, speed limit signs, maps, documentation? The US survey system, then? Acres, townships, counties, baseline locations, meridian locations, title and deed documents? What about food packaging? Why eliminate US measurements when metric measurements are already there?
Interstate 19 between Tucson and Nogales, Arizona is labelled in km/h for some inexplicable reason. Is there a benefit to anyone there?
--Jim (me)
It's right there under "Related Stories", NASA will go Metric On the Moon
http://www.space.com/news/070108_moon_metric.html
Personally, the only compelling reason I've seen to use Imperial units is that they tend to use other number bases (12 inches to the foot, 16 oz. to the lb.). These other bases have many more common factors than the metric base 10
12 is cleanly divisible by 1,2,3,4, and 6
16 is cleanly divisible by 1,2,4, and 8
10 is only cleanly divisible by 1,2, and 5
This makes working with common fractions much cleaner in imperial units, which is desirable if you don't use a computer to calculate everything for you.
3/8 = 0.375 in metric
1/3 = 0.333... in metric
If we were to come up with some kind of hexadecimal-based metric system (which would make transition to computer binary cleaner), this might go away, and then we'd just be left with the gut feelings of "horsepower" sounds "stronger" than "kilowatt"
I shot a deer from mah kichen winder last nite. The deer was 20 yards away. If we would have communist metric systems, that deer woulda bin much further away, and I wouldnta bin able to git him (cause of conversion and all). So y'all ungodly sumsabitches wit yer communism, metric, evolushun, and anti-war, can kiss my sweaty hehind, and my brother Earl's too. Lie-nuks is for comunists too.
I'm gunna vote for George in the next election, and hes gonna win again, cuz there are just too many true blue americans! Metrics is for terrorist countries!
Billy Joe.
The US gets a lot of flack for not using the metric system, but honestly, we're not the only ones (and I don't mean Liberia and Myanmar).
Just recently a friend from Canada (Montreal) astounded me when she stepped on my scale and complained that she had no idea what it meant, since it used kilograms. She told me that she thinks of her weight only in pounds, and that, furthermore, clothing measurements (like the waist and inseam on jeans) are measured not in centimeters, but in inches. I don't recall if I asked whether she measures her height in feet+inches or centimeters.
But honestly, what difference does it make, anyway? Sure the metric system is great, I rather like it. A cubic centimeter = 1 millileter, and if you fill it with (pure) water (under 1 bar of pressure at 4 degrees centigrade) it weighs exactly 1 gram. How cool is that? But really, it doesn't make measurements any more or less accurate to use one system or the other. All Americans learn metric in school, anyway, last I checked. So who cares what we use?
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Who the hell is Moser?
For one simple reason => football Until football stops being a sport, the metric system has zero chance. "It's 1st and 9.14400 from their 32.00400 line, and Manning drops back to pass" just doesn't have the same ring.
The Celsius scale is calibrated to the freezing and boiling points of water. This is great for scientific use, but comes at the expense of sensitivity for day-to-day use. It is seldom that anyone wants to know the temperature outside as a fraction of the temperature required to make water boil (though the freezing point is of more use), and temperatures in habitable areas of the earth seldom exceed 50C. That means the upper half of the scale is not being used. Since a Fahrenheit degree is finer-grained than a Celsius degree and the endpoints of the scale more closely match the range of habitable temperatures, it makes more sense to use F outside of science and cooking, IMO.
I'm in agreement on use of all other metrics.
Or how much force would it take to accelerate a 2kg object at 5m/s^2? SI uses the same base units for all of it's units so such a conversion is simple.
I don't know where you work, but as an American scientist/engineer myself I always use metric in my professional work. Meters, kelvin, kilograms. In school (chemical engineering) we often worked with pounds and gallons since they're common in some industries, but we were thoroughly drilled in how to convert between units.
I honestly don't see the problem with using Imperial units in daily life as long as professionals use metric in their work. In many parts of the country, roads are spaced one mile apart. Converting to metric won't change that. Refrigerators are designed to hold a gallon of milk. Converting to metric would mean either misfitting jugs or odd quantity containers.
Let the public use Imperial units. They happen to be useful for human-scale measurements. Just be sure to teach students that metric is the professional system.
AlpineR
The original effort, back in the 70s, was poorly done. The schools wasted a lot of time, money and effort on teaching kids how to do conversions, rather than simply getting everyone familiar with the units. Millions of pocket conversion tables were given out. It was all useless and misguided, because there was no real incentive for people to switch.
Gradually, however, manufacturers have been changing. As another poster has observed, soda bottles are increasingly in liters and half-liters. Same with orange juice. All bicycles, even the ones made in the US, are metric, now.
I work for a major semiconductor manufacturer and we started doing everything metric in the early 80s. All the components in the computer in front of you are designed using metric dimensions, right down to the microscopic transistors. Electrical units (volts, amps, watts, ohms) have always been metric.
After all, does one size always fit all? (It just popped into my head. I have no idea if it has any relatively helpful meaning or not.)
I mean, we're inching towards it all the time!
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
The problems in the past is they try to make gradual migrations. Having the English units big and the metric smaller. then switching the size. The problem is these units create odd variants. If you have a road speed limit at 60 Miles Per hour and you say it under it 96 KPH People are going to see 60 and equate that easier. What they need to do is think metric first then give English as a fall back until poeple get use to it. So it should say 100 KPH 62 MPH That way they can equate metric as the easy system and english as the more difficult one.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
what would happen if we all were forced to use roman numerals for math?
industry has no problem with it either, as if you use metric parts then you have to use metric tools and that only helps to sell more metric tools., etc..
Maybe we just need to get rid of choice and become generic whatever, but then the drug industry would have a problem with that...
My choice is to use hexidecimal. Why? because I deal with computers. And I truely think since the world is going computer, every one should use hexidecimal, regardless of whether they are translating it to metric, imperial, binary, decimal, 1/16" scale, 5th, etc.
I mean what does it matter what language you speak, so long as you have your universal translator implant. You do have yours don't you?
"Staying with imperial measurements has only served to handicap American industry and economy."
Seen the US industry, economy, and market performance lately? Seen theirs? I rest my case.
I wholeheartedly agree that we US'ers should go metric. But not for the reason stated.
Cloned foods give the statement "We had that last week!" a whole new meaning.
The original article said that there are only three countries still using Imperial; make that at least four. Belize uses very little metric. Speed limits are miles per hour, temperatures are in Fahrenheit, most paper is Letter and Legal, weights are usually pounds and ounces, and lengths are in inches, feet, yards, miles. Areas are in acres. Being formerly British Honduras, we even call our fourth-of-a-dollar coin a shilling.
Vincent: And you know what they call a... a... a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris?
Jules: They don't call it a Quarter Pounder with cheese?
Vincent: No man, they got the metric system. They wouldn't know what the fuck a Quarter Pounder is
Staying with imperial measurements has only served to handicap American industry and economy
That's a very dubious assertion.
The US is the worlds largest economy by a large margin by virtually any measurement. We have the worlds largest GDP, per-capita income, highest productivity rates, most liquid stock and commodity markets and on and on.
Any scientist worth their salt will be working in metric regardless of where they live. What difference would it make to the typical American?
If you use a different system when precision matter than you use in your daily life, you are more likely to overlook mistakes.
We have had that discussion at work, do we use mm/d (the common unit) for rain intensity, or do we use m/s which is the "pure" ISO unit? The advantage of using pure ISO units is that there is no risk of conversion errors. Nonetheless, I prefer the first, if I see that we had 60 mm/d I immediately know that this is a huge event (for Danish conditions). And that 600 mm/d is almost certainly an error. If I see 5.2e-7 m/s I'll have to convert it first, and an error is much more likely to slip through.
Folks, unit conversion is not that difficult or uncommon. For anyone thinking that a conversion from English to Metric would magically obviate all unit conversions, and therefore eliminate the need to check for units, think again.
Anyone familiar with dec/bin/hex? Which of those should we "ban forever" because it's SO DIFFICULT to convert between them? How about deg/rad? Spherical/Cartesian? FRD/NED/ECEF/WGS84? Get a grip, people.
Also, it's not like the metric system solves any of the truly DIFFICULT unit problems. Length and weight are easy. Tell me, what's the metric unit for time? Well? So we're stuck with the bloody hour, 24 of which make a day, divisible into 60 minutes of 60 hours, with all those lovely leap years and leap seconds thrown into the mix. Or how about currency conversions, where the scaling factor changes minute-by-minute?
Put into Slashdot terms, note that if you get rid of the Imperial Inch, say goodbye to "point" font-sizes; no more will you be able to specify a simple 12pt (ie, 12/72 of an inch), but rather 4.233mm! Selection boxes just got wider, eating up all that valuable screen real-estate. Speaking of, no more DPI or PPI resolution metrics.
At the end of the day, can you imagine how many millions of man-hours of effort would go into such a conversion? For what? UNITY, so that every nation could be the same? I thought DIVERSITY was supposed to be the valued goal? Everyone who values their "non-standard" Linux or MacOS or whatever box should be concerned at the idea of forcibly moving everyone to The Same Standard because it would be Easier For I.T. that way.
I say, God save the Queen, and all her twips, arpents, and stones!
Shooting deer is amoral because -- well, because they remind me of Bambi. Since no measurements were taken, you can't say the deer was a specific yardage away and using yardages makes me have to remember how many feet and inches and so forth are in them. So, when we talk about abstract concepts such as unmeasured distances between a Republican and a murdered animal, we'll use metrics, since I can then turn off my brain and just shift zeros. It amazes me, the correlation between Replublicans and things I don't care for like being successful at business or enjoying sports. That makes me fear that there is something much deeper than just the statistics and that those kinds of people (you know, the poor and uneducated you see in the aid commercials) really are different from us intelligent and morally superior Democrats.
I will vote for the candidate who aligns himself with keeping my state of being constant and comfortable so I can easily attend the rallies against the capitalist oppressors of the world's people in my mini-SUV.
I agree that it would better serve our needs to change to metric. When I was going to post my first reply, I was going to say something to the effect that as much as I agree that we need to change, I admit I would have a little trouble doing so. But then I got to thinking...if we suddenly changed everything, what's the big deal? If I didn't have to convert gallons to liters at the gas station, Fahrenheit to Celsius, inches to centimeters because everything was already set, it wouldn't be so bad. I'm sure it would only take me a few weeks to get used to the idea that 0 degrees celsius is freezing (we already know that) but that 27 degrees celsius is actually comfortable to me. Yet, we stick to these standards and rather than go through the brain power to convert to metric, I'll stick with what I know. It really wouldn't be that bad if we'd just do one swift change. Drive 65 MPH on the highway? Fine, get used to driving 104 km/h. Easy.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
Don't you mean you are 1.2 Gs old? Mid-thirties is soooo Imperial.
The USA learns the Metric system, and the rest of the world learns to speak English. Seems reasonable to me.
A school district in Massachusetts today voted to remove all references to "imperial" and "metric" from their science and mathematics curricula, after complaints from a parent that 'cubits' were not receiving equal time in the classroom. A spokeswoman for the district board said today that if scientists themselves cannot agree on the matter...
The most visible change would be all the road signs, which would cost a bundle just on their own and cause quite a bit of confusion in the meantime. But do you have any idea how my machinery and infrastructure is built around the imperial system? Even if you could convert (at great cost) everything, you still need it to maintain products like cars or houses, and if you thought the Y2K thing was a hassle, how about adjusting those unlabeled numbers in your databases from one system of measurement to the next?
After WWII it probably wasn't too hard to convert to metric, since there wasn't much infrastructure left. The US on the other hand was going full blast. Even the UK had a lot of intact industry by war's end.
And for the record, imperial units (feet, miles, gallons, fahrenheit) are standard in aviation worldwide.
If you really want to convert to metric, take it slow. Force one major industry at a time to adapt their infrastructure, and let the smaller industries adapt themselves around them. E.g. food distribution and labeling, then aerospace, then automotive, etc. Hell, you should probably only force new companies to do so, and you'll need to offer incentives to the older companies to change. Or demand that any industry reports to government and stockholders be given in metric, and let the pain of audit keep them in line.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
The metric system (SI) is awkward to use in some common cases because it requires more digits than Imperial for common precision or range. First, consider temperature. Indoors, 20C can be too chilly, 21C too expensive to heat, and 69F just right. Outdoors, 33F is still above freezing, but the equivalent 0.6C is cumbersome. Next, look at speed and length. On a limited access highway, 100Km/h requires three digits, yet in miles per hour all posted speeds in the US require only two digits. Ten inches spans many more everyday objects than 10cm.
Democrats tend to try to push us to metric and Republicans squash it. There are two events I remember.
One reference I found to support last point
The metric system is legal for trade (and anything else) in the US and has been since 1866. If you want to use it, use it.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Join the fight against metrics! :)
We don't want no foreign rulers!
Whenever Mrs. Fitch breaks wind, we beat the dog.
The metric works best if you have a strong grasp of place value and decimal notation.
The traditional system works better if you are good at fractions.
So, teach more about decimal notation and place value, and, if necessary, make up the time by teaching less about fractions (especially adding the stupid things) - although the problem is not that people succeed in learning fractions, but that they fail to learn decimal notation.
Teach the meaning of the centi-, deci-, milli- prefixes, powers of 10 and standard form. Don't chant "10 milimetres 1 centimetre, 10 centimetres 1 decimetre 10 decimetres" as if it were something arbitrary that had to be remembered, like inches, feet and yards.
While we're at it, can I recommend the European system of paper sizes, where each size is made by folding the size above in half? US letter encourages people to make lines too long, anyway.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Hey...so far 100 cents equals one dollar. They're working on it. ;)
It's probably the closest the US will get, but hey, can't change TOO fast now.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
maybe, in the future, American people will know they're not alone in the galaxy. waiting this day, maybe they can use http://joshmadison.net/software/convert/ to learn other systems. welcome in Modern Age.
I'm a young fellow from Australia, and I guess from my perspective growing up in a metric society perhaps has given me biased for the way we measure things. Our Television so saturated with American television has acustomed me to seeing your world in imperial measurements. There's just something about an American house built on inches compared to an Australian building built in centimetres - I guess it comes down to culture. At the end of the string though, we are slowly moving to a globalisation - the ability to communicate, travel and live throughout the world without headance means that more than ever we need to communicate and collaborate together in the most efficient way possible. I know this is a very idealistic view on the world, but surely we will all eventually have to start working together to reach the same goals - renewable power, elimination of poverty, global harmony. There is certainly room for both standards and I'm sure if America moved to metric, Impreial would be a common association in describing physical characteristics. Almost all people in Australia know their height in feet and inches, building materials are still sold in inches - whatever happens, I'm sure the old way will not be forgotten with the incredible data collection of todays society it surely will not be forgotten. Perhaps we should look at what would be best for the world instead of what works for our country. Heck, if that meant the world went Imperial, I'd be all for it, it is just the time that it takes for our Governments to gell together enough to figure out what is best - for all I know, it may be better to keep going the way we are, really we have made it this far without any major short commings. Everyone has their beliefs, and it's my view that everyone has the right to believe whatever it is they want to believe. As long as this is the case, there will always be a fight about who is right and who is wrong.
Frankly, for day-to-day use imperial measurements make more sense. Base ten only has a kind of hypnotic effect on people, because we have ten fingers. Imperial units vary a bit but often they tend to be based around doubling and halving - and you've got to ask what's wrong with base 2? One would think Slashdot readers would have noticed and mentioned that computers use base 2. Also, the units are satisfying sizes for day-to-day use. A pound is, effectively, about the weight of a lump of stone of a convenient size for holding or throwing. A cup (double that for a pint, and double that for a quart) holds about as much drink as you'd want with your breakfast.
The jumps between units are too big in the metric system and don't relate to convenient everyday sizes. In fact, centimetres aren't even valid SI units: it's millimetres or metres, take it or leave it.
The metric system arises from "rationalist" (as opposed to "rational" or "reasonable") ways of thinking and emerged, tellingly, in the wake of the French Revolution. A metre was supposed to be based on (incorrect) measurements of the Earth not on human use and practice. It's not surprising that the more "pragmatic" Anglo-American culture has been reluctant to adopt it - except where, again tellingly, there are threats and coercion.
Use it where it's useful, but don't try to force its adoption where its use doesn't make practical sense.
We'll introduce a genetically engineered retro-virus to cause Americans to have 10 fingers, and not 8 like what we see on The Simpsons. Bwahahahahahahahahaa!
I'll get in touch with the ever intelligent Richard C Hoagland to assist me in my nefarious plans (I'll tell him that another Angstrom is available for him if he does...).
Just tell them they'll weigh less in kilograms than in pounds!
Join the anonymous, help develop the network: http://www.i2p2.de
After having to do engineering in the imperial units, I thought when I swithed to a more sciencey field of study and all metric, life would be easy factors of ten. But alas, it is not so. there are in fact two metric systems, MKS and CGS, and they are not different by factors of 10 in units involving electomagnetism. In fact, under the two different systems, the equations of electromagnetism gain or lose constants depending on which system is used. So much for easy powers of ten....
If you change measurement units, it becomes impossible to use your reference system. This is why people resist changing to metric.
The same thing happened in Europe with the conversion to Euros. At the beginning, you didn't automatically knew whether 10.000 was the price of a house or rather of a car. For things you come often across, it is fairly easy to build up a new reference system in the new measurement unit. However, for rare things, this is much more difficult. I notice many people use and think in Euros, unless they start thinking about buying a house. Then, they start out in their old currency. Once they have seen a few houses, they learn the relation between price in euros and property value and they start thinking in euro's. As a sidenote: I used to work together with American scientists at NIST and they all used metric units (of course, it was NIST, so if even they didn't use it...)
I personally do not understand how you can do sciency and engineering in an imperial system. It is working on a disaster waiting to happen. Endless conversions are needed to calculate derived measures, like torque, energy, and momentum. There are hardly any means to check for correctness.
An additional problem of the imperial system is the lack of uniformity.
How much is a gallon? 4.5 or 3.8 litre? A pint? A pound?
I write all my software using SI only. Before I did that I often had unexpected outcomes. Now, if the algorithm is correct and I use the correct formula, the outcome is right.
There is no need to drop the use of imperial measure, but it should only be allowed for informal use. In science, engineering, and trade the use of SI measures should be compulsory. If the USA starts converting this year, all will work perfectly in 2030, without additional costs.
One of the reasons the metric system was adopted was not just for uniformity in science calculations, but to make business easier by adopting international standards for weights and measures. If a country did not convert, they would have a rough time dealing with all the others who did. Most converted, the U.S. did not.
The problem with converting to metric now is that the U.S. has enough economic power that businesses in other countries are perfectly willing to bend over backwards and make the non-metric conversions in order to do business with us. The U.S. will only convert to the metric system if and when an economic disaster reduces our economy to nothing, while leaving most of the rest of the worlds' in a relatively unscathed state, and therefore able to renegotiate contracts with different terms. (Of course, the global nature of the economy makes that exceedingly unlikely to happen, which is about how likely it is that the U.S. will convert to metric in the foreseeable future).
oh fuck you; if it's is too inconvenient for you to talk to your friends, then jusy fucking use the metric system and shut the fuck up about what you want me to do
1 US gallon = 231.000001 cubic inches
Everyone knows that Google does this, right? I put in seach "1 gallon in cubic inches" and this is the result. You can do this for just about any units, there really is no reason to post things like "what's that in real units?" when you can so easily convert between anything.
Just for example, I asked:
"speed of light in furlongs per fortnight"
and I got the handy answer:
the speed of light = 1.8026175 × 10^12 furlongs per fortnight
So why doesn't the US change? Because the advantage of using a metric system over not having a metric system is very great compared the relative advantage of using one particular metric system (like SI) over another (and the costs of switching).
