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USMA: Going the Extra Kilometer For Metrication
EagleHasLanded writes "The U.S. Metric Association has been advocating for metrication since 1916 – without much success. In the mid-1970s, the U.S. government passed the Metric Conversion Act, but now it seems the time for complete conversion has come and gone. Or could U.S. educators and health & safety advocates put this issue back on Congress' radar screen?"
Cut out the intermediary step. Adopt the units of the future world superpower now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_units_of_measurement
It just makes sense
Pissing the rest of the world off is just a bonus.
perhaps the people have spoken...many times...
All you have to do is convince the male congressional leaders that they will gain manhood size once we convert over to metric! 15 is a whole lot bigger than 6 :)
trying to figure out what this had to do with West Point, before I realized USMA here is an acronym for "U.S. Metric Association."
Are the Colonies really still using Imperial units? - thought they must have stopped doing that yonks ago, after losing all those space probes to erroneous conversions between foot-slug-poundals and furlongs-per-fortnight.
Or is it like their refusal to use global standard paper sizes, or basically follow any other international standards - if it was invented in Europe it must de facto be Communist and therefore can't be touched with a barge pole?
Ths slashdot summary doesn't seem to be based closely on the linked articles:
but now it seems the time for complete conversion has come and gone.
The linked articles don't discuss a "cold turkey" government-mandated switch to metric (which was never a realistic possibility given the nature of American culture and politics). They discuss incremental government-mandated measures. Some of these measures have already been carried out: requiring food labeling to be in both US and metric. Some have been stalled legislatively: eliminating the US units from food labeling.
It would be great if we could get road signs to be switched over to dual units. E.g., congress could pass a law saying that on the interstate system, any time an old sign is replaced with a new one, it has to have dual units.
These incremental measures would be incredibly easy, and would require no new taxes or increase in government regulation (just changes to existing regulations). That's why it's so pathetic that the pace of implementing these measures has been so slow.
I teach physics at a community college. My students are a bell curve, extending from folks who are very bright and will transfer to elite four-year schools, all the way down to people who really shouldn't be in college. The bottom half of this bell curve is probably pretty representative of the population of the US.
Some characteristics of people in this range: (1) They tend not to understand at the conceptual level what the operations of multiplication and division are about. (2) They tend not to have any habit of checking whether their answers make sense in order of magnitude. (3) When they learn some new mathematical concept, they memorize it as a rote procedure, and therefore when they don't use it for a month, they forget it completely.
My students are mostly science majors, so they end up developing some facility with the metric system, but it's an uphill climb. For most people, what happens is that they learn the metric system in grade school, and then they never use it in everyday life, so they forget it completely and utterly.
Find free books.
After all, Imperial (in the US flavor) is better for computing than metric since it's at least partially base 2.
Which would, potentially, be helpful and useful if the humans who program, enter data into, and use information from, those computers were also in the habit of working in base 2.
And I'm sorry, as long as there are 5280 feet in a mile - that's 2^5 * 3 * 5 * 11(!?) - I'm going to call bullshit on the computing usefulness of a "partially" base 2 system.
~Idarubicin
They'll never take my pints.
There would be so much to change that the cost would prevent it - just think of how many road signs there are for example.
taking 5 gm and dividing or multiplying by 10s isn't quite metric system, neither is taking 1.03 L for base volume unit.
you'd better take steps to educate yourself lest our new not-quite metric asian overlords be displeased
When they tried pricing gasoline in liters at the pump in the 70's, folks were convinced that it was just a big scam to jack up the prices. They were probably right. And in the 70's we were going through the OPEC crisis, as well. That didn't help.
The same thing happened in Europe with the introduction of the Euro. Folks perceived everything as being more expensive.
If these folks want the metric system in the US to succeed, they had better think up a good solution for this problem.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
we don't make buildings and machines using miles
I had to equip my shop, and among other things picked up a set of socket wrenches, in both SAE and metric sizes. One thing I noticed, though, was that the socket drives were all in English measurements (1/4", 3/8", 1/2", 3/4") and that there were no metric-drive sets around anywhere. Just curious, are there any metric drive standards in Europe, and why haven't they found their way to the US? I'd expect at least some metric size sets from China to sneak in...
That's great, except that computers don't care - they'll do the math out to the limit of their numerical representation regardless, and probably all in a single standard unit, with no loss in speed whether the answer is 1 or 1.0012846235284624. Meanwhile the humans who can't do high-precsion math in their head have to deal with all sorts of wonky conversion factors, as well as potentially making I/O more annoying (you want me to convert my nice clean 3.26478 mile value to miles, feet, and inches before displaying it? Really?)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
What exactly is gained by change in units? As a metric "native" I can tell you that metric units are not based on real-world criteria. There is no way to naturally define an "approximate" centimeter or a gram (as opposed to approximate inch, foot or ounce, for example).
Metric units primary convenience in common use is to make shorthand in writing easier by avoiding decimal point or additional places of 0 and replacing them with predefined short prefixes. I suppose it may be useful to those who have good memory for greek-derived words but can't multiply or divide by 10, but are these people a majority? There are more convenient unit conversions when it comes to scientific use, but as far as I can tell, scientists do use metric quite universally.
More importantly - if you like metric system, just use it. I can't think of many (any?) products sold in US that are not dual-labeled. Virtually everything has either both imperial and metric weight/size etc. marked on it, or sold in metric and imperial versions. If metric system is superior in day-to-day life - market will no doubt prefer it without the need for government intervention.
Do you really want to be able to have a calculator around? When I need to consider units, it is absurdly easy to convert them. Do you realize that the United States does not use the English system? It uses the United States customary units (variations exist between it and the English system). 'Imperial' in fact has no many variations around the world. I think the best reason to change it, is because it is one of only three countries in the world that doesn't use the SI system. For the world to interact with the United States it would be much easier if everyone used SI.
A few years ago I was driving on a road somewhere south of Raleigh NC (route 1 somewhere between Raleigh and Southern Pines ) and my jaw dropped when I noticed a short stretch of the road had distances marked in km. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason as to why this one bit of road in the middle of nowhere was marked that way.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
give 'em an inch, and they'll take over 2 kilometers.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Don't worry, they're safe. Many American sports cars are using suspension technology that was developped by the Romans.
a legitimate question that is never asked - why should the US go metric? Who cares if somebody buys a pint of liquor or drives 65 mph? What problems are caused by imperial units?
let's have a conversation! let me know what you think.
We do make buildings using feet and inches which is a nightmare.
Suppose you need to put a 2 feet 8 3/8 inch window in the middle of a 4 foot 7 3/16 inch wide wall.
How far from the left edge of the wall is the left edge of the window?
(I'll leave the math to you.)
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
So you'd actually be going the extra 1.609344 Kilometer.
The U.S. Military is almost completely metric. They made a great leap when they switched 5 gallon water cans to 20 liters, which were one of the big hold outs. Still weighing aircraft fuel in pounds, and speed limits are miles per hour, but they are moving forwards. At least we only need one tool set now.
Replying to my own post here. Another good example of where metric units don't work out so well is estimating distance by pacing. Most people don't have a yard or metre-long average stride. I can do metre-long strides, but I have to pace rather unnaturally and with very long steps. My average stride, and most people's actually, is closer to two feet. So is it easier to count paces and multiply by two, or count paces and multiply by 2 and divide by 3?
Of course in this day and age people don't pace off distance or estimate dimensions, so all of this argument is likely moot. Google Earth can do dimensions in either unit!
Torr isn't metric. None of metric systems (CGS, MKS, MTS) use Torr as a pressure unit.
