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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?"
Got to disagree with that. There are a few hold-outs that have thus far resisted metrification - basically anything that involves old, miserable people - like speed limits, temperature, clothing and body weight. And there were some big arguments about weighing fruit (I'm still amazed that people can get so worked up about units). But everything else is pretty much metric: the plumbing in your house, screws in your electrical system, paper sizes, temperature of your oven, power of your lightbulbs (ergs/s anyone?), anything to do with engineering or science. Everybody who's serious is using metric.
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.
Canada.
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
Kind of true... it's not that strict though. Yes, road signs here are in miles and mph, and many people use feet and inches, but metric is taught in school so most people under 30 generally use metres and centimetres.
It's also worth noting what happened a couple of years ago (most people blame the EU) - greengrocers had to start listing prices in pounds (the currency) per kilogramme rather than pounds per pound. There was a lashback at the time but most people seem to have accepted it (and most greengrocers list both now).
Having said that, if somebody asks my weight or height, I'd tell them in stones and feet, so we still have a way to go.
There is a drive to convert road signs to metric - again, partly because of our EU membership - but there's no easy, straightforward way to do it. One interesting idea, coupling with the concept of reducing our speed limits in general, is to leave the speed limit signs as they are but tell everyone that they now refer to KPH rather than MPH (ie. a 30 MPH limit becomes a 30 KPH limit). But of course, the number of people who want our speed limits reduced is relatively small, and that would be a much harder change to propose than metric!
This isn't really true. Britons uses imperial measurements a lot for day to day use, but you'll find that anywhere something needs to be done precisely, it's done in metric.
For example, the hardware store will sell the same standardised pieces that have been around for years, and these will be in imperial. But I doubt you'll find a building site in the country which is working in anything apart from metric. Any architecht would make plans in metric, as would any engineer.
General rule of thumb would be imperial for casual stuff, metric for work - although there are going to be a few exceptions to this ;)
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Actually it's a mix. People talk in miles, stones, pints and inches (for certain body parts). But then they'll happily talk centimetres, metres, kilograms or litres for other things. As for hardware stores, it is almost entirely metric with just vestiges of imperial here and there. Everything from screws, nails, flooring, tiles, boards is all measured in metric. A short trip to an online DIY site such as www.screwfix.com would confirm that.
Certainly it's less metric than the rest of Europe, but not massively so. Anyway, Ireland demonstrates that the UK could convert to KM for road distances and speed without the collapse of civilization - the changeover happened virtually over night.
it's always feet and inches when buying anything in hardware stores
Neither of the above statements are true, and I suspect you know it. I wonder what you hope to prove by making them?
I only ever use imperial measurement for the following;
- body weight
- body height
- road distance
- vehicle speed
And that's only because if I used metric no-one else would follow me.
Everything else is metric, and everything is sold in metric.
It's actually 40 inches (1016 mm) long.
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
Miles, being an exact multiple of feet, which are an exact multiple of inches, are metric.
Yes, inches are metric, as they are now _defined_ as an exact multiple of the standard metric unit.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
231. To quote a line from a certain video game, "Twenty-three is number one."
"Since he calculation using the metric system is really easy"
A US gallon is made up of:
- 4 quarts
- 8 pints
- 16 cups
- 128 fluid ounces
- 256 tablespoons
If you can't see the pattern and do that kind of math in your head, you don't belong on Slashdot.Of course, there's nothing wrong with using decimal gallons (I fill up my car's gas tank with decimal gallons of gasoline all the time), but using binary in SI is strongly frowned upon by BIPM.
Or are you trying to focus on the conversion between volumic and cubic-linear measurements? First off, there's little point in it since converting between two such units is hardly useful in day-to-day operations, but even if it is, you're better off using using the US gallon than the liter because it has been far more consistent: 231 cubic inches since the eighteenth century. Initially, the liter was defined as a cubic decimeter, but then somebody had the idea to define it as "one kilogram of water," and despite protestations from metric fanbois, they're not the same thing. It was eventually changed back to "cubic decimeter," but now you're left with a system where "one liter" today is non-negligibly different from "one liter" a century ago.
