Astronauts Having Trouble With Tranquility Module

Coldeagle writes "Astronauts ran into trouble while trying to connect up the new Tranquility module onto the ISS. A critical insulating cover didn't fit quite right: 'The fabric, multilayered cover is supposed to go between Tranquility and its observation deck, but the metal bars are not locking down properly because of interference from a hand rail or some other structure at the hatch.' One has to wonder if this is another imperial/metric snafu."

Comments

Metric Everywhere

[elzurawka]

Atleast in scientific application there is no reason to use Imperial. Metric makes all calculations simpler, and is accepted by a much larger portion of the world, and should be the standard in all science.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[profplump]

He means that metric makes prefix-changing calculations easier, even though no one ever does those outside of middle school science classes. And he's assuming that you'll ignore the fact the most real-world calculations involve a coefficient that isn't a multiple of 10 because the physical world is not dictated by our measurement system, even when using SI units -- is 6.67300 × 10^-11 m^3 kg^-1 s^-2 somehow easier to use than 1.06891206 × 10^-9 feet^3 pounds-force^-1 s^-2?

Used by a large portion of the world is a good point. There's great value in having everyone use the same system. Of course there's also an enormous cost in switching between systems, and little direct benefit to anyone who was happy with the old system, which is why no one does it.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[AdmiralXyz]

You're absolutely right, but I detect in your voice that you think some people disagree with you. This is something I see a lot, especially from Europeans: the assumption that Americans are actually fanatical supporters of the Imperial system. The truth is, we don't like it (can't speak for the UK, but I suspect it's similar). There isn't anyone in America who actually believes that the Imperial system is easier or more useful. The reason it persists is simply one of tradition, and the enormous expense (in terms of money and headaches) it would take to move the entire country over to a new system.

For example, I have basically no concept in my mind of how far a "kilometer" is. Oh, I know it's .62 miles, and I can usually do the conversion in my head, but I don't have an intuitive, subconscious sense of how far a kilometer is, like I do for a mile. I suspect most people raised on the metric system are the same way for Imperial units, it's just not easy to get a natural sense of the units you didn't grow up with. An entire country of people who don't have an intuitive sense of the units they're using would be chaos.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[gmuslera]

Maybe not in temperatures, but in i.e. measuring distances all names are at powers of ten of a base measure. Inches, feets, miles, are not so regular, in proportion and in names. How many feets is a mile? How many meters is a kilometer? How many different names of units you must know?

And yes, it makes math easier, if you have numbers of different units... a mile + 3 foots is harder to do than a kilometer + 3 meters.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[socceroos]

Not to mention movies like "the Green Kilometer" - doesn't have the same ring to it.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[KibibyteBrain]

Most Chinese/asian made components are metric, but these sort of high tech/super high quality American made components are usually only Imperial. "Scientists" can do their maths in whatever units they like, but at some point they have to use components that actually exist. And even many of these metric parts have fun values like "2.54 mm" as standards... A big part of the reason high quality components are Imperial is because that is what all the shop equipment used to make them are designed for, and replacing them all would be impractical since they are very expensive and now too low volume for a re-investment to ever see returns.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[navyjeff]

Here's a handy guide to get an intuitive sense of metric measurements.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[ircmaxell]

I am an american, and I do believe the Imperial system is a lot easier to use. For me. Because that's what I learned from day 1. Do I think it's better? No way. Do I think it should be changed to metric? Absolutely. But the fact that most people would have a very hard time with switch is why it hasn't happened. The only way it would be able to happen is with a (possibly multiple) decade long "dual usage"... That way kids would be taught from the beginning, and regular people would have time to learn the new system...

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Pentium100]

He means that metric makes prefix-changing calculations easier, even though no one ever does those outside of middle school science classes. And he's assuming that you'll ignore the fact the most real-world calculations involve a coefficient that isn't a multiple of 10 because the physical world is not dictated by our measurement system, even when using SI units -- is 6.67300 × 10^-11 m^3 kg^-1 s^-2 somehow easier to use than 1.06891206 × 10^-9 feet^3 pounds-force^-1 s^-2?

Prefix changing calculations are used a lot even outside middle school. If you have measurements in smaller units (mL, cups) and need to convert them to larger units (m^3, ft^3) because you have some table which only lists the larger units (for example a table of volume densities of various materials), then you need to do more complex calculations in the imperial system.

1mL=1e-6 m^3
1cup = 0.00835503472 ft^3

and here is when you get the extra complexity.

that's the point. While the coefficients that were observed in the real world rarely match our units evenly, with metric system at least the units themselves are a power of 10 of larger and smaller units.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh well, re-adjusting your intuition to new units of measure isn't nearly as hard as it seems at first, before you actually have to do it. I say this as an european, who not that long ago switched from a national currency to an european one. Back then, many people were scared of the very same thing, but it really didn't take long for people to adapt. I guess it would be pretty much the same for any physical unit relevant for people's everyday lives.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Anonymous Coward]

There isn't anyone in America who actually believes that the Imperial system is easier or more useful.
Well unless your buying weed, selling weed or busting weed dealers...

Re:Metric Everywhere

[0100010001010011]

It's mainly educated people. There is a large percentage of our populous that wants creationism in schools and thinks that telling teens to abstain works.

When visiting other countries switching over to metric for time and distance takes all of a week to get into my head. It helps that all those countries are in Metric. So when I want to go from Delhi to Agra. I know it's X km and trains travel about X km/hr, so it'll take X hrs.

It's like Americans that point at manual transmissions and claim that takes too much thinking. After you do it for a while, it's just instinct. If every Weather forecast was given in C tomorrow, it would be 'chaos' for a week. Then everyone would figure it out. Packaged food is already sold with SI units. Grocery store patrons would take all of a week to need to order 2kg instead of 1lb.

After a week in the new system, the only time I have to 'convert' is when I have to explain distances from the USA, but even then 100km/hr is a good speed. I know it takes 5 hours to get home. Home is 500 km from here, no converting the mi -> km.
-
I work for a Fortune 50 company, ALL of our engineering has been metric since the late '90s. I bet most actual companies are.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[skirmish666]

It's also useful for conversion of units - 1,000 cm^3 is equivalent to 1Litre(of water) which weighs 1 Kilogram, 1 Joule = 1 Newton over 1 Meter = 1 Watt Second etc.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[vlm]

Not to mention movies like "the Green Kilometer" - doesn't have the same ring to it.

I can see my ipod now, "Aerosmith" "Toys in the Attic" "Big 25.4 Centimeter Record"

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Brett Buck]

There's absolutely no reason to think this has anything do do with units conversion, that's just a silly strawman.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[icebraining]

Well, we changed our currency in a couple of years. I know it's not the same, but it hardly caused any major issues. And the Spanish didn't have a nice conversion: an Euro is 166.386 Pesetas. Doing conversions in your head was troublesome!

Re:Metric Everywhere

[vlm]

And even many of these metric parts have fun values like "2.54 mm" as standards

Thats not a metric part, thats a 0.100 inch pin spacing expressed metrically.

Thats like reporting the length of the space shuttle in cubits, then using that number to describe it as a "biblical" spacecraft, since it was reported in cubits.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[KibibyteBrain]

That's exactly my point. Even the most popular standard "metric" parts in design use today are really Imperial.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[epp_b]

Not to mention movies like "the Green Kilometer" - doesn't have the same ring to it.

*ahem*

"The Green 1.6 Kilometres"

Re:Metric Everywhere

[dronkert]

Funny as always. Still, 3 l in a two-liter bottle?

Re:Metric Everywhere

[QuoteMstr]

Indeed. I'm an American, but I'm familiar with SI units. If I tell a friend that something is about two meters long, he's surprised, but he understands what I mean. That goes for everyone. Even in the US, people intuitively grasp how much a liter is, how heavy a kilogram is, and how long a kilometer is. We seem to have more trouble with temperature and speed though. I'm still a little taken aback when I drive into Canada and see speed limits far higher than what I'm used to.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Anonymous Coward]

That is pretty much how it is in the UK. We are effectively a "dual" nation, however we are a Metric nation when it comes to new implementations. Milk can be bought in Pints, however it has to be primarily labelled in Litres. We buy pints of Beer, Petrol is sold in Litres, Sugar/Flour etc is sold in Grams/KG's. Products are measured in mm/m, but almost anything on the road is done in Yards and Miles. Temperature is all listed as Celsius, but almost every weather broadcast translates that into Fahrenheit also. Our currency is pretty much metric to, working in 1's 2's 5's 10s and 100's. We have no quarter of a £ like you have with the $.

The only possible benefit to the Imperial systems is it's workings on numbers divisible by 2, 3 and 4. You can half it, third it and quarter it easily - great when people worked with small numbers all the time. Otherwise, Metric systems are fantastic - its far easier to work in 10s/100s and to add/remove 0's quickly and easily when the numbers get bigger.

Personally, I doubt in my lifetime i'll see the Pint disappear as it's too much of a tradition; both in Beer and Milk. The roads will no doubt stay the same for a long time through cost of sign replacement. Seems quite difficult to see us moving from the status quo we are in at the moment where things are all officially Metric, but the Imperial system is digging in it's heels.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[MillionthMonkey]

Whenever they attempt to introduce metric here, the first thing you see is old ladies on the TV news bitching about the road signs being wrong.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[dgatwood]

When visiting other countries switching over to metric for time...

How are those ten day weeks working out for you, anyway? :-D

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Hadlock]

The Green Klick (Click?)

Re:Metric Everywhere

[maxume]

Aren't the speed limits about the same?

Or do you mean the numbers used to represent the limits are higher?

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Jazzbunny]

Here in Europe most countries changed their currency from something else to Euro lately. Learning new currency took some time but in the end the change from using one unit to another wasn't that painful, and it certainly didn't take decades to learn.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[frdmfghtr]

Indeed. I'm an American, but I'm familiar with SI units. If I tell a friend that something is about two meters long, he's surprised, but he understands what I mean.

I've seen signs posted using metric dimensions (mainly boats, expressing lengths in meters) and somebody would scribble on the sign "This is America, we use feet here." Probably the same stubborn type that blames anything and everything on those "damned commie liberal pieces of shit."

Some argue that Imperial units work better, since things designed and built are built to nice round Imperial values. The point that I try to make (and fail at) is that if we used metric, things would STILL be designed to convenient increments. That 100-foot wall? Maybe only to 30 or 30.5 meters (not 30.48 meters necessarily). Eight-foot (not a nice increment of anything in itself already) ceiling? An extra 2.5 inches gets you to 2.5 meters. Instead of buying a gallon of milk, buy four liters instead.