But if you insist.
760 Torr = 1 atm = 101.325 kPA
1 kPA * (760 Torr/101.325 kPA) * (1000 mTorr/1 Torr) = 7501 mTorr.
(I didn't look-up any of this stuff. I remember 1 atm was 760 Torr from manometer experiments in high school, and 101.325 kPA from physics.)
After all, Imperial (in the US flavor) is better for computing than metric since it's at least partially base 2.
Base 10 is partially base 2 as well, 10 = 2x5. So metric is as good as imperial unit, by your logic.
I don't know about this "partially base 2" stuff, but having units which are evenly divisible by 3 seems like a clear advantage to me. Why do you think we still measure time in base 60, or angles in 360ths of a circle?
(Do not sign anything.) -- Fell, Planescape: Torment
If American companies used the same units of measurement as most of the rest of the world I would guess that would lead to more sales.
The metric system is also used by the sciences and science leads to MONEY.
I was fortunate enough to be a small child in the 70s. I learned the metric system in elementry school and it helped me greatly in my science classes.
I never learned the standard American system until I studied architechture in college.
The metric system is much, much easier to use.
I'm surprised we haven't seen a push since food manufacturers are already repacking in smaller units to hide inflation. Remember when salami, chocolate, ice cream and coffee were purchased by the pound?
If we switch to metric the confusion would probably so great as to mask even smaller package sizes.
Most people's average step is about 2.5 feet, making the average stride 5 feet. It's how the Romans had a 5000-foot mille passuum and lead to the British 5280-foot mile.
Oh, I'm sure no problems are caused by this at all.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
http://articles.cnn.com/1999-09-30/tech/9909_30_mars.metric_1_mars-orbiter-climate-orbiter-spacecraft-team?_s=PM:TECH
Conversation problems -- in both meanings of the word.
A legitimate question that is never asked - why should anybody standardize anything? Who cares if you want a pint of liquor and this particular bartender sells it by the fistful? Or if the speed limit is 65 mph and a cop stops you for going 278 yakaplutz per solarity?
The main justification for preferring the metric system over the 'english' system, at least for everyday non-technical use, was that the metric units were generally in multiples of 10 and were therefore easier to mentally manipulate to convert between mass, volume, and length. Now, with digital helpers everywhere, the ease of managing unit conversions is irrelevant and the impetus for changing to the metric system is gone. Moreover, we like the familiarity of our psi, pounds, degrees fahrenheit, miles per gallon, ounces, and teaspoons, etc for everyday use. Scientists and the military switched over to metric units years ago.
Even without computers and similar to assist in conversions, the fact of the matter is that the average person doesn't do unit conversions very often. I can only think of two cases where I do it regularly. The first is cooking, since sometimes it's useful to be able to switch between teaspoons, tablespoons, and cups. Maybe metric would make this simpler, and maybe not -- I haven't ever used metric-labeled measurings spoons or cups for cooking, so I don't really know.
The other time I have to convert between units is time -- and, of course, the time units aren't base-10 in the metric system either.
There's a good argument for switching, but trying to get people to switch because it will make conversions easier isn't going to go anywhere. As you noted, people who actually frequently do unit conversions -- scientists, engineers, and so forth -- have generally moved to metric already.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Are the drawings dimensioned in feet and fractions of inches?
I haven't touched imperial in twenty-five years, but when I did, everything was in inches. From 10 metres to 0.02mm, everything was dimensioned in inches. Inches were broken down into thousandths.
I can't even begin to imagine talking in feet and inches. Saying "two feet, eight and three-eighths" it so long compared with "eight-two-two mil" (822mm). Even remembering the dimension while marking out must be an extra pain.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
It's doing fine in some parts of the country.
Bad choice of target for your "hurr american cars use old tech" attack. Even the article you link notes that people mistakenly associate the Corvette suspension system with the setup used on trucks just because it has a leaf, even though the operation is completely different.
A better choice would have been the Mustang for its continued use of a solid axle, though even that holds its own against the M3 so it's hard to call it all bad.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
But it does matter for manufacturers building equipment for markets using the different units.
It should require no explanation conversions between mm, cm, m and km is easier to explain and comprehend than the conversions between 64th, inch, foot, yard and mile.
Alone the need for different tool sets is in my company a serious cost and especially a quality control issue.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
You should read up a bit on trade before metric and why so many countries gladly made the jump from imperial.
Your question is not legitimate, it's ignorant.
Another good example of where metric units don't work out so well is estimating distance by pacing. Most people don't have a yard or metre-long average stride. I can do metre-long strides, but I have to pace rather unnaturally and with very long steps. My average stride, and most people's actually, is closer to two feet. So is it easier to count paces and multiply by two, or count paces and multiply by 2 and divide by 3?
Which is the reason we had a pace-count course setup during land navigation exercices in ROTC. We'd follow a 100m course, count our paces, go back the other direction, count again, then average the two numbers. That was supposed to be able to allow us to convert our map distances into an easy to remember number when looking for waypoints. For the most part, it worked okay, since the pace course was a good average of the terrain. However, you'd still have to fudge a bit due to fatigue when your stride got shorter.
But in the end, it was still a LOT easier to use metric than imperial, simply because the course was probably 8-10 square miles. Imperial would have worked for road distances, but not when you're going through the brush trying to find specific points and cut-ins from the trails.
"So after all this, you make my case for me. To end this stalemate, you must die..."
I did a little fact checking before posting and found that Porsche may have stopped using torsion suspensions in 1989, otherwise I'd be pointing out that Germans use technology that dates back before the Romans (Greeks are known to have discussed torsion in at least some manner), though it wasn't use in transportation suspensions until the 1900s.
Learn to love Alaska
I agree -- imperial units are generally better for human perception and estimation. One of the worst metric units is pressure, which is measured in kilopascals (newtons per meter). Who the hell knows how big a newton is?? :) Pounds-per-inch is way easier to wrap your head around.
I think the exception is Fahrenheit, which is not only annoying to spell, but nonlinear, and calibrated quite absurdly. (-10F is actually 22F! WTF! :)
I also find gallons and miles a bit unwieldy, but I suppose they are "chunkier", making it easier to do rough estimates.
though even that holds its own against the M3
Drag racing hardly qualifies as holding its own. Real race cars have to turn sometimes.
The problem is it's just too expensive. All of our road signs are in imperial. All of our building codes are in imperial. All of our tools are imperial. Many standard building materials like pipes are measured in imperial and then converted to metric for the rest of world anyway (if you've ever wondered why they sell weird sizes like 31.8mm, it's because it's 1 1/4 inches).
Answer: who cares? You find the center line of the wall and the center line of the window and work off of those. You can do that with two sticks and a pencil. When Norm wants to build things that are identical and repeatable, he doesn't measure each one down to the thousandth. He builds a jig of some kind so that each thing ends up being the same size.
The ugly truth is that building construction plans, materials, rulers, etc. are all dimensioned in feet, inches, and fractional inches (not decimal fractions).
Carpenters in the US get really good at doing the complex math required to multiply and divide these units (i.e. 4 feet 8 3/8 inches) (and there are construction calculators) but metric is so much easier.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I think he was joking.
Incidentally, something like this was tried. And, of course, it was rejected. There were some technical problems with it, but there's a bigger problem with it: most people don't want to trade a seven day week for a ten day week if that entails no increase in the weekend. Most employers, on the other hand, would be fine with this arrangement. Besides, in spite of all the Culte de la Raison business, there's nothing more inherently rational about a ten day week than a seven day week.