I am not a crackpot.
A length of string is a length of string. Call it what you will.
"I personally deal with European scientists on a daily basis, and find our lack of common measurement"
I don't why you're dealing with other scientists IF you've got to convert your units. Almost every place I've taken courses at or worked in the US we ALWAYS used the metric units for calculations and THEN converted them back into English units as necessary...
Overall this is entirely a non-issue, as it is NOT about USING the metric system, but about PRODUCING items in metric units. Usage is NOT required by the general public to do this.
The snooty arrogance in this thread is astounding.
There is no doubt that if you are designing a system from scratch, the metric system is superior.
There is also no doubt that if you are in science and engineering, you should be using the metric system.
But for every day use? It does not matter one tiny bit. Whatever accurately supports commerce is really all that matters. And the Imperial system works in the US.
Some dirty secrets for you all who think the rest of the world has adopted: a lot of the Commonwealth nations have adopted the metric only in an official capacity. Go to the UK and see how often you see Imperial units.
Saying that converting to the metric system would bring us in line with the rest of the world is actually a DISINCENTIVE to many Americans that want to maintain some level of uniqueness.
I remember buying smoothed and finished 2x4s that really were that size. They just shrunkified* the wood you get now to make money. Same as giant bags of potato chip air. Whoa, look at this giant bag of chips! ..looks inside....4.5 chips and a disclaimer on the bag "contents may settle in shipping* Ya, the 4.5 chips sure did settle in that giant bag of air!
* I can make up all the words I want to as long as the meaning can be parsed. Language is cool!
And the real reason them furriners like the metric system is because of their girly man little barbie doll cars! They can go ZOMG, I was going 100 KPH!
Because this is what has been done in ruggby (you known the "RRREAL-men-love-pain-and-being-hurt" version of american football)... I mean, even tough beeing briton this now uses Metric system for all mesures.
...." just simple as that !
This means you will have roundings. So in your case, you can expect "It's 1st and 9m from their 32m line, and
Just use metric system in your daily life. Perhaps you haven't noticed but this is pretty trivial to do in the USA.
Don't be shy about using metric units in conversation with others. If you hesitate you are part of the problem and not part of the solution.
Use metric only with your children. Take them to another country so they can see what "normal" looks like.
If you are waiting for the government to force the issue you're going to be waiting quite a while.
The kids who were in school in the 70's and 80's are the ones who have the obligation to start the ball rolling. We have done so in many areas of government and commerce but we need more progress in the popular culture. The next generation can take the next steps but we have to pass this on to them.
Sure, we should be using metric for science, but why does the need for metric in science mean that everybody needs to use metric? Miles and miles per hour are our traditional travelling speed and distance units, and any argument that the common person using miles to measure something harms the economy is simply ridiculous. Science and daily life do not need to have the same unit of measurement.
Pints of beer? Thats your argument?
If so then you have lost.
We manage to buy pints of beer quite nicely, eventhough noone alive in this country has ever used pints for anything other than to buy beer in english pubs.
Customary American Units are an abomination, it's a bloody mess and the only reason you can't see it is that you have been steeped in it since birth.
Everything is harder with CAU, except comparing new bits to old bits.
-- To dream a dream is grand, but to live it is divine. -- Leto ][
Really? Why don't you just do like Switzerland does with its three official languages, and put both everywhere? Make the metrics higher priority, in bigger writing, and make everything relative to metric sizes. Have a liter of milk, but display the imperial measurement as well. Also, require that all cars, new and old, have the dashboards switched out to metric. Place all the road signs in metrics too. It's relatively easy to match your speed with the sign on the road if they're in the same measurement; they're not going to cause any accidents. On all the distances, place the kilometers first and in big, bold letters, and then in parentheses and smaller italicized letters the imperial system of distance. Then, in every organization that has to do with the government, use ONLY the metric system. In schools, teach ONLY the metric system.
Then the switch should be relatively easy. It's not that hard people!
By NOT telling them the French invented it, or by calling it "freedom system"
I live in Australia, where metric has been the official measuring system since the early 1970's. However, a lot of imperial measurements do unofficially live on.
:)
For example, you're more likely to hear the weight of a newborn baby in pounds/ounces than in kilograms, but for everyone else, it's always in kilograms. Height is more commonly expressed in feet/inches than centimetres, some lengths are more common in feet or inches (yes, like yer penis). Beer measurements are based on imperial (sometimes rounded to nearest metric units), as well.
The most common ones would be feet and inches, easier to say 2 feet than 60.96cm
A strange thing is, though, that although our CRT TVs are almost always measured in centimetres, our computer monitors and all LCD TVs and monitors are measured in inches.
americans will never switch to metric, because they're too stupid,
and they don't recoginize that the world doesn't end at their borders.
My brother-in-law works for a road construction company that frequently bids jobs for the NJ Department of Transportation. A few years ago the DOT tried to convert its construction jobs to the metric system.
It was a total a disaster. While the DOT management and construction management thought it was a good idea, the grunts on the ground doing the actual work screwed up constantly. Jobs took longer, simple tools like tape measures became useless and needed to be replaced. Bridge parts needed to be rebuilt due to conversion errors. Materials orders were frequently incorrect resulting in delays or wasted material. The confusion permeated every aspect of the process.
The costs and productivity losses proved excessive for the perceived gain, so the idea of using metric was scrapped.
If one single government department couldn't make it work, how is the ENTIRE country supposed to make it work?
-ted
I had the entertainment of designing some circuit boards a year or two ago - using, of all units: mils (thousandths of an inch) and mils (millimetres).
Isn't life confusing?
So In US and the other two countries, E does not equal mc^2?
Can't all American Scientists simply get a calculator like this one that can convert units (even obscure ones like R!) and simply use it whenever in touch with metric-unit scientists?
There are two kinds of people - those who are radioactive and those who have already decayed..
The failure to switch fully to the metric system here in Britain, as opposed to Ireland and mainland Europe, is because we've been resistant to changing things like road signs. If you only teach metric in school, the associations children build up between reference objects and formal measurements will still be imperial, because that's what they see and use in every day life. You simply can't teach this sort of thing in a formal setting. Other countries have shown that by just biting the bullet and changing as much as possible, you can get people to accept the metric system. But if you just teach it in school, and hold out on road signs, groceries, the hardware store, etc, the process becomes slow and painful.
The metric system is just a theory! It has no place in schools... It's a conspiracy I tell you. First they take away our origins with that Darwin's theory now they want to take away our measurements... May God bless you with a tinfoil hat.
I think, therefore you are.
So let my summarize by saying "Who will think of the rulers!" (And steel mills and pipe fittings and rolling mills and everything I'm ignorant of)
Say, what do they prefer to measure, umm, size in, centimetres or inches?
I must agree, George Bush has a golden opportunity for a solid policy win, and a chance to get something other than Iraq and September 11 in the history books.
Switch to metric. There will be resistance from the populace that is satisfied with the status quo, but metric is more sensible from a design standpoint, it makes greater sense from an industry and economic standpoint, and really it won't be that hard. The best part is he might find some of his former detractors backing him on this one.
I am pretty sure those forward thinking folks of California could do it. And then New York would get jealous and do it. A federal territory like the District of Columbia should already be metric.
My father approved contracts for the DOD. He always said if he really wanted to piss people off, he would bring out the old metric regulations ( 15 U.S.C. 205c). A if a contract is not up to federal regulations, it should not get approved.
Just make available drugs sold in units of kilometers and celsius. Americans already know grams from "private experience", mostly learned in college.
And get utility companies to sell service in real metric. What good is a "kilowatt-hour", when it's base 3600? How about just "megajoules"? Make car companies rate engines in kilowatts, not "horsepower" (probably the best example of America's imperial anachronism - how powerful is a horse, if not in watts?). After the kilometers have sunk in, with highway signs in both miles and Km for a while. Then just Km, first local roads then interstates, as public polls show we know the distance in each state. That's the time to switch car ratings over to Km:gallon. Then Km:liter - we already drink in liters, now that America's beverage industry is owned by global Europeans. Probably take 10-12 (er, 10-20) years.
Too bad, because celsius isn't as intuitive as fahrenheit (even if it's easier to spell). 100F is clearly too hot, 0F too cold. In the middle third, between freezing and air conditioning, we wear more clothes in its lower half, and less in the upper half - the extremes belong to the machines. Maybe we should switch to celsius below 33F/1C and above 66F/19C, and make the machines do the math. Eventually we'll get the feeling for the middle third, even if its 33C degrees are too big to precisely describe our most immediate condition.
The key is to introduce it gradually. Switching to the whole new system makes redneck Americans feel like Europeans are taking over. And since we buy ammo in powers of two, like the ancient British system we still worship, it's obvious that we'll shoot first and add 32, multiply by 9/5 later.
--
make install -not war
The reason that the United States doesn't switch to the Metric system is because 99% of the people are to ignorant or are not intelligent enough to understand.
[%] Cingular Ringtones
I don't actually the problem with using non-metric units - I'd say Imperial, but US measurments are actually different to British Imperial measurements; the US Gallon is slightly larger than an Imperial Gallon, for example - for everyday measurements.
In the UK we still use miles for measuring distances, mph for road speed (boats use knots), and pints for measuring things like beer and milk. People are still damn annoyed about being forced to use metric for loose goods - I have to say I'm one of them; I still think of loose sweets in multiples of 1/4lb. I end up working out how many I want in lbs, then convert it to metric. People tell me distances in km and I just look blank, I have no point of reference for them (as someone else mentioned). We still measure height predominantly in feet and inches and personal weight in stones and ounces (we skip pounds, interestingly).
Even with the metric system it's not entirely standardised; dl are used a lot on the continent, you rarely see them in the UK, we almost always express liquid less than 1l as ml, e.g. 500ml not 5dl.
Metric comes into its own in things like international trade and science/engineering, where they already used in the US and pretty much anywhere else with any sense.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
>>I personally deal with European scientists on a daily basis,
I think you're full of crap.
Professionally, both my wife and I deal with scientists and doctors from all over the world and all of the work we do and collaborate on is done in the metric system; as is almost all science.
Really, when was the last time a real scientist measured anything in ounces or inches?@!
I'll probably get modded troll for my post but then again, this article is a troll too.
Democrats and Republicans are like AIDS and Cancer, I want neither!
...Is ignorant people.
If we (Americans) were to convert to the metric system in everything, people would still work in the Imperial system and think they were working in the metric system. A good example would be speed limits. People look at the signs and passively notice them and sometimes follow them. When you convert 55 mph to km/h you get about 88.5 which would probably be rounded up to 90. When some idiot sees 90 on a speed limit sign, he or she is not gonna look at the km/h below it, nor will he or she look at the small km/h units on the speedometers of cars, he or she will look the large ones, the mph units and then we have a bunch of jackasses thinking it's legal to drive 90 mph. This will be a way for many people to get out of the many tickets that would follow, and it would be a continuous problem even if new cars were manufactured with the position of the mph and km/h were switched because that would not be a feasible reason for people to buy a new car.
And that's only one example, there are plenty of others. I do recognize the ease and scientific superiority of the metric system, but converting the U.S. to it would probably be pretty monumental and right now doesn't seem feasible. Just my thoughts.
I like the way metric/imperial measure is done in Canada. While "officially" we are metric. Road signs are in km and km/h. Temperatures are done in C, except in Windsor ON. Extremely large or extremely small values are metric "Human" sizes seem to have remained imperial. If you tell someone you are 165cm tall, they will give you a blank stare and cars are advertised with MP(US)G ratings even though we never used American gallons. You still buy 2x4s (not 5x10s). Wall studs are 16" apart, not 40cm.
I make a reasonable middle-class wage by going to work and not spamming blogs with scams.
I've been working for the automotive industry for a long time and everything is now in metric except when it comes to display data for Joe Blow consumer who don't know anything about other system.
The problems usually come in error of conversion and not the fact that people use the english system instead of the metric system. Metric system is no better and no worse than the english system.
Switching completelety to metric is not necessarily a solution to screw ups. It makes it easier for foreigners to get by when they visit and not much else. Personnally I oppose a complete change partly for selfish reasons. I make good money doing both metric and english versions of my projects. I also don't think that it will make people any smarter by switching to another system that everybody else uses. The extension of the life before senility is for peple who speak more than one language, not for people using the metric system versus the english system.
I can grant you that whoever came up with the english system was a moron but once you're used to it you really don't care how stupid it is compared to the metric system.
In spite of the fact that the attempt itself was a conclusive failure in that it didn't convince anyone to "get converted" it was successful in the sense that we are all quite familiar and somewhat comfortable with metric units. I'm a product of that 70's attempt.
We're a long way off from KpH road signs and "keys" on our gas pumps, but there was some success in getting the ground broken. Any future efforts will meet much less resistance and will likely be more successful. The war will be won by conquering specific areas one-by-one. As you mentioned, many specific areas are already exclusively metric. We just need to get some more public areas metric.
And as for bicycles? I still see them sold with inch sizes for wheels.
I'm guessing you're a norwegian. Am I correct?
As a scientist, I can attest to the massive superiority of the metric system
Back off man I'm a scientist too.
You must be daffy or have only book leanrt experience to have such a clouded understanding of the issue. Walk in to any machine shop some time. It's filled with decimal measures. Every dial is calibrated in decimal inches down to thousanths of an inch.
Nothing prevents decimalizing any unit of measure
Your argument only hangs on the idea that metric units tend to be more derived other units. For example, you indicate that length measures can be turned into weight measures by filling a measured volume with water and weighing it.
That's an irrational argument for such a renouned scientist to make since the SAME is true of the english system. In your example you selected water to do the conversion. But if you had selected dihydro pentoxy sulfate as the liquid you would find that 1 pound of this is equal to 1000 cubic inches. Laugh but it's only slightly more arbitrary than water. Since we seldom actually use this fact, what matters more it how useful the ratio of unit measures is not how they were derived. English units have two properties that metric units lack. Namely most of them have rations that are commonly divisible by handy numbers. weight measures are mainly powers of 2: (2 cups to a pint, 2 pints to a quart, 4 quarts to a gallon). Or by thirds and twos: 60 seconds to a minute, 60 second to the hour, 24 hours per day. How many hours are in your metric da, mr science? The second property is that they are created to be right sized for many daily human interactions. An inch is about the size of tip of a thump to it's knuckle. If your making something that uses hand work it's a pretty damn "handy" measure. A gallon of water is about what a soldier, field worker or seaman needs to drink every day, so if your provisioning it's a pretty useful measure. and so on.
there's no reason not to use decimal english measures and in most ways they are superior.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
To know both systems of measurement. I do, and yes, I'm under thirty.
I know metric, and I know the conversions between imperial and metric. I use metric myself if I'm doing calculations on my own because it is easier.
But you know what? Screw you measurement snobs. I like my gallons, miles and pounds.
I want my power plant measurements in PSI not KPA, Farenheit not Celsius, and gallons per minute are fine by me. The engineers seem to keep everything humming along just fine with imperial units, and I operate it all the same.
By all means teach the metric system alongside imperial units. People can learn multiple languages, so a few conversion factors aren't that hard.
Now that we've established that, we can take a look at the educational system. Competent schools already teach both, and incompetent schools suck on so many levels the metric system should be your least concern.
Go find something worthwhile to do. A crusade to impose the metric system universally is pretty high up one the list of worthless endevours.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
I can see a reason in switching to metric for some scientific and industrial applications, such as the dimensions of various computer components perhaps, but not for speed limit signs or the weather reports (actually which can be given in both measurements). I have the philosophy that no one measurement system is the best for every use. I actually find fahrenheit to be preferable, I think inches and feet seem more practical and natural for everday use, it is something about the size of the units I suppose. Perhaps it is due to the fact it is what I am used to, but I do think the units seem more convenient in some cases. I actually tend to use both metric and english measurements (like NASA :-) ), and am familiar with both, and use which one is most convenient for the task.
I always thought that the only reason why the US didn't switched to metric
was this one: If God Wanted us to use the metric system, Jesus would
had only taken 10 apostles.
seriously, folks, everything you buy new has those funny foreigner fasteners in it. has been that way for almost 20 years. including made in US, designed in US products. every hardware store has big racks of metric stuff now, and a full line of tools in metric.
it's been done. we couldn't export if we didn't do it. so stop whining. get your 250 mL flask of schnapps out and swig if you have to (yes, hooch went metric 10 to 15 years ago, too) but you are METRIFIED! your car is in liters, your weight is in KG, and your blood sugar is in mG/dL and the insulin is in mL volume injectables if you drive to the doctor and complain of evil plots from outer space to take your inches and pounds away from you. the rubber room thickness is measured in millimeters.
now get out there, and fight for your last 25.4 mm of personal space.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
insightful and inciteful.
I'd just like to say that I have no idea what a "Liberia" or "Myanmar" are.
Woooo Hooo!
U.S.A.!
U.S.A.!
In your face, R.O.W.!
I now return you to your regularly scheduled Slashdot postings already in progress.
Ok, units of measure for volume, distance, weight, yea, metric rocks. But lets face it, celsius is not dramatically any better than Fahrenheit. In fact as a gage for human relateable temperatures in weather Farenheight is vastly superior. 0 is f'n cold and 100 is f'n hot...what better range is that? I feel totally shortchanged in other countries when I have to deal with the measly tiny little range of temperatures. I mean come on! How can you get any satisfaction at being hot at 40 when you could complain about 100. Now thats a number to be hot at!!! So what is water freezes at 32? Im from Iowa...trust me 32 is still warm. Its not cold untill your under 20
Besides whats so magical about Celsius anyway. Its just as arbitrary as Fahrenheit. somebody just picked a range based on water..so what? and it doesn't even hold up in higher elevations where water does NOT boil at 100.
Oh man, you're cruel! :-D I wonder just how much trouble you'd get in if you actually did something like that. But a fake file, appropriately labeled, in a glass-windowed frame (think fire alarm switch) would be a very humourous thing to have on the wall in such a place!
"Good news, everyone!"
You correct him on cubits, but you're ok with him spelling it "bibel" ?
It is probably a good thing that the USA still uses imperial measurements. Since it is one of the fastest growing and most successful economies not to mention one of the key sources of innovation in the world. It is a good thing the USA is "handicapped" or the country would be assured world domination. One of my personal issues with converting from imperial to metric is that I would have to go back and totally recalibrate my beer consumption limits. I know how many pints I can handle before I fall over. I have not idea what that point is in liters. Hmm, now that I think about it the calibration process isn't really that bad. OK, bring on those liters!!!
weird that this conversation pops up after the one on shoutwire. as always, reading user comments on slashdot makes me want to smoke crack.
At gunpoint. Unless you can convince the Regime that if we stick with Imperial, the terrrrists win..
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
The French came up with the meter back in the 18th century, which is only a few inches different than a yard. The French didn't like the yard because it was based on the human body, which isn't a standard size. They had three ideas for how they would define a meter...
1) A portion of the distance between the equator and the pole.
2) A portion of the distance around the equator.
3) The length of a pendulum with a 1-second period.
They didn't like the pendulum, because it was based on a second, which they thought was just an arbitrary measurement. That would have made the meter 39.13 inches. That would also have been too easy... Anybody could have come up with that.
So, they decided on a measurement of the Earth. The trouble was that there wasn't enough land to measure the distance around the equator or from the equator to the north pole. They had more land north-to-south, so they chose that, and spent years surveying as far as they could through Europe and England, and then ESTIMATED what percentage of the full distance they had measured. They then divided that by 10000000 and defined a meter that was 39.37 inches. Wow! Years of government-paid work to come up with another quarter inch. And the best part is that they estimated wrong... So the meter is almost two millimeters short of what it should be. They might as well have just moved their hands apart about a yard and said, "This is a meter."