This is why BIPM is trying to deprecate the liter outright.
Since nobody else has answered, Two hundred and thirty-one, apparently.
Oh wait, actually, it depends on the gallon!
qntm.org
A US pint is 16 fl oz but an Imperial pint is 20 fl oz. So crossing the atlantic, when I order a pint in a US pub (ok, I mean a large beer in a bar) I feel short changed. Far worse than the fractional percentage differences in the evolution of the litre (note spelling) - which mostly comes down to which is the prime unit. When I was at school we were taught that a kilogram was a litre of water (not the other way round) even though SI had moved on by then.
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USA: home of the world's largest terrorist training camp.
We decimalised the currency 35 years ago !
Steve
The SI unit for time is defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the Cs-133 atom.
If you can't remember this simple fact, you are not worthy.
Regarding paper sizes: I don't know about the area (others have posted on that), but the ratio of the l:w dimensions is 1:sqrt(2). So A1 is an A0 cut in half. A2 is an A1 cut in half and so on. But for all A0, A1, etc., the l:w ratio is still 1:sqrt(2).
40 (rods / hogshead) = 0.00198412698 miles / US gallon
And to be more on topic:
40 (rods / hogshead) = 0.000843539098 km / L
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
I am a mechanical engineer who works on government contracts. I think it's a chicken and egg thing. I design in inches because the materials I buy come in inches. But the material I buy comes in inches because I'm not demanding metric materials. But whenever I do a dynamics calculation I always convert everything to metric do the calcs and then convert the answer back to imperial. I still get confused using LBM and Slugs and g.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Prior to 1971, Britain used:
1 pound (£) = 20 shillings
1 shilling (s) = 12 pence
1 penny (d) = 4 farthings
I think it's interesting that the yard is defined in meters.
After moving to England 4 months ago from the US, i've been surprised at many Imperial units are still used here. besides have friends studying non-scientific graduate degrees who don't know which temperature scale they use, the commonly used lengths are quite a hybrid of the systems. millimeters and centimeters, then yards, and finally miles. Seeing that a (mostly) European nation like England still isn't metric makes me thing it'll be a century at least before the US converts.
...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.
My father came to the UK some years ago (15 maybe) and they still used that strange system where 12 shillings was a quarter and 8 quarters was a pound (I am just babbling what I remember... those are not accurate numbers)...
We switched to the Pound and Penny in 1971. That was 35 years ago. I think you would remember the difference between 15 and 35!
At the time, it was the same old OLD MISERABLE people that complained, because they didn't like change, even if it was for the better. We had a fucking 3p coin before that! And a 1/4 of a pence coin. And the coins were the size of dinner plates.
As for pre-decimalisation monetary denominations:
Originally the pound consisted of 20 shillings each of 12 pence, the abbreviation for which, d, came from the denier of Charlemagne, which in turn came from the Roman denarius.
http://www.tclayton.demon.co.uk/coins.html#index
Fahrenheit is a much more human-based scale, ostensibly it was derived from the maximum and minimum temps that Fahrenheit experienced (he lived in Copenhagen, IIRC).
So, 100 is "really hot" and 0 is "really cold". That seems simple and very human-centric, albeit not terribly useful for scientists.
I have to say, it sounds fairly dumb to say "oh my gosh, it's 37 outside!" - there's just no intuitive oomph to it.
-Styopa
I take it you mean lengh and mass.
>>Tell me, what's the metric unit for time?
It's the second. If you have ever taken a look at the MKS system (Meters, Killograms, Seconds), it makes physics so much easyer. All units can be expressed in MKS units.
1 Joule is the amount of energy required to raise 1kg to a height of 1m.
Oops! Looks like you need to review the difference between mass and weight. A joule is the energy required to apply 1 Newton over a distance of 1 meter or to raise 1 kilogram 0.102 meters at a nominal gravitational acceleration of 9.8 m/s.