When was the last time you ever had to convert feet to miles, or yards to miles? In general, the US system is good enough.
I use miles-per-hour and miles as a measurement of driving distance.
I use gallons for gas and milk.
milliliters for other liquid measurements (since it's on the bottles, and easy enough to read)
Inches for building things out of wood. 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, and 1/16 are good tolerances in construction.
F for temperature (because 98.6 isn't any worse than 37.0)
The reason there's no motivation to change is because everyone gets along well enough with the systems we have. It's cool you can do conversions from grams of water to liters in your head, but when was the last time you had to do that?
And when I do science, I use metric. No prob.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
First the United Nations, then Darwinism, then Galileo. If they force us to use litres, we'll all be living in the USSR before the decade ends.
Every question is ignorant, by definition. Unless (like mine) it's a rhetorical device, or a test.
And, using the base 2 advantage, it'd just be shifts for a computer.
2' 8-3/8": 100000.011 inches (binary)
mid-point: 10000.0011 inches
4' 7-3/16": 110111.0011 inches
mid-point: 11011.10011 inches
It's 11011.10011 - 10000.0011 inches from the wall or 1011.01101 inches or (in decimal) 11-13/32". No floating point rounding errors.
could U.S. educators and health & safety advocates put this issue back on Congress' radar
Not a chance. Educators and advocates lack two things: Lobbyists. Jesus.
Other than increased costs of goods for companies having to support multiple units or an occassional NASA crash?
Learn to love Alaska
Suppose you need to put a 2 feet 8 3/8 inch window in the middle of a 4 foot 7 3/16 inch wide wall.
That's what blue prints are for. Or you can just use inches......
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The US should have a push for "hard metrication", which means using metric-sized components, to improve exports to the rest of the world. The military and auto industries are already metric. Electronics is mixed; newer components are metric pitch, but there's still a lot of 0.100 pin spacing around. Construction is still mostly inch. This is more important than the units consumers use.
(I restore old Teletype machines from the 1920s, which use inch fasteners, but fine thread; 6-40 instead of 6-32. Those are rare today. Gun parts suppliers still have them, but the selection of lengths and head styles is limited, so matching old parts is tough. On occasion I've had to buy long bolts, cut off the threaded part, and thread the base part myself. Despite this antique stuff, there's no reason that the US should not be routinely using metric screws for almost everything. Outside the US, getting non-metric screws is hard.)
We do make buildings using feet and inches which is a nightmare. Suppose you need to put a 2 feet 8 3/8 inch window in the middle of a 4 foot 7 3/16 inch wide wall. How far from the left edge of the wall is the left edge of the window? (I'll leave the math to you.)
You stretch a string from one end to the other; then fold the string in half. There's your middle.
Have you EVER worked in construction?
Hehe, a damn good example of the problems of the US or Imperial system. :)
Would it have been a metric system you could have easily and without pen and paper figured out a 0.82 m. window needs 0.29 m. edge to be in the middle of a 1.40 m. wall.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Because it works around the world, no exceptions.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Try weights and volumes:
1 gallon = 4 quarts = 8 pints = 16 cups = 128 ounces = 256 tablespoons
1 pound = 16 ounces = 256 drams
The core is there, we just need to rationalize it further.
A yard isn't that far from 2^5 inches.
A mile is already pretty darned close to 2^16 inches.
And, surely you're familiar with the rounding errors involved in trying to represent base 10 decimals in binary? That is, no finite representation of 1 cm in meters? 1 1 cm = 0.0000001010001110101... m
Face it, base 2 measures are superior for our computerized society. I'f we're going to switch measures in the US, let's go with a system which recognizes the problems of base 10.
Because the US/Imperial system is awful when working in fractions or doing rather important things like having to translate depth or hight into pressure differences.
The biggest problem is for companies and people being forced to work in both systems, yes some of us do travel or sell abroad.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Obligatory Oatmeal reference: http://theoatmeal.com/pl/senior_year/science
Besides the fact that it's pointless (why does it matter that my 180km drive is 180,000 meters?) there are reasons to not change. I'm from Brazil, IN:
http://goo.gl/maps/GQt46
Take a good look at all of those squares. Want to guess how big they are? The land is platted in acres, of which there are 640 per square mile. Normally in that area, the townships are 36 square miles - known as sections - and individual pieces of land go down to 1/16th of that. Obviously they can be subdivided smaller, but the 40 acre plot is common. See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_(United_States_land_surveying)
People who advocate for changing to all metric don't know what kind of clusterf*ck they're wishing on themselves.
Do you have ESP?
Printers are prone to default to letter size paper at the most inconvenient of moments.
So, here I am, wanting to print an A4 sized document on a printer loaded to the gills with A4 size paper, but because of some retard in the device driver division of the shitty printer manufacturer the printer will guess that now is really the time that I mean to print on weird-ass paper formats, I'm not getting any output.
First printer manufacturer that includes a button that does "print the fucking document on the fucking paper that is in the tray, and fuck that noise" gets my business first thing in the morning.
Well they don't have to, It would be almost effortless to simply start describing the drywall (and all other building materials) in metric terms using precisely the same sizes. Then when new designs are made people will naturally use whole numbers in metric sizes.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
That's why no one would build a 4 foot 7 3/16 inch wall.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
So true. Best of both worlds. I tell people how tall I am in feet and inches, express my mass in pounds, measure my bike tires in psi and give photo sizes in inches but I have no problem buy 500mL of chocolate milk or measuring my bike rides in kms. Use whatever. It doesn't matter.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
Yeah, well, what have they ever done for us?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Nobody buys weed by the ounce or pound, they buy it by the gram or kilo. Same with cocaine. Charlie Sheen only buys it by the kilo, never by the pound. Let's face it, metric is already here, just nobody wants to admit it.
Don't forget hard liquor and ammo, both of which go well with drugs and are frequently sold in metric measures(never mind about the delightful metric/imperial overlap caused by US-derived rounds that also have a NATO-standardized military offshoot, sometimes slightly different in certain other respects, leading to wacky fun like .223 and 5.56...)
Maybe if you're talking about liquid measure. I mean, there are 2 cups in a pint, 2 pints in a quart, and 4 quarts in a gall -- oh, wait.
Honestly, the usefulness of U.S. customary units (not to be confused with Imperial, since the U.S.'s system broke off from the British system prior to its development into the Imperial units that we have today, meaning that there are indeed some differences) is that it's relatable. Nothing more. I like the fact that a foot is about the length of my foot or my forearm, making it easy to approximate. I like the fact that 100 degrees is hot, 50 is chilly, and 0 is downright frigid. I like the fact that a mug or cup holds about a cup of a liquid.
But when it comes to most engineering, computing, or other uses, S.I. wins, and there are ways to make them relatable as well (e.g. my pinkie finger is about 1cm across). There are a few exceptions, of course. I have a few petroleum engineering friends who swear their undying love for some weird American unit that they use in place of the "equivalent" S.I. one, but for the most part, S.I. units are just plain easier to work with. And I'm an American who grew up using U.S. customary units his entire life.
I did a little fact checking before posting
Sacrilege.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Everyone uses feet and inches for estimating height.
Except for horses, which are measured in hands. And probably a handful of other exceptions too.
1 N = 1 kg*m/(s*s). By laymen's terms, 1 kg puts 10 N of force onto a surface it's sitting on.
Therefore, 1 Pa = 1 kg/(m*s*s).