I personally prefer metric, since it makes many conversions easier (1000 cc = 1 liter to me is easier remember and calculate instead of 231 cubic inches = 1 gallon) but in the end, it's a matter of what you are used to that ultimately determines what is easier.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[skine]

Yes, metric is easier to convert between different types of units (cups to ft^3, as in your example), and often different units within a single measure (inches to miles). This is why it's the customary measurement for scientific purposes.

However, in daily life, it's rare for any extremely difficult conversion to come up. Cooking is an example where it may prove difficult, but when I started cooking as a child I memorized "3 tsp to a tbsp, 4 tbsp to 1/4 cup," and "8 fl oz to a cup, 2 cups to a pint, two pints to a quart, four quarts to a gallon." As I know the powers of two, this means that, off the top of my head, there are 768 tsp in a gallon, which again is 128 fl oz.

Distance can be tricky, but I would say that, again, it works in practice. Also, I'll claim that it's much more interesting (to a certain kind of nerd, at least).

The history of Standard (US Customary) Units of course comes from Britain, and most of them are in some way organic. The foot, of course, should be fairly obvious. The inch has been postulated to derive from words meaning one-twelfth, or thumb. Either way, in English law, it was defined as three widths of a barleycorn. The yard is generally considered to be half a fathom (ie half a "wingspan").

The mile has a stranger history. It comes from the miles used by Ancient Romans, which was exactly 5000 Roman feet (which, with the increase in foot size over time, would be about 4500 feet today). However, the English compared a mile to eight furlongs, where a furlong is about how far a horse could pull a plow before needing to rest. The difference between common measures and measures used specifically for surveying led this to be 5280 ft.

Wikipedia finds it important to mention that Abe Simpson claims “My car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!” That is, where a rod is 1/40 furlong, or 1/320 mi and a hogshead is roughly 63 gallons. This means that the fuel economy is .002 miles per gallon.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Professor_UNIX]

Do Italians even use Imperial units? The Tranquility module and the cupola were both designed and built through the Italians and the European Space Agency. I seriously doubt conversion had anything to do with it. I'm sick of people making such dumb statements as the submitter did without checking simple facts beforehand.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[CharlieG]

Actually, Aircraft , and for that matter, almost all machine shop work is done in decimal inches (of course except for fastener sizes, which are their own odd 'wire gage' sizes, but are not really added/subtracted), and measurements are usually NOT reduced to feet and inches, so you'll see things like 78.50 inches (and yes, the significant figures matter for tolerances, so 78 1/2 - which yes is sometimes used in old drawings is different than 78.5, 78.50 and 78.500)

So, yes, metric IS easier, but the inch system is not as bad as you think in doing industrial work )and yes, I have scales (what most of you would cale a ruler) that have 1/32nds, 64ths, 10ths and 100ths all on the same scale

Re:Metric Everywhere

[jfruhlinger]

Of course there's also an enormous cost in switching between systems, and little direct benefit to anyone who was happy with the old system, which is why no one does it.

This sentence is correct if by "nobody" you mean "everyone on Earth at some point in history except for Americans." It's not like everyone in the world outside the US has been on metrics since time immemorial; they all managed to make the switchover at some point.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[darthflo]

take all of a week to need to order 2kg instead of 1lb.

Are you sure this switch hasn't happened yet? All those obesity problems sure make it look like it did. ;)

Re:Metric Everywhere

[line-bundle]

"The Green 1.6 Kilometres"

You might laugh at this, but this is part of what made the metric system fail in the US. Instead of putting new signs at point like 10Km from a destination they would put a metric sign at the same location as the imperial sign. So a lot of signs had "16.09 Kilometers to destination". This led people to believe that metric is complicated with the obvious result.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[GIL_Dude]

Changing currency is easy compared to dealing with conversions in things like maintenance. "We need some new bolts to replace these old ones on the bridge. The manual says they are 7/8". What, we can only get 19 cm ones? Those don't fit." Equipment in refineries, pipelines, trucks, etc. all have long lifetimes and need replacement parts. I think we SHOULD change over, but it isn't simple and it isn't easy.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[CrimsonAvenger]

Grocery store patrons would take all of a week to need to order 2kg instead of 1lb.

Well, if I wanted a pound, I think I'd order 0.5 kg rather than 2 kg. Why buy four and a half pounds of meat when you need one?

Oddly enough, I've never had any problem dealing with either SI or Imperial. Contrary to rumour, there's no real ease of use difference - it's not like we do our math with sliderules anymore, and my calculator can divide by 12 (or 5280 or whatever) as easily as it can by 10.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[zoney_ie]

Ah sure it's childsplay to switch over.

Just gradually use km on new road signs. Sure it's no big deal if people get a bit confused as to whether the distances are miles or kilometres. Then 20 years later you can finally change the speed limits to km/h overnight. Admittedly this is a bit of a more major cost/manoeuvre, but sure by now people will just want an end to it all, and most people would agree a mix of km/h and mph speed limits is not good.

I kid you not, this is pretty much what happened here in Ireland. Fortunately, it's all over and done with now, bar the small issue of the north of the island not being metric as it's part of the UK!

We are supposed to be fully metric now, but I think Imperial survives on the railways (mileposts and even some obscure measures like chains or something). Also people use Imperial for everyday stuff like height (although weight is increasingly referred to in kg due to official use in hospitals/doctor), pints (of course it's actually 576 ml - and because Germany doesn't include the head of the beer in their 0.5 litre measures, and we include the head in the pint measures, we can use the same glasses as Germany for their beer) and for meat a lot of people still ask for pounds (although again, it's priced in kg and they'll give you something approximating 454 g). People are switching over to referring to distances in km now, although sometimes you'll hear people use miles especially for made-up distances (ah sure it's a few miles down the road).

Re:Metric Everywhere

[BKX]

I find it kind of bizarre that in a discussion about the origins of and standard usage of units, you used a non-standard unit for fuel-economy. Well, sort of. Generally, fuel-economies less than 1 mpg aren't reported in mpg, but instead in gallons/mile, which would make 40 rod/hogshead = 504 gallons/mile. Holy shit would that be bad.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Da Cheez]

I find it amusing that xkcd bothers to define -40 degrees Celsius as, "Spit goes 'clink.'" I know it's trying to offer intuitive ways to make the switch without having to reference Imperial units, but -40C and -40F are exactly the same.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[misexistentialist]

Even in the US, people intuitively grasp how much a liter is, how heavy a kilogram is, and how long a kilometer is.

I don't, except for the liter since that's how soda is sold. I guess that weighs about a kg, but that doesn't help much. There may be athletic events measured in meters, but that also doesn't help with my intuition!

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Stormwatch]

Do you like 22.8 Centimeter Nails?

Re:Metric Everywhere

[HiThere]

One could make an argument on a base twelve measure system...but then everyone would need to learn a new set of multiplication tables.

Still...it would have advantages. But you'll never convince everyone to change the way they count. You'd need to have started back in Babylon, and convince them that base 60 was too complicated to catch one.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Stormwatch]

...to order 2kg instead of 1lb.

Actually, 1 pound = aprox. 0.45 kg.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[MichaelSmith]

We took the big bang approach in Australia for most things in the early 1970s. Speed limits changed overnight. Signs changed over a couple of weeks before the change. People who claimed they couldn't cope were pretty much told to STFU. I have a friend who went to a private school which stuck it out teaching imperial units as long as they could do it legally and he had a lot of trouble later at college when people wouldn't understand what he was talking about when he talked about inches, feet, etc.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[PCM2]

In the U.S., where the pint is a little smaller than in the UK, a pint is basically half a liter. The only time we ever mention liters, though, is when buying soft drinks, like Coke or 7-Up (which all come in two-liter bottles). Seriously -- I can't think of any other product that we'd buy in liters. We'd say quarts (and then two quarts is a half-gallon, etc...)

Re:Metric Everywhere

[DarkofPeace]

they make medicine for that.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[DarkofPeace]

but the more expensive drugs are sold by the gram or kilo.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Opportunist]

Honestly? I've been living on metric for as long as I can remember and I have no concept of a "kilometer" either. Why? Because it's just "a few minutes of walking" or "a few seconds of driving". 1 or 1.6 kilometers isn't a big difference there.

What I have trouble with when I'm in the US is mostly with more "handy" values. I know a can here is 0.33 or 0.5 liters. A bottle is 1, 1.5 or 2 liters. And, curiously, the cans and bottles have the same size in the US. So picking one up isn't so much of a problem. The problem is that I wouldn't know from an ad whether I'd take it or not, not knowing what that amount compares to. Is that a 0.33 or a 0.5 can? Is that a 1.5 or a 2 l bottle? Or even 2.5?

It's less distance, it's more amount that confuses me every time I'm in the US. Whether a distance is 10 kilometers or 10 miles makes little difference when you're in a car.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Gordo_1]

An entire country of people who don't have an intuitive sense of the units they're using would be chaos.

Quick, time travel back to Canada circa 1973 and warn them of impending doom!

Re:Metric Everywhere

[marcansoft]

We (the Spanish) didn't have a truly terrible time with it, because 6 Euro happened to be damn near 1000 Pesetas (it's actually €6.01, but no one cares), so we were saved by the inverse relationship. That was the reference point that everyone used during the transition, and in fact most people still think of large amounts of money in terms of millions of pesetas. This is why you'll often hear people calling €6000 "un kilo" (1 million pesetas used to be called a "kilo" - no, it doesn't make sense).

Re:Metric Everywhere

[turbidostato]

"That's exactly my point. Even the most popular standard "metric" parts in design use today are really Imperial."

And that surely has nothing to do with the fact that USA goes Imperial.

Change USA to metric and you'll see what happens with all those 25.4mm components.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Rorschach1]

When I picked up a camper van in Auckland and started driving around New Zealand (and once I'd gotten over my initial terror at driving on the wrong side of the road) I found it was really easy to adapt. I made a game of it for an hour or so, trying to pick an object in the distance when I thought it was 1 km away and watching the odometer to see how close I was.

The only time it nearly caused a problem was one evening when I came to a turn that was marked <<<< 45 <<<< and I instinctively slowed down to about 50. 50 mph, that is.

So if you need a rule of thumb for metric speeds, remember that 45 kph is the speed at which you can negotiate a sharp bend on a wet road in a top-heavy camper van without crapping your pants.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[marcansoft]

Bad example. Pin spacing in multiples of 1/10th of an inch was the standard for through-hole electronics components, but with the switch to surface mount everything is being switched over to mm. The first and largest surface mount packages (SOIC, PLCC, etc) used 1/200 in spacing, but pretty much everything smaller is using fractions of a mm. And connectors smaller than your standard humongous (these days) pin headers are also done in mm: flat flexible cables, tighter pitch connectors (e.g. the pin headers on laptop IDE HDDs are 2mm), etc.