You should see what it's like in Canada. Due to certain laws, most products are sold in metric, like cans of coke. But because Coke uses the same cans for the US market, we get nice metric sizes like 355mL. And then when you start talking about mass, every grocery store I go to advertizes and posts (in large font) prices for produce, meat, etc, in dollars/pound, but then at the cash register it rings up in dollars/kilo. It makes it annoying to verify if you were charged the right price at the checkout, since you need to do the conversion. Also the scales my supermarket provides only measure in kilos.
Then there's lumber and other construction materials. Again, to allow import/export from/to the US, all our building materials are specified in imperial units. We use 2x4s to build our houses (though they stopped being 2"x4" a while ago). Room measurements and area are usually discussed in feet and square feet.
Finally nobody I know can tell you their height or weight in metric. I suspect this is because of the construction thing; most people have at least some reference of how tall, say, a door is and thus can correlate that to the height of a person, which are both expressed in feet/inches.
Despite all of this stuff still gets done, but I look forward to the day when the US is finally free of the metric system and we can finally call 2x4s 4.5x9.5s
Converting between the two shouldn't be too difficult for a maths student ^_^
360 is a useful number for measuring angles because it divides by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 24, 30, 36, 40, 45, 60, 72, 90, 120, 180 and itself. One of the arguments against metric that I've heard is that it makes it impossible to accurately divide by 3, something that is possible in some imperial systems (but not others - 14 pounds to a stone for example).
Personally I think the solution is to travel back in time, and re-engineer the human race so that we grow 12 fingers.
There are two official miles in the US. One is the international mile (exactly 1760 international yards), the other the survey mile (exactly 5280 survey feet). They differ by about 2 * 10E-6. Both are based on the metric system; the survey foot is 1200/3937 meter.
I think the rail miles you speak of are probably conventions used only in that specific industry, and if rail in the US was measured in kilometers they'd do exactly the same thing.
The liter is (and always was) a unit derived from the meter, which was originally defined based on the length of the meridian through Paris. It doesn't have anything to do with pints (it's much closer to a quart, anyway)
Personally I think the solution is to travel back in time, and re-engineer the human race so that we grow 12 fingers
Interestingly, Schoolhouse Rock covered a similar possibility on children's TV back in the 70's. Hell of a concept to lay on kids.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
by definition 1 liter of pure water weights 1kg (== 1000g) at sea level.
Nope, not true. The kilogram is still defined by a metal cylinder kept in a vault in Paris. And you can't just say "sea level"; you'd need to define a standard temperature and pressure too.
The mass of a liter of water is very close to 1kg, but it's not exact.
Seriously, it is scary that it is possible for someone to reason so badly.
Firstly, he claims conversion is implicit and universal despite mars probes crashing because obviously people DO forget to do it sometimes. Then he throws up some rhetoric involving binary and hexadecimal, number systems which are only used in low level computing because of their affinity with hardware with having two general purpose unit systems used in parallel. Then he brings up seconds, minutes, hours and days when anyone who knows anything about metric knows that only seconds are part of SI, the rest should never be used in calculations. Then he claims that points are somehow better than millimeters because he likes his fonts at exactly 12pt and is not willing to have his fonts 5% smaller to make them 4mm but instead NEEDS that extra .233 millimeters to make his fonts JUST RIGHT but doesn't want to be bothered typing it in. Of course if someone wanted 4mm fonts they would need to type in 11.3394pt in the current system, but of course we all know that fonts are especially right when they are at even numbers of points rather than millimeters. What the hell is a point anyway? Millimeters are used in carpentry, particle physics and trade, points are just another unit made up for one purpose that doesn't really need its own system of measurement.
He summarizes in extolling the virtues of diversity. Diversity is great, don't you just love the Gnome and KDE flamewars on slashdot because any given application only really works properly and looks right with one desktop. And how you can't run OSX applications on your linux box. And how there are more BSDs that you can name but only one of them has proper SMP support but it is neither the one that is portable nor the one which is secure nor the one that is modular. You've gotta love the web pages designed around IE's quirks that don't quite look right under firefox. Oh, and how IPSEC has two types of header which can be used with either of the two modes and how nobody quite supports it because it's too "diverse". I can't begin to explain how having two types of high density optical disk has helped me enjoy high definition video so much quicker. Ever tried to hook up the tail lights of a friends trailer to your car and found out the plug is different? Ever bought some electric guismo from overseas but the plug doesn't fit without an ugly adapter?