Psi is kind of absurd because it matters not what mass you put on a square inch, but what force you exert. In order to wrap your head around it, try first touching somebody with a baseball bat, and then smashing his jaw with it - the mass was equal, but the pressure wasn't
Among other things: The Mars Climate Orbiter. This was "just" a $655M mishap, but things like this happen all the time. Not to mention that imperial calculations are just f'd up for scientific and engineering purposes.
Manuals are your last resort only
When I worked in construction, I found inches are better than centimeters, because you can specify your tolerances really well. It's really hard to cut a board to a mm precision with a circular handsaw, but no problem to cut it to 1/16 of an inch.
so it is easier to cut it down to 0,15875 cm precision than to 0,1 cm ? surprising :)
Rich
You do have to give credit to the (probably illiterate) medieval craftsmen who created the various customary units for often having the intuitive notion that 12 would be a better base for our number system than ten.
However, since unfortunately ten is the base of our number system, dividing units into 12 does more harm than good. You only get the convenience of occasionally splitting things into 3 parts at the expense of having to do complex fraction calculations on most everything else.
I would listen to you, but my ears only listen to arguments that save babies.
Please note the US oil/drilling industry expresses the SG of liquids in lbs/gal or for giggles lbs/cu.ft.
A nice example of an industry that's in deep shit because of the use of historic units is the oil industry, the safety of the well is depending on a driller using all kinds of irrational conversion factors:
http://www.drillingformulas.com/estimated-mud-weight-required-to-safely-drill-the-well/
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Weed by the ounce is actually quite common.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
Fractions by themselves are not difficult, but they do add difficulty, especially when you have a stacked fraction.
4 ft 4 3/16 inch translates to 4+(4+3/16)/12 ft or 4*12+3/16inch. I need to do at least one division and a multiplication or another division with numbers that are not that easy to multiply or divide (12, 16).
On the other hand, using decimal system it would be simpler - 55inch, 5.5deciinch or 0.55kiloinch.
No, it's much simpler. Let's say you have to measure a 1 kilometer road. in meters:1,000 meter. Now do the same calculation for a 1 mile road. How many inches? What about a 4.2 mile road? The possibility for conversion and rounding errors is eliminated with the metric system, and that makes it superior to the imperial system.
The metric system is more convenient for doing math in. The American/English system is more convenient for doing living in.
I can usually barely feel a 1-degree F difference in temperature. A 1-degree C difference, however, is almost twice that much, and that I can feel. So Fahrenheit is more practically precise, even if less aligned with physics.
Likewise, inches are slightly more convenient than centimeters, in large part because they are based off nominal body-part sizes and other common everyday objects instead of an abstruse mathematical derivative of the size of the Earth. More to the point, a lot of convenient distances are easier to quote. Like a 2-foot wide door instead of a "2/3 meter wide" door (approximately).
I never got properly corrupted by weights and fluid measures, so I am fine with either one there. A liter is close enough to a quart that it breaks down to pints and cups without too much inaccuracy for most of my needs. And weight is just something I read off a scale, so one number is as good as another for the most part. Especially when the number is based off another commonly-encountered thing (water).
Once I get into more esoteric realms, such as electromagnetism, there was never really much competition for units to begin with, so no problem.
The biggest reason that metric hasn't taken over in the USA is probably too many anti-flouridation folks who consider it as part of the Conspiracy to establish One World Order. But it must be popular with someone. Back in the 1980s (give or take), the State of Florida put up "88km/h" signs on the interstate below the 55mph speed limit signs. They were promptly stolen right and left.
And it also means that dividing by it you get a really long (or infinite) decimal fraction that you will most likely truncate because the original measurement was not that precise. Then if someone converts that back, you get additional inaccuracies.
Please read this, it explains it clearly:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-paper.html
Your problem is partial conversion, angst of going the whole way.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
No, computers and calculators are designed for decimal entry. Entering fractional of inches into a calculator is several times harder than entering decimals. It often requires using the memory or parentheses functions on the calculator if several numbers are involved. Then you have to convert the decimal output back to fractions, which is yet another otherwise unnecessary step.
That's one reason I always buy dual-scale rulers and tape measures, and I always use the metric side unless I'm dealing with pieces that came pre-sized in inches. Metric is both easier to do in your head, *and* easier to use with computing tools.
Or, you know, I could just use a tape measure (I have one that's 100m long) for short distances or GPS/maps for longer distances (a few kilometers or more).
Bad choice of target for your "hurr american cars use old tech" attack.
Especially when there is a better example of an even older technology that american cars use: the wheel. It predates the Romans by several millennia at least.
The aqueduct.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Who the hell knows how big a newton is??
A newton is approximately the weight of a 100g mass object on Earth (actually 100g weighs 0.981N).
100kPa is approximately 1 atmosphere (1atm is precisley 101.325kPa).
1kPa is also the approximate hydrostatic pressure of 10cm column of water, so the pump needs to be at least 10kPa to lift water to 1m height.
Alright, but apart from better sanitation, medicine, education, irrigation, public health, roads, a freshwater system, public order and an automobile suspension... what have the Romans done for us?
I am officially gone from
The old-time reporter kept files of stories that could be dusted off and re-cycled as filler for slow news days and the traditional annual New Year's wrap-up. Metrification is one of the oldest of these winter hardy perennials.
What excites the geek is the persistence of common weights and measures in circumstances where metric precision isn't wanted or needed and has no political constituency. The desire to impose your own sense of order on everything and everyone around you is the stuff of high comedy. What the geek lacks is a sense of the ridiculous.
7 is more rational than 10.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
In Canada even my dad is metric oriented enough to get ticked off when they measure snow depth in cm. It should be in mm.
The possibility for conversion and rounding errors is eliminated with the metric system
If you think rounding errors are not possible in the metric system.....then you've never seen a 3.27876899 kilometer road.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Torr is a metric unit: it's MILLIMETERS of mercury. Millimeters are metric.
Sorry but that is simply wrong. A Torr is defined as 1/760 of one atmosphere of pressure. This ratio is chosen to as to be approximately equal to 1mm of mercury. So the definition is non-metric (1 atmosphere is not a metric unit) and the result is not metric because it is not equal to 1 mm Hg. In fact even if it were defined as 1mm Hg (which it is NOT) I would argue that it is still not a metric unit any more than an inch is a metric unit because it is defined as 2.54 cm.
You and your commas.........in the old days of programming, some early computing leaders got together to make Algol. The conference nearly broke down over what to use for the decimal point, with on participant tearfully crying, "I will never use a period for a decimal point!"
Eventually they overcame the problem.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The USA has already gone metric for scientific and industrial uses. That's where it's needed; there is no need at all to shove it down the public's throat for ordinary uses like what was done in the UK.
Do you know how many jobs will be created from all that confusion?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
No, it's much simpler. Let's say you have to measure a 1 kilometer road. in meters:1,000 meter. Now do the same calculation for a 1 mile road. How many inches? What about a 4.2 mile road?
Have you ever in your life been asked for directions, and, after giving them, your interrogator then wanted to know about how far that was in centimeters?
Of course not. I've never been asked about how far it was to Chicago in inches, either. I also don't know my weight in ounces. And if I told you my mass in grams, I'd have to include a precision figure with that data.
Anyway, neither converting a distance in miles into inches or km into cm is "simple," since in both cases you haven't measured it that precisely.
I am not a crackpot.
Peace!
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Ten millimetres to the centimetre. Ten centimetres to the decimetre. Ten decimetres to the metre. Ten metres to the decametrr. Ten decametres to the hectameter. Ten hectametres to the kilometer. I now some of these prefixes isn't in common use, but it does show that all you have to do is to mulitply by ten.