I'm European and I was initially annoyed when I started using SMT components and things wouldn't match up on my grid (since I was used to a grid in mils from through-hole design), but these days I just default to a metric grid and use the relevant auto-snap features of layout programs to make traces seamlessly switch from the metric grid to being aligned to a one-off through-hole component. It's really just a base unit change, as the old "imperial" components were just measured in mils (thousandths of an inch), which is already a metric-style subdivision applied to an imperial base unit.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[marcansoft]

That should be 1/20 in spacing, not 1/200.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[barzok]

The only way it would be able to happen is with a (possibly multiple) decade long "dual usage"

It was tried 30 years ago and some small-scale attempts are still in progress. The problem is that it's all small-scale so it won't really make inroads.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Blakey Rat]

I'd be fine if we picked one or the other and stuck with it. My biggest problems are the interactions between the two systems.

The other day, I couldn't get the damned oil pan drain plug out of my Chrysler car. Why? It's a Chrysler car, build in the Americas (well, Mexico, close enough), but the damned drain plug is a *metric* size. (Size 13... 13mm? I guess?)

I had to borrow a wrench for it... in a million years, I'd never guess Chrysler would use a metric size. (In retrospect, I'm guessing they standardized this so the vast number of oil changes places don't have to constantly change their tools.)

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Blakey Rat]

When visiting other countries switching over to metric for time and distance takes all of a week to get into my head.

No countries use metric time.

Grocery store patrons would take all of a week to need to order 2kg instead of 1lb.

And get four times as much as they wanted?

While I get the point of your post, you're not really demonstrating a good fundamental knowledge of metric here. :)

Re:Metric Everywhere

[jessemaurais]

I think the better system depends on the context in which it is used. Measurements with units that break down into nice fractions are convenient for baking (I'm a baker) and for cooking generally. Woodworking is also made easier by fractions like a third, quarter, or eighth. And while I like the idea of having a standard system, perhaps it should be done per industry, rather than across all industries in all countries.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[karnal]

I've been around Ford and Chevrolet vehicles for the past... oh, as long as I've been driving. As long as I've been changing my oil, they've always used metric (14mm to 16mm, depending on vehicle).

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Blakey Rat]

Well, it's good to know that even though it's all metric, the easily-standardize-able component still isn't standardized. We wouldn't want things getting too easy.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Ryanrule]

"14 cm = penis" you poor bastards.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[aXis100]

Here in the Australia contruction industry, there's sort of a hybrid. Everything is measured in metres or mm, but sizes are commonly in units of 300mm which is close to a foot. If you buy timber it might be a moninal length of 2.4m, or any other multiple of 300mm. Same for ceiling heights - 2.1 or 2.4 metres.

 

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Cmdrm]

Grocery store patrons would take all of a week to need to order 2kg instead of 1lb

Hmm, there might be lots of stock left on the shelf after the first week. 1lb roughly 500g or .5kg. It is actually 453g per pound, but who's counting anyways?

Re:Metric Everywhere

[zippthorne]

My lab students get that wrong *all* the time. 1 meter = 1000 cm, therefore 1 cubic meter "must" equal 1000 cubic cm.

Its very simplicity makes it "difficult."

Re:Metric Everywhere

[stumblingblock]

I have often though of how unfortunate were are to live in the transition from a smoking to a nonsmoking society. Lots of friction. Another example is the Monty Python skit about England switching over from driving on the left to driving on the right. To ease the transition, the changeover would be done gradually.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[PCM2]

You're right, I forgot about car engines. But that just further proves my point, which was that we'd certainly be capable of using the metric system -- and in fact a liter and a quart are practically the same volume -- but we don't.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Vellmont]

This is something I see a lot, especially from Europeans: the assumption that Americans are actually fanatical supporters of the Imperial system. The truth is, we don't like it

It depends. For cooking, I much prefer the system of cups, teaspoons, and tablespoons. The system was largely designed around proportions, and cooking is all about proportions so the system works. Having to use milli-liters for everything wouldn't work (and in fact I believe many recipes in European countries still use something like tablespoons, teaspoons, and cups).

For temperature, Is centigrade really any better than Fahrenheit? For distance, how often do I really need to convert miles into feet? Nobody ever does, and we use 10ths of a mile when we need a smaller unit. When I buy bulk items, it's always displayed as a decimal anyway, not in Pounds/oz. So what's the real advantage?

The only time I REALLY think the imperial system is stupid is when measuring inches. I detest having to figure out if the marker is 1/2, 3/8, 5/16, etc. Converting between them is stupid, and I really which I just had millimeters. Decimalization doesn't really work either, since the materials are all set sizes that are based on a power of two fraction. It can't really go away either, since the studs in my house are always going to be 16 inches on center and the thickness of the drywall is going to remain 1/2 inch.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Farmer Tim]

I prefer 0.33814023 fluid ounces.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Vellmont]

The other day, I couldn't get the damned oil pan drain plug out of my Chrysler car. Why? It's a Chrysler car, build in the Americas (well, Mexico, close enough), but the damned drain plug is a *metric* size. (Size 13... 13mm? I guess?)

Where have you been? "American" cars have had metric parts for the last 20 years or so. I couldn't say which is more common, but both cars I've had in the last 15 years have been largely metric. One was a Chrysler product, the other a Chevy.

(In retrospect, I'm guessing they standardized this so the vast number of oil changes places don't have to constantly change their tools.)

They standardized it so they can sell the same car in Europe, or at least change parts throughout their different models.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[PCM2]

The only way it would be able to happen is with a (possibly multiple) decade long "dual usage"... That way kids would be taught from the beginning, and regular people would have time to learn the new system...

Well, no, that wouldn't work on its own. If you think about it, we already have a dual system. Weights and measures of all packaged foods and beverages are printed in both Imperial and metric units. The problem is that the amounts are chosen based on convenience. So "a 12-ounce can of Coke" makes sense, but "354 mL of Coke" sounds off. Similarly, if you went to a butcher and wanted to ask for the same amount of bacon that you get when you buy it prepackaged at the supermarket, 0.454 kilos sounds funny, but a pound sounds about right.

It would be possible to make it so that the metric units were more favorable, but you really do have to pick one and stick with it. If the soft drink makers switched to 500 mL bottles, for example, it would make more sense to go buy a half-liter of Coke than to say "a 16.9 ounce bottle." Similarly, they could package bacon in half-kilo packages. But as it stands, our culture favors the Imperial units, so when the soft drink companies wanted to come out with a larger-sized decanter, they chose 20-ounce bottles instead of half-liters. A 591-mL bottle sounds appealing to no one.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[zippthorne]

d'oh. Proofread too quickly.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[donscarletti]

Used by a large portion of the world is a good point. There's great value in having everyone use the same system. Of course there's also an enormous cost in switching between systems, and little direct benefit to anyone who was happy with the old system, which is why no one does it.

Apart from the aforementioned "rest of the world" which was largely not using the metric system 60 years ago (especially in the former British Empire for which "Imperial" is named). We even switched to decimal currency from the 12 pennies = 1 shilling, 20 shillings = 1 pound system.

Anyway, this discussion has happened many times before, the same arguments have come up in UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada etc. and have gone just as quickly.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[theanticool]

Atleast in scientific application there is no reason to use Imperial. Metric makes all calculations simpler, and is accepted by a much larger portion of the world, and should be the standard in all science.

I fully agree, I am in physics, and unless something is given to me in imperial form, I will always use metric. That goes for everyone I have ever partnered with. Further more, if data was given in imperial, we would convert it first thing anyway. If this was a case of mix up, at least this one will cost a great deal less.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[camperdave]

... or buying ammo for your nine.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[dryeo]

And while I like the idea of having a standard system, perhaps it should be done per industry, rather than across all industries in all countries.

In practice that is what happens. Here in Canada we went metric in the '70's. Lumber is still measured in imperial and cooking is also done in imperial while most everything else is metric though many also use feet and miles for distance and elevation.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[DavidRawling]

For comparison, here in Aus, flavoured milk is often sold in 300, 500, 600 and 1000/2000 (1L, 2L) containers. Coke and Pepsi lines are sold in a 250ml small can, a normal 375ml can, a 300ml small bottle, a 600ml large bottle, and 1.25, 2 and 3 litre bottles.

600ml in particular is very close to your "20 oz" (591ml) bottle - so much so that it would be trivial to label and sell the 600ml version as a 20 oz bottle (woo hoo, 9ml for FREE). Perhaps they already do! And the 375ml can is a natural fit to the 12 oz can you have in Bizarro-World^W^W^W the USA.

In summary the metric units are generally "close enough", with the possible exception of recipes which might need more careful treatment.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[dryeo]

We (Canada) converted about 35 years ago. Lumber is still measured in inches and feet. At the grocery store the prices on signs are per pound with the metric in small print, potatoes etc come in 10 lb bags. Distances and elevations are usually referred to in feet and miles and I have no idea how many cm tall I am or how many kilos I weigh.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[lazy_playboy]

It's already happened in virtually all industries outside of the US.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[dryeo]

All that happens is that you have 2 bins in the hardware store. Metric and imperial. Much like today where some equipment is metric, some is standard (split between fine and course threads) and pipe threading is still whitworth.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[dryeo]

They actually use 16 mm? I was just talking to a friend who was bitching about a Jeep that used 15 mm somewhere. I commented that I had never needed a 15 and we both agreed that we'd never needed a 16.
My '88 F150 seems to use a 9/16ths for the oil drain.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Blejdfist]

I lived in the US for a year while working, and I had no problem getting a mental concept of how far a "mile" was. But I had a problem once, trying to find the correct cap for a pipe that I had measured. I had the measurement in millimeters, thinking I could just convert it to inches in my head in the store, but all the caps were specified in fractions!

Re:Metric Everywhere

[tibman]

The US Army makes heavy use of Metric over Imperial. Especially when it comes to measuring distance. There are zero Maps that are measured in miles. Shooting is done at 50m to 300m targets or 400m to 1km with larger weapons. Flash to bang is metric.. you see a flash and start counting seconds.. multiply that by 340m (or 333m) and you get distance to the target. Round sizes are in millimeter, m16/m4 rifle is 5.56mm, m9 pistol is 9mm, m242 auto-cannon is 25mm, mk19 automatic grenade launcher is 40mm, Abrams tank is 120mm.. the exception is of course the M2 .50cal machine gun because it was made in 1920's and still heavily used today.