And, my absolute favorite part of the whole story is, the meter is now defined as 1/299,792,458 the distance light travels through a vacuum in one second. Yeah!!! We're back to the arbitrary second!!!
Ok... That's the meter. What about the other standard units? They defined the litre as a decimeter cube. And, they defined the kilogram as the mass of water in a litre. Yes, that's right... They defined the KILOgram. A gram, the quote-unquote standard unit of measure of mass, is correctly called a millikilogram.
As I see it there are several approaches to take:
Trivia:
- A Swedish mile according to the rules of 1665 was 10688.54 meters.
- A Swedish mile after 1889 is 10000 meters. (not much difference from earlier. (Most swedes use the mile distance today meaning 10km, sometimes to amuse or confuse the people that thinks the British distance.)
- Anders Celsius (English) used originally a reversed scale with 100 (positive value) representing the freezing point of water and zero for the boiling point. Later this was reversed to use the scale we know today.
- An inch as we know it is 25.4 mm except for the US survey inch that is 25.40005 mm. Other countries have had inches too with other sizes.
And finally - let it be known that it's much easier to market the products for export if they use the metric system. Don't mind the "Freedom2Measure" extremists, there will always be conservationists for whatever reason.And don't forget - standardization of measurements in our international world will decrease the risk of being ripped off.
From what I have seen, the metric is a standard in the US too, but it's just filed as an amendment to the other standards and not replacing anything.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
jaymz
As far as I'm concerned the SI units are taught in US school. In every science and math class from physics to algebra, there's a section dedicated SI units. Or at least it was that way when I went to high school. The problem with converting an entire country is convincing my grandfather that 100 ounces are 2.8 Kg which is also 2.830e3 grams.
while I am from a country where they primarily use SI system, I have no problem adapting to the mks/cgs/imperial units. The first lesson that one learns in any science class is to make sure that your units are consistent. If companies like Boeing/DHS are losing money, its not because they used inconsistent system of units, its because people are too lazy to check their units.
... ... guess no one will like it after all even 24 hrs are not enough to make up a day ...
... will keep everyone happy ...
It does take some time to appreciate the magnitude in different units, but it keeps your gray cells working.
If people are so crazy about the metric system, why not change the definition of minute, hrs,
so now you have 1 min = 100 sec, 1 hr = 100 min, 1 day = 10 hrs
On the second thought why don't we just change mks to read miles kg and second
Metric is already the official standard of measurement in the USA. While the Government lacks the influence to convert the general population, perhaps Wal-Mart can do it. After all, their products aren't made in any countries that _use_ Imperial measures. I'm sure they have solved the conversion problem and should share that information with Homeland Security.
But then again, Wal-Mart did fail with pushing the gold dollar coin. But for that to have succeeded, the Government needed to stop printing dollar bills. Once Wal-Mart completes their takeover of the Government (they can start with NASA and DHS, um, no need to involve Immigration or the FTC), perhaps coercion of the general population can be the success proponents of metric adoption hope it o be.
I, for one, welcome our new Retail Overloards . . .
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
The biggest reason is the number of syllables in the equivalent measurements: yard (1) = meter (2) foot (2) = well, meter I guess. inch (1) = centimeter (4) mile (1) = kilometer (4) pound (1) = kilo (2) or kilogram (3) It's pure LAZYNESS that is preventing the large mass of the population of converting.
Move sig!
The reason for not converting every roadsign etc to metric is simply cost... When I was on vacation in the states I was very suprised to see a roadsign with KM on it, in the middle of the desert (it made it much easier to judge the distant for me ofcourse). But when people are so used to the inches etc, it would take a generation before people are used to the metric system.. So when replacing roadsigns they'll propably also have to have the miles indication (just like on the speedometer, where it says miles (and in small print km)).. It's just not that easy to convert (such a big country) from miles to KM.. But I must say thay I really never understood the miles/inch thing, it's so much more difficult to work with than the metric system.. But then again, when at the gasstation you won't be scared so much of how much fuel actually goes into you big SUV hehe.. it looks like about 3 times less than when in Liters.. LOL.. (I'm driving a SUV myself..)
> [...] Staying with imperial measurements has only served to handicap American industry and economy. [...]
Imagine how much stronger the world's *biggest economy* would be, were it not so tragically "handicapped".
Cool it. Areas where it either makes sense to go metric or at least isn't a particularly bad idea, such as science, automobiles, and medicine, have already gone metric. For the others, metric is a yawner. Products can state their quantity in both systems (and most do). Highway signs and items for sale should stay as they are because that's what we're familar with. If Europeans come here, they can learn our system. And construction work should continue to use the English system because it's quite a bit better.
7 8_Egyptian_Researcher_Blinded_by_Science&only
The US hasn't gone metric for two reasons:
1. The metric system is rather stupid, dreamed up by French philosophers who'd probably never did an honest day's work in their lives. Building around 10 with conversions between units (i.e. meter to kilometers) isn't that useful in the real world. What is useful is have quantities that are easily divisible. That's why sensible, experience-based systems use 12, 16, 36 and 360 so much. They're easily divisible into quarters, thirds, halves etc. Powers of ten systems give you nasty results like 33.33333333333333.... cm for one third of a meter. Really, really dumb. It's a marvelous demonstration that experience is the best teacher, that people who think they're smart often aren't.
2. The US is far more democratic than Europe, including the UK, where the politicians crammed metric down the public's throat, fining store owners for even displaying English measurements. I like to think we'd never put up with that sort of behavior here, but given the lemming like behavior of some on Slashdot, I have my doubts.
When the choice is between having a stupid French system forced on us and a practical English system we all know and find helpful, I'm quite happy with telling the Europeans to take a hike. To tell the truth, I quite enjoy telling the French and the Germans to take a hike.
Besides, by the end of this century Europe is going to be filled with nutty Islamists who'll be waving nukes and demanding that we adopt THEIR system, derived from Sharia law and based on reasoning as convoluted as that used to justify metric. There's already a Dr. Abd Al-Baset Al-Sayyed of the Egyptian National Research Center calling for the world to adopt a system of time based on Mecca rather than Greenwich. You can read about it at the link below. It's quite funny. Born two centuries ago, this Dr. Al-Sayyed would've been a French philosopher. He has the same out-of-touch-with-reality way of thinking they had.
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=239
Metric or Sharia measurements, both are bad ideas made worse by those who want to cram them down our throats.
Ok, what that was supposed to say was:
The biggest reason is the number of syllables in the equivalent measurements:
yard (1) = meter (2)
foot (2) = well, meter I guess.
inch (1) = centimeter (4)
mile (1) = kilometer (4)
pound (1) = kilo (2) or kilogram (3)
It's pure LAZYNESS that is preventing the large mass of the population of converting.
For that matter, why the hell is HTML-formatting the default when posting comments on slashdot?
is it more common to have to make a bold or italicized statement, than plain-text with line breaks?
Move sig!
The problem with the metric system is that it is founded upon the evolutionary accident that the number of human digits is 10. If we really want a measuring system that is friendly to computers (and other extraterrestial lifeforms that we might encounter), then we should drop the baroque decimal systems and go to Base 2. But it is most likely that scientists will resist efforts to go to a more universal measuring system. In the meantime, those of use that work with computers have to constantly translate from decimal-to-binary and binary-to-decimal in order to get our jobs done.
Where it's easy, we use it, where it's a pain in the ass.. we still use the imperial system.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
My theory on why you can't change the general public of the U.S. to the metric system is football. That's American football with the helmet and pads. It's big over here. From the small towns to the big cities people are fans. Yards are so ingrained in the game, and so much money is at stake that they will not change it for fear of turning people off. It sounds stupid, but if there is a large change in terminology, there would be a large amount of resistance to it. I believe the non-sports fans (of which I am one of) are outnumbered by the sports fans.
For this to happen, the US will need a major addition of brains.
ok.. lets be real about this, the US economey engine is running strong (another one of bush's faults, damn him). So how exactly does not using the metric system hurt us? humm.. let me think... oh yeah, because when we export stuff we sell it by the foot/yard instead of by the meter.. wait.. how does that hurt us? Oh I know, it's because we sell stuff by the pound (not to be confused with the English Pound) and we don't sell stuff by the Kilo, unless it's something in a white brick for recreational use. humm.. how does selling stuff by the pound hurt us again? oh wait, we sell stuff by the gallon instead of the liter. That MUST be why we are at war in Iraq. Saddam wanted us to buy oil by the liter and not the gallon. silly kids, tricks are for kids.. Get over it their is nothing wrong with the US using the standard system for measurements.
Obama = Socialism.
I am not sure, but this is a maybe:
... don't invest in the future global market in the USA, because of the hostage customer (Stockholm syndrome) base of US citizens.
... everything.
... all based on economics in the USA.
... not the unit of measure standard used. How many of us have grabbed something in a hardware, electronics ... store (without reading the spec detail) and got home to find we made a small mistake in our selection.
GM, Ford, GE, GD
Then again they may see no reason for complicating their USA manufacturing processes further by more investing in something that means for about 10 to 20 years their operations in the USA would be using two different measure standards for R&D, E&D
Also, the USA Government does not require the most international common accepted standards (Open or any other) in most (maybe all) contracts as incentive to change.
I think USA business has many good valid reasons
Most customers/citizens only care about the features, functions, performance
We ain't ever had no reason to change?
!HAVEFUN!
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Deleted
Wouldn't that be confusing...when I know all I look at is the big ass number on the sign. If you started intermixing MpH and KmpH I think you're asking for trouble.
A US governor was heard oversaying: "It's unfair! They're miles ahead! We're just inching toward the goal." over a pint of lager.
It's a chicken/egg problem for me. I don't use metric in everyday situations because I don't have an intuitive feel for the units. But I don't have an intuitive feel for the units because I don't use them every day. But that would be naturally remedied if we just got on with it and converted.
And that would have probably happened back in the 70's when they pushed hard for it, except the people who made the "educational material" had no skill in convincing people it was a good idea. They made the metric system look like a giant pain in the ass. They would convert 3 feet to 91.44 centimeters, implying that somehow metric forces you to be that precise. Three feet is one meter in almost every non-technical circumstance you are likely to encounter. How often do you tell someone that the living room is 10 feet 8.97 inches long? You say ten-and-a-half feet.
I don't even think I'd have much of a problem with any part of the metric system except Celsius. I'd have to convert back to Fahrenheit for quite a while. I know that if it's 45F outside, I need a jacket. If you tell me it's 31C outside I have no idea what to wear until I convert it to 87F and go get some shorts.
yes, keep it, this way the US keep falling behind comparing with the rest of the world by increasing their costs and incompatibility problems... its a great way get their products being ignored all over the world...
all countries that have global influence tried to first enforce and later maintain their "way of living" despite everyone seeing that things have changed... this only helped the fall of their empires
check the history of the Romans, Arabs, Portuguese, Spanish, Holand, France, Austro-Hungarian, Japan, URSSS and UK
the long a "empire" tried to not adapt to the new global rules, the faster and/or more painful they fall
plain and simples, adapt or join all other "empires" and die
the rest of the world doesn't really care
Higuita
You'll need to replace a LOT of textbooks (maths problems will need to be posed in metric terms, same for science books, etc) and all of your measuring devices will need replacing with metric versions (throw out those yard sticks and replace them with metre rules).
Textbooks in the United States already use metric units, and have now for decades.
If the kids grow up learning metric terms, they'll see the benefits of simplicity, easier unit conversion, and so on.
Everybody in the United States under the age of forty grew up learning metric terms. Virtually nobody in the United States under the age of forty, unless such person has some specific technical reason for doing so, has any interest in using metric terms in day-to-day life.
It must be a legal requirement that wherever an amount is shown in Imperial, it must also be shown in metric.
This is already the case. A can of cola in the U.S. reads "12 fl. oz. (355 mL)". A bag of microwave popcorn states "1.5 oz. (42.5g)". A snack bar reads "1.59 oz (45g)". No consumer product is sold without both Imperial and metric measurements.
Then comes the tricky part: legislation. The resistance from the lazy public and business will be incredible - it'll be seen as one extra unnecessary expense - but it has to be done.
If the public doesn't want it, and business doesn't want it, then who exactly is supposed to benefit?
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
Rubbish, I'm British, aged 40, I use metric for more than I use imperial, I don't think I am alone. People my age and younger are generally conversant in moving between the two systems because of our half arsed mix in the UK. I think it would be fairer to say in the UK people generally move between the two informally, but work in metric in formal situations. Skinfitz: can you give us examples of scientific or engineering companies you know that do their work in imperial? I don't think this happens, small places might take on work in imperial measurements but I think they are few and far between these days.
Me and all my mates use metres,cm,mm etc for measurement, that's what the big shops in the UK all use for their stuff. Now your corner hardware store, yes they use imperial but we know the kind of cherished special places they are and the people that run them- they are not exactly the norm. But if I am going to get some plumbing piping or shelving I get out my metric tape measure and work out the maths in cm and mm.
Incidently I drive a 60s car so I have to move between Imperial and Whitworth inches!
Now someone makes a question (why?) and this is modded "insightful"? WTF?
> What use is it to change units for the general population? Is there a need to buy apples in Kg? Or gasoline in Liters? Medicine is specified in Mg. Engine displacement is shown in Liters. Should 2x4's be 50x100's?
The very question answers itself. It shows the need to change to the metric sytem so that an engineer (or engineering student, at least) come to understand the importance of units. Sorry to be that blunt, but man, this is almost scary.
> What use is it to change units for the general population?
So that the population can compare things correctly, because they will be in easily convertible units.
> Is there a need to buy apples in Kg?
How much weight can you carry? It's not simple to sum up things in different units. The very use of metric for engineering and other units for other things make difficult to figure if your car is over the maximum cargo.
> Or gasoline in Liters?
So that you can calculate gas consumption correctly and not confuse units, like some guys did in their plane and ended up without fuel in middair and having to glide a fscking Boeing to ground (which is a major feat nonetheless, but that's beside the point here). I will not link them here because they're already slashdotted (so to speak).
> Medicine is specified in Mg. Engine displacement is shown in Liters.
You can't compare those. You live in a such confusing world of many units, everybody forgets what is mass and what is volume.
At the bottom line, it's better to use a single unit system, be it metric or imperial.
The metric system is more coherent, because it was thought up. The imperial one is confusing, so it's not a great idea.
Do you put your hopes in making deals with Liberia and Myanmar?
If you want to trade with the world, better use the world's standard units and not "your fscking way".
Everytime I get news from your news agencies, facts come with "your way" imperial units and it's as useful as shit. Oh, wait, shit is more useful for agriculture; your imperial units are just a pain in the ass.
I haven't seen it mentioned, so I'll say it here. My work van has about 454 kg of tools in it. That a lot of crap that I would have to duplicate in metric if everything started showing up with metric bolts, nuts, and screws. I'll tell you right now that my van doesn't have space for that increased tool load. I'll also say that I regularly see equipment that is better than 40 years old. It's the back end that really makes it hard to switch to metric. Ask any auto mechanic. Every GM car out there has both metric and SAE bolts in it. It's a major pain in the butt to figure out what you are working on.
Rotating assemblies is where I would have the largest problem adapting. A standard 56 frame motor has a 5/8th inch shaft. That shaft mates to a fan section or pully where thousands of an inch count. So now if I crater a motor and the only thing I buy is a standard metric size, that means I get to replace the fan wheel as well. Now, can I find a fan wheel that has a metric shaft hole that still matches the dimension of the cage it rides in? Am I going to have to replace that fan cage as well? Is the new fan cage with slightly different dimensions going to move the correct amount of air? Am I going to have to adjust the TXV to account for the increased/decreased airflow?
This stuff snowballs really quick. Pretty soon it's a lot like having a hard drive crash. If you are doing the work yourself, it's cheaper to buy a hard drive and install it. If you are paying a tech to put it all back together for you, lots of times it's cheaper to buy a new machine.
Oh yeah, Paper. That is great... Last time i was in the US, I had to put a US sheet of paper (letter i guess? 9x11 Inches probably?) in an A4 (21x 29.7 cm or the 4 folding of an A0 sheet of paper if you prefer like that) envelope I carried from Italy.... and guess what, it doesn't fit, so I spent a couple of hours photocopying all the material I carried from italy in 9x11 format, and only then I was able to send my Ph.D. application. Guess application for what: Physics. Guys you can't want to rule the world and be completely outside of it!
...since no one *needs* (for example) to see kilometers on road signs to simply know how far to go, or Celsius to know how cold it is outside.
People who need metric in their work (like me) will use it, those who don't need it won't (and shouldn't) be forced to.
Same as always. "Metrication" pushes come... then go.
Let the market figure it out, that approach has worked perfectly well so far.
BWilde
I live in the UK and it's mostly metric now although there are few things which you need to be 'bi-lingual' in for older people. Like distances, your weight and height. There's confusion with drugs dealers too. Marajuana is sold in ounces always but coke in grams - same in America I believe.
Tubbs and Crockett always used to go about busting 'kees' which I always thought was very progressive and European.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
As soon as kids enter high school they'll start ordering pints instead of 40's
Engine sizes have been metric for years... people talk about the legandary "5.0" for example... only a few holdouts will call it a 302...
speed? do the canadian thing... put the US system 2/3rds larger or something w/the metric equiv beneath it... which all auto gauges do anyway...
people would think fuel were cheaper if it were 1.39$/litre instead of 3.00$/gallon... they'd see the 1.39$ and shit themselves... if your ig'nant enough to drive a hummer you probably won't notice...
distance... this trips people up the most... if they stopped teaching little kids the us system and had them use the metric system first.... by the time their old enough to start really caring all the signs will use both... and while we're at it lets teach thems spanish and mandarin as well...
when I was in elementary school we learned both systems... but it wasn't until high school that anybody followed up on that... chemistry & physics were probably the first time the metric system was touched upon... and between those times everything had been related to me in miles/gallons/lbs... so the metric bit had fallen out of use...
I use the metric system now when I know I'm going to have to do some kind of conversion... but then again I've been converting mpg-->knots for years so I'm used to it.
I'm pissed that I need two sets of tools though.
follow the leader. "Oh the rest of the world is using it, so should we" blah blah blah. The military uses it: Fine, good for them. Some scientists used it: Let them, it's part of their job to decide upon a measurement system at the beginning of their project time. The general public does NOT need it: We've used Imperial measurement for years and it's suited us just fine. Why even waste our time and energy?
If you were offended by anything I said... No, I'm not sorry. Please lighten up.
Think I'm wrong? Go measure one, and get back to me.
Of course America is converting to the Metric system - we're just doing it inch by inch...
"Straddling the sword of technology..."
Furthermore, there is nothing nice about the sizes of metric units. Nice units are ones that eliminate pointless numeric constants. Using natural units, e=mc^2 becomes e=m. Using natural units, the ideal gas law loses the R constant. Isn't that way better?
Metric is nothing special. For example, the meter is based on an erroneous measurement across France. This bad measurement was used to estimate the size of the Earth so that the meter could be claimed to have a tie to the size of the Earth. (which isn't unchanging anyway, even if it were perfectly round!) We might as well use a foot defined as the distance traveled by light in a particular amount of time, with that time amount chosen so that a foot just happens to match King George's foot.
Base 10 isn't special either. Binary is special, and trivially convertable to the more-compact hexadecimal.
"How can we convert everyone to X"? The /. masses condemn these sorts of questions when X = religion, but when X = the metric system we're OK with it?
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
Two sets of standards is economically inefficient and introduces conversion error. NASA famously missed hitting a planet due to conversion error. Not exactly getting on fine.