In art, food and society you have diversity, in science and technology you have incompatibility.
Nobody could be dumb enough to truly think what the OP thinks, though I live in Australia where we switched to metrics in the 60s to the 80s and cannot imagine anyone having any trouble. That is why I think the OP is a troll or just having a little sarcastic joke that nobody got.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Every US unit is defined in terms of SI these days.
I think you mean the babylonian number system.
MRSH-Recording device, corned beef sandwich with kraut, seafaring bird, and the foamy top of a beverage.
> With SI, on the other hand, many divisors are problematic. What's a third of a metre? [...] What's a twelfth of a litre?
Those are extremely popular and somewhat contrived examples to prove the superiority of the imperial system. Yet what's so special about easy division by three or by 12? When you happen to need it, that's fine, but more often than not you will find yourself having to divide by four instead: estimating the amount of material needed for the circumference of a rectangle (amount of fencing, sheetrock, etc). For division by four neither system is vastly superior.
Where the imperial system is mind-numbingly and idiotically inadequate is in day-to-day length measurements. If you have have ever done any carpentry work and encountered the endless fractional "standard" sizes such as thicknesses of 5/8" or 31/32", and then tried to add those together while holding a bunch of nails between your lips, a 2x4 in one hand and a hammer in the other, you know what I'm talking about. Yes, it is a contrived example, but not by much. Addition of lengths with fractions of differing denominators is so common in everyday life that the imperial system is pretty much untenable for that reason alone. And please spare me any erudite counter examples showing how some sophisticated fractional magic actually makes it EASIER, because no carpenter or contractor I've ever met knows and uses those--they all fudge the fractions by "gut feeling" and consider accuracy to half an inch or so "good enough".
Metric makes the life of a carpenter infinitely easier. Except for fine woodwork the millimeter is the highest accuracy you need on a construction site, and you can measure and add together lengths of centimeters and millimeters all day long in your head without any loss of accuracy or confusion. Try it sometime. Incidentally, you don't really need a unit between the meter and the centimeter. While the decimeter is not explicitly used much, implicitly people have a good feel for it. Seeing a measurement of 0.3m you don't have to perform mental gymnastics to know that it's 30cm, and people intuitively have a very good feel for the length of 10cm (about the width of a hand), so they can easily visualize fractions of a meter.
No, it's not. It's not as if the current measurement system we're using somehow belongs to us; we inherited most of it from the Mother Country. For that matter, other children of the Mother Country have managed to convert; heck, our neighbor to the north did, and they never had that little "revolution" thing that we did, so they arguably had stronger ties to Britain.
In some people's eyes, perhaps, but not in others.
I'd consider the death of Welsh sad. I wouldn't give a rat's ass about the death of the imperial system. As far as I'm concerned, it's ridiculous to insinuate that there's something wrong with the "sorts of people" who would agree with me on both.
Actually no. He established his scale in the same manner as Celcius but based it on different criteria. Fahrenheit marked as zero, the coldest temperature he could get to, a salt water bath. 100 was supposed to be body temperature. Oops, guess he was wrong.
(many stories of the history are seen in wikipedia)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit
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.
And to make matters worse, we Oldies in the UK use 1 pint = 20 fluid ounces!
the error if memory serves me correctly is about 1 in 1000, so when your shoot a mortar 4500 meters it'll be of 4.5m which is insignificant since the burst is 35m, usually the wind will blow it off that much. You're defiantly correct for long-range stuff like missiles, for artillery we were basically shooting from an estimated position to an other estimated position, and corrects being given from a third estimated position. You have to realize that I'm an old fart, and we did it all manually with a pencil, paper, map and a firing table; now a days they got digital computers, laser range finders and GPS so they had better be able to drop steel in your back pocket with one round.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
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.