Height and Weight are still Imperial. The 2-mile run PT event is still imperial... land-navigation and ruck marches are metric though.

You get a really good feel for kilometers when you walk them over and over and keep tabs on distances to everything. You also get a good feel for 50meters, 100meters and so on by shooting at man-sized targets for those distances. Though i don't recommend these methods of learning metric to the general us public.. it does work.

What really drives me nuts is when people talk in football fields... gah! the horror!

Re:Metric Everywhere

[PCM2]

600ml in particular is very close to your "20 oz" (591ml) bottle - so much so that it would be trivial to label and sell the 600ml version as a 20 oz bottle (woo hoo, 9ml for FREE). Perhaps they already do!

Nope, it really is labeled 591mL. Nobody pays any attention.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Pentium100]

I am not a baker, so I can't say it with full confidence, but wouldn't it be just the same to measure, say 7g of something as it would 0.25oz? I can give you half, it would be easy to get a half of a cup (not the unit) but 1/4 or 1/8 seems kinda difficult, unless you have a measuring cup (in which case you can measure any arbitrary volume smaller than the cup itself, for example 115ml) or you have a cup that is the same volume as the volume you are trying to measure.

Woodworking - If you have a log that is 1m in length and you want to cut in to 3 equal pieces you end up with ~33.3cm length pieces (you will lose twice the thickness of your saw) - if your tape measure has mm grades, you can put a mark just as easily as you would with other units. 1/4 and 1/8 are 0.25 and 0.125 and can be measured exactly (1m/8 = 12.5cm). Now, let's say there was a new unit of length, equal to 33.3cm (or 1/3m). Would it make cutting the 1m log in three equal pieces simpler?

Using different units for different industries would be OK as long as the end user would not have to deal with the different units. As my country only uses metric units (and has been for a long time) I fail to see what would be gained by adding more units.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Pentium100]

In my country fuel economy is measured in L/100km. I guess it is because this is easier to measure (measure the amount of fuel in the car, drive 100km, measure the remaining fuel, subtract if from the original) accurately than would be if, for example, we used km/L (which would mean pour 1L of fuel to your car and see how far you go), because shorter distances would cause inaccuracies (say, the fuel in the carburetor, the fuel needed to start the engine and so on). Not that it's not possible to convert the units, it's just how it is here.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[mrboyd]

Well.. for baking I like it better when the quantity are given in baker's percentage instead of fixed size whether in cup or grams. Somehow it makes more sense to me to have everything expressed in percentage of the mass of flour, particularly when I need to make more or less dough.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[MartinSchou]

However, in daily life, it's rare for any extremely difficult conversion to come up.

Not particularly. Any area becomes a conversion nightmare.

If you want to tile a room that's 6' by 4'3", how big an area are you tiling? If we do gross simplification, that's 180 cm by 130 cm = 23,400 cm^2 or 1.8 m by 1.3 m = 2.34 m^2.

Imperial you can either do it as (6 foot * 12 inches/foot) * (4 foot * 12 inches/foot + 3) = 3,672 inch^2 OR 6 foot * 4.25 foot = 25.5 foot^2 OR 2 yard * 1.4167 yard = 2.833 yard^2. But you pretty much need a calculator to translate from one to the other.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Jerslan]

To quote a college instructor of mine: "I thought we won that war?"

He was an astronaut working on some of the Hubble Repair missions, and this quote was from one of his stories on working with Russians on joint missions in the early 1990's. It was his response to the on-going Imperial/US vs Metric system argument they were having. Given that the Cold War was barely over... Yeah, it ruffled some feathers, but got his point across. The "ISS" is still mostly US made. The US uses Imperial (for the most part), therefor the ISS should use the same system.

Don't force your Commie Metric System down my throat just because I don't want to use it ;)

Re:Metric Everywhere

[xaxa]

I think L/100km is used because it makes more sense for what people want to know: how much will it cost me to get to work and back every day. (Rather than "how far can I travel with X amount of fuel".)

6.4 L/100km, and a 34km commute. That's 6.4L / 100km * 34km = 2.18L. That's £2.44 (£1.12/L).

43 miles/gallon, and an 18 mile commute. The conversion is a little more complicated, it's 18mi / (43mi/gal) = 0.42gal.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[xaxa]

There's no reason you can't use numbers that divide easily, if you want to. For instance, fitted kitchen units here are often made in multiples of 300mm, a standard for that industry. That has a good number of factors (two units, 600mm wide, has even more factors).

For general cooking (not baking) quantities don't really matter much. For baking, a recipe usually uses numbers like 500g, 250g, 125g, 50g, -- multiples of 25g. A metric teaspoon is 5ml, a metric tablespoon 15ml (and 1ml of water has a mass of 1g, which is very convenient for measuring water/milk).

It does help when things tie in though. For instance, the British standard maps (produced by the government) are obviously metric -- the gridlines are e.g. 10km or 100km apart, the contours at 100m intervals, etc. But, since the road signs show miles, many maps based on them don't bother to point this out, which removes one easy way of estimating a distance (counting the squares crossed). Of course, you could reprint with 10 mile gridlines, but there are significant benefits to having only one system, such as giving a position in a remote area in an emergency, or even just lowering the barrier between scientists, engineers and "normal" people.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Jesus_666]

That won't be a problem. The rest of the world already deals with some the equipment using metric bolts, screws etc. and some using imperial ones. Even if we switched to metric manufacturing all the way we'd still keep manufacturing imperial stuff for decades as a legacy tech.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[jdigriz]

Dude, a football field is just a decikilometer. Or a hectometer if you prefer.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[xaxa]

What country are they from? (Meter = USA?)

Here, that kind of conversion is covered several times in school, starting at age 5 when we'd play with "unit" bricks -- 1 cm plastic cubes -- that arranged nicely into 10-block (10cm) strips, 100-block (10cm^2) squares and 1000-block (10cm^3) cubes. There were also liquid containers that measured cm^3 i.e. mL. (Search-in-page for base 10, only my school had thousands of them, so they clearly don't need to cost that much).

Presumably, it also helps that all my education has been metric, and most of everything else. I don't think I've ever taken a serious measurement in inches, square inches (?), or cubic inches / fluid ounces (?). (Except measuring my penis. For some reason, 14 year old British boys do that in inches, even if it means working out the conversion since the ruler only has centi/millimetres. At least, they did 10 years ago.)

Re:Metric Everywhere

[GNious]

Was easier for the Germans: Stuff that cost 1 Deutchmark suddenly cost 1 Euro.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[xaxa]

It's also an argument raised in the UK when people suggest we stop selling "pints". But in reality, people just like the word "pint", and I doubt most care if, when using it in a pub, it means 568mL, 500mL, or 600mL, so long as it remains consistent, or is clearly advertised. After all, we do exactly the same thing with "shot". One "shot" is 25mL, 30mL, or 35mL, depending on how cheap the bar is, and is clearly written on all the spirit measures and on a sign by the side of the bar.

I understand that in France "livre" (i.e. pound, lb) in common use means 0.5kg.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[GNious]

as a child I memorized "3 tsp to a tbsp, 4 tbsp to 1/4 cup," and "8 fl oz to a cup, 2 cups to a pint, two pints to a quart, four quarts to a gallon."

You're saying that cups and quarts and sticks are real meassurements?!? Whenever I google a recipe and see "mix 2 cups of flour with 3 sticks of butter and a quart of cream", I always wonder what the heck the Americans are on...
(1 package of butter is usually 250g, but not always - but if thatis a "stick", that is a LOT of butter!)

Re:Metric Everywhere

[xaxa]

You already have two systems. At the moment, plenty of American engineers buy metric parts to fit various machines designed or made in the rest of the world (or in some US industries).

(For an everyday example, look at the fastening sizes on a bicycle.)

Re:Metric Everywhere

[xaxa]

I was born in a pure metric country and lived in the UK for a year. I now have a concept of how much 1, 2, 4, 6 pints are - both beer and milk. I also know from driving how far 100 ft and a mile are. However I have absolutely no concept of an ounce or a stone, of a distance of say 1 ft, or of any volume units besides the pint (and the 1/2 pint).

That's pretty much the same as most British people under age 40~50.

(Although I don't notice the difference between the metric and fake-metric "1.05L = 2 pints" milk containers.)

Re:Metric Everywhere

[xaxa]

In the UK it's the reverse. The only liquids we don't buy in litres are beer in pubs, and milk in (some) supermarkets. (It used to be milk in all shops, but all the smaller ones have realised that they can sell 1L of milk in a bottle that looks more-or-less like a 2-pint one, and no one notices.)

Re:Metric Everywhere

[xaxa]

1L of water weighs "exactly" 1kg (for all non-scientific purposes). This works fine for weighing (rather than measuring volume) of most liquids in cooking, except for oils.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[xaxa]

I think Imperial survives on the railways (mileposts and even some obscure measures like chains or something.)

I read a report of a small accident near London (train hit an engineer's trolley) that happened because the engineer read a distance plate on a catenary post (power line support) and assumed it was the distance in miles from the start of the line, like the distance-posts showed. It wasn't, it was the distance in km, and they were close enough to the start of the line that the number seemed reasonable.
Luckily, they were also close enough to the start of the line that the express train was still going very slowly, and the engineers jumped clear, but it's obviously something that could be avoided by converting everything to metric. Probably someone has done a cost-benefit analysis and doesn't think it's worth it yet.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[xaxa]

[...cooking...] Having to use milli-liters for everything wouldn't work (and in fact I believe many recipes in European countries still use something like tablespoons, teaspoons, and cups).

Incorrect, at least for cups. A teaspoon is defined to be 5mL, a tablespoon 15mL, and it's 50:50 whether the recipe will say "30mL" or "2 tbsp". Cups are a crap measure of dry things anyway, there's so much variation depending on packing. Dry amounts are given in grams, wet ones in litres (although unless it's oil, L = kg is near enough for most liquids used in cooking.)

If I search for a recipe online and the result uses cups I tend to find a different one, as there are several different cup measures, with significant variation between them. (US, AU, JP and more, IIRC.)

Re:Metric Everywhere

[nutshell42]

What's a quarter of something 3 ft long? Well, a foot are 12" so it's 3*3=9". That's not something outlandish and everyone's done something like that lots of times in their lives. It's not even an especially hard case for the imperial system because the numbers are nice and the foot to inch ratio is not braindead (how about a quarter of half a mile in yards?).

But the calculation is nevertheless clunky because we're not operating in a base-12 system no matter how much better than base-10 it would be.