Twelve inches to the foot. Three feet to the yard. One thousand, sevenhundred and sixty yards to the mile - or more correct; eight furlongs, each of which is ten chains, each chain is four rods, each of which again is twenty five links. And just to show how well thought out the system is; each link is 7.92 inches long... So you either have a progression of 12-3-1760, or one of 25-4-10-8.
Tell me again why the so called Standard Measures are better than SI?
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Yeah, when I lived in El Salvador, I gave my height in cm and my weight in pounds. Not sure how they ended up with that tradition, but it's what they do in that country.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
And, surely you're familiar with the rounding errors involved in trying to represent base 10 decimals in binary? That is, no finite representation of 1 cm in meters? 1 1 cm = 0.0000001010001110101... m
BCD. In use in computers pretty much since computers stopped being people.
Why should the US convert? Here's why: graph.
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
The fact it can hold its own against an M3 in any measurement is impressive. The M3 costs OVER DOUBLE what the Mustang GT costs. Even in the UK it costs over 75% more than the cost of buying a mustang and having it shipped in. Then with a few k in bolt-ons you have a Mustang thats going to smoke the M3 in most any real-world situation on the street.
Neither is a race car, but both are good cars. In their own right.
I hate europeans that don't understand the point of a Mustang... it goes fast. It goes fast cheaply. It makes a lovely sound and looks amazing for the price of a base model family sedan. It can be made to go faster than anyone could ever possibly need for under 10k USD.
If we're going to compare Mustang to M3 lets put the GT500 onto a track against it. I'll bet dollars to donuts that the extra horsepower on the GT500 makes up most of the time difference. Because thats what the M3 is. Its in the GT500 price range, and it only MIGHT beat the GT500 around a track(its a might because it will depend on which track, one with a lot of straights the M3 is a bit screwed, and vice-versa for the GT500), even with the SRA, because the GT500 outdoes it on both horsepower and horsepower to weight by a lot.
That said, the 1/4 mile is often considered the ultimate test of a car, and I'll mention about the first fucking thing they do on Top Gear UK with very nearly every-single-car they bring on there. If they do a comparison test its always either 1/4 mile, standing mile, or 0-100 and back to 0, which are all essentially the same thing.
The 1/4 mile is the easiest and fastest way to say "My car beats the pulp out of your car".
Besides that, for the same reason as James May on Top Gear says the Fiat Panda is fun, the Mustang is fun. Cars are most fun when they're driven at the edge of their capabilities. Its due to this that the Mustang with its SRA is more fun than any of the BMW's I've test-driven. The Mustang can be fun on a daily basis, relatively within the legal local speed limits. The M3 is about as boring as it gets until you can get it onto a track somewhere.
This only true in a very limited micro processor. Working with 16 bit you might have to be careful, I guess. Once you are working with 32bit integers this is not an issue and if it is use 64. There is not really any benefit to using floating point here just pick a good "unit", say 1/32", to work from.
Most modern processors are as fast at multiplication and addition and some are faster in cases.
Out of curiosity ... how does it work in all the physics?
like the construction supplies industry, which benefits from using measures and sizes different to everyone else in the world.
Having to deal with multiple measurement systems is nothing but a cost with no benefit - which is why metric is not commonly used here in the US. There is a HUGE cost to switching which is why it hasn't been done but there is no actual advantage to having more than one measurement system to the construction industry or any other industry. Furthermore all the skilled trade workers are trained in imperial units and don't use metric much and there is a lot of resistance from them since they'd have to re-learn a lot of how they do things.
It effectively acts as a trade barrier against the Chinese.
I assure you it does not. All those commodity bolts, fasteners, etc are made in China. Construction companies are often Chinese.
Oh DRIVE!
Now grand parent makes sense. MOD PARENT UP
-
I use kilometres-per-hour and kilometres as a measurement of driving distance.
I use litres for petrol and milk.
milliliters for other liquid measurements (since it's on the bottles, and easy enough to read)
millimetres for building things out of wood. 1 mm is a good tolerance in construction.
C for temperature (because 37.0 isn't any worse than 98.6)
And when I do science, I use metric. No prob and it's all nice and consistent across the board
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
I don't think your argument that the American system is more convenient to live in holds. If you talk to people who grew up outside of the US (like me, for example) you will find that they can think as easily in Centigrades and cm as an USAian can think in inches and Fahrenheit. For example, you wouldn't talk about a 2/3m door, but a 70cm door, and people tend to think of room temperature as 20C or 22C. I travel back and forth between Europe and the US quite often and I do not find any practical difference between both systems. I think you're spot on with your argument why metric hasn't taken over yet. It's one of the idiosyncracies of the US system that are very difficult to understand for people from the outside (others are, e.g., the electoral system, discussions on gun control, etc.)...
I don't think we have made a car in 30 years that wasn't mostly metric.
My company makes car parts and the supply chain for US car makers still commonly do not specify parts in metric. Drawings from Japanese or European auto parts suppliers are typically in metric but from US manufacturers we normally see some form of imperial units. Lengths are specified in inches, wire gauges in AWG instead of metric, etc. Most of our tooling is in fractions of an inch instead of millimeters. Not to say metric doesn't get used but it's not as much as it should be.
If you're putting a window in a wall, and measuring things in metric units, floating point rounding errors are never going to be a problem - they're going to be orders of magnitude smaller than your margin of error.
If you're using a calculator then, to avoid such errors even potentially being a problem, it's most likely working internally with BCD anyway, so there are no floating point rounding errors and no having to work with fractions, so you can easily convert between, say, centimetres and metres or millimetres by shifting the decimal point in your head.
Quick - what's 1/2" + 7/32" + 3/8" ?
Now, add up 50 mm + 20 mm + 4 mm and convert to cm.
Which was easier?
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
but then you also have issues of say a 2x4, which is neither 2" nor 4". Same with a 1x6, 2x6, etc. They average something like 1.5 to 1.75 by roughly 2.5" anymore
Engineers already mostly work in SI
In my industry (wire harnesses) engineers mostly do NOT work in SI here in the US if the drawings we receive are anything to go by. They will if the customer needs/demands metric (usually for Asian or European customers though sometimes for domestic customers) but mostly the engineers I've dealt with are an old fashioned lot that cannot be bothered to use metric. We have a few customers that use metric but most of the drawings we receive use inches - not even decimalized inches.
Yes, so why try to force your way on other people?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Really? I find it harder to relate weather temperature because cooking temps like freezing and boiling are so arbitrary in imperial units.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
Imperial is okay until you want to start calculating with it. For a start you can't use a normal calculator because it can't cope with 12 inches in a foot and three feet in a yard.
At this point someone normally claims that Imperial is better because 12 is divisible by 2, 3, 5, 6 etc. The brilliant thing about metric is you can always just use a multiple of 12 centimetres as your base, or 8 litres, or 3.141596 kilos, or whatever is most suitable.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
My stride, and most people's stride, is around 600 mm - it's pretty easy to work from there. I don't know why you need to count paces and multiply and then divide, once again, that's the point of the metric system, it's all decimal.
If I walk, say, 85 strides, it's easy to calculate 83 * 6 and then move the decimal point on place to the left to get the distance in metres.
60 * 8 = 480
3 * 6 = 18
480 + 18 = 498 50 m
Either that, or shorten your stride for the purpose of measuring things to 0.5m and multiply by two.
With your example, if you need to know the distance in yards or miles, it's then more complicated than just counting paces and multiplying by two.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
They don't do the complex math, they just slowly memorize the units. They are still screwed when asked to combine a bunch of mixed fractions.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
Well...