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I also can move back and forth pretty easily, but most Americans cannot. The difference between those who can and those who cannot, seems to be that those who cannot see an inch as something that just exists in the world. If you asked them why an inch is as long as it is, they would tell you that it's because that is how long an inch is. Those who can switch tend to understand that an inch is as long as it is because a bunch of people got together and decided to make a word that defined that particular length. Now if your view of the world is that the units and names of lengths are just a made up system that we all agreed to use, you are probably more willing to switch to a different system than someone who sees their measurement system as the "natural" way to do things.
There are nearly 2 F degrees for every C degree.
Adding a decimal place is irritating.
Nope, irrelevant. I live in a 1729 built house in Buckinghamshire (ironically, quite near Milton Keynes, that English attempt at a 60s new town). I used to live in East London in a 19th century redbrick terraced house. Let me tell you, no standard measurements in either. I fitted the entire kitchen in the London house and there wasn't a 90 degree angle in any of the walls, or a length in exact feet in any direction, mm just as useful as inches. Same in the current 1729 house.
Maybe reasonably modern mass produced houses (1900 - 1970, say) might have standard imperial measurements, but in the UK I'd say a lot of our housing stock is *too* old to have standardised fittings. I'd say standardised imperial measured houses are probably a blip...
Should aviation convert, too?
In much of the world, altitudes are assigned in (thousands of) feet, and airspeeds are measured in knots (nautical miles per hour). How many accidents would metrication cause?
There are two things about the metric system that I find are highly overrated.
#1 is the Celsius scale for temperature - 100C is the temperature at which the vapor pressure of water is 101.6kp - would make more sense to express temp in K or better yet, electron volts.
#2 is fixing the gram to be one cc of water at God knows what temperature and pressure - for almost all cases, I'm going to look up the density in a table and it really isn't that much different in dealing with lbm/cu.ft versus tonnes/m^3.
The comment about pipe sizes is a good one - transferring to metric will be a very long process.
When I see arguments against the Metric system it's reminds me so much of people arguing why Windows is better than Linux (or anything open source), the argument is about apples and oranges. Linux isn't Windows and Metric isn't Imperial. Sure Metric and Imperial are measurement systems but you can't complain one inch and one centimeter are different, of course they are!
What's easier to remember, there are 1,000 meters in a kilometer or 5,280 feet in a mile?
A cube-shaped box 10 cm on a side is 1 L.
If the box is 100 cm on a side, 10 times as much, it should be 10 L. Oops...
BTW, do you know the time in kiloseconds? Why not?
I've reading all the threads defending Imperial units but the US doesn't use them. Imperial units are so called because they were the units used by the Empire! The British Empire. This means 20 floz to the pint, 16lbs to the stone, 112lbs to the hundred weight (cwt), 2240lbs to the ton, etc...
The US uses their own bastardisation of the units.
True about the military. And for a bit of trivia bonus, the short name they use for "kilometers" is "clicks", as in "The landing zone is about 3 clicks north of here".
First time I have heard the expression "American Units" - can any US readers clarify what you generally call this measuring system (inches, miles, pounds, etc) over there?
I've heard USians call them "English" and over here in the UK we call such a system "Imperial" - though I know there are differences - our gallon is different to yours, you use "cups" for cooking while if using imperial we'd use ounces (that one confuses me a lot, we have lots of different sized cups in the kitchen for drinking out of!).
I suppose it's kind of more honest to call the system "American Units" as its what you guys use... (USA not = all of America is another discussion) - what is the feet and inches system called generally (or legally)?
but I don't use it as a rule. ~Redd Foxx
I live in the USA.
The USA also uses imperial system for everyday things. And, like other countries, we use the metric system for science and engineering.
The US uses Queen Anne gallons. This is what Britian used to use. There was no real reason for Britian to change, but I guess the King wanted bigger jugs...
The group linked in the /. article makes the suggestion that the computer binary system is related to the English system of units. I think it is time for /.ers to let this group know what's up and that the binary system has nothing to do with the English unit of measure. The claim i am referring to is made under the paragraph titled "The base 10 myth". I suggest every /.er worth their weight in binary code to shoot the group an e-mail to dispell the myth they are spreading.
We also use imperial for everyday.
But, what many here don't seem to realize: we also use metric for science and engineering.
Also, we are taught the metric system in school.
Why not be smart and front a understandble system, that doesn't measure thermal activity ind the reciprocal of the derivative of the quantum states times with respect to the energy times a constant that makes it "work out", or distances in rations of 299,792,458 times a second light speed travel?
What about natural units, c=1, and fundamental temperature? Let's get scientific.
The fact is, there's nothing stopping anyone from personally using the metric system in America. If you want to use metric to discuss issues with scientists from Europe, the most you might have to do is a bit of conversion--and there are many online sites available that'll readily swap one for the other if you don't feel like crunching the data yourself. Virtually all modern cars display their speeds in km/h as well as mph (even if mph is the preferred method), and many scales can be set to display kilos, rather than lbs. From an individual perspective, society has made a personal metric conversion completely possible. As for America as a whole... I don't see that it matters. Every nation has specific societal quirks that make it unique, from the relatively small (the uniqueness of Aussie slang, for example), to the relatively large (British countries and former colonies drive on what we consider the "wrong" side of the road). In America, soda from a fountain is always served with ice. In Germany and many other European countries, it isn't. We could argue all day that one is "better" than the other, but such differences are simply a part of culture in specific areas. Sometimes, yes, culture gets in the way of doing what's scientifically smart or optimal. That, in and of itself, however, does not mean culture should automatically give way to science. Using the old Imperial standard of measurement rarely hurts anyone, and metric conversion is readily available. As far as I'm concerned, keep the inches rolling.
Use both for a while, but understand we may never be completely rid of the imperial system. Both systems will be with us for some time.
For example, gas stations could advertise the cost of gas (petrol) in both gallons and liters. Speedometers could give speed in both mph and kph. And speed signs could use both mph and kph. And do the same with other everyday things.
Eventually, we steer away from the imperial system, on post speed limits in kph and so on.
How Can We Convert the US to the Metric System? is like asking "How can we convert France to speaking English?" It would sure be convenient if everyone grew up speaking only English, but that's hardly going to convince the French or the Germans or the Chinese or.... "But people often have to learn English to participate in international life!" True...and lots of Americans learn the metric system for the same reason. Americans are actually rather "bilingual" with their units: we have gallons of milk and liters of soda, ounces of meat and milligrams of vitamins, 100-yard football fields and 100-m dashes.
Seeing Imperial units die out in the U.S. would be as sad as watching Welsh die out in Wales. (Knowing the sorts of people here, I imagine many of you wouldn't give a damn about either.)
Failure to give whole-hearted and unwavering support for the absolute superiority of metric makes you a troll.
Born and raised in Canada, which of course is a completely converted Metric Nation, I was taught the metric system in school since I was 3' tall. Now that I'm 6'1", I wonder why I feel the need to describe small distance and weights in the old imperial way that wasn't around in my country for my entire life. My drivers license tells me I am 185cm tall, but if someone were to ask me how tall I am, I would still tell them in feet and inches. I still see myself as 170lbs and not 77Kg. When I'm talking about how far I have to drive or how well my car is on fuel it is always in kilometers. When it comes to volumes I only think in Liters and milliliters. I think the problem being, with me anyway and probably most people, is that their parents, still half stuck in the Imperial era, have unknowingly pushed it upon their children. My father, being in residential construction and of the "old school", would still measure things in feet and inches. I helped him in many a projects growing up and I found telling him a measurement in metric confused the heck out of him so it was imperial all the way. I found myself saying 2.5 inches, which in my head meant 2 1/2 inches but really doesn't work the same if you're not thinking about it as a half. In school it made complete sense and does in everyday life. My problem being is that I can't seem to get over the weight and short distance problem. When I get my hair cut I still say I want it about and inch and a half. When I lift weights I still say I can lift 200lbs. I still tell my height and weight in the old imperial. This has all made me think that maybe I should make a mental note to curve my parents influence so as not to inflict the same damage on the future generation.
As far as the country and government are concerned, Canada is completely metric. You wont find any lingering signs with miles or inches on them, the grocery stores will still have the lbs in fine print to help out the 'old school' but that is the final residue of a country gone completely metric. As for me, I need to work on it still. The metric system makes so much sense in calculations and is all based on water which we can all relate to. Why shouldn't water freeze at 0 and boil at 100 degrees C? It make sense, it's just beating the aftermath of change that is the biggest problem.
I read the other day that the Moon missions NASA is undertaking will use Metric, mainly due to the potential of interaction with International Partners. I think this is a good thing, especially seeing how the Mars Climate Orbiter was lost due to a metric/american mismatch in units.
We should remove the state from deciding what units people are and aren't allowed to use. Yeah, I know, metric is better for calculations ... I use it myself ... but you show an ugly, geekish side to yourself when you decide to force people who have used another system for generations to stop doing so: tradition is more important than you think; without a feeling of contiguity with the past, we stop taking the lessons of history seriously. Without that, we don't even have a civilization any more.
Let the market decide which system is better in which situation. What to teach in government schools? Let the parents decide on a district by district basis - like I said, it souldn't be a state decision. Signs on government roads? Keep 'em as they are until the demand for change from the private sector becomes irresistable.
Never get a government to decide such things.
'I arst you civil enough, didn't I?' said the old man, straightening his shoulders pugnaciously. 'You telling me you ain't got a pint mug in the 'ole bleeding boozer?'
'And what in hell's name IS a pint?' said the barman, leaning forward with the tips of his fingers on the counter.
''Ark at 'im! Calls 'isself a barman and don't know what a pint is! Why, a pint's the 'alf of a quart, and there's four quarts to the gallon. 'Ave to teach you the A, B, C next.'
'Never heard of 'em,' said the barman shortly. 'Litre and half litre--that's all we serve. There's the glasses on the shelf in front of you.'
And if you are ever stumped, the nice people at Google have enabled you to enter a query like "55 mph in km/h" and get an answer right away.
I can assure you, the best way to get rid of dragons is to have one of your own.
Scientists Alread Use Metric, as do many engineers.
The US uses the Queen Anne gallon. Queen Anne was a woman.
As a PSA (for those who haven't discovered this wonder): If you'd rather not get out a pencil and paper and look up conversions of measurements, you can simply type "[some measurement of some unit] in [some other unit]" into Google, it should give you a boldface conversion at the top of the search results page, along with all of the normal search results. For example you could type: "10 kilometers in miles", and it would tell you "10 kilometers = 6.21371192 miles". You can also use the syntax "convert [this] to [that]" if you please.
More details/features here, but I assume a good portion of slashdotters already know about this feature.
I work for a scientific company, everyone uses metric measurement for their scientific work (as does everyone else in the world, no matter what country they're in). Oddly enough, the measure of the speed that our scientists drive to work or the temperature outside have failed to have any impact on the science they accomplish inside the building.
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
Or ask a jarhead the distance to an object and you'll get the answer in clicks (kilometers).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication
In the United States its use was made legal as a system of measurement in 1866 and the United States was a founding member of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in 1875. The system was officially adopted by the federal government in 1975 for use in the military and government agencies. In 1985, the metric system was made the preferred (but predominantly voluntary) system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce (see Metrication in the United States). It has remained voluntary for federal and state road signage to use metric units, despite attempts in the 1990s to make it a requirement. A 1992 amendment to the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act, which took effect in 1994, required labels on "consumer commodities" to include both metric and U.S. customary units. Most states have passed laws permitting metric-only labels. Regardless, the American public and much of the private business and industry use U.S. customary units. One state, Kentucky, has even moved towards demetrication of highway construction projects.
Canada did it. It wasn't easy, probably expensive. But the way I remember it was they all switched one day to have 100km/hr in the center and 60 mph in smaller text below. Soon after, the 60 mph was gone.
Now the thing about Canada is that it has a lot of roads and a lot of signs. While United States is slightly smaller and has more roads, they really don't use a lot of signs. At least where I've been, most interstate highways only have a speed sign whenever the speed changes. Distances to towns aren't known until you're there. Contrast this to where I'm from there's a distance signs are everywhere and close enough together to make you impatient, speed signs after every major intersection (and immediately before every speed trap).
It can be done. It's not cheap, but bite the bullet. When you're done, calculating how long it will take to drive 525 kms at 100km/h is easier than 315 miles at 60mph.
--
Oz
Hmmm. How about 'Simpsons individual stringettes. Absorb water today!'
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
I personally don't know any US scientist that isn't fluent in metric, and very few that don't default to it when doing science. NASA might have some issues, but I think that's isolated...
IS a country with leadership that can and will take the time to focus on DOMESTIC issues. As for how this one stacks against the rest, it's a low priority. Not that it shouldn't be addressed -- it's one of my pet peeves. However, you can't address ANY domestic issues when all your money, mental energy, time and focus is going into a war in a far-off land. Look how much domestically has been addressed since 9/11 -- change to prescription drugs in Medicare and widely considered a debacle.
Americans will never submit to a foreign ruler!
Wow, if this is what is feels like to have a handicapped industry and economy then I would think the rest of the world would WANT the US to stay in it's backwater ways. Be careful what you ask for, you might get it.
"All those moments, will be lost in time...like tears in rain..."
I am sure in time, the politicians and the lawyers will find a way to read this out of the law like they did with all the other amendments, and then this barrier will be gone.
The people who tend to oppose this type thing are the same who have trouble with math in the first place. Do we really need people incompetent in math and science making decisions for the rest of us? That's why liers and CEO's should be allowed to run for public office.
Someone hates these cans.
I've never heard it referred to as anything except for "Imperial" except for on that stupid website, and I know people all over the US.
Remember, open source is free as in speech, not free as in bear.
Could an American help me here:
I have a piece of wood that's 5 feet 7-3/4in by 2 feet 2-5/16in, what is the surface please?
Many thx in advance
A proud metric user
I've always heard Imperial measurement. Isn't vehicular speed still measured as miles per hour in England? Oh, 1 cup = 8 fluid ounces.
There is an interesting point made in the article about time:
... Time. Nowhere
> There is a simple piece of empirical evidence that points to the fact that
> the entire world can handle units that are not in base ten
> are there 100 seconds in a minute, 100 minutes in an hour and 10 hours in a
> day etc. And yet the world manages to tell time and to calculate time-related problems.
This is correct, but everybody who had to make calculations and program I/O involving time knows what a PITA it is.
More tellingly, basically all the early groundbreaking work on computers and electronics (or, rather more accurate, that which had a large influence on later designs) was done in the US.
Outside of computers and electronics, sub-second time units and measurements have hardly any significance, so they were not in common use before the second half of the 20th century.
Yet, there is (and, to my knowledge, has never been widely used) no such unit as "1/60th of a second".
Subsecond units are metric - ms, ns, ps.
Even in electromechanical engineering, there is hardly any use of "1/12" inch - the prevalent unit is a "mil" which is 1/1000th of an inch.
The most important electromechanical constant of measure that the large group of EEs that is now about to lose their hair had to learn was 1/10th of an inch (100mils) - the spacing of connectors and DIP-Packages before SMD-technology became prevalent.
According to the theory that fractions are easier, it should have been 1/8, 1/12th, or 3/32th of an inch.
So this shows that, whereever given the chance of a fresh start, even american engineers, grown up with and proficient in using the "imperial system" of using multples of 3 and 4, abandoned it - even in computers, where at least 1/2**n would have made a tiniest bit of sense.
We just call it measurement. ;)
I won't use the term 'Imperial' because it's completely inaccurate, as well as misleading. The traditional system of measurement in the US is a sibling to the 'Imperial' system in the UK, but it's not the same thing. A UK pint is considerably more than a US pint, for instance, a fact which is very convenient when one is fortunate enough to be drinking your Guinness by the former.
I don't like to call SI 'metric' either since that is also inaccurate and misleading. Any unit of measure is a metric. All three systems, traditional US, 'Imperial', and SI are metric systems. Unfortunately, the SI is actually a subset of another metric system, which doesn't seem to have any other proper name available, but probably *should* be called 'Imperial' as it was spread by the French Empire. But I digress...
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Living in the UK and being brought up with both metric and imperial systems, I find that both systems have merit.
imperial for approximation and metric for accuracy.
it all depends on what you need to know.
if you need a rough idea then imperial is great a foot for example is about the size of a typical male foot and a yard about an arms length. temperature is much easier to gauge in imperial 60 is about as cool as i like it 70 is warm and 80 I am sweating already. I couldnt tell you the equivilent metric values I do know that water boils at 100 and freezes at 0, 0 being the important one since it tends to mean ice on the road.
problem with inches is with fractions sometimes its 10ths of an inch sometimes 16ths, 12ths fractions are pretty easy to guestimate half quarter eighth.
precision and converting units metric is easier ideal for precision engineering.
raw materials are best selected using imperial.
However there are some problems with metric its not an easy fit for computers soon as that decimal point gets used accuracy is shot to pieces. imperial fractions fit right into the binary system.
it's purpose that determine the suitablity of the units pints, and pounds are ideal for food when you don't need scientific accuracy for example.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
That was one of the funniest posts ever.
When I lived in the US I learned to quickly convert Fahrenheit to Celcius in my head so I could understand the temperature. It was annoying but after a few weeks it was automatic.
The problem with metric (and counting for that matter) is this silly fetish people have with using 10 as a base. I'm sure it has something to do with a diest philosophy that since we have 10 fingers, that's the way it should be. Any sensible person knows that we should be using base 12 for counting.
Whereas base 10 only has 4 factors (1, 2, 5, & 10), base 12 has 6 (1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 12). This makes it much better for use in commerce. It's pretty easy to cut a pizza into twelfths, try cutting one into tenths.
Now I hear everyone scream about having to learn to multiply by 12 and how everything is already in base 10 and it would be hard to change. I say that staying with this outdated system is not an option!
What we need is a law now to outlaw the use of the base 10 system throughout the world to force everyone out of there complacent, counting-on-fingers mindset and to the more versatile dozen system!
you want people to use metric, educate and encourage them to do so; trying to force people to use it via government power is both lazy and fascistic.
we studied the metric system in elementary school, know how to convert units, have a reasonable idea of how long a meter is, etc. - we JUST DON'T CARE.
get a REAL problem
Hah - I didn't know that US pints were different to British pints.
Then again, we weren't even taught conversion to non-metric units in school here in Ireland; we only learnt metric units. That's despite the fact that our metrication only properly finished with our conversion to km/h for speed limits a year or two ago (prior to that we had km for distance, and mph for speed, with no units on speed limit signs!)
Anyways - we still have pints here in Ireland, good old 568ml beer glasses rather than the continental 500ml. Although I believe the glasses used in Germany are the same ones we have in Ireland - because the head of the beer does not count in the measurement there, but does here in Ireland.
I don't know why soft drinks cans are 330ml though.
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
Wherever mountains, rivers, and lakes don't get in the way, every road is on a 1 mile square grid in the western US.
I am in favor of using metric for all science and engineering measurements, but leave our road signs alone please.
It gets tiring when I have to hear it drummed in over and again how wonderful the metric system is, and how it will improve our lives. It's just a measurement system! It makes no sense for us to switch everything for the sake of conformity, when there is nothing to gain.
Besides which, I don't own a yardstick (and I own some old ones!) that don't also have a metric measure on one side. Old mom and pop hardware store yardsticks (one went out of business 35 years ago) are included.
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
yeah, cars drive in miles per hour here still, we're a right bastard nation! as with most things to do with the EU, the UK has dug its heels in and is slowest to change. There's a big old fuss a year ago when the law changed so all shops (including small market traders) had to sell things in kilos and grams instead of pounds and ounces. A few people fussed, most traders just put both measures and the whole thing seems to have blown over. I reckon people will have moved over in twenty years or so. The change over to decimal money in 1971 was the same, people fussed but got used to it.