A quarter of 3 meters is 75 cm. A lot nicer because it's base 10.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[WindBourne]

You can thank reagan for that. The nation was prepared to make the switch-over, including road signs, car speedometers, packaging, etc. He was SUCH a bad leader. I can not believe that W chose to emulate him, rather than his father.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[RealErmine]

The only way it would be able to happen is with a (possibly multiple) decade long "dual usage"

Finally I can market my line of centiyard rulers and kilofoot odometers!

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Lumpy]

It's been that way cince 1985. you don't work on cars much do you.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Lumpy]

And short of spices the exact amount of the ingredients means nothing.

If you are obsessing about he inaccuracy of a cup measurement, you need to stop cooking. You can go over by 20% on major parts of a recipe and have almost no effect other than yield amount. When I bake bread, I dont use a recipe or even measurements, I dump in what I think is the amount I want to make and go from there. you can be off by 40% in the flour in bread making and still come out with a perfect loaf. French bread you can be off by almost 200%!

Bake or cook by taste, not exact measuring. you'll end up with a better product.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[kevingolding2001]

Grocery store patrons would take all of a week to need to order 2kg instead of 1lb.

2 kg is about 4 and a half pounds, so there are bound to be a few 'surprises' at the end of that first week.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[skine]

Cups and quarts are measurements, yes. A cup is 8 fl oz, a quart is a quarter-gallon (tricky, huh?).

As for stick, butter here in the US can often be found in tubs, but usually we use standardized sticks. The sticks are almost always labeled with tick-marks at each tablespoon, with at least the 1/4 cup (4 tbsp) and 1/2 cup (8 tbsp = 1 stick) labeled.

http://www.thehungrymouse.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/dscn1169.jpg

Re:Metric Everywhere

[lena_10326]

There isn't anyone in America who actually believes that the Imperial system is easier or more useful

Imperial is entrenched in the construction industry and it's not something that will convert to metric any time soon because building codes and materials are all based on inches. It's industry-wide. For example wood studs commonly come in units of 8, 10, 12, and 14 feet. The height of ceilings is guided by these units. Building codes mandate 2x4s 16 inches on center or 2x6s 24 inches on center which means insulation comes in 16 or 24 inches width. It's all those little things that will keep us on imperial for quite some time.

Also 12 is a magic number in construction. This is due to the ease of integer division by 2, 3, 4, 6 which makes for nice round divisions of 1/2, 1/3, 1/4. This is invaluable when your tools are primitive.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[Yamata no Orochi]

Your example is crappy, and you're pointlessly badgering the OP by ripping his sentences out of context. He explained that he thought it was easier because he was used to it. You don't need to pick it apart.

And to address your example, easier would be small, medium, and large, not dealing in hundreds of some arbitrary unit. People never refer to the "fluid ounces" in a drink anyway, unless to express that's it's especially large somehow (omg 32. oz! Holy shit, 64 oz!)

If you had to have numbers, 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[skine]

Honestly, if you told almost any American to add 0.25 oz of salt, they would just stare at you blankly.

If you instead asked them to add 2.25 tsp of salt, they would go grab the spoon labeled "1 tsp" and the spoon labeled "1/4 tsp," and measure it out (that is, unless they're lazy like me and realize that that 1 tablespoon = 3 teaspoons, so I can just mostly fill up the "1 tbsp" spoon).

Americans just use volume when measuring food instead of weight while cooking, except, for example, potatoes and meat.

Basically every American kitchen has a set of measuring spoons (usually 1/8 tsp, 1/4 tsp, 1/2 tsp, 1tsp, 1/2 tbsp, 1 tbsp), a set of measuring cups (1/4 cup, 1/2 cup, 1 cup), and a liquid measuring cup with scales in cups, fl oz and mL ( http://www.all-creatures.org/recipes/images/u-meascup-liq.jpg ).

Re:Metric Everywhere

[xaxa]

The various cup sizes on Wikipedia are between 180mL and 284mL. They're inconvenient for me for several reasons:
- unfamiliarity, I can't visualise them
- lack of equipment -- nothing I own is calibrated in cups
- inaccuracy. I'm quite happy to guess when it doesn't matter, but I was always told by my mother (who was a trained to cook) that it does matter for baking. I remember screwing stuff up when I was a child so I'm sure she's not completely wrong.

I also find it much more convenient to measure weight rather than volume. I stick my favourite bowl on the balance, hit "zero" and add butter until it says 125g, then add sugar until it says 250g. Mix, add the eggs, mix, and return to the scale, hit zero. Add flour until it says 125g. Total washing up: 1 bowl, 1 spoon, and the mixer things.

Incidentally, Cooking for Engineers says Most American kitchens have a set of measuring cups, but don't have a kitchen scale. I think most European kitchens have a scale, but no cups.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[rickb928]

I'm interested in the comment earlier that science should only be done in metric.

Even in high school in the early 70s, we used metric in any lab. I've never seen ounces used in any lab class.

And getting used to metric is indeed a pain, and one I would need total immersion to succeed at. My wife uses a digital scale to measure food with that turns on in metric mode. She knows her gram equivalents now, but I just haven't bothered. I can grok ski jumping at 100m being about a football field long, but working out home runs in metric is no fun at all. Ninety feet is what, 27.43 meters? This doesn't improve my understanding of baseball. Rounding the distance to first base to 27m would destroy the game, unless maybe you reduced the distance from the pitching rubber to home plate to 17m, since the current distance is the subject of some conjecture on measuring errors, and shortening it some 2 1/4 ft might give the pitchers an advantage to equalize the shorter distance to first, but we are distubing the rules too much and will just have to live with 27.43m, and 17.98m. More problems. Ask the Toronto Blue Jays.

But the metric question in the U.S. is slowly becoming moot. Most of my car's fasteners are metric, certainly the electronics stuff I putz with is metric, and metrci will win, Some day. We wi\ll adapt

Re:Metric Everywhere

[BlackSnake112]

My second and third car had both metric and imperial (standard) parts on it. It was a pain to do an oil change and a tune up at the same time. I need metric for the oil change and both to do the tune up.

I guess the car maker was phasing in metric. They would have been better off picking one.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[yurtinus]

A reasonably equipped toolbox already contain *both* metric and standard tools. We've been a dual-system nation for quite some time now. Imperial units in manufacturing will go away eventually, and I look forward to the day I don't need to pull out my 11/16 socket anymore.

You're right, not simple and not easy. It's a process that's happening naturally already, but we'd sure as hell appreciate some official push that direction. Availability of imperial nuts and bolts won't be an issue for a long time.

Re:Metric Everywhere

[swillden]

I say this as an european, who not that long ago switched from a national currency to an european one. Back then, many people were scared of the very same thing, but it really didn't take long for people to adapt.

Duh... that's because the Euro was calibrated against the US Dollar which, as everyone knows, is the true, natural and intuitive unit of currency. I'm sure that as the Euro has drifted away from the dollar it's become harder to use.

Don't these people carry toolboxes?

[SuperBanana]

Tape? SS wire (what's used for tying down hoodpins on racecars and securing critical bolts) or aircraft cable (used with crimping connectors for tamperproof seals), some velcro bands, rope?
Didn't they learn anything from the apollo missions?

Re:Don't these people carry toolboxes?

[Tablizer]

They do, but they keep losing them:

http://fadingad.wordpress.com/2008/11/20/tool-box-enters-orbit-more-debris-adds-to-space-junk-hazard/
   

duck tape

[mikey177]

it can fix anything!

Re:duck tape

[twiddlingbits]

Not quite. If at first it doesn't fit then get a bigger hammer! THEN you patch with duct tape and baling wire.

Re:duck tape

[cyn1c77]

No, duct tape, a sawzall and pliers can fix anything. Duct tape by itself can only fix 1/3 of anything.

Re:duck tape

[Leebert]

How could you leave out WD-40?!

Re:In before...

[Anonymous Coward]

Another preemptive strike: for anyone planning to say Fahrenheit is better because you can think of it as "percentage of warm", I call b/s:

• Warm is subjective - one man's warm is another's cool, and yet another's hot
• You can't argue that the freezing point of water isn't cold - no-one would think of it as "32% of warm"
• Celsius is better because it maps directly to percentage of the temperature difference between phase changes at STP, which is not subjective
• Since we need to deal with temperatures for more than just weather and HVAC, Celsius is better, because it makes sense for lots of things. Cooking a stew? 85 degrees (almost boiling, but not quite). A roast? 160 degrees in a fan-forced oven. Meringue? At least 200 degrees - twice the boiling temperature of water. Soldering? A bit over three times boiling temperature (320 degrees). The Fahrenheit numbers don't make anywhere near as much sense.

Um, no one doesn't

[afabbro]

One has to wonder if this is another imperial/metric snafu.

Uh, why? Yes, NASA made that mistake once, ten+ years ago. Aren't there plenty of other mistake categories that are just as if not more likely?

Re:Um, no one doesn't

[Tablizer]

NASA made that mistake once [metric conversion], ten+ years ago. Aren't there plenty of other mistake categories that are just as if not more likely?

Probably, but they are not all as entertaining to poke fun at.

One of my favorites is making a latch on the Galileo Jupiter atmosphere probe *almost* symmetrical such that it was accidentally put on backward. It almost caused a mission failure by preventing a parachute from opening. NASA got lucky in that turbulence vibrations eventually triggered the chute just in time. I hoped they learned that lesson and now make parts either entirely symmetrical or too different to "half fit".

The failures and their human cause would make a fascinate book with diagrams etc. Do you hear that tech authors? Example Title: "Space Fails! Rocket science gone wrong."
   

Re:Um, no one doesn't

[Nyeerrmm]

Yeah, this sounds much more like an issue of not thinking through interferences and tolerances well enough. Those problems tend to be hard to find in a computer model, since its all perfectly precise in those cases.

Of course it could also just be that something else was attached improperly and causes everything else to be messed up. There are a huge number of issues that this could be, and I think maybe the poster just has an axe to grind with Imperial units.

Re:Um, no one doesn't

[maxume]

The Mars Climate Orbiter crashed because some software loaded data from a file and made (incorrect) assumptions about the units of the data.

Only allowing data to be stored in metric units would likely reduce the likelihood of such a mistake, but it would not eliminate it altogether.

Re:Um, no one doesn't

[Brett Buck]

Only allowing data to be stored in metric units would likely reduce the likelihood of such a mistake, but it would not eliminate it altogether.

            Unfortunately you are about 50 years too late. In the aerospace industry, virtually ALL the data about most components is already "stored" in conventional units, no Metric. Forcing it to all be converted to Metric just creates the problem you are trying to solve.

