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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...
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
This sig all sigs devours
"The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!"
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.
It's actually 40 inches (1016 mm) long.
If children aren't taught the metric system, they'll have to learn it. As a scientist, I can attest to the massive superiority of the metric system for scientific measurements et cetera, after all, that's partly what it was DESIGNED for. (1cm^3 of pure water doesn't weight 1g at sea level for no reason, for example...).
I like in England, where we're mostly metric (although a lot of Imperial units are still used), but ALL scientists use metric for everything. It's not because of some magical superiorty science that normal people need either, it's mostly because multiplying by 10 is a lot easier than multiplying by 12 then 16 then 8, or whatever!
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.
My car gets forty rods to the hogshead
Typical American. Sir, ye need a Nipponese Prius! Ye should be able to journey a great many furlongs on but a small part of a hogshead.
Exactly. If I'm at the grocery store, and I need to integrate a trigonometric function in order to determine how much milk I should buy (seeing as how you can roughly approximate the demand during the day with a sine curve), and I'm stuck with degrees, it'll be hell to integrate, when compared to radians.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
I'm guessing you're a norwegian. Am I correct?
The argument that imperial is better for daily use is repeated here over and over. However I have been using metric system all my life and it is intuitive for me that where I live there is at least 30C in hot summer, about 20C in spring and 0C to -15C in winter (except January 2007). I can easily estimate dimensions of things in cm by looking at them, their weight in kg by trying to pick them up etc. I know how 500ml of beer will affect me and what will happen after four shots of 100g vodka glasses (or 8 x 50g, both are common).
There is nothing special about imperial or metric system for daily use. You just have to be accustomed to it.
A unit between cm and m exists: 1dm = 10cm = 0.1m, but is rarely used (at least here).
Bullshit. In almost every metric country, type is measured in points. Certainly from my personal experience, Australia, Hong Kong, Thailand, India and the UK, which are all metric in most respects. There are proposed metric units to measure type, but they are not offically part of the SI. And the idea of a font "size" is actually fairly arbitrary and fuzzy. It's generally defined as the smallest line spacing so that the descenders of one line do not collide with the ascenders of the line below. But there are many cases where this rule is violated. Consider it more like women's dress sizes rather than relating to a specific dimension.
Of course, we can thank Adobe for embedding their definition of the point = 1/72" in PostScript (which is slightly larger then the older traditional point.) Page sizes however are often quoted in mm.
However, I suspect you are trolling. If so, well done. I also have to suspect that the site linked in the summary , http://www.freedom2measure.org/ may be a parody.
Could anyone write that stuff seriously?I have only one hold out personally for the Imperial System and that's the measure of temperature. Celsius is all fine and good when using it in a scientific scope, but when talking about the weather, the units are TOO big. The difference between 12C and 13C is too great. A degree in Fahrenheit is about the right size when thinking if something is hot or cold. It may just be my lack of thinking about the temperature outside in Celsius, but being comfortable with both measurements, Fahrenheit allows me to predict a little better what it will feel like when I walk out the door.
Surely, everyone knows that the proper measure for fuel economy is the square millimetre (or millimeter for the other side of the pond). After all, we're dividing volume by distance here, so naturally we get an area. And this measure has an obvious geometric interpretation: Distribute the fuel needed to drive a certain distance as a very thin tube along that entire distance, and measure its cross section.
Well, to me, Farenheit seems ridiculous. Why is 40F "Very Cold" or Freezing? Shouldn't it be 0? or 100?
You're saying that because you grew up with it, but ask anyone who uses the Centigrades and they'll be able to tell you what temperature they are at (ballpark number, at least).
The units are not "Too big" either. Can you use decimal points? 22.5C
To me, Farenheit units are ridiculous and nonsensical.
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
You say that as if having twice as many tools doesn't cost anything and doesn't take up twice as much space.
Also, how many bolts have been stripped because someone wasn't careful and tried to use an SAE wrench instead of a metric one? How much time has been wasted trying to figure out if you need SAE or metric?
there's really no advantage to either methodBut there is a huge advantage to going with only one rather than both - and since everyone else in the world uses metric, why not use it too? And actually there is a pretty big advantage to metric - you don't have to remember that there are 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard, and some other random number of yards in a mile. Pushing a decimal around is just so much easier.
I don't expect us to ever switch, but much more because we're obstinate than because of any sort of rational cost-benefit analysis.