:-)
I think we'll gradually move over to kilometres per hour, probably have a period of dual signs or something daft and then go over. It's funny how some things have changed and others haven't. Most people can informally move between both systems with enough accuracy to get by.
Cheers for cup measurement, I gave up after screwing up some recipes by guessing which cup I should use and got a measuring jug which does cups, fluid ounces and ml, hehe
Sure there are benefits, but you've got a fine point -- is it worth the costs? What would metric advocates say to standardizing the world on the English language?
I am so sick and tired of these articles that pop up every now and then about how superior the metric system is and how we should force all public transactions into using SI units. This is probably the main reason why we in the United States still get annoyed by the French even thought they have long since ceased to be relevant to our lives.
First of all, the only people that care about SI units are people that believe they would die without a perfectly base 10 set of units. Unfortunately for them, the SI system will never be perfectly base 10, because it includes time measurements, which will always be based upon cosmological phenomena (at least until such time as Sol 3 ceases to be the center of the universe for most sentient beings, from our perspective, anyway).
The "Imperial" or "US Customary" units, what ever you like to call the traditional measurement system of your choice (personally, I like the Japanese Tatami system), was generally conceived to have measurements that are in some way related to the scale of the human body. The so-called "metric" system is based on a completely arbitrary division (1/10 000 000) of the distance from the equator to the north pole, as measured through Paris, France. This works out to a unit of measurement that is in no way related to human experience. Yes, I know the SI units are now based upon another arbitrary standard, but the point remains.
And in any case, all American Standard units are defined in terms of SI units, and have been for a long time. The United States is officially a metric country, much to the dismay of anyone who actually bothers to think about why a foot is a foot and a pound is a pound without having a kneejerk reaction about the arithmetic.
You are not racing the with the sheriff's horse right now because the international standard is metric units. Is really hard change your daily measurement units. It's HARD. When I moved to US I found no decimal relation between foot, yard, mile, that drove me crazy for a few months. While in metric you have a decimal relation between mm, cm, m, km, etc. in weight, length and volume. Is it easiest ? maybe, but the change would be really hard for all of you. About DPI, points in fonts, etc.. US made the standard because they are pioneers on technology and seems something difficult to change. I really don't imagine a font of 0.07 cm. Some things should change... somethings should not.
I see your logic ... The English system must be based on binary since 12 is a power of 2 :-)
330ml is 12 ounces of soft drink, that's the standard sized can in the US/Canada
pretty funny to me anyway
I honestly don't see the problem. If someone wants to use an inferior, of for that sake superior, measuring system - more power to them. It's not like it affects the quality of life.
:-)
;-) (ducks!)
:-)
/4 pints / 8 pints .. then if you order that in half litres when you're in France/ Germany/most of Europe you're in the same sort of territory of being able to walk/needing a taxi/needing a really big greasy take away..
no way, our pints are bigger than your pints? no wonder it's hard to get pished in the USA. Maybe cos your beer's weak as well
hehe I seem to remember the standard bar measurement for a beer in the US is "a beer" or "a bottle" generally
well a pint is sort of half a litre. I think us humans are comfortable with generalisations. I know that's *incredibly* inexact (more like 0.55 litres) but ya know, if your idea of a good night out is 2 pints
I think that's fine, as long as the doctors are precise when measuring out 50ml of some chemical so put in to a sick person or an engineer is using exact mm when building a component etc...
Yes, it's important that we use convenient, rational calibration standards, such as 1.0E-7 times the distance from the equator to the North Pole along the prime meridian. Or a couple of scratch marks on a platinum bar.
Yeah, a US pint is only 473 millilitres. That's 16 US fluid ounces, and again our fluid ounces (and gills) are slightly different as well.
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I propose we redefine the standard unit of measurement as the distance travelled by light in 1/1 000 000 000 th of an SI second.
That would make the new standard approximately 11.80 US customary inches long.
Maybe then we can all get on with our lives.
Why, oh why can't we become the economic powerhouse of France? Is it because of the lowly inch?
"Likewise, if I need to estimate the length of the room and I don't have a measuring device, do you know how I do it? I walk, one foot in front of the other, and see how many steps it takes. My feet are each just about 1 foot long, and it works pretty reliably."
Likewise, if I need to estimate the length of the room and I don't have a measuring device, do you know how I do it? I walk, one foot in front of the other, and see how many steps it takes. My feet are each just about a third of a meter long, and it works pretty reliably.
RTFM; please, I beg you.
Start with schools. Provide more time using the metric system than the English system from prekindergarten on up.
Encourage children to measure themselves in cm or even mm instead of or in addition to inches. Encourage them to weigh themselves using kg. Yeah I know kg isn't a unit of weight but at any given spot on earth it's proportional to Newtons.
Change things kids buy like soft drinks. Sell 1/3-liter drinks instead of 12 ounce bottles. Yeah 1/3 isn't very "metric"-y but kids will go for it.
Change the chip and candy bar labels to show grams more prominently than ounces.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
After reading many of the comments now my 50ct. I use all metrics (I'm in Germany). In some cases I prefer the Imperial System, displays for example. I'd always prefer a 24" screen over anything sold in centimeters. And I couldn't possibly tell how large a 24" screen is in cms. I have a fairly good idea how much 24" for a screen are though. So I guess it's always dependent on what you're used to. And don't tell me the Celsius thing is not useful. It's fairly convenient when telling how cold it is outside. You'd be warned if it is under 0 degrees, it's freezing. Otherwise I really don't care what you Americans are using. Blow up your rockets and whatever else as long as you don't hit me.
I am a little bit confused as an European and a longtime lover of the SI Units I have to mention that
* The Unit for temperature is kelvin not celsius
* The Unit for speed is m/s not km/h when m/s is not sufficient is is common to use km/s or mm/s but never km/h (that's only on traffic signs)
Just call it the British system, since they use it there. Our Great Unwashed is nuts about the Brits -- Fergie and all that -- ohmygod Posh and Beck are coming to the USA! -- and we'll think we're being hip and supporting all that's right and proper.
Just don't call it the French system, OK? Or the world system. We go for British prejudices too.
it's simple - just start using the metric system. Most programs and applications can be changed to use metric units, and convertors are everywhere. Metric is in common usage by anyone that's doing anything important, or anyone that has to deal with other countries in science and trade. So.. just do it. Screw your government and the luddites. It is you that run your country.
Or.. you could move to canada.. nothing like 355ml of good beer (i'm not even going to tell you what that is in ounces... because i don't know).
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Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.
First, metric is easy, a first grader can easily understand it. In fact, many first graders do. Some schools teach metric, not that imperial c###. Hey, we don't have an emperor, why should we enshrine an imperial system?
To those who say that the measurements are too large/small. Only if you don't understand them. Once you've got the hang of it, it's actually very easy to estimate in metric. (I estimate in metric, and then run the conversion math to stupid, err, imperial all the time.) I've seen some complaints about celsius being so much larger than farenheit. Well, lets put it this way, the farenheit degree is Smaller than the 'Just Noticable Difference' of temperature for humans, so it doesn't bloody well matter if it's a degree or two off, you'll never know without a thermometer. (And probably a digital readout on that too...)
But there's a lot of resistance to change, especially when going from something obtuse to simple. (It must be some bizzare function of human nature or something.) The only real way to do it is to mandate it. Put up laws that set all government, military, scientific, and commercial activities to use metric. Start teaching metric in all schools. And finally, make available for free, one the web, dead tree format, etc, the training and conversion information for the public.
I know that sounds kinda mean to the old stick-in-the-muds, but the only other way that doesn't end up with us being taken over by another country and forced to convert is to teach it in all schools and wait for the old people to die off. Kinda like communism in the Soviet Union. Of course, this assumes that our self-evicerasion in the trade market doesn't cause our downfall first.
How many rods to the chain? Chains to a mile, inches to a mile, gallons in an acre (yes, that is a water measurement), what the heck is an acre (yes, the area measurement this time), how many ounces to the ton? Which freaking ton? How many yards to the mile? How about a furlong? Don't forget the Fathom, whatever that is. And how the frack fast is a knot supposed to be? Leagues anyone? How many ounces is that? Did you mean weight or liquid? It just goes on and on...
How about I choose what unit of measurement to use, instead of the government?
A so called two by four, is more like 1.5 by 3.5 inches.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
The problem with the metric system is that it is based on 10, but should be based on a more divisable base such as 12. 12 is divisable by 2, 3, 4, and 6. 60 is another good alternative because it is divisable by 2,3,4,5 and 6. This makes dealing with fractions much easier. 30 is yet another good choice for a base, although it has a problem with 4.
Table-ized A.I.
As with many of the world's problems. This is seemingly strictly a logical and technical problem. In fact, the solution is financial. If you want the US to switch to metric, then a financial power greater than the US will need to emerge. US can switch, if they have to. But we're talking about a lot of communication headaches. So they won't do it unless if they have to.
"I get four rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it!"
This space for rent.
it has nothing to do with science, it is just a cultural matter (or problem) whenever usa folk's realise that they're just equal as every one else and not superior and that world is shrinking (virtually) they may solve that and a lot of other "issues" they have.
But isn't a metre the distance from your nose to your fingertip? :) (Roughly, at any rate. As good as any imperial measure.)
It'll improve once there's a generation that grows up with things mainly in metric. (The transition to metric at the supermarket and selling petrol in litres instead of gallons happend within living memory there, whereas here in New Zealand, it was before the living memory of this 28 year old. Thus, there's a generation of us that grew up with metric as our main system - translating occasionally but only when actually necessary.)
A few minutes ago you were at +4 interesting; now at 0 troll.
Too bad, because the point about fractions & 1/3 of an hour or a yard is a very important one.
by force.
Over the past century the US has developed into a country that sees itself as the ultimate in all aspects of living, "There's no way like the American way", and no attempts at convincing through reasoning, no matter how valid, are going to change that.
It is not in the overall culture of America to look at the world, notice that 99% of everyone else is using a common measuring system and think "Gee, maybe we should used the same system as well for efficiency, consistency and economic reasons". It is hubris on a grand scale and the only real discussion anyone should be having is: How is this going to affect America's competitiveness in the future? Will American graduates be disadvantaged in the non-scientific global economy?
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Claus
How are 0 and 100 defined by entirely arbitrary values better than 0 and 100 defined by freezing and boiling? If you had any experience with Celsius, you'd know it happens to be exactly the scale needed for day to day use:
above 40 - about as hot as it can be
30 to 40 - wear shorts
20 to 30 - nice temperature
10 to 20 - you need a jacket
0 to 10 - you need a sweater under the jacket
below 0 - doh, it's freezing (literally)
with some variations, of course, allowing for the different tolerance people have for temperature. But the numbers happen to fit quite nicely the words one has for temperature, 0 = freezing, 10 = cold, 20 = nice, 30 = warm, 40 = hot.
maybe the US schools can teach the metric system right after evolution class, and showing the Gore climate change documentary.
-- bartman
This is a social problem. If you don't like what society is doing, then set a better example.
I absolutely despise the idea of using force. That doesn't solve problems, it creates them.
I've always found the imperial system to be its own reward/punishment anyway. Every time I screw up a recipe because I can't remember whether a cup is 8 or 16 ounces, that's just another incentive to modernize.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
America would feel less american with the metric system. It would be yet one more of these countries that uses boring little metric system where everything multiplies by multiples of ten. Booooooring!
You just got troll'd!
I am usually just a lurker on here, but I finally signed up to post because this made me think of a humorous song by a "band" (a guy actually) Atom and his package. Song is called. "(Lord, It's Hard To Be Happy When You're Not) Using The Metric System"
Lyrics as according to one of the many lyrics sites (don't feel like validating them)
12 inches per foot two pints per quart why don't we make it easy? The English system of measurement must relate to history. We can use units of 10 and convert with ease like all the other countries. I am in command yes I am taking a stand from this disease we must be free. good god! You're drunk with your tradition that has no validity well I'm intoxicated with sports in metrics come drink a deciliter with me we want metrics we want it now we know we can win I weigh 170 pounds that's 90 kilograms see metrics can even make you thin all cool things are in metrics for example here's just one I've got my 9 well that's 9 millimeters, sounds cooler than my point two seventy inches gun. The president will not exist and they will call me communist and call me scum but its worth it Canadians will think we are smart or at least they will think we are not as dumb. your tradition that has no validity well I'm intoxicated with sports in metrics come drink a deciliter with me we want metrics we want it now we know we can win I weigh 170 pounds that's 90 kilograms see metrics can even make you thin the revolution is here we must overcome at last as we symbolically stick their fucking foot up their fucking ass guitar! Your tradition that has no validity well I'm intoxicated with sports in metrics come drink a deciliter with me we want metrics we want it now we know we can win I weigh 170 pounds that's 90 kilograms see metrics can even make me thin
That should give you nerds a laugh. This song is about 10 years old too.
> Staying with imperial measurements has only served to handicap American industry and economy.
How the hell has staying with imperial measurements has only served to handicap American industry and economy? Did you just pull this "fact" out of your ass?
It ain't hard to convert between the two. Somehow, I think our industry is sufficiently good at chasing dollars to not be impeded by the English system of measurement.
I think that outsourcing of all technology and manufacturing has done far more to hurt the U.S. economy. Does America even make anything anymore? Sarcastic answers not required.
I don't know why people (even americans) think the US doesn't use the metric system. I first learned about it in 2nd grade. I still remember how it works. I haven't forgotten.
Maybe we'll have a real issue when european scientists come to the US and have to drive around and it will seem to them as they are driving more slowly beaucse they can't match the mph with the clearly labelled gauge, but I think we are safe for now on that issue.
When I visit canada, I have no problem converting metric to imperial. how many liters of gas are the same as a US gallon? how much value is my canadian dollar in us dollars? what is the temperature when converting canadian temp units to us temp units? how long does it take to drive to the border, converting a canadian hour to a US hour?
"...had to sell things in kilos and grams instead of pounds and ounces."
I think that would be a problem too. Kilograms is a unit of mass not weight. Granted, it is inferred kilograms-force but still a bastardized use of a fundamental SI unit, IMHO.
The way to get it into the mainstream is to get the porn industry to adopt it first. When they start using metric measurements, the rest of America will follow.
We actually still use pund (pound) in Denmark, it is just redefined as 500 g.
Not quite as drastic as the Swedes, who redefined their miles to be 10 km!
When you live in the more nothern parts of the world (or southern) it is cold in your winter. It seems now that we spend 4 to 5 months in the NEGATIVE degrees range even though it is warmer then in the 60's, as we all know too well. Mentally you spend all winter in the negative. In the 60's and 70's (or even today) you might spend 2 weeks in January and maybe February in this negative mentally with Fahrenheit. As a humanoid carbon unit, somehow 20 degrees Farenheit seems not as negative as -6.66666667 degrees Celsius. There is supposed to be this mental thing, in the real north, about living in the dark for almost 6 months. The same can be said about negative temperatures. I can just image more north than me. Brrr! 46.04380, -73.11511 You adjust to Celcius of course because your body can relate to outside but... On the positive side, when you drive 60mph you are now doing about 100. YES!
Cans in Canada are 355 ml. Not 330.
apparantly speed limit signs in the US affects relationships with european scientists. not sure why he made that comment but I digress.
.0017636684303350970017636684303351..... and that is truncated or rounded.
.00176 of a million, but then there is some money left over. $2,080 to be eact.
.01 is 1/100 of a dollar .05 or 1/20 of a dolalr .10 or 1/10 of a dollar .25 or 1/4 of a dollar (imagine that, a US quarter is a quarter of a dollar) .5 or - you guessed it - half a dollar.
I am going to take a counter argument; that the imperial system is just as good as the metric system, and the metric system has failing points.
first off, to make things clear, in the US we are all taught about the metric system. I remember learning about it in the 2nd grade, at the age of 6. we use the metric system in all of our science classes. the imperial system is rarely used in science in the US.
the metric system is based on the number 10. the imperial system is based on the number 12.
10 divides evenly between 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, and 10
12 divides evenly between 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, and 12
the advantage with the imperial system is clear; it supports division by 3, which the metric system does not.
1/3 can easily be expressed in the imperial / american system
1/3 cannot be expressed easily in the metric system. in fact, computers don't support the metric system at all. in order to express 1/3 on a computer chip, it gets written as 1.33333333333332 to fill the memory, and when the number is read, it gets rounded up to 1.33333333333 whatever.
so if you load your calculator program and do 10 / 3, you don't get the correct answer. it is rounded or truncated. you might get 3.33333333333, you might get 3.3333333332.
if you do 12/3, you get 4.
a second reason to use the imperial system; it works awesome when dividing numbers, as I explained above, and not just when dividing by 3.
let's say I have 567 people. and I have to divide a million dollars evenly to all these people. all I have to do is say everyone gets 1/567th of a million dollars.
if I did this with the metric system, it would be
which would you rather use? sure you could say everyone gets
when you need EXACT measurements, and you are dividing, it is better to use the imperial system, which is used in the US.
so if I say there is a million dollars to be divided by 567 people and each owns 4 cars and has to share each car with 6 people and they drive to 9 stores and put 17 items in the trunk, how many dollars from the original item does each person get per item in the trunk, then I think you'd use the imperial system.
americans use both the metric and imperial system every day. a good example is money.
a penny
a nickel is
a dime is
a quarter is
a half dollar is
so with that the metric / imperial debate is over. notice how I just used the division symbol when I wrote the two? maybe I should say the metric * imperial debate is now over.
clearly each has its benefits but one is not better than the other.
a copy of this article is located here:
http://forum.cheapbooks.com/viewtopic.php?t=412
At least within US West coast physics departments, we usually refer to them as Imperial units and SI/MKS/CGS units in the classroom.
In the lab we call them English or metric. (As in the phrase, "Damn it, we forgot that the new pump flange doesn't use metric screws. Who wants to head back down the mountain to find an English hex driver set?")
All you have to do first, is get Americans to drive electric cars, install low-flow showerheads, change the CBS logo, and stop going to Wal-mart. After that, it's a snap!
I dunno if you've noticed this, but Americans hate change.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
As our life basically revolves around hockey (evidenced today by the country watching 3 straight all-Canadian hockey games), Celcius is by far the superior measurement.
If the temperature is in the plus range, your hockey rink will be slushy and no good for skating on. If it's in the minus, game on!
What's funny is I'm only half kidding. We used to think this way as kids, when determining what to do on the weekend in March.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I don't know if this is true, but an architect friend of mine said that for work he prefers imperial to metric... and he was raised in Korea using the metric system. His explanation was that in architecture, you often divide things up by fractions as you work, and it is easier to do the fraction math in your head than dealing with long decimals. I have no idea if this is true since I can't do math in my head at all these days...
Now of course, you could certainly do metric in fractions, saying "1/32 cm" instead of ".3125 mm", but that's not really the metric system in the larger sense then, is it? I don't know if this really matters or not, but I found it interesting that a person raised with the metric system could prefer imperial at all.
Cheers.
... it looks like the Brit's actually won it .
Which sounds better - six inches or 15 centimetres ?
The US should gradually adapt to metric: first the combined units like heat & power. Kick out BTU/h for Watts. Display Energy Efficient Ratio's in W/W. Go for Joules, too.
Keep the mile/pound/inch to the last moment. The UK did this too.
However I have been using metric system all my life and it is intuitive for me.....There is nothing special about imperial or metric system for daily use. You just have to be accustomed to it.
I agree, there is nothing wrong with either. Because you were raised from birth using SI metric, you are conversant with it. Because I was raised from birth using the english foot-pound system, I am conversant with that. I also know SI from school and the military.
SI Metric is like the English language. It is standard in international science and business. When doing scientific work or international business, use English language and SI Metric. But that doesn't mean that Italians need to use English Language at the local green grocer in Italy or that I have to use SI at home in America.