      BTW, the MRO incident may have *started* with a units conversion error, but the real flaw was with the lack of due dilligence. The trajectory was diverging for months, and the problem could have been detected and solved easily if the normal checks and balances were applied.

        Brett

Hubble

[MillionthMonkey]

The Hubble misfocusing problem wasn't due to English-metric stuff. A contractor was assembling an optical apparatus and was supposed to be adjusting the focal length to a point inside some hollow cylindrical cap with a hole bored in its center. When adjusting their eyepiece they missed the hole, and centered instead on a shiny point near the edge of the cap that was also reflecting laser light, because the paint had been scratched there. They couldn't get the focus knob to rotate far enough as they would need to get this paint scratch into focus, so they drove out to a hardware store, bought some flat washers, inserted them on the threaded rods holding up the laser, and elevated the focusing section out a bit so they could dial the focus length to properly get the length to the scratch right.

Re:Hubble

[Tablizer]

I also heard that they skipped an integrated (final) test to save money, relying on unit tests instead (like the paint scratch story you give). As we in the software biz know, unit tests are not a true replacement for the real thing. Unit tests merely reduce the problems in the final contraption, not prevent them.

Re:Hubble

[MichaelSmith]

True but then NASA pretty much invented formal interface definitions, and as a result integration tests of hardware go much smoother than might be expected. And it is only hardware anyway. Its a bit like what my wife does as an architect. She specifies this type of wall and this type of fitting and expects them to work on site.

Re:Hubble

[Tablizer]

But they didn't actually test the completed scope on a real target, such as a star or far off test pattern. They used only stand-in tests, which as we know now are flawed. As they sang in 1968, "Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing, Baby".

Re:Hubble

[Blakey Rat]

Who said anything about Hubble?

Re:Hubble

[MillionthMonkey]

I did.

It's probably the most famous example of a misconstructed space module, and ordinarily one might have to wonder if it was an imperial/metric snafu.

Re:Hubble

[Blakey Rat]

Uh, it's not in the article and it's not in the summary, and Hubble's flaw had nothing to do with imperial/metric. That was a reference to Mars Climate Orbiter.

So, in short, fail.

I love the use of passive voice, instead of saying "I'm the one idiot who thinks the Hubble has anything to do with this story" you can say "one might have to wonder."

Re:Hubble

[MillionthMonkey]

I love the use of passive voice, instead of saying "I'm the one idiot who thinks the Hubble has anything to do with this story" you can say "one might have to wonder."

The "wonder" phrasing was just making fun of the article summary that you didn't read.

Re:Hubble

[Antique Geekmeister]

> True but then NASA pretty much invented formal interface definition

I've simply no idea why you think this. While NASA has perfected them to a high art form, international manufacturers of railroad components have been doing work to extremely tight international and cross-compatible tolerances since the invention of railroads, and the British did it across their empire since they actually had one on which the sun never set, and it doubless came up repeatedly in the days of Rome when they ordered marble from other countries. The level of detail NASA uses may be relatively new, because of the highly stressful environment in which the machinery absolutely _must_ work. But even mil-spec standards far, far, far precede NASA, and much of their engineering is military based.

Now, the _Russians_ would doubtless have their own solution for this. "Comrade, unbolt the handrail first!" Their aerospace manufacture tends to be very simple, very robust, and admittedly more massive than American, partly because they couldn't afford the fancy versions, and partly because they've always built larger launch vehicles to work with. But that simplicity improves its reliability, even though it's less likely to spin off new industries. (Does anyone remember "space pens"? The Russians just used pencils.)

Mock ups

[koan]

Don't they have mock ups on the ground and quality control for these issues?

Re:Mock ups

[skirmish666]

Or for that matter did they not think to try testing the actual module on the ground prior to launch?

Re:Mock ups

[maxume]

Step 1: Land ISS.
Step 2: Test Fit
Step 3: Spend 20 years and billions of dollars reorbiting ISS.

Re:Mock ups

[4181]

Or for that matter did they not think to try testing the actual module on the ground prior to launch?

Lead ISS Flight Director Bob Dempsey was asked that during the most recent mission update briefing. (He discusses the problem in his initial remarks at 5:00, and answers the fit test question at 12:50.) He replied, "The main reason is the Center Disk Cover that we are installing was on orbit for many years before it could be fit checked on the module. Similar Disk Covers were fit into the module, but not the actual flight hardware, and not exactly in the configuration with the Cupola mated to the Node 3 as well." He later said that "every Center Disc Cover is a little bit different" (while discussing the Cupola relocation at 17:15) but didn't elaborate on it any further.

ISS commander Jeffrey Williams removed two bolts from a Cupola handrail mount which gave just enough clearance to install the center disc cover, but at the time of the briefing the ground engineers were still determining if the clearance was sufficient to proceeded with the relocation of the Cupola to the Node 3 nadir port, or if they should remove additional pieces and delay the relocation by a day. They eventually decide to go ahead with the relocation as is, and shuttle pilot Col. Terry Virts and lead robotics mission specialist Capt. Kathryn Hire will be relocating it in a couple of hours.

Watch it all live on NASA TV.

Re:Mock ups

[Antique Geekmeister]

Mock ups can only be done with the parts you have in stock, with the last set of diagrams. Unfortunately, far too many components are being manufactured in far too many different states and being manufactured at the last moment, and not enough of these things get built for the kinks of that approach to get worked out.

The multi-state manufacture has to do with how the US Congress often winds up funding a big project in as many states as possible to get as many Congresspeople as possible to vote for it. And the result is this.

Correct about Hubble. Mars Climate Orbiter however

[JoshuaZ]

They aren't talking about Hubble. The classic example of an imperial-metric snafu is the Mars Climate Orbiter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter which was lost because the software measured force in pounds while the thrusters gave results and throttled accordingly by newtons. This is not the only time an Imperial-Metric screwup has occurred but this is the most expensive. There have been multiple minor issues in the past on the ISS related to units issues.

Not an issue

[pyrrhonist]

One has to wonder if this is another imperial/metric snafu.

Probably not. From the article:

The $27 million, Italian-built observation deck sports the biggest window ever flown in space. In all, there are seven windows that will offer 360-degree views.

The 11 astronauts aboard the shuttle-station complex opened the door Friday to the $380 million Tranquility, also made in Italy for the European Space Agency. The door leading from Tranquility into the observation deck was opened soon afterward, and that's when shuttle pilot Terry Virts and Kay Hire encountered the cover problem.

So, now even submitters aren't reading the article? Damn...

Re:Not an issue

[omuls are tasty]

The $27 million, Italian-built

Ah, that explains it. You know the old joke:

Heaven:
The police are British
The cooks are French
The engineers are German
The administrators are Swiss
The lovers are Italian
Hell:
The police are German
The cooks are British
The engineers are Italian
The administrators are French
The lovers are Swiss

Re:Not an issue

[WindBourne]

As was the insulation. This was simply an issue of poor QC by Italy. I wonder how many other issues are there? Just thankful that poor QC did not cost ppl their lives. OTH, I do wonder who will pay for this.

Re:In before...

[Anonymous Coward]

At least 200 degrees - twice the boiling temperature of water

Any thermodynamics guy will tell you that "twice the boiling temperature of water" is 473.15 C.

Problem fixed as of Sunday

[chelberg]

The problem has been fixed, it was interference by some bolts.

"Late Saturday, the space station's commander, Jeffrey Williams, reported that bolts seemed to be causing the interference. He removed all eight bolts, saying the clearance would be tight but that the cover likely would fit. It did, with some coaxing Sunday."

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20100214/D9DS3UOO1.html

Re:Problem fixed as of Sunday

[d474]

"...bolts seemed to be causing the interference. [b]He removed all eight bolts[/b], saying the clearance would be tight but that the cover likely would fit. It did, with some coaxing Sunday."

...And in other news, the International Space Station exploded and fell apart for some [i]unknown reason[/i] today.

Re:Problem fixed as of Sunday

[Tablizer]

He removed all eight bolts, saying the clearance would be tight but that the cover likely would fit. It did

But aren't the bolts there for a reason? Launch and fuel costs being so high, It's not likely the bolts are extraneous.
   

Re:Problem fixed as of Sunday

[darkmeridian]

The article doesn't say if the eight bolts were reinstalled or if the bolts are necessary. I doubt that there would just be a bunch of unnecessary bolts on the International Space Station, and yet...

Re:Problem fixed as of Sunday

[oljanx]

Awesome. Now I have some ammunition for the next time my wife insists something I've assembled is a "death trap" because there are leftover parts.

Re:Problem fixed as of Sunday

[Forty Two Tenfold]

The problem has been fixed, it was interference by some bolts.

Ah, these...

Re:Problem fixed as of Sunday

[selfsealingstembolt2]

Indeed.

Better coverage?

[vlm]

Here's another mystery. Why does the headline link to a story at USATODAY.COM ?

You wanna know whats up with some peculiar internet routing? OK, we get quotes from the guys with hands on the SSH session keyboards right off the NANOG mailing list.

You wanna talk about apple stuff, Woz himself posts here, although all he talks about is his Prius accelerating.

You wanna talk about amateur space exploration, John Carmack himself posts here about his peroxide motors.

You wanna talk about star trek, you get CleverNickName posting, although not since October.

I figure Don Knuth, linus, and RMS probably post here too, although AC.

Here is a very interesting spacecraft story, and we get a hyperlink to USA-freaking-today.com. USA-freaking-today.

Slashdotters you should be ashamed of yourself for slashdot linking to USA-freaking-today, I know theres a genuine NASA console jockey out there whom can post the real goods, AC at least...

Re:Correct about Hubble. Mars Climate Orbiter howe

[Rockoon]

There are two valid solutions to the classic problem of accidentally mixing imperial and metric.

One solution is to use only metric.




The other solution is to use only imperial.


I blame the rest of the world for trying to force their system of measurement upon us.

This is already a solved problem

[ChrisCampbell47]

Even if this gets modded up to +5, it's going to be buried under a dozen pointless and irrelevant posts about imperial vs. metric ...

From the ISS Flight Director briefing on NASA TV at 1:30pm today:
http://www.space-multimedia.nl.eu.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5693:sts-130-iss-flight-director-update-fd-7-8&catid=1:latest
[transcribing] "Crew was able to use their eyes and hands and gave good info on interference along with photos, Jeff has had a lot of hands on the hardware and he's given us the best info. His info allowed us to validate what he's seeing with our records on the ground. Actual interference is just a bolthead, that caused us to question our clearance analysis. We went back and looked at it since we don't want clearance issue when we install Cupola on nadir, and found that we have more clearance than originally expected."