My house is post and beam construction and everything is on "exactly" 4 foot centers.
However, due to the width of the posts, the distance between the posts is 3 feet 6 5/8 inches. Hence a wall "that no one would ever build".
Also, there is the fact that nothing when it is actually built comes out exactly as specified on the plans. Things are always an odd 1/8 or 1/4 or 5/16 inch off.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Continuation of the gradual change to metric needs to begin. Labels should all include metric - including all new street signs. Many things are labeled for both already, especially products not entirely bound for the USA. Internationalization already pushes many things towards metric; cars and science being examples.
I would make the predominant number metric; flipping the order in many places and adding metric where it was excluded. Would people complain? Sure, call them morons for not being capable of reading. Not that this would work on many Americans who have no problem with stupidity, especially if it conflicts with traditional beliefs. By having both people are "free to choose" to thoughtlessly use what they were raised with (oh the irony...)
As for estimation, that is all bunk - you use what you learn to use. I like inches, but 2cm is good enough I estimate by even numbers and it comes out good enough to ball park; over time I got more accurate. Besides, if there was something to gain by a unit between inch and yard we'd see more decimeters being used.
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There are people out the smoking cigarettes, for crying out loud. Not to mention saving injured woodpeckers and selling fresh milk.
Seems like there are more important things for the government to be doing rather than changing speed limit signs.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
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I'm not saying it's 'better,' I'm saying it fits my needs perfectly, and there is no real motivation to change; and for people who don't already know metric, there is real motivation to not change.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Why not simply skip metric and simply go to natural units and get rid of many historical constants (like Avogadro constant).
Yea whoever wrote that obviously never bought weed. eights of an ounce, quarter ounces, half ounces, pounds. All the common forms of measurement of marijuana.
That said, the 1/4 mile is often considered the ultimate test of a car, and I'll mention about the first fucking thing they do on Top Gear UK with very nearly every-single-car they bring on there. If they do a comparison test its always either 1/4 mile, standing mile, or 0-100 and back to 0, which are all essentially the same thing.
You mean
That said, the 400 meters is often considered the ultimate test of a car, and I'll mention about the first fucking thing they do on Top Gear UK with very nearly every-single-car they bring on there. If they do a comparison test its always either 400 meters, 1.6km, or 0-100 and back to 0, which are all essentially the same thing.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
What does the weather have to do with cooking temps? F is simple, 100 degrees is HOT and 0 is COLD. Celsius is design for water, and Farenheight is designed for humans.
Surely there was room in ASCII for a decimal point character.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
That was before ASCII
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Well okay in the character set they were using a dedicated decimal point character would have been really handy and the user agent would have been free to render it as needed.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Instead of spending effort on pushing metric, the US govt should have tried a pull approach.
Mandate that all contracts and business with the government be conducted in metric units. All public construction project bids will be submitted in metric, from public restroom to public subsidized football stadiums. If it starts in the construction industry, it will spill over to the rest of the society. Within a decade, all new Home Depot & Lowes hardware store inventory will follow.
I have no idea how they solved the problem, but that might have been what they did....
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
For the same reason Microsoft is trying to get everyone off IE6. Because it's bloody annoying and as times goes on it costs more and more just to maintain compatibility.
Almost the entire world has moved to metric. Because the US stubbornly refuses to do so, it makes things that much more difficult and error prone for *any and all* interaction with the US. Costs, if not for any other reason, are a primary factor in this. Extra work done for conversion. Extra work done for testing. Massive quantities of money thrown out the window (such as the Lookheed thing) for nothing, just because someone makes a conversion mistake.
It's a ridiculous waste of money, and will continue to be a waste of money, for absolutely no good reason whatsoever.
10 days to a week, 10 hours to a day and 100 minutes to an hour. The only reason we use the current system is to do with the Babylonians and their love of base 6. They tried to get something like this started in the French revolution but it never caught on.
BMWs are boring cars for middle aged business men having a mid-life crisis. A better comparison would be something like a Skyline or Evo. Reasonably priced and very modifiable, great fun to drive.
Drag racing is for cocks, even Top Gear only uses it as filler. On the track, through the corners is where it's at, and I'm afraid the GP was right. The Mustang does suck at cornering.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I'm not saying it doesn't fit your immediate needs, I'm saying it is all fine and dandy until the moment it isn't and then you are screwed. With metric you can be sure you won't be snookered later on as things get more complex.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
At that point I just use metric. Simple problem, easily solved.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
In a global economy we want global standards.
And even if there were no international interactions, the metric system is far easier to understand and use. Clinging to the more difficult and arcane is pointless.
Mustang does that better as well. German cars are for cunts.
So Steve McQueen was a cunt? You should go tell his son Chad... I'm sure he will react well, he's a Porsche owner like his dad and therefore (according to you) a cunt.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
I think the OP was referring to building blue-prints. Where I work all our drawings are in a single unit, inches. Any drawing that might be seen by the customer will have inches and then the millimeter equivalent in brackets for reference, e.g. 1.000 [25.4].
OK I even read TFA which outlines some of the history -- there is lots of pro-metric legislation in America, yet still the system hasn't been officially adopted. I don't care about whether one system is better than the other, or what the relative merits are of each. I'd like to know:
Are there any explicitly stated reasons out of the US government or industry, specifying why the metric system has not (or cannot) be adopted??
The linked article seems to imply that simply inertia or lack of will is the reason, but I'd like to know.
Hej! Nasi tu byli!
The problem with numbers like that is that they imply a false precision. A 2x4, for example, isn't really all that close to being 2 inches by 4 inches, but because they are nice round numbers, people will cut them some slack. 70cm, on the other hand, implies precision to a small fraction of an inch - perhaps too small.
Despite ongoing efforts, I still have trouble relating degrees Celsius to "real" temperatures. For a long time, optimal temperature for me was 83 degrees F. 82 was "cool", 84 was "warm". 83 was perfection. I live in an area where 20 Celsius means that either I'm in an air-conditioned building or it's Winter, so that's fine, but nobody gives weather reports to the decimal place that I know of.
I didn't say it didn't.
Top Gear has also mentioned it as being the ultimate quick test of a car though.
On a track it is all about cornering, but lets face it, at 30k USD fully loaded the Mustang will never be a track car because its not intended to be. The Skyline and Evo have the same problem, they're both significantly more expensive unless you start talking about packaged or modded Mustangs that make so much more horsepower they could win on a lot of tracks by doing the straights in 30%+ less time than it takes something else. Now, they likely won't win unless they're on a track with more straight than turn, but again, these cars are Muscle Cars. They make big horsepower and go fast in a straight line, and they're cheap. People who like to Drag and people on a budget that want the feeling of shitloads of horsepower buy them.
The Mustang is meant to put big horsepower and a fun car into the hands of more people, thats it. It works as what it is. Poking holes in it for something its not is like me saying the Ferarri 458 is a piece of shit because a 2013 Mustang GT with 10-15k in bolt ons can completely rape it on the 1/4 mile.
I think it also has a lot to do with the roads over here. Our roads in North America in general are much more straight than turn, while I understand its pretty much the opposite in Europe with a few exceptions. The modded Mustang GT that runs into the 458 on the highway here could actually rape it in a real world situation, which to a lot of folks is all that matters. In Europe(again from what I understand) you're spending most of your time either on fairly twisty roads or on something like the autobahn where you need a load of top-end instead of low-mid range.
Thats a lot of speculation on my part though. I do hope to travel Europe one of these days, then I'll be able to confirm or toss out my hypothesis.