There is nothing wrong with America having its own culture and using the foot-pound systems, as long as people are taught the standard for science.
The US actually adopted the metric system by an act of Congress in 1866, which included the text:
"It shall be lawful throughout the United States of America to employ the weights and measures of the metric system; and no contract or dealing, or pleading in any court, shall be deemed invalid or liable to objection because the weights or measures expressed or referred to therein are weights or measures of the metric system."
What Congress did not do, was penalize or discourage other systems of measurement. Consequently, there was little incentive for metric units to be adopted outside science and engineering, so traditional quirky units persisted in common use, despite their problems (the standard yard was shrinking, for instance). However, even these were redefined by the Bureau of Weights and Measurements in 1893 to be based on the metric units, so that 1 inch is exactly 0.0254 meters, for instance.
Perhaps as a result of the lack of use of the metric system in the US in the century since it was officially adopted, Congress passed another act in 1988, which mandates "the metric system of measurement as the preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce." All government business is supposed to be in metric units...
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Yeah, no kidding. I just realized I purchased a swimming suit in Montreal and it was for a 34 inch waist.
./ while drinking from his half liter bottle of water) Opps. That's 500ML, but I love fractional math and you'll never stop me from using it no matter how stupid the metric system has made people in other nations.
Damn.
Next they'll want us stupid Americans to purchase bags of Milk.
(Stupid American sitting here reading
I'm a biologist, and although I use metric for all of my experimental measurements, I use imperial units when I make experimental apparatus (a behavior chamber etc.). I use them mainly because most materials are available in THICKNESSES in imperial units, and because the thickness of your material pops up over and over again in overall dimensions, it's easier to use imperial rather than deal with long decimal fractions. In addition, all of our machining equipment is in imperial, for example the leadscrew on our lathe and the crank on our drillpress. When I'm machining, it's far easier to remember "2 turns for one inch" than ... something harder.
The metric system is unarguably superior for science, but it's not for every day use. Normal people don't deal with inter unit conversions, or usually even in unit conversions. It's not important to be able to figure out the number of calories in a given volume of water, it's just important to have a feeling for how much a given volume of water is.
All the real arguments for metric being better fall on deaf ears for the normal populace because they just don't do that kind of thing.
We should have make it a big patriotic thing back in 1976...
There would have been cool posters "We though out the King 200 years ago, It time to though out his feet and inches"
There could have been big ruler burning rallies. All the and all stuff for the bicentenary could have been metric boosting the metric economy.
O'well
Maybe in 2076
Comment removed based on user account deletion
At first sight it seems odd but it is very useful. For example say my car gets 9 litres/100 km, then I plan to take my car on a 600 km trip ... how much fuel do I need ... why 9 x 6 = 54 litres ! If on the other hand I wanted to do it the old way so I have 11 km / litre then if I am going 600 km I will need .... 600 / 11 = 54 litres. I have replaced a division, a harder task, for a simple multiplication.
Bitter and proud of it.
You know, when I was growing up, that was considered a very stupid reason for doing something.
Clear, Dark Skies
OK, for those of you who think that there would be no shell shock from a switchover to metric, please go back to bed. Here's your binky and your teddy bear. The adults want to talk.
Firstly, the metric system is known, if not actively used, by just about everyone born during or after Vietnam as a matter of school curriculum.
Secondly, the metric system is actually used by some industries, just not many. Sure you put gas into your car by the gallon, but you buy your soda by the two liter. And if you buy most any food product in the US, you'll note that you have your choice. Ounces and grams, or fluid ounces and milliliters.
But consider this, how long, and at what price, does it take to retool a car plant to use metric dimensions when everything from the blueprint to the last nut and bolt specifies US measure? Or any sort of manufaturing for that matter? And what benefit is it to them? As long as the bolts are the right size for the nuts, and all the welds are in the right places, and all the little bits fit together, then does your average US consumer care what measurement system you used? For that matter, does the US car enthusiast/tuner want to trade in his set of US tools for metric, now that they've been obsolete.
Another thing, do you know what kind of a mess you'd have on your hands if you all of a sudden changed all the speed limit signs to KPH from MPH? I don't know if you've noticed this or not, but the scalar KPH is quite a bit higher than MPH. It'd be fun for a while, watching people rocket down the highway at a good 120... MPH because they got the graduations confused.
And everyone in this country knows exactly what to wear when it's a springy 70F outside. What's that, like 20C?
The fact of the matter is, the only people who really want America to use the metric system are those whose jobs are made easier because of it, or those who already have adopted it (in other words, read you change and make all the effort). Everyone else would be forced to change for reasons they don't get or care about. It isn't that Americans don't like to change, but when they have no problem with what is, their attitude, quite reasonably, is to ask "what the fuck for?"
What other good reason exists for the average person, other than the aforementioned "everyone else is doing it", to go along with it? I believe that there is an American aphorism that goes: "If everyone jumped of a bridge, would you?"
Yo measuring system is so primitive, it doesn't even take the freezing and boiling points of water into consideration!
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
Multiply the US by 2.54.
*ahem*
;-)
:-))
You know those imperial units you love to use? Their official definition is actually in metric. America has been on-board with metric for a long time, and you are allowed to use it in trade & commerce (and is often used -- buy a 2 liter bottl of pop recently?). American Imperial is just a special case of metric.
(sadly, this post will get ignored because it's Saturday and at the end of a 900+ message thread
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
I agree for Time.
Kiloseconds and megaseconds are much more fun to use when talking to metric system advocates than days and years.
But for the rest of the units, give me something that lets divide by three over something that encourages division by fives anyday.
If you're a scientist in the US and are having unit trouble with scientists in other countries, you must be using kitchen measuring cups. Even if you are using kitchen measuring cups, you must not have a very good calculator.
I know, someone is going to mention Mars Climate Orbiter now. Actually it's probably already mentioned 50 times below but I'm too lazy to count.
Actually that was fairly convenient for navigation, almost as much as the nautical mile was, where a nautical mile is one minute of arc at the equator (which was believed to be identical to one minute of arc along a meridian).
The nautical mile survives in aviation and to a lesser extent in maritime navigation, and is defined as 1852m exactly, and corresponds to a meridional arcminute.
This definition of nautical mile was agreed internationally only in 1929, and even into the late 1960s NATO had problems reconciling different nautical miles actually used in member-country navies (the US used 6000 and sometimes 6080.24 feet, the UK used 6080 feet exactly and sometimes (6000 * 6000/8192) feet, while the rest used the 1929 treaty value (1852 m).
The kilometre was in wide use in the late 1800s even on the high seas.
The metre's original definition was the length of a pendulum with a half-period of one second, which was elegant and handy and could be duplicated with great accuracy, but not on the high seas. The parallel Earth survey approach that resulted in the second definition (1e-07 of the meridian running through Paris) was difficult to duplicate exactly (terrain could cause problems). Subsequent definitions refined the measurement (metre bars of various alloys), with precision increasing with increasing requirements on the conditions in which it is made and observed.
In 1960, however, the metre was redefined to a physical standard (based on an 86Krypton laser's interference properties) and then in 1982 that was abandoned in favour of the current frequency based standard.
The current frequency based standard is very good, since portable frequency generators can usually maintain much better than microsecond accuracies even in rough environments, and calibrating for the speed of light in vacuum in known non-vacuum conditions is straightforward.
Whether the parallel origins (Earth survey, pendulum) were especially good choices is certainly debatable, but the result was a standard which was and is widely used for navigation and mapmaking, with competition only from another scale with an Earth survey origin (nautical mile) and many different statute miles (almost one statue mile per statutory authority... neighbouring countries speaking the same language often had dramatically different miles).
The various systems called "mile" or the equivalent also broke down into subunits almost arbitrarily, whereas the metre scaled upwards to the kilometre and downwards to the millimetre by powers of ten. At the time, this was an enormously popular feature.
You won't find anyone in the UK who doesn't know what a mile is. Or a pint. Especially a pint.
US wasn't metric because the building materials they dealt with were too big for cm but too small for m.
Today building materials measured in inches and feet are no longer affordable in dollars. They're going to start buying smaller building materials and that's going to be the turning point for metric.
Actually, metrification wasn't a failure of the Carter administration as much as its failure was complete during the Carter administration. But it wasn't a failure. Metric units are ubiquitous in America. Soda comes measured in liters. Everyone has seen "16.9 ounce" bottles of soda. People have 4, 5, and 6mm Allen wrenches right next to their 1/4" drill bits. It's not confusing in the least.
Soda also comes measured in ounces. What caused the end of metrification was the metrification that had already been implemented by the mid 1970s. It proved that the metric system could coexist with English units. Consumers don't care whether they are buying pints or half liters. They don't care that they take 500mg capsules of Tylenol. They don't care that bullets are measured in grains (which is not exclusive to the US). They don't care that they are buying 750mL "fifths" or that beer is measured in cL in Germany.
It's a non-issue, unless you insist on being a pedantic twit who wants road signs marked in kilometers and gasoline measured in liters. Well, that's part of the cultural heritage you experience when living in or visiting our fine little country.
Why, after all, does Canada insist on using "metric dollars"?
To hear some people talk, you'd think that removing English units from America is next in line after abolishing slavery.
So the arguments are: imperial is easier to use (which anyone born in a metric country knows is just a matter of what you're used to) and imperial is our American heritage and no goddamn-pinko-lefty-hippy-mathematician will take it from me unless they pry it from my cold dead hands! Lets just think about this for a second... imperial measurements... empire... England.... This isn't pride in independence, it's pride in being stubborn.
The metric system is better for people doing calculations.
The imperial system is better for people who cook, fix, build and actually do things.
I'm tired of scientists whining about how everybody doesn't make their math easier, especially when computers do 99% of their math for them anyway.
The English units are intuitive. 1 cup, 1 pint, 1 teaspoon are designed around quantities that are easy to visualize. 350 milliliters is designed for easy math but it's hard to visualize 350 1 milliliter things.
Also, in the English measurement system you find systems divisible by 3 and 4 which are very handy for building things. Metric is divisible by 2, 5 and 10 which is useful for doing math.
The metric system was designed before computers to make certain math in science easier. That goal is outdated. Metric units are inferior now.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
Slow News Week :(
Here here, I believe we should mod this up! I mean, come on, get off the stupid dime, what system you measure in is meaningless, the measurement is the thing and of course, people being smart enough to know to convert... BTW, ever been to the fucking UK? You buy a Pint of beer, but a liter of gas, your roads are marked in MPH, as are your speedometers... Hell it is competely bastardized, you want to complain about something, complain about their non-self-consistent measurements. I could give a rats ass what the system is, learn it, learn the conversions, and then you can go anywhere and be understood. Now I will go take my medicine and calm down... Heading out for a pint, anyone coming?
My not responding to your flame is in no way indicative of my submission to your statement, it just means I don't have t
Water freezes at 0c Water boils at 100c There are 10mm to a cm 100cm to a m 1000m to a km etc. What's taking so long, America?
maybe you have a chance getting them to learn to spell correctly, or realise that football is played with a round ball.
I've experiments to run, there is research to be done on the people who are still alive.
They have been driving standards and technology for years now. It would be an easy sellas well: "Now 254% more satisfying!".
HTH
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Which feet and inches system? Most every country in Western Europe has had their own feet & inches systems in the past, and some still do. Those feet & inches are not harmonised between the countries, so a UK feet is not the same as a Swedish feet and so on. When I lived in the US, the feet & inches system used there was called "standard" or "real" units. As if the SI units are unreal, or even surreal. Can't we all agree to measure everything in "ticks"?
I say good sir, we should break our eggs on the big end. And I say we should break them on the little end.
I think we've all had this argument before. It's stupid and pointless, and the english measurement system is quite entrenched in our culture. I don't know how far 10 km is without converting it to miles, likewise, someone who's used the metric system all their life won't know how far 10 miles is without converting it to kilometers. It's silly to argue what is better for measurement. It's just arbitrary numbers.
For science the metric makes more sense. The conversions are much simpler. Powers of 10 are easy. Even for cooking metrics would be nice, but I haven't grown up knowing what an ounce really is in the same way I know what a mile is. However trying to make people convert just doesn't make much sense. It's expensive to change all the signs, and more expensive to try and change peoples minds. Plus we'd end up with the situation where all these products in the US that are standard sizes would no longer be reasonable. Who wants to buy 3.785 liters of milk? Thinks like this don't change overnight, and it's messy.
Besides, I think the europeans need us to stick to the english measurement system so they still have something that they can point to and say "see us europeans are so much better than you americans..."
Phil
Admittedly I do not have the latest and greatest version of Photoshop at hands. I use v6 at a friends place from time to time. We're printing a lot. At home I use the Gimp.
What really annoys me about both of them is that use can have them use cm instead of inches - they'll act like they're actually measuring in cm then. But they DON'T do it for real!
Both programs keep and insist on THINKING in inch and roughly spit out measurements in cm - really obscure and long numbers with lots of zeroes behind the dot.
Say: You want to print something on a sheet of paper and you want the printed image to have the exact(!) size of 20 cm. You enter that in PS or Gimp, I dare you! It'll accept your input and then change it to something like 19.8434".
I don't want these programs to PRETEND they can handle cm, I want them to actually handle cm! I mean - how hard can it be? Why do they insist on thinking in inch and run your numbers through some kind of measurement converter? It's annoying as hell. You call THAT professional, Adobe?! Hear me laugh!
Then again I was really confused that Gimp is doing it the same way. What were they thinking?
Leopard cub
...as far as I know. But you are the math student.
I took a trip up to canada a while back (where everything was in metric, obviously) but i went into a subway and they still had 6" and foot long sandwiches. i asked the kid who worked there "so if you guys use the metric system, how do you know how long a 6 inch sub is?" he didnt seem too amused. i wonder if subway uses inches all around the world. and if theyve ever considered calling them 15.24 cm sandwiches in some countries....
Did anybody even notice when 2 liters replaced the quart bottle? If we went to bed tonight and got up in the morning and the US was on metric people would bitch the first day, barely notice the second and not care by the third. Does anybody really care how many liters it takes to fill your car? The only people who would pitch a fit would be the people who make measuring devices. Give them some kind of tax break and just change. By this time next month nobody would remember what a gallon was. Oh and then maybe we could LAND on Mars instead of crashing into it.
I think this is a place where change of measurement system would be a lot more useful to the average person than trying to force SI use where it's wanted, frankly. A size 2 is not twice as large as a size 1, and a size 10 is not five times that of a size 2, whether we're talking dresses or shoes, and they're not based on any acknowledged standard, so a size 2 with one manufacturer may be the same as a 2.5 with another, or a 1.5 in a third -- for dress sizes, the more it costs, the smaller it's size number will be.
Get international clothing makers to establish a system of sizing that is internationally consistant and coherent, and you will have done as much good in the world as you would by forcing my aunt (or daughter) to figure out her weight in kgs.
Rather than play catchup with the world, let's do it right and switch to base 12 counting. now suddenly the english system of measurements makes sense! I mean, base ten lets you take 5ths or halfs of something easily. not very useful. with base 12, you can easily take halfs, thirds, quarters, eigths, and sixths of things. how nice is that? very. support base 12 now.
http://notanumber.net/
I thought a "klick" was a unit of distance, as in "5 klicks southwest."
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
Seriously. I am an engineer and I use what I like to call normal units all the time. Good old feet, slugs, and seconds are perfectly fine for use in science and engineering. In exactly what way is metric better? So what if every body else uses it, like my mom told me way back " If every one jumped of a cliff would you?"
Once in a while, somebody gets killed when trying to inflate a tire using the wrong units.
w as_then/life_society/gimli_glider
There is also the "Gimli Glider", an which ran out of fuel because of the fuel was calculated in pounds instead of liters.
See http://archives.cbc.ca/IDC-1-69-240-1155-20/that_
Just because the country as a whole has not converted doesn't mean the submitter as an individual can't. I personally consider Monday the first day of the week (for a variety of reasons). But I can't get a normal calendar with this setup in the U.S. it seems. Apparently there are a lot of other countries where Monday is the beginning of the week. But I don't let an obviously religious-influenced standard stop me personally. I can set my Yahoo Calendar to Monday as first of week, and I think I may skip a regular wall calendar.
I think that is the one that would bother me the most!! I know how to dress if it is 32F, or 40F, or 99F.
I'd be lost with whatever the equivalents in C are...(yes, I'm too lazy to look up a converter). But really...most people in the US seldom have a need for accuracy needed in science. For daily life...the mile, mph, mpg...temperature in F is all way too ingrained into the culture and just isn't going to change anytime soon. Most people in the US have very little if any contact with any else in the world besides possibly a chat room on the internet....so, no one here generally sees any reason to change to 'go along' with the rest of the world. They don't see or touch the rest of the world, so, it pretty much doesn't exist to them.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
No other country in the world can be so pragmatic and so stupid at the same time.
my perspective (as an australian)
1. It isn't that hard
many people trot out reasons why it is so hard (changing tooling, hardware shops, celsius too coarse grained, all road signs have to change etc)
Australia did it in seventies. Lot's of people complained. Once a generation of school kids came through it was no longer a problem.
Estimate distances... a stride approx=metre (same accuracy as pacing out feet).
Temperature - can't say I can tell difference between 22.5C and 23C. (Perhaps US folk are more sensitive to temperatures but from somewhere where all temps quoted in C can't say I've ever noticed it being a problem)
Litre - when liquid food containers and fuel pumps are litre/ml multiples, you encounter it so often you forget the old units
Change size of things at the hardware - you can still buy imperial screws and metric screws but most people will think in metric. Often you buy things that are 25.4mm (=1inch) to fit old stuff. You get used to it pretty quick. After a while imperial stuff just becomes a nuisance and you think in all metric
Road signs - As I remember it (as a kid) Australia for 5 years replaced the miles/mph signs with ones of different colour/shape with 'km' ones (clearly marked as km) and people got quickly used to it. Then removed old ones Within a few years people just forgot about mph
2. Does it matter?
if you deal with the rest of the world it makes life easier for both them and you. If you don't - who cares.
If you change older people will still think imperial younger people won't. Life and society though doesn't break down and probably over 10 year period the benefits (ease of international trade etc) will outweigh the costs (OK that number pulled out of my hat but reckon it is arguable)
(by way I grew up through the change over process and in the end was a bit of an anti climax. Reckon hardest job is getting people onside. If you do it will go well. If you don't you'll have clumsy situation like in UK where they have only done it half hearted and result is a bit of a shemozzle)
"damn, it's colder than a witches titty out here"
because everybody else is using it. It must therefore be the best.
Even the druggies have switched over to metric (kilo of coke gram of weed). Come on America you can do it!
I don't need to test my programs.. I have an error correcting modem.
And the problem is? You're purchasing a given mass of food. That banana will have the same mass whether it's here or on the moon.
I recall reading in 1976 an article about the bicentenial. The article mentioned that every year since the first congress in 1789 that congress had passed a motion resolving that this is the year that the USA would convert to metric. Assuming that they haven't missed any year since, we must have 218 consecutive metric conversion resolutions. If metric conversion is not the oldest debate in the country, it must be close.
The stupidity of resistance is not just embedded in our laws. How many places in the statues of the federal government and the states must we have feet, pounds, and miles per hour embedded in the law. It would take another 218 years to get them all revised.
I remember the history of one such law. In 1979, during the oil crisis, the price of gasoline threatened to go over one dollar per gallon for the first time. That caused a crisis in gas stations because all the gas pumps had only two digits for the price per gallon. An obvious solution would be to start selling gas by the liter, but the Democrats in New York State declared that to be a fraud on the consumer and passed a law forbidding gas to be sold by any unit other than gallons.
why people think the US highway system should be converted to metric. Miles are longer than kilometers. Our roads are longer and need the larger measurement. People argue about needing metric because we export products. WE DON'T EXPORT ROADS!