From the Flight Day 8 "execute package" sent up around 3pm to the Endeavour astronauts:
( http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/426345main_FD08.pdf )
"Because of your excellent work in checking interferences, we are now comfortable with
proceeding with cupola depress and relocate today!!! Thanks so much!!!"

From the NASA TV schedule, Tuesday:
CUPOLA MLI REMOVAL 10:39 PM EST / 03:39 UTC

After that the windows can be opened, which is what we're all waiting for!

Re:This is already a solved problem

[Gudeldar]

This is Slashdot, the articles are just an excuse to argue about our pet issues. Just look at the article about the proposal to create a national climate service. It had absolutely nothing to do with whether anthropogenic global warming was valid or not yet the vast majority of comments were arguing for or against it.

Re:This is already a solved problem

[bill_mcgonigle]

Crew was able to use their eyes and hands and gave good info on interference

And this is why our successful Mars colonization efforts won't be done solely with robotics.

More problems for NASA

[physburn]

But its the reports that like to post the problems not the successes, its like there biases against NASA. Tranquillity is the worlds biggest glass out house, plenty to see there and plus there put the gym in there. Its usages to science is probably quite low. But when it comes to space tourism and making videos of astronauts in space, its the businesses. When they get it working, and i'm sure the will. The ISS can boost its film rights and tourism value, to get new heights hopefully enough to keep it in space, for decades to come.

---

Space Colonization Feed @ Feed Distiller

Cliche mushup

[Tablizer]

"Houston, this is Tranquility Base here, we have a problem."

Actually, when Apollo 11 landed and announced, "Houston, this is Tranquility Base, the Eagle has landed", mission managers were initially confused because they'd never heard the phrase "Tranquility Base" in training. Neal threw that in as a surprise. That teaser, Neal.
     

Re:Cliche mushup

[maxume]

They should have aborted. He wouldn't think it was so funny after that.

Re:Cliche mushup

[MichaelSmith]

They should have aborted. He wouldn't think it was so funny after that.

Only the crew had access to the abort button and I doubt any of the crews would have used it if they had a small chance of making a landing. There is some discussion in the ALSJ of what would have happened if the radar altimeter had failed to lock after high gate, preventing automatic throttle control during powered descent. Generally, engineers felt that a landing would be impossible and pilots felt that it was worth a go.

And the engineers are probably right. Pilots tended to fly too high, and too slow while the computer saved fuel for a final deceleration close to the ground. If a pilot stopped the descent at 10000 feet to organize the landing he would run out of fuel.

Re:Cliche mushup

[maxume]

Did you miss the joke? GP quotes Armstrong's words from after they had already landed .

Re:Cliche mushup

[the_other_chewey]

Actually, when Apollo 11 landed and announced, "Houston, this is Tranquility Base, the Eagle has landed", mission managers were initially confused because they'd never heard the phrase "Tranquility Base" in training. Neal threw that in as a surprise. That teaser, Neal.

Who? I thought there were only two of them, Neil and Edwin.

Re:Cliche mushup

[meringuoid]

"Houston, this is Tranquility Base, the Eagle has landed"

No. "Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed."

"Roger, Tranquillity, we copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue, we're breathing again. Thanks a lot."

Transcript

Inside Scoop

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for Boeing (the main contractors for the ISS) and the problem is that the cover will not retract over one of the CBM (common berthing mechanisms) where they wish to install the Cupola. It is actually no impact to Tranquility which is working wonderfully so far. This issue has at this time already been resolved and the Cupola is being relocated to this area, while PMA-3 (Pressurized Mating Adapter #3) is being relocated to where the Cupola used to be. This was done so that the Cupola could face the earth and create all those fantastic views everybody envisioned from the ISS, while being able to be launched in the shuttle payload bay.

Re:Metric Everywhere (Viva Base 12)

[Tablizer]

Europeans: the assumption that Americans are actually fanatical supporters of the Imperial system. The truth is, we don't like it (can't speak for the UK, but I suspect it's similar). There isn't anyone in America who actually believes that the Imperial system is easier or more useful. The reason it persists is simply one of tradition

One thing that Imperial units have going for them is that they better divide by 3 and 4. 12 and arguably 60 make a "nicer" unit base mathematically. Ten is merely a happenstance of tetrapod evolution. A "smart" god would have given us 12 digits instead of 10.
 

Re:In before...

[djh2400]

Metric is better than Fahrenheit, and USA should get on with the times.

It's not a matter of just "getting on with the times". Yes, the SI system is easier to work with, but there are immense costs in converting every system in use to another system. The government would have to replace all speed limit and mile marker signs across the country, roads would not line up with measured distances, as well as many other things. You also need to consider that every piece of software and every table of elevations and distances that engineers use when building such systems are not in metric. It is not just a matter of using a few conversions here and there; it's a matter rewriting software, referring to old designs, and many other factors. When my government is over $12,300,000,000,000 in debt, "getting on with the times" is the last thing on which I'd want it to waste more money.

But Fahrenheit is more accurate. But Celsius can be just as accurate, if you take decimals into the play.

I disagree with using Celsius; having a temperature of 0 equate to something that is /not/ equal to 0 energy in a system is one reason why so many students (and adults) have such trouble in basic science classes. Negative temperatures are Just a Bad Idea. As I'm sure you've guessed by now, yes, I am in favor of measuring temperatures in Kelvin; it is absolute and its value proportionally reflects the amount of energy in the system.

Consider it from the other side: why doesn't the world convert to Impirial Units? I'm sure no country wants to incur the cost of converting everything to another system.

Re:In before...

[ctmurray]

Are you trying to get to Kelvin to double the temperature of water? Water boils at 373 Kelvin x 2 = 746 K

Re:In before...

[Anonymous Coward]

Celsius? Fahrenheit? Who gives a shit? Both are just based around some physical referents. Neither is inherently "better" than the other. Both are equally descriptive of temperature. The main "selling point" is really the number of other folks using one or the other. For that reason alone, I would choose Celsius since more people use it. (And no, I don't natively use Celsius as I was born in, and live in, the US.) Oh, and both are the same at -40.

Re:In before...

[Jophish]

Yes, and 746 Kelvin is about 473.15 Celcius.

Re:Metric Everywhere (Viva Base 12)

[MichaelSmith]

One thing that Imperial units have going for them is that they better divide by 3 and 4. 12 and arguably 60 make a "nicer" unit base mathematically. Ten is merely a happenstance of tetrapod evolution. A "smart" god would have given us 12 digits instead of 10.

By that argument a power of two should surely be best, but I expect that fourteen fingered aliens would favor base fourteen anyway.

Anyone else think this is 41 years late

[syousef]

Did anyone else glance at the headline and think they were talking about the Apollo mission, then feel a fool when they read the story properly? ;-)

Re:Anyone else think this is 41 years late

[k2r]

> then feel a fool when they read the story properly?

On Slashdot, nobody reads the story properly....

Re:Anyone else think this is 41 years late

[WindBourne]

No, but good point. I doubt that most here really have a sense of what that was about.

Americans are just mental wimps

[bussdriver]

The rest the world has to deal with english, American technical terms, corporations, IP laws, military bases, a hysterical anti-terror crusade and occasionally our messed up measurement system. Yet Americans can't handle having to transition to metric because it would be too hard and too difficult. The greatest generation could have done it, but not the current ones - its beyond their abilities.

Legacy parts? live with it. Eventually, they stop being produced anyhow. It can take decades to move hardware but a ton of stuff can be moved quickly.

Bunch of wimps. I know, I live here.

Re:Americans are just mental wimps

[dominious]

The rest the world has to deal with english, American technical terms, corporations, IP laws, military bases, a hysterical anti-terror crusade and occasionally our messed up measurement system.

So true, mod parent up!! Although you dropped an "of" before "the world" and a "y" before "our messed up"

Re:Americans are just mental wimps

[dissy]

Legacy parts? live with it. Eventually, they stop being produced anyhow. It can take decades to move hardware but a ton of stuff can be moved quickly.

Don't you mean:
Legacy parts? live with it. Eventually, they stop being produced anyhow. It can take decades to move hardware but 907.18474 kilograms of stuff can be moved quickly.

Re:Americans are just mental wimps

[iNaya]

In the metric system 1 ton = 1000kg. 1 ton = 0.90718474 tons.

Re:Americans are just mental wimps

[xaxa]

In British English (not sure about anything else) we usually write "tonne" (1000kg), just to be clear. (Tonne never means the Imperial/US one.)

Re:Americans are just mental wimps

[iNaya]

In NZ, tonne and ton are used interchangeably to mean 1 metric tonne.

Re:Screwup, but not an units problem...

[joh]

Every dimension was converted prior to doing anything else. There are 25.4 millimetres to the inch, or 2.54 microns per ten thousandth of an inch. Never, ever had a problem converting.

That's because, ironically, the inch now is DEFINED as being 25.4 millimetres, so a clean and exact conversion is no problem since the inch is already based on metric units. Saying "one inch" is just another way of saying "25.4 millimetres". Other units are less clean and exact.

Maybe it's the screen door?

[kawabago]

All space craft have trouble with them.

Re:In before...

[fido_dogstoyevsky]

Been there, done that, got the T-shirt (in Oz, coupla decades ago). Can't see any problems, even with hindsight.

*REALLY* can't see any benefit at all in keeping the imperial system.

Re:In before...

[rockNme2349]

Metric is better than Fahrenheit, and USA should get on with the times. But Fahrenheit is more accurate. But Celsius can be just as accurate, if you take decimals into the play.

I'm just waiting for everyone to realize the true superiority of Rankine. You don't have to settle! Want for something more: Rankine.

Re:Metric Everywhere (Viva Base 12)

[Tablizer]

If we have a weighting system that gives the lowest integers the higher weights and also gives credit to the lowness of the number (5 is better than 500 as a base, for example), then 12 and 60 will likely be top candidates. We as humans do a lot of division by the lower integers (2, 3, 4, etc.). A base that reflects this would make life easier.

Open the windows? Oh, noes!

[ridgecritter]

I'm pretty sure we don't want them to open the windows. I would rather they just open the window covers. If they open the windows, it will be very, very windy....for a little while.

Re:In before...

[quenda]

You can't multiply a C or F value - it makes no sense as they use an arbitrary zero. 746K or 473C are correct.

Funny how the goofes make the news

[physburn]

Its a small problem and i bet there fix it. Then the station has a observation and excerise room which will do wonders for space tourism. No point paying for the ride, if you don't get a great view which is exactly what tranquillity with give astronaunts and space tourists. ---

--- Space Craft Feed @ Feed Distiller

Re:In before...