Sure, metric makes everything simpler and it's a great benefit to idiots who failed basic math classes ....... but it continues to fail in the US after even an organized propaganda effort in the schools for one very basic reason: SIZE
Simply put, an inch and a foot are very natural and convenient SIZES; we like them; they're convenient. If the guys who came up with the metric system had simply defined a cm to be the physical size of an inch, then the cm would be a handy size... a decimeter would be about a foot long (another human-friendly size) and a meter would be about 10 feet (so things like levels of structures would be by rule-of-thumb approx 1meter..... another friendly size for quick estimates) They chose, however, an arbitrary cm size that is stupidly inconvenient and unnatural and then later tried to pass-off the story that a meter was defined as a particular fraction of the circumference of the Earth, as though that meant anything or added some legitimacy (they got it wrong anyway). People who keep trying to push metric in the US always seem to think it's just a cultural issue that will be overcome by "education" .... it's not. Education is for introducing new ideas, not for training people to give-up something that works and which they like, in favor of something that somebody else thinks those people need to learn to like more. Average Americans tend to just be practical and they have a system that works fine and has convenient sizes ..... and it was good enough for us to use as we invented aviation, the light bulb, radio, tv, the internet, etc and as we won some World Wars, put a man on the moon, etc (in other words: the system is not just comfortable, but it has been perfectly adequate for everything we've used it for). We buy inch-thick lumber (we don't want to need to by 2.54cm-thick lumber). We like to use two-by-fours .... 5.08-by-10.16's would just be strange (while providing not enough benefit to offset the annoyance).
The simple truth is that now we all have computers and/or calculators that can easily do the math for us to convert from any system to any other system and most modern engineering is done with CAD systems that support both inches and meters, so the supposed advantage of just being able to move the decimal pt are not that important.
Actually since Top Gear is in the UK its still the 1/4 mile and still the 0-100.
I live in Canada though so I'm comfortable with either.
Those Porsches also use circular wheels rotating around a central axle. I mean geez, that's so 4th Millennium BC; even Mesopotamians sports carts were using those. Can't the Germans come up with something that's actually new?
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
It has helped me many times when arguing about the best way to do something.
Someone will confidently say
"we should do it this way, because that's how they do it in the US",
and I can just reply
"You mean those people who measure distances in inches and feet?".
I love your imperial system.
Personally I found degree F annoying. Change that first!
For length and weight measurement, at least I can multiply it a fixed ratio to convert, which is within the capacity of mental calculation/estimation when done often. However, degree F conversion to degree C is a nightmare. 32F for water melting point? 212F for water boiling point? This is crazy! In all other places on Earth, we have 0C for water melting point and 100C for water boiling point. Simple :)
I know that eventually it's going to have to happen, but right now is probably the worst possible time for it to go down.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Right, weed is in US customary units (or sometimes arbitrary ones based only on price), but cocaine and heroin are in SI units. I'm not sure about meth; it's a redneck drug which argues for customary, but it comes out of the pharmaceutical industry which argues for SI. Some searching indicates that small measures of meth are metric but large ones are customary.
Don't believe everything they told you in primary school. It is true that the kilogram is a measure of mass. It is also a measure of weight...
It's great to hear that they taught you this at primary school. However had you continued in your physics education beyond this level you would have learnt that mass and weight are not the same thing: mass is a scalar and an intrinsic property of an object; weight is a vector and is the force acting on an object due to gravity.
It is true that people use both terms interchangeably in common usage but that does not make it correct to say weight when you mean mass any more than it is correct to say "your" when you mean "you are". The meaning is probably clear but not always: "Your ignorant friend" vs. "You're ignorant, friend". The same with weight and mass. So long as we all live in an environment with the same gravitational field you can get away with being wrong because a particular mass implies a particular weight when you assume a common gravitational field. However this is not always the case. For example the Voyager 1 spacecraft has a mass of roughly 720kg but a weight far below what a 720kg mass would have on Earth.
A balance scale is used with calibrated weights of known mass; it's measuring mass, not force.
Not a bad argument for primary school level physics but unfortunately not correct. A balance measures force not mass: the forces acting on each arm have to balance, not the masses. This is easy to illustrate: take a balance with 1kg of lead and 1 kg of aluminium on opposite arms. This balances in air but the moment you put it underwater the lead arm will drop because the higher density of lead means that it has a lower buoyancy force due to the smaller volume of water displaced compared to the aluminium. This actually also happens in air but with a density ~1,000 less than water the effect is 1,000 times smaller.
IThe temperature scale is too imprecise to be practically useful. You loose a lot of precision using celsius vs fahrenheit without resorting to having to communicate fractional values. It is something like a few degrees f for every c.
Kilometers are just as arbitrary and useless as miles. If you want to standardize on something non-arbitrary I would rather see the world standardize on nautical miles which represents a minute of arc on the earth. Something much more useful for navigation than either the metric or imperial options.
The metric order of magnitude conversions are nice. There is also value in consolidating systems I just don't think Metric is necessarily better in cases that matter to me but what you are most familiar tends to override all else.
The metric time measurement is the second. It has an exact definition. The day and the year are non-metric units which are natural units. You'll note that metric places also use non-metric natural units like "car lengths" for the safe distance between cars driving with no hypocrisy. You could make at most one of them align neatly with an SI unit, but inherently can't do both. Light-years and astronomical units are like that as well.
Generally, despite arguments to the contrary, neither imperial nor metric tends to be particularly "natural", except perhaps for Celsius which has approximate boiling and freezing points.
But anyway, this is an all-or-nothing fallacy.
The "one of three countries that doesn't use SI" argument doesn't make sense to me.
Especially given that, even with countries that have adopted SI measurements, that doesn't mean that the people actually use them. In the UK, people drive in miles per hour and weigh themselves in stone.
Work from there. 1 foot 4 to ether side. Find the nearest stud. There's your rough opening edge. The other side will require framing.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Those feet to inch conversions, works great if you leave them out. Now out of a sample of 10 random people how many can do this quicker in binary than decimal?
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
A competent architect knows that and designs it that way. It's not new ether.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Your circular handsaw still has the same precision... If you are close enough to 1/16th of an inch when cutting to millimeters, you won't know the difference between having done it in 1/16th. I also think that European construction workers would disagree on the usefulness of inches.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
The reason no one converts between feet and miles is because it's a pain in the ass, this doesn't prove it's not useful.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
768 teaspoons... that are then divided by two again. What's not to love?
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Not to mention dimensions into volume. A 4' x 2' x 2' container holds fuck-you gallons of water.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Anyone who cares will know that it's one newton per square meter, which has the advantage of avoiding the ambiguity of "pound". As for chunkiness, pick whatever estimation unit you are comfortable with, if increments of 4 liters make sense to you then do that, you'll still have liters in the end. I personally calibrate my volume and weight estimation with soda bottles, I just can't easily feel a single kilogram with the same precision, much less a pound. Two kilos is just right however.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
A cup is a cup... except when you try to cut a recipe calling for a third cup in half. Stop obsessing over precision if all you care for is approximates. Also, once you've nailed grandma's bread recipe, recording to the nearest 5g-10g will really help you repeat it.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
The failure to convert falls squarely on the government. See building codes for examples. So long as your construction industry is using imperial units, society is not going to change.
If I see a measurement stated as 70cm, without any tolerance specified, I'm going to expect it to be somewhere between 65 and 75cm. With some context (other related measurements being obviously stated to the cm), I might expect it to be in the range 69.5 - 70.5. I'm certainly not seeing any implication of precision to a small fraction of an inch.