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
If you do it over 30 years, most of the oldest Americans today won't be around to see it used. And everyone else has a really long time to get used to equating the units they grew up with to the new units because for 10 years, you're seeing both side by side everywhere. And with the schools teaching with metric within 10 years, kids may learn imperial the same way their parents learn metric (by seeing the equivalents side by side everywhere) or from their parents. It would take a generation, but it would be hard to argue that a 10 year transition would be hard on most industries... as they replace or update packaging according to their normal cycles, they can update the values.
Parochial Idiot. American?
God was my co-pilot, but then we crashed and I was forced to eat him.
An important point you neglected to mention was that of terrorism. As we all know terrorists are dirty foreigners, and these filthy outsiders all use the metric system. At present you can quickly identify an enemy of the state by asking them the number of inches in a mile. If they don't know the answer, they want to destory your freedom.
The war of independence would never have been won if we had not changed the British Imperial system ever to slightly to cause confusion (the Red Coats just gave up fighting when they found out that a pint of beer was smaller this side of the ocean).
We are at war, and a patriot will use the American Imperial System of Measurement.
God Bless America.
You'll never change.
I've read the arguments pro-imperial and against SI (here simply referred as metric).
The arguments used reveal a disturbing lack of logic reasoning, a generic despise for correctness, a perception that ease in math is not important and even problems in understanding Physics, arising from bad comprehension of the many units you use.
The problem, therefore I conclude, is not the unit systems themselves, but the people (i.e., you). If you leave in a country which only uses metric, I believe it's impossible not to find it exceptionally good; as you don't have this kind of experience, it will be very hard for you to change collectively -- even though a few do get it.
I haven't lost my faith in you or something... it's much worse: I've read your arguments and most are bogus... yet everyone writes them seriously as if they were valid. This is why I think you won't change. But let's hope I'm wrong!
Can't we all agree to measure everything in "ticks"?
I think we should measure everything in "dicks", since there's been a lot of them waving around in this thread (and around the world, for that matter) and compatibility won't matter since they're all different lengths anyway.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
There it is: English units measure our everyday world better but metric units are better fitted for use with our number system. So I'm gonna choose to keep some of those English units around. At least until I can answer with a straight face "'bout 15.24 centimeters" when someone asks me how it's hanging.
Sometimes at night I imagine the darkness is filled with horrible things with too many teeth, like Julia Roberts.
Everything you mention about Canada is the same in Australia.
;).
Everything is metric except Imperial Units are popular for the weight of new born babies and height.
Even though kids are getting taught metric at school here, parents are still talking about their height in Imperial Units (but never weight it seems). I asked a couple of 13 year olds a few months back how many centimetres they were (as a bit of a test). They had no idea.
I know myself my cm height for passports and licenses etc. However, every adult I speak to about my height knows what 6' 3" is
I am a bit of a Gridiron fan (excuse the Australianism - we have too many football codes to call it all "football") and so it is interesting to talk yards about the statistics. Rugby League (big in my state of Queensland) used to measure things in yards, but haven't for a loooooonnngggg time.
"The future comes 60 minutes an hour no matter who you are or what you do." The Screwtape Letters - C.S. Lewis
I appreciate that Americans simply disregard all efforts to force a standard on them. No protests, no complaining, they simply ignore whatever laws the government tries to force on them that they don't like. This Freedom is part of what makes America different. We do not do what we are told.
Every package shows both units on them and that doens't affect the printing costs but people can see both and use the units they prefer. It simply does not matter in everyday life. In engineering there is no argument that SI is superior. So I use both, and I like it that way.
i'm from the philippines and we are generally a metric country. however, there are certain instances when the imperial system is used. it is often done in sizes in hardware parts like pipes where we have 1/4", 1/2", etc. in those cases, it will be much harder to convert to metric as 1/4" is 0.635cm and 1/2" is 1.27cm are not of typical sizes like 0.5, 0.25.
anyway, i have been accustomed to using feet and inches in measuring my height (but uses metric on objects) and pounds for my weight. i have recently converting those to metric and i am quite getting used to it without having to think about the conversion.
at the end, i believe that education in school will make a much bigger impact. having been taught the metric system, it is easier for me to visualize and estimate in those items than in imperial system.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
My generation was taught both systems and taught in school that the metric system was superior and used by the rest of the world. My generation is between 25-30 now. That means we will start to gain power is about 10 years and will be the driving force running the nation in 20 years. With Gen X taking over the nation, and the baby boomers out, you will see quite a shift in US policy. The metric system will be part of that.
Unfortunately, Gen X is actually rather cold, logical, understands technology and does not share all the romantic notions of previous generations. This means that the romantic notions that most individual rights are based upon will likely be ignored in policy decisions. Our understanding of technology means that law enforcement will probably be much more effective. In short, life is not going to be much fun under gen x. I predict that we will sell out even worse than the baby boomers ever dreamed of. And the baby boomers are fairy serious sell outs. They went from being hippies protesting the man and the war to putting us into an even worse war and moving the nation to the closest it has even been to a dictatorship.
I mean imperial ??? you would think any Texan would just hate any reference to a king ?
You can buy a length of 2-by-4. But it's not actually a 2x4 inch measure - it's a metric equivalent. Lengths (where I buy timber) are always quoted in metric.
Short yarn: Tesco supermarket (after our ratification of some metrication part of EU law) started quoting prices in £/Kg - great, finally. Then when there apples went over £1/Kg they suddenly changed all the signs to read in very large letter the £/lb value (some signs even illegally missing off the Kg value). I then found it very difficult to work out how much the fruit was having got used to the metric version. They are not so bad now. So I can understand the reluctance but it only takes a couple of months to tune into the new weights.
I'm a Canadian living in the US. Temperatures are about the biggest thing that bothers me down here. Most groceries have the metric equivalents written in smaller letters, and portion sizes are usually the same as in Canada anyways. So it doesn't bother me very often, unless I am buying fountain pop, and someone tells me the drink sizes in ounces. Then I will just give them a blank look for a minute, and ask to see the cups. I also had difficulty when mailing a letter. I was quoted prices by the ounce. But the guy working there converted it to grams for me right off the top of his head (I was grateful).
But I have a fast way of converting Fahrenheit to Celsius, with a reasonably small margin of error for common values. 100F is more or less the same as 40C. Every degree in Celsius is about 2 degrees Fahrenheit. So if someone tells you that it's 80 degrees, you can guess that it's about 30C. It isn't exact, but it's within about 5 degrees, which is good enough for the most part. It at least tells you what to wear.
28.3 grams to the ounce, 3.5 grams in an eighth. Just ask any druggie in the U.S.
Just do it.
it as the time it takes for Cs-135 to vibrate 9,192,635,770 times. Is it the same lenght of time as the parent comment?
If you delay pleasure infinitely, the pleasure will be infinite. (YM)
The advantages of using a common system across the globe are obvious. The metric system is good enough. We should use it.
BUT...there are significant advantages to our system in day-to-day life. Inches and feet are more useful than meters in daily life, the metric degree is too big for weather forecasting, and perhaps most important, powers of two are actually more useful on rulers than powers of 10 (1/64 of an inch is smaller than 1 mm, and 1/10mm can't be measured on an affordable ruler).
I'm sure these have been noticed by lots of the individuals who oppose switching to the metric system, and they help strengthen their resolve.
*I* am for the conversion; the disadvantages can be coped with, and it seems to me it's a net win to use the same thing as everybody else.
You know, the reason a US gallon differs from an Imerial gallon... after the war Britian did a system upgrade and wouldn't sell us a license :)
--
It is not even so much as that the rest of the world doesn't exist. It's more like out of sight, out of mind. The grand-parent is correct that most Americans will never have any contact with people from another country (Outside Canada or Mexico). The same thing is true that most Europeans will not have any contact with Americans. Honestly, with a giant body of water between the two it isn't exactly easy. Planes don't count. Most people don't make day trips by plane :) I can easily get to Canada with in 2 hours, less if it is a slow day at the border. I can't say the same about France or Germany. But now I'm rambling. So I'll stop.
--
Could some of the reticence to use the metric system be linked in some ways to the fact that it was invented by the French?
Grams, litres, meters were created in the 18th century in France as a way to unify the disparate units that were used at the time and have a unified system that simplified trade (no more inconsistent regionally-used units) and help standardise technology and simplify science.
I'm pretty sure the long reticence of the British to using SI in everyday life is probably due partly to not giving in to the French on that front: politically, it probably was seen as dangerous to try to enforce a unit system that came out of the ideas of the Revolution.
In the UK there is still a mix of imperial and SI in everyday life but the younger generations tend to only learn SI at school. Of course everyone knows their weight in stones and pounds and their height in feet and inches but at last meters and kilograms are slowly being accepted and the Fahrenheit is almost on its way out.
For the US, it's a huge economical issue: moving to SI would take at least 2-3 generations and the cost would be staggering.
It's not an impossible thing to achieve, but in the current political climate, I see no politician having the guts to push this on the people and I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be long before some douchebag TV host starts reminding people that SI was invented by the French and is therefore anti-American...
The US already is mostly metric. Ask any auto mechanic stuck with a ton of SAE wrenches and tools. The same applies to every other product made for export - they couldn't be sold otherwise. All science is conducted in metric, including medicine and related disciplines as well. Again, the rest of the world would have to go through contortions converting things to replicate scientific results. It is just consumers who rail against it. It happens in all convert countries to some degree - Britain and Canada are examples. Canada, though, has a somewhat different problem. As the US's largest trading partner much food flows back and forth across the border. Since rural people are the metric sceptics, here and in the US, the measurement of that food is in US terms, but Canadian labels show the metric equivalents.
First off, the metric system is the only system that has been officially recognized as a legal system for trade, in 1866.
Secondly, the existing Imperial system was officially based on the metric system in 1893, known as the Mendenhall Order.
(References.
So, we're already using Metric. We just use funny names for cm, g, and l. Those of us who are into unilateral, pre-emptive metrification use the regular names, instead of the funny names, and eventually we'll win. Nobody ever changes anyone else's mind: you just wait for the fogeys to die off and the revolution will be successful.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Yes I know there are advantages to both imperial and metric systems. The biggest problem with imperial systems, imo is that they differ from one country to the next and so, for example, a gallon in the states is smaller than a gallon in the UK. Also conversion between imperial and metric units is difficult since there are no exact matches.
Why not alter the imperial measurements so that (1) they are the same everywhere and (2) they match a close metric unit. To help reduce confusion we could have a metric/imperial name for them. Note that this is already done for some units (the metric ton is equal to 1000 kilos but is close to an imperial ton which is 2000 lbs). We could do this for lots of measurements (note that from this point forward the "metric imperial" units shown are not real, just imagined)...
metric ton = 1000 kilos (already done)
metric lb = 500 grams (metric ounce would be based on 1/16 of a metric lb)
metric yard = 1 meter (or metre, take your pick) (not really necessary, since we could just call it a meter, but it becomes a base for conversion of metric foot, metric inch, etc.)
a metric mile gets converted to 2000 metric yards (meters) or 6000 metric feet, so a metric mile becomes significantly longer than a mile but not so much as to throw off our sense of what a mile is and becomes easy to convert to km (2 km per metric mile).
metric miles per gallon is easy to convert to liters/100km (divide 200 by the metric miles per gallon so 20 metric miles per gallon = 200/20 = 10 liters/100km)
km/h is exactly twice the number of metric miles per hour (Americans will love this because we would get to drive faster for the same speed limit since 70 metric miles per hour is actually 87 miles per hour).
metric gallon = 4 liters (or litres, take your pick) hence:
metric quart = 1 liter (not really necessary, but there for completeness, it would probably just be called a liter)
metric pint = 500ml (you can still have your pint of beer and it's not too far off from what it used to be)
metric cup = 250 ml (already done) (metric liquid ounce based on 1/8 of a metric cup)
temperature conversion is rather difficult and may be best left alone.
by pushing countries to new units such as these it becomes easy to convert and Americans can still feel that they haven't lost their old units. Unfortunately it will also create some confusion when you need precision measurements to line up with old work. We can solve this for tools by keeping the old imperial measurements for them and using metric tools for the new system.
Anyways, just a thought.
Windows is a bonfire, Linux is the sun. Linux only looks smaller if you lack perspective.
If the issue ever comes back to Congress, I'll be it's a matter of days before somebody decides to replace "Imperial" system with "Freedom" system.
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
Go try to buy a set of tires in any country. You will find that they are a combination of metric and British units. I can buy a set of P235x15's just anywhere in the civilized world, and in many uncivilized areas.
yes, he's from Guyana.
SI is not about division by 10.
It is about almost not needing any calculation at all, since the few fundamental units is a basis for everything else.
How much energy does a 100 Watt bulb burn in a minute? Immediately it is 60 kilojoule, since Watt is defined as "Joules per second".
How much energy does the same bulb burn in a minute for calories? C'mon, imperial people, bring out your calculator, punch fast, and check twice!
The easiest way to get the US to convert to metric is by making the meter divisible by the second prime number. I mean, let's get serious: you guys can't divide by every third number? WTF are you thinking.
Sincerely,
The Committee for changing the number base to the International Standard of 12 which all Scientists Use and must therefore Be Right
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Anyone that works in a real scientific or engineering profession doesn't work with the English Imperial system. Have you ever seen a lab tech measure anything in "cups" or "table spoons"?
I don't even think I've ever seen pipets labeled in anything other than mL. Fluid ounces? Please!
The only people using the Imperial system are either watching their speedometer or cooking (in America).
And as for your fancy "European" scientists, ask them where the Imperial system came from...
What are those of us who wish to finally see America catch up to the rest of the world supposed to do?
Wait, did I miss something? I thought the US was still an economic superpower. Who do we need to "catch up" to? Seriously, I mean, I know other countries are catching up to us, and the tables may turn sometime relatively soon, but we're not exactly way behind.
or else!
Staying with imperial measurements has only served to handicap American industry and economy.
I don't know, it hasn't seemed to have worked out too well for Europe. =)
While I say that somewhat tongue in cheek, America seems to be doing fine with the imperial system. It's not like we're growing crops of scientists who can't figure powers of 10.
everybody hates everybody else ... just watch German and French public TV.
back on topic: how about we trade ? We switch to American English and you switch to the metric system ?
Living in Canada we still have a mix of imperial units being used. People know what a mile is and what an inch is. Pounds and Feet/Inches are commonly used to describe weight and height for people (as well as food sold by the weight; although food sold by volume is almost exclusively sold in Litres).
Everything else is mostly in metric. Even then people still some resistance to metric units such as L/100km and instead use the miles per gallon. Ironically this one actaully illustrates the need for standardization. MPG in Canada is measured in Canadian gallons which is different from US gallons.
The one thing that I don't readily auto-convert in my mind is temperatures in F vs C. Other than 32F = 0C and 100F ~ 37C, everything in between isn't as clear without actually doing some calcuations.
Metric is standard but imperial units are still understood because of US influences.
if you teach metric to all of the children from kindergarten on up, this will help adoption.
They're using their grammar skills there.
I don't feel like reading the other 600000000 posts :p so sorry if someone mentioned this already.
:p
I think the only way (and possibly simple but it will take a long time) to get the U.S. to move to metric is to push it harder in schools. Public schools have been the perfect forum for all the other brainwashing so why not this? Now I've been out of school for 13 years but I remember never being taught the metric system beyond the idea that there is one. I think we may have used it in biology and chemistry and that was it.
Old people (adults) aren't going to change but if you teach children something new and they grow up being completely used to it, then when the time comes to finally switch when they are adults, it won't quite so hard.
While it doesn't really hurt my relationships with people outside of the country, I've found it annoying when my friend talks about celsius (I was never a good science student and all the conversions slip out of my head 10 seconds after I've read them) or kms.
On a side note, I wonder if the reason we keep the Imperial system is because "bigger is better"? I'm sure you've all noticed that an inch is much larger than a centimeter. So... my measurement system is bigger than your measurement system
Seriously though... the answer to the question is simply... use the schools.
Most people in the US have very little if any contact with any else in the world besides possibly a chat room on the internet....so, no one here generally sees any reason to change to 'go along' with the rest of the world. They don't see or touch the rest of the world, so, it pretty much doesn't exist to them.
Could not resist, and don't get me wrong, please.
Despite of your accurate describtion, the US armies are all over the world. Everywhere the US thinks they have to have their fingers in. They want the oil, the resources and gives the rest of the world the polution and "way of live" ideas back. They want us to buy your gene food, they want us to buy your hormon poisened meat. If a european country has a law that regulates how much medical or hormon particles my be in meat (for safty of children e.g.) and banishes the trade of it, the USA threaten to answer this with e.g. import taxes on european cars.
You don't want to compete with your agility on our markets, you want us to adapt our markets to your needs. I don't think that europeans hate you, as one of the guys answering to you said. But surely lots of people in the poor areas of the world indeed do.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
And fucking hot
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything" -- Josef Stalin
Don't mistake the will of corporations and the government with the common American.
The average American will never meaningfully leave the United States, and has no frame of reference to the rest of the world. Hell, I've known plenty of people who've never, or rarely, left their homestate. That was the grandparent's point.
In your rant, you seem to be confusing these normal Americans with large corporations and the government. Normal Americans have very little influence over these dealings.
Length - Metre
Mass - Kilogram
Time - Second
Electric Current - Ampere
Thermodynamic Temperature - Kelvin
Amount of Substance - Mole
Luminous Intensity - Candela
But because of the internet you can easily get in contact with someone from europe. In fact, it seems you are not like most people, because you are in contact with a european right now.
Sigs are bad for your health
Let's rename Celsius as "Freedom Degrees", kilometers as "Patriot Miles" and liters as "Star Spangled Gallons". That oughta get the American public behind metric.
-deane
The short answer is to just stop being so damn stubborn about it. I don't know why my fellow Americans have such a hard time with metric. It's just multiples of ten, much easier then all the odd numbers that we use. But when I reach for a ruler I automatically use the metric side, so maybe I'm just some sort of demented pervert. My idea is to have a "transitional period" in which all signs and whatnot should have both metric and imperial on them, and over years switch.
now that we are in EU, we changed our money into Euro. And that's like weird. A thing that used to cost 240 tolars is now 1. The big problem isnt converting prices, but to get a feeling for price. I can tell how much is a car worth in tolars but not in . I don't know how much time will it take to get a feel for that.
but ur just like saying "me no understood english, me dont like it, u learn to speak chinese like we do! We ARE the largest country!"
...unless you're in Scotland where a good number of pubs sell spirits (inc whisky) in 1/4 gill measures... :-) ( I guess they are moving over to what ever that is ml but I think they'll take some time about it...)
Lighten up my friend. I think we're all just having a laugh discovering how many different systems of measures we're all using even in this small corner of the world...
You only think so because you're used to it. But when you learn to use Fahrenheit from the beginning on, it's a matter of course to simply use it for everything, no matter whether it's science or the weather.
My car does 28 rods to the hogshead, and that's good enough for me!...
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Mentally and physically. I frankly LIKE the different systems. Variable systems mean diversity.
Plus, as to temperature, remember that baseline is 32F (freezing) and 0C (freezing) and 0K (absolute freeze).
Meters versus Inches/Feet/Yards.
I learned this in measurements. I can convert either precisely (precise math) or quickly on the fly (quick estimate math) 100 meters ~ 110 yards ~ 330 feet (an no, I didn't look up a metric calculator). I just know, because i've had to deal with machinery in both systems.