[quenda]

Sure, almost every country on Earth has done it.
But the US government seems to struggle to change even trivial things. As an example look at their coinage.
Last I saw, they still had pennies in circulation, which everyone hates, and the biggest common coin was 25c, which buys just about nothing.
After decades of inflation, every other developed nation has removed the smallest denominations from circulation, and introduced larger ones.
How is the US, an otherwise capable bunch, unable to do this?
Vending machines need banknote readers, which are expensive, awkward and unreliable, unless you have brand new notes.
If they can't change the coins, what hope is there of metric? (And don't get me started on the US banking system :-)

Re:Correct about Hubble. Mars Climate Orbiter howe

[Brett Buck]

The classic example of an imperial-metric snafu is the Mars Climate Orbiter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter which was lost because the software measured force in pounds while the thrusters gave results and throttled accordingly by newtons.

WRONG. The data was supplied to the mission analysts was in lb-seconds. The program they used to do the mission analysis expected the data in newton-seconds. And, once again, that particular error was far from the most damning part of the issue. With even the most basic due dilligence on the part of the mission analysis it would have been corrected. And in any case, the units WEREN'T SPECIFIED in the interface, and *all*, repeat, *ALL* the data associated with this thruster has been for decades and will continue to be in the future, in conventional units.

        Please read this : http://www.jamesoberg.com/mars/loss.html before spouting more tiresome drivel on this topic.

Take MY space module, will you?!?

[IonOtter]

"Take that NASA!"

Stephen Colbert's revenge!

it isn't hard, point is, people dont want to

[Anonymous Coward]

they're sick and tired of having to learn new things just because some asshole decides they have to, they just want to live their lives in the environment they grew up in

Re:In before...

[ross.w]

...because the rest of us have ten fingers and count things in base 10.

Re:In before...

[Chris Gunn]

You have forgotten to consider the costs of not converting to metric. This forces you to have two systems. workshops have to have a set of imperial tools and a set of metric. You lose sales to other countries who can't be bothered with your backward machines. Expensive mistakes (some famous) are made when you aren't sure which units you should be using. Are you sure you can afford not to give up imperial?

Re:In before...

[selven]

I prefer my Kelvin inverse scale.

300' = hottest day on Earth
320' = average Las Vegas summer day
350' = average temperature on Earth
375' = average Toronto winter
400' = very cold
450' = normal day in Antarctica
500' = very cold day in Antarctica
540' = coldest day on Earth
1000' = what we'll be seeing when we colonize Jupiter

It actually makes quite a bit of sense.

Another Imperial/Metric SNAFU

[hey!]

Not to mention that thermal exhaust duct that's only supposed to stretch from the exhaust port at the surface 621/1000s of the way down to the main reactor.

Re:Another Imperial/Metric SNAFU

[bill_mcgonigle]

Not to mention that thermal exhaust duct that's only supposed to stretch from the exhaust port at the surface 621/1000s of the way down to the main reactor.

But they are two meters across.

Re:In before...

[Mitchell314]

I raise one kilokelvin.

Re:Metric Everywhere (Viva Base 12)

[Tablizer]

Please clarify. Where did you get 14? The more root integers a candidate matches, the higher the score. 14 ain't match much in terms of quantity.

Re:Correct about Hubble. Mars Climate Orbiter howe

[JoshuaZ]

Ok. I read it. According to what you linked to, other problems occurred also. In particular, they ignored initial evidence that something was wrong. This, and the initial failure to find the problem resulted, in according to that piece, systemic problems at NASA. I fail to see how anything in that piece justifies responding to the statement that the craft was lost due to software working on imperial and throttle as working under metric is at all "wrong" given what you've stated, much less "WRONG."

Re: Another Imperial-metric issue

[Jeremy Erwin]

A gallon is 128 ounces, not 256.

Re:Correct about Hubble. Mars Climate Orbiter howe

[Vadim Makarov]

All things being equal, the latter solution is inferior to the former. Metric is logical and much easier (powers of ten, same decimal prefixes in all units). The only thing holding the imperial system is legacy; it has no inherent advantages.

Idiot

[justinlee37]

If you want a refutation that uses facts, why don't you try making an argument worthy of one instead of drooling all over your keyboard and parroting meaningless bi-partisan cliches?

Re:In before...

[MrResistor]

The government would have to replace all speed limit and mile marker signs across the country, roads would not line up with measured distances, as well as many other things. You also need to consider that every piece of software and every table of elevations and distances that engineers use when building such systems are not in metric. It is not just a matter of using a few conversions here and there; it's a matter rewriting software, referring to old designs, and many other factors. When my government is over $12,300,000,000,000 in debt, "getting on with the times" is the last thing on which I'd want it to waste more money.

That sounds like a whole lot of jobs to me.

Re:In before...

[MrResistor]

...because the rest of us have ten fingers and count things in base 10.

Thanks for finally explaining why machinists are so anti-metric.

Re:In before...

[SharpFang]

Say what you want, this winter is twice as cold as the previous one.

(...now twist your head around this.)

Metric/Imperial snafu not likely

[Dr La]

Both the Tranquility unit and the observation deck are Italian built

So it is not very likely this is a Metric / Imperial mixup problem, as Italy uses Metric only and built both objects.

Re:In before...

[xaxa]

roads would not line up with measured distances

Are you suggesting the sign saying "Chicago 128 miles" is exactly 128 miles from Chicago? I'm sure if it said "Chicago 206km" no one would care about the few metres difference.

You also need to consider that every piece of software and every table of elevations and distances that engineers use when building such systems are not in metric.

Are you sure? Whether that's correct or not, it doesn't have to be. In the UK the roads are signed in miles (and yards), but they are built using metres. Some of the official requirements for positioning signs even say that the "exit 300 yards ahead" sign should be 300 metres from the exit.

I'm sure no country wants to incur the cost of converting everything to another system.

Except for your country, and for a couple of uses in the UK (displayed road distances and speeds, informal body measurements) those other countries have already converted.

Re:In before...

[davidsinn]

In the midwest the county roads are built on even fractions of miles apart(1, 1/2, 1/4, usually, although I know of one at 1/8.) Our address system is a grid based on the mile roads. If we were to change to metric the whole system stops making sense.

Re:In before...

[Ibn al-Hazardous]

You also need to consider that every piece of software and every table of elevations and distances that engineers use when building such systems are not in metric. It is not just a matter of using a few conversions here and there; it's a matter rewriting software, referring to old designs, and many other factors. When my government is over $12,300,000,000,000 in debt, "getting on with the times" is the last thing on which I'd want it to waste more money.

Bullshit. That software is already sold outside the US, and thus it already supports SI units (unless it's written by the boss' nephew, which is one more reason to throw it out).

And really, do you think the conversion snafus don't cost anything?

They had the REAL THING

[WindBourne]

Tranquility, Cupula AND the insulation were all made in Italy.

Basically, Italy should have tested this in a low atmosphere chamber. Had they done so, then they would have found this issue. This is going to turn out to be BAD QC on Italy's part.

Imperial/Metric Snafu

[dredwerker]

"One has to wonder if this is another imperial/metric snafu."

I am wondering if its a postage stamp vs metres snafu.

The longer you wait...

[sjbe]

It's not a matter of just "getting on with the times". Yes, the SI system is easier to work with, but there are immense costs in converting every system in use to another system.

True, but every other country in the world has already paid those costs. The metric system isn't terribly old. The longer the US waits the more expensive and difficult it becomes to switch.

You also need to consider that every piece of software and every table of elevations and distances that engineers use when building such systems are not in metric.

Most of those bits of software are already capable of metric (or easily made so) and generating new tables is trivial. Most engineering companies are quite capable of working with metric. Any company that does business outside the US (which is a LOT of them) already deals in metric whether they want to or not. It's a global economy and the US is intentionally incurring an unnecessary cost and burden on its own businesses.

Yes, the conversion would have some significant difficulties but the real difficulty is getting people to just accept metric as the standard. The biggest obstacle is simply people (older people especially) not wanting to bother - not the financial cost.

When my government is over $12,300,000,000,000 in debt, "getting on with the times" is the last thing on which I'd want it to waste more money.

As a percent of gdp the US has been in more debt as recently as 65 years ago. The conversion costs of going to metric, expensive as it would be, would be tiny in comparison. You could pay for the whole thing with a relatively modest cut in your choice of Defense, Social Security or Medicare. Of course good luck getting that done...

Consider it from the other side: why doesn't the world convert to Impirial Units? I'm sure no country wants to incur the cost of converting everything to another system.

Because the other 95% of the world's population has grasped the concept that using standard units saves money in the long run and makes it easier to communicate as well. Are you seriously arguing that 95% of the world's population should switch to a measurement system that even you admit is more difficult to work with? That's a bizarre way to convince someone...

Re:In before...

[MobyDisk]

The main "selling point" is really the number of other folks using one or the other.

That might be a good way to sell it to the public, but it is not the main benefit of a system. People should understand that a "degree" really does have meaning.

In America, every household appliance seems to use a different unit. My water heater is in BTUs, my electronic devices are in watts, and my air conditioner has na EER which is something stupid like BTUs per Watt - a horrible combination of systems. Even within one fieldd - say, cooking - they use different units. My microwave is in watts while my stove is in BTUs.

If we switched to Metric, this would become much simpler. And then you could compare your lawn mower, your car, your horse, and your TV all using the same units. Suddenly, things that were in the realm of complex math become accessible to the average person,

Re:Metric Everywhere (Viva Base 12)

[Yamata no Orochi]

He was addressing the person that suggested 14-fingered aliens would prefer base 14, much the way that we as 10-fingered aliens prefer base 10.

Re:Metric Everywhere (Viva Base 12)

[bill_mcgonigle]

Ten is merely a happenstance of tetrapod evolution. A "smart" god would have given us 12 digits instead of 10.

Your god gave you 12 knuckles on the grasping fingers of each hand. Egyptian and Babylonian children were taught this at an early age. It seems his children are the idiots here.

Dozenal or bust.

Re:In before...

[Lunzo]

Consider it from the other side: why doesn't the world convert to Impirial Units? I'm sure no country wants to incur the cost of converting everything to another system.

Every other country has already incurred this cost. We're waiting on you!

Re:In before...

[Nivag064]

Actually 200 Celsius is not twice the temperature of boiling water, as zero Celsius is not absolute zero. The Kelvin scale is the measure of absolute temperature.

100 C = 372 Kelvin (approx)

200 C = 472 Kelvin (approx)

So 200 C is less than a third more than 100 C.

Re:Metric Everywhere (Viva Base 12)

[Tablizer]

Nothing a hatchet can't fix.