Some things are nicer in metres, others are nicer in inches. And quite honestly, the inches/standard system is more fun, IMHO, because it uses a more varied system of unit translation / sub units. The metric system strives for the typical one world everything.
Pretty soon we'll do the same for language, if measurements go that way. And I really hope we do not. I like travelling to different places, or learning new things, and this will be ONE less thing for my kids to learn when they grow up. So I hope you socialists "demanding" that your politicians PUSH this thing on the rest of us that might not want it, learn that "variety" is as important as "sending someone to a gulag for not wanting to use metric".
I grew up on metric, and now I'm living in standard. Love'em both. I want to see them both around. If you want to FORCE me to use only one, then go walk out onto a an Israeli battle field with the UN flag taped to your forehead.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
I went to 'Freedom to Measure'. I read this:
I followed the 'search engine' link, which went to http://www.hostess.com/womanhood/f2m/Search.htm
It didn't work, so I manually went up to http://www.hostess.com/
There is a search engine!
But there were no hits for metrification.
Jeff Freeman
Until you can get a liter of beer while watching the Superbowl being played on a 100 meter field, the U.S. will not be using the metric system.
Wouldn't the metric system use temperatures in kelvin?
hen don't shift units. Use kilo feet or centi-miles. The reason you are decimal shifting in the metric system is precisely because you are Not shifting units. kilometers, meters and centimeters are all the same units. Nothing prevents you from using decimal english units and decimal point shifting. that's how they do it in machine shops. In the metric system, a unit shift is like going from cgs to MKS where mu and epsilon change scales and all of maxwells equations require conversions.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It's dead easy. Zero's cold, ten's cool, twenty's warm, thirty's hot.
(Cue some Canadian piping up with a Pythonesque "Zero? Cold? In my day it were minus thirty in the summer! And we were the lucky ones!" etc.)
...when you pry my yardstick out of my cold, dead hand.
Most people don't even think inside the box.
It's because the cowardly French were the first to adopt it.
"And the problem is? "
Calling force, kilograms. In the GP post, kilograms was required in lieu of pounds. Do you think those Market Traders are reporting actual SI mass? Your example is obviously true but in reality the cost of those bannans is based on how much force they apply to the scale at the check-out stand.
http://metric.org/ - US Metric Association.
http://gometricamerica.org/ - He's trying to drum up support and get people moving
http://gometric.us/ - A wiki that's just started and is trying to get something actually happening rather than wallowing in imperial measures for the next 20 years.
End dual-measurement, let's finish going metric!
http://gometric.us
I can go into any shop in Moycullen and ask them to slice me a pound of bacon. I'll get 500 grams of bacon, but they will take the order in avoirdupois.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Point size is 1/72 of an inch (US, 2.54 CM). Don't know why, but that's what it is.
Actually, for close to 50 years, the US Imperial system (The American version of the older English system) has been defined in terms of the metric system. The rest is just inertia.
Americans did adopt metric volume measurement quickly, when they realized that a 2 liter Coke was 6% bigger than a 1/2 gallon Coke, for the same price. that may give you a feel for just how hard the switch would really be.
It wasn't too long ago that the English tried to breed-out their neighbors. Perhaps we need to think about this; if we might get the federal government to mandate metrics in our public schools, we'd all be speaking SI in a matter of years. Bubba can complain if he wants to, but little Jimmy will be driving grandpa Bubba's butt back to the home at 50kph soon.
~~~~_/)~~~~ M.Berk
The U.S. shouldn't convert to the metric system, but the duodecimal system.
Damn moderators these days.
Side from the severe economic penalty to changing to a system that isn't even based off of anything real (i.e. what it was originally supposed to be based on we now know is wrong), there is also the rebel factor. The ability to not let the leaders tell us what to do. We aren't mindless like other countries that simply complied. Ok, that probably isn't fair, Like other countries that after great debate caved into a simple measuring system that any idiot could use. I know because I have seen complete idiots use Metric.
I can remember there was the idiotic attempt a few years ago to switch to metric time. See http://zapatopi.net/metrictime/ . So clearly Metric isn't "universal" as proponets claim it is.
It would be nice if we all did use the same measurement, whatever it is. Personally I don't care because I use both. I think within the next say 20 years SAE will die out. It is already on the run now. I'll keep my SAE sockets around so I can still work on older stuff. Just need more time to let the older folks die out, then for better or worse it will be a Metric world.
Part of the reason for sticking with the imperial system is that it would be too costly to convert industrial machinery to metric. I would guess that the effort hours that were spent preparing for Y2K would be dwarfed by the effort to reprogram industrial controls and modify tooling. The useful life for industrial machinery is often 10-20 years. And the software is usually static, not meant to be upgraded or modified.
Simple people talk of people, better people talk of events, great people talk of ideas.
my fellow americans do not start measure bytes in dozens and length of nucleotide sequences in kilodaltons, I am fine.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Here in Australia we'd probably change that to: Zero's freezing, ten's cold, twenty's cool, thirty's warm, forty's hot. And from personal experience 46-50 is stinking hot.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
What's going to happen to all those air miles I've accumulated?
Well never get anywhere until we start thinking in metric terms on a mass scale. That means initially setting up road signs to list speeds in both miles & kilometers initially. And requiring auto manufactures to include kilometers on all car's speedometers. Once the nation has slowly switched over all of it's road signs to the dual option listing we can then switch over all new road signs to Kilometers.
Yes, minus thirty degrees Celsius IS cold cold cold. Where I live we have it every five, ten winter or so. Standard is minus ten to minus five.
:)
In the spring, and when the temperature rises to minus five, your hormones go banana and you're in a constant smile and all the girls are beautiful!
I thought a lot about the metric system one day and actually like some of its neat orders of magnitude measures but not all of them.
... In celsius its 37.7 which seems arbitrary from the normal human perspective.
:)
My biggest problem is with the celsius scale. Fahrenheit gives you much better (About at least ~2x?) resolution than celsius. To get the same accuracy with that other system you'd have to start speaking in fractions or live with less accuracy. Also 100 degrees is *hot* 0 is *cold*
When they transition the speed limit signs from MI to KM can I plead ignorance when the cop pulls me over?
I'll start dreaming in metrics if the rest of the world makes the switch from QWERTY to DVORAK.
I'm an American who's trying to use Celsius. A dead-easy conversion formula is double and add 30 (for C->F). It isn't perfect, but it works well for most temperatures. Obviously, F->C, which is probably better for you is subtract 30 and divide by 2.
Yeah, that works a lot better. I should have thought of that myself. I always try to over-simplify things, and get it completely wrong. Thanks man.
Maybe you Americans are just too dumb to use metric. Metric is the only really easy measurement system, but you Yanks want to stick with a really complicated and inconsistent system that no one really understands or knows how to use properly. How quickly can you tell me how many inches in a mile? Or the difference between a statute mile and a nautical mile? Or how many grains in a ton?
But in metric, everything is easy. e.g. how many millimetres in 1 kilometre? Answer: 1 million. How many micrograms in a tonne? Answer: 1 trillion, i.e. 1x10^12, because 1 tonne is 1000 kg, 1 kg is 1000 grams, 1 gram is 1000 milligrams and 1 milligram is 1000 micrograms.
Also the prefixes of the units in metric tell you the magnitude, i.e. kilo always means 1000 of something. Micro always means one millionth.
And if the rest of the world jumped in the ocean....
I fail to see the logic that just because everyone else does something, I need to do something...
Just remember - if the world didn't suck, we would all fall off.
It's not just Europe - it's the whole rest of the World. And the US only got 4.6% of the world population.
You are a minority! In quite a few countries a political party with less then 5% of the votes are not allowed into parlament.
Martin
SI is indeed Kelvin but for genereal use one used Celsius. Both are only offseted - to get from one to the other only add or subtract is needed.
But I have a fast way of converting Fahrenheit to Celsius, with a reasonably small margin of error for common values. 100F is more or less the same as 40C. Every degree in Celsius is about 2 degrees Fahrenheit. So if someone tells you that it's 80 degrees, you can guess that it's about 30C. It isn't exact, but it's within about 5 degrees, which is good enough for the most part. It at least tells you what to wear.
You must be someplace in the US that's really hot, if you use 100F = 40C (actually it's 104F) as your equivalence point. You might be better off remembering that 20C = 68F, or maybe 30C = 86F.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
Despite of your accurate describtion, the US armies are all over the world. Everywhere the US thinks they have to have their fingers in. They want the oil, the resources and gives the rest of the world the polution and "way of live" ideas back. They want us to buy your gene food, they want us to buy your hormon poisened meat. If a european country has a law that regulates how much medical or hormon particles my be in meat (for safty of children e.g.) and banishes the trade of it, the USA threaten to answer this with e.g. import taxes on european cars.
You don't want to compete with your agility on our markets, you want us to adapt our markets to your needs. I don't think that europeans hate you, as one of the guys answering to you said. But surely lots of people in the poor areas of the world indeed do.
Hey! Who is "you" in the above rant? Who is "the USA"? You're talking about three tenths of a billion individuals there, bub - represented by a government that many of them did not vote for. Generalizations like the ones you're making are a big part of the reason that the people of the world don't understand each other.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
The metric system an "attempt to control how people communicate". You think you're oh so free when you fight sensible conventions for units. At the same time you're blind to the fact that the US has become the country which spies most on her citizens' communication, all for the sake of "fighting terrorism". That is the enemy to your freedom. It's so sweet how you wave your flag, but a little pathetic too.
I remember being an IT manager at Playboy magazine in the early nineties when Microsoft was trying to get people to switch from Word Perfect/Lotus 1-2-3 to Microsoft Office. MS could get IT departments to want to switch by making it so that everyone else's offerings were unstable... but how could get they get the rank and file computer users to go along? If enough department managers didn't want to learn the new software, the IT department would be told to keep trying to support the old stuff.
:-)
MS shenanigans aside, here's how MS got the a bunch of people who *hated* computers and insisted they didn't have so much as five minutes to spare; to learn a whole new software suite.
They had built-in translations. You could use all the same weird Lotus commands in MS Excel, and they'd still work. But they'd work by showing a demonstration of the corresponding Excel commands. You could set the translation demo to run *almost* fast enough that it could be ignored. But eventually, the knowledge sunk in, person by person, until everyone was comfortable using the native MS Office commands. We never did a lick of formal training because they all insisted they didn't have time for it.
To translate that tactic to Metric System training for America, simply use both measurements for everything for a while. We're already doing this in a number of areas (when was the last time you bought a "gallon" of coca-cola?). While the corporations selling things like to do this because it's easier to increase profits when consumers can't readily compare the value of a 2 liter bottle to the value of a gallon bottle, it is up to the government to dictate that both measurements must be used in consumer products, and that both measurements must be used in public works. Speed signs should have limits in both miles and kilometers. But the Microsoft way is to make the metric measurements *slightly* easier to use. Say they have to be listed first, or slightly larger, or in bold. Oh, you can still the old measurement system, no problem. But you'll eventually work out how the two relate, and gravitate towards the slightly easier path of reading the metric measurements first.
Technically, the next step for the "Microsoft Way" would be start intentionally using inaccurate measurements for non-metric numbers so you grew to mistrust them. And to somehow jack-up the price of using the metric system once it became hard to NOT use. And then replace it every so often with something that required you to upgrade to a more expensive car, and came with a bunch of new features that would only be useful to someone trying to commander you vehicle to pitch penny stocks. Oh yeah, and instead of all this being on behalf of the metric system, it would be on behalf of some 4th-rate system of measurement so inferior to the current measurement system that it could be wholly acquired cheaply enough to leave plenty of cash left over for marketing and dragging out lawsuits for years on end.
But the point is, if the "let people do what they want, but make the behavior you want to see just *slightly* more convenient" method could sell MS Office to companies made up of IT people who loathed Microsoft, and non IT people who loathed computers in general; it could certainly be used to convert America to the metric system.
Yes, there is an organization you can back, and we welcome your support! We are the U.S. Metric Association (USMA), Inc. (see www.metric.org). Founded in 1916, USMA is working constantly to establish the modern metric system (the International System of Units, or SI) as the primary system of measurement in the U.S. Dear thesolo et al., Yes, there is a legislative proposal you can back that will bring metric into the U.S. spotlight. USMA and other U.S. metrication advocates are seeking an amendment to the federal Fair Packaging and Labeling Act (FPLA) that will allow U.S. industry the option of labeling U.S. products in metric units only. The current FPLA requires dual U.S.-customary AND metric labeling. The FPLA amendment is needed now, because European law will ban non-metric units in labeling and other documents imported into the EU after 31 December 1999, and a new export burden on U.S. manufacturers will appear if the FPLA is not changed. Yes, there is a U.S. Representative you can contact who supports metrication! He is Representative Vernon Ehlers of Michigan. If he is YOUR representative, write to him and ask him to introduce the FPLA amendment! His contact info is at www.house.gov or by regular mail, phone, or fax at: 2182 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, DC 20515 voice: (202) 225-3831 fax: (202) 225-5144 SI-ncerely, Paul Trusten, R.Ph. Public Relations Director U.S. Metric Association, Inc. www.metric.org 3609 Caldera Boulevard, Apt. 122 Midland TX 79707-2872 USA trusten@grandecom.net
Ok... cm=2.54", 2.2lb = 1kg, 100miles is approximately 160km and 100km is approximately 60miles.
212 - 32 = 180, 100-0 = 100, 180/100 = 9/5. Therefore (Fareheight - 32) * 5 / 9 = Centigrade
Every single 2 liter coca cola bottle shipped in america containing 2 liters of fluid clearly marks 67.6 fluid ounces. Therefore we have the point of reference that states that 67.6 / 2 = 1 liter or 33.8 fluid ounces = 1 liter.
I am an American living in Norway. I found the transition between ASE (not imperial, the gallon bones this) to be quite natural. Thanks to the complexity of conversion between unit types in ASE/Imperial, the additional math to convert between ASE and Metric was easy enough. I never once have had to guess at a conversion, I just use what's close if it's acceptable.
After 8 years here, I can now say "It feels like it's about 10 degrees" meaning centigrade now that it's natural for me to function in metric.
I would have to say that only an idiot would assume that the math community should have any impact on the measurement units used by the general public. If that were the case we could go forward and start informing people that it's obviously more logical to calculate their smaller power usages in joules for example.
Let's just say that if you're a scientist, mathematician, an engineer, or something else that required you to actually use gray matter during your life, then you're a fool to complain about unit conversions. They should just be natural.
As a note, if I were hiring an architect, engineer, or scientist for a job and an applicant actually felt that unit conversion was complicated, I wouldn't invite him back for a second interview. If you struggle in the slightest with these conversions, you should definately consider a change of careers.
...catching up with the rest of the world, please replace all your units of currency under $5 with coins. There's nothing stupider than trying to feed paper bills into a vending machine so you can buy 355 ml of pop. Er, I mean 12 ounces of soda. Or coke. Whatever. Get rid of the bills.
Forcing change where it makes no difference is a waste of money and effort, and justly is opposed by anyone who thinks we waste enough time in non-productive ways already. Proposals like requiring every map and property deed to be converted to metric convince citizens that anything so stupid and error prone makes the whole metric system suspect.
Products and services which interface with other countries can be, and for the most part are, done in metric. But the idea that metric is in some way better morally is silly. Both systems are arbitrary, the benefit of metric is that it is more common. Let's let common sense and the market choose what and when to convert, not people who treat the issue as a crusade.
I like metric for science and tech stuff, but for everyday items English makes sense.
Hot day? 100 degrees. Cold day? 0 degrees. 100 increments, no negatives. Not -15 and 37 garbage.
Thirsty? Grab a pint of beer. A liter gets warm too quickly.
Family needs milk? Get a gallon. Not a 3.5 L of milk.
Need to measure something? A foot is a natural length estimated with body parts on most people. A meter? not so much.
Same with an inch. A cm is too small to be useful in many cases.
The AA Road Atlas for 2007, published in July 2006, can be found here:
0 1._SS500_SCLZZZZZZZ_V61210859_.jpg
http://ec2.images-amazon.com/images/P/074954872X.
You'll notice a handy-dandy scale of 3.2 MILES per inch.
...already use metric. Pick up a copy of a journal from this century.
California. I got used to 100=40 this summer, when everyone was whining about how hot it was, and I would be forced to give my trademarked blank stare.
What next? Are you going to suggest we only have 10 mili-hours in a day? Will a dozen donuts now only be 10 and a baker's dozen 11? Can you imagine the look in my wife's eyes when I bring her 10 roses on valentines day? "Honey, it's the metric system, I'm not being cheap."
There's nothing wrong with base 12. Just look at your fingers!!
Temperature: At sea level, water boils at 100C and freezes at 0 Weight: 1Kg of water is 1 liter Distance: 1L of water is 0.1m ** 3
I was refeering to more physical contact. It is difficult to get the full idea of a culture's differences (or similarities) with out experiencing it first-hand, IMHO.
:)
On a similar note i am sure that most Americans don't even think that much about other STATES in daily life. I just know that I wouldn't dislike someone/group of people because of that.
Plus, on the Internet, generally don't tend to think of someone having a nationality, unless we happen to be talking about that
--
You only have the one measure of length: the metre,
However, that is completely pants for measuring much smaller or much larger than a metre. So you use "cm" or "km".
Now you complain about the weird units and how many of them. Well, where people use km, you'd use miles.
The only people who still use furlongs are racetrack owners.
Where you use m, use yard. Where cm, use inch. Who uses chain? link? Nobody. hands? horse owners. Fathom? sailors.
YOU DON'T USE the 300 different measurements.
So why do you complain about them?
was the distance a roman soldier could march in an hour. 3.2 miles (ish).
The unused rod was the length of pole an ox team would pull ploughs behind (IIRC) and an acre was an even number of rodsxfurlongs (and roughly what a team could do before a rest).
The odd imperial units were developed separately. Complaining about them is only OK if you include metre, gram and litre in there and say "how do you work out litres per hogshead". The hogshead was used for a purpose and developed for measuring that object or system. It had little to do with the pint but we re-defined it so it built nicely in to the system (like an inch is now DEFINED as 2.54 cm).
Pretty low on the list.
* Schools in the US are trying to bring about that it is ok to stop trying to prove something and just say a God did it.
* People are trying to claim that the world has "hot" periods even though the one in the last 100 years seems to be "hotter" than any we can prove through history.
* I am sure I can add some things about a certain warmonger president, etc, etc
* Oh, and people still use IE
Yep, need to get the US to use metric. I am not too sure the US can handle multiply by 10, that would just be too difficult.
The US is the Land Of The Free. I think it is getting closer to "The Land of the Free to not give a damn." (unless it directly affects me, then I'll show you exactly what freedom means.)
If you couldn't tell, some of this was sarcasm.
Scott Carr
That is, don't make laws that everything must be in X. Instead make laws that everywhere you mention somthing in non metric formats, you are legally required to also list the metric equivelent. Even on measuring instruments (you have a yardstick? It also has to list the number of centimeters down one side.) Do this for 10 years. Let people get used to the idea. Eventually, the printing/sign people will get cheap and offer the "metric" only versions. Once those become common, then pass a law stating no more non-metric.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I will not use that French system.
No, I was counting the countries using the metric system - which would include China and India - against the US. OK a bit unfair, there is also Liberia 3,283,000 and Myanmar with whooping 50,519,000. Well Ok, with Burma in is't 5.3% - you got me there. But that still make 94.6% for the metric system.
;-).
Of corse it's just official measuments: Brits still buy beer in pints - that's ok.
And the last carton of milk I bought in GB was labled "1.35 litre/2 pints" - and that's ok as well. As long as litre is bold print
Martin
PS: In the german election system 4.58% does not round up. You Party got 5.000% (or three direct mandates) or goes home. And I expect it's the same in other countries with a 5% border.