It's not a matter of forcing, but seriously, the US is the last holdout. It's a pain for every industry that has to deal with the US, or US industries that have to deal with other places. It adds a layer of duplication or redundant effort to everything that needs to operate in the international market. That'd be fine if half the world was using one system and half the world the other. But it's just one last country, stubbornly holding on to their system for what at times seems no good reason other than just 'to be special'. The rest of us just want to consign traditional units to history and be done with it, but we can't while a major market like the US still uses them. I'd love to actually be able to print a document sent to me from America without having to go and change the paper size and deal with all the pagination issues that result. I'd love not having to change my ruler in MS Word from inches to cm every time I install it. And I'm sure programmers of all software would love not having to waste their time programming two sets of measurements into everything so it can be used in all markets.
Also, it's confusing for travellers (seriously, the US unit system baffles most visitors and results in American tourists overseas looking like idiots and loudly demanding to know what things are in their own units). A minor quibble perhaps but it does perpetuate a negative stereotype of Americans that doesn't do anyone any favours.
Don't get me wrong, I am no anti-American. Half my family (including my wife) is American and I enjoy spending time in your country. But everyone scratches their head at the lack of progress on metrication. Again, it's not that we want to force a change. Its just that the job, globally, is almost done, except for one last place. Drawing on the experience of every other country that has successfully changed, they should be able to do it easily and without major issues. But still don't, despite the benefits to the nation as a whole (note that as you say, there are few benefits in day to day personal life - the benefits are more societal and in industry). The conclusion in some people's mind therefore is that the US behaves this way just to piss everyone else off and be different.
Who the hell knows how big a newton is?? :)
According to Nabisco, a fig newton is 2 oz, which at sea level equates to a force of around 0.56 N, give or take depending on your latitude.
If it was always hex, it would be OK. It's the switching to base 14 when you want to scale up to the next set of units, or combining base 16 with base 12 when you want to do calculations involving weight and distance that really messes things up.
It's interesting that you mention the 'relatability' of units. I wonder if this, too, is purely a product of upbringing and experience. I can't relate at all to feet and pounds and inches etc. I grew up and still am completely metric (in Australia). And I simply have my own 'body part visualisations'. Pinky finger width as you mention is a cm. but my hand width at its widest point (fingers together) is exactly 10 cm. And a metre is a walking pace stride (much like a yard would be). So I have my 1/10/100 cm approximations and that's all you really need.
For weight and volume, I just think of a 1 litre soda bottle. That is 1 L but it also weighs 1 kg. Or 2 L / 2 kg for a 2 L bottle if that's easier. Oh and we still use cups for cooking in metric - it's actually 250 mL, but roughly fits in a cup or mug just like the old 'cups'.
Similarly for temperature, I think what 'sounds' right is a product of upbringing. Fahrenheit temps just sound so ridiculously huge to a Celsius-only brain. -20 is frigid (like 0 F, which is pretty close)' -10 is rather cold, 0 is freezing point, 10 is cool, 20 is room temp, 30 is hot, 40 is HOT (40 C acts like the de facto '100 F' in metric countries - the temp that the news will make a big deal about if it gets there).
Anyway, simply wanted to add a bit on the idea of 'relatability' of units from a purely metric brain. I think if you are brought up on ANY system, you will find ways to approximate it pretty well for day to day use.
Drag racing hardly qualifies as holding its own. Real race cars have to turn sometimes.
Car and Driver (a magazine known for being fans of the 3 series) ran the M3 Competition Package against a Mustang GT with the Brembo brake package on Streets of Willow Springs in 2011. The amateur driver was 0.55 seconds faster in the Mustang, the pro was 0.09 seconds faster in the BMW. Either way, the oxcart-axled Mustang holds its own against the German benchmark around real tracks with real corners.
I daily drive an E46 3 series, I know what handling means. Realize that the Mustang is no longer a joke.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
Best troll of 2013 so far, A+++ timothy.
Expecting a bunch of Americans to rationally discuss scientific measurements is like asking a bunch of religious nuts to rationally discuss the origins of life. They're just not intellectually equipped to do it.
One cubic metre of fresh water at sea level has a mass of one thousand kilograms, i.e. one tonne.
Yours, the rest of the world, using sensible measurements.
1) Why is the common base unit of mass the KILOgram? Rename the kilogram so that you can attach metric prefixes to it properly: kilokilogram doesn't cut it.
2) 1 g of water = 1 cm^3 = 1 mL? Can't we come up with units of length, volume, and mass that agree with one another?
3) The names are cumbersome: kilometers vs miles, etc. Prefixes should be one syllable long so that the words can be shorter.
#1 and #2 could be fixed by defining the unit length to be 1 decimeter (about 4 inches): 1 cubic decimeter is 1 liter, and 1 liter of water weighs (roughly) 1 kilogram (which would get a new, better name as per #1).
And oh yes, 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day? What the heck? Decimal time, all the way. (We're stuck with 365.25 days in a year, but portions of a day are under our control.)
I suppose the argument against all of this is that people are used to the metric system the way it is.
...I pretty much use metric extensively and nearly exclusively in the work environment. At home I shift back and forth depending on what I'm doing.
People who want to "force" change are just being silly. Over time the nation will probably move towards metric, or the rest of the world will move back to Imperial units....whichever is fine.
It's a poor excuse for an engineer of whatever nationality who can't handle a couple of different measurement systems in the time being. Chillax....it'll happen over time.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
As far as a car for an everyday person who can't afford a 60k+ car... "Fun" is the often only metric that matters. The only other metric that could matter is "Moddable" and there are VERY few cars that meet that criteria as well as the Mustang.
My buddy just bought a Kia Forte 2 years ago because besides the Ford Focus it was the most fun vehicle in his price range on the market. He also wanted some gadgets though and the focus, while a better base car, was significantly more expensive by the time he got them.
I'd like to see a show like top gear that reviews more of the low to mid-range cars. Not the low-low end but something within shooting distance for most people, or at least within a 3-5 year old used shooting distance.
There used to be a show on Spike that did a lot of mods install instructionals on a lot of mostly ordinary vehicles but they never used to do any reviews. It could be on the speed network now but I'm not sure.. A combination of the two would be something I'd watch religiously. Occasionally toss in some top-gear style challenges and away to go. They could toss most of the instruction for pure mod reviews/testing and car testing etc.
I forgot to mention that "practical" often factors in as well... but if someone is looking purely based on practicality they're not watching top gear or any show like it anyways and they'll be one of the idiots on the highway driving a volvo, toyota, or honda doing 10km/hr below the posted limit.
I vote we bring in finnish licensing tests.
Actually, a "2x4" is actually 1.5x3.5. All dimensioned lumbers are exactly 1/2 inch less than the advertised size, with radioused edges. These measurements are universal, though wood warping can affect them. I am not sure how dimensional lumber is done in Europe.
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
You make a few interesting points. As far as relating measurements goes, by no means do I intend to suggest that S.I. is not relatable. It certainly can be and, more importantly, is. What I should have said is that I believe it is less inherently relatable than U.S. customary units (which isn't actually very useful, but I'll explain what I mean in a moment). I also think you may have conflated familiarity and relatability slightly, or else inferred that I was speaking of familiarity when I was not.
As you said (and I agree), what sounds right is a product of upbringing. I'd refer to that as familiarity, and you'll pick that up in any system from day-to-day use. In contrast, relatability (at least as I'm using it) is the ability to relate a particular unit of measure to something we deal with in everyday life. It's you knowing that your hand is 10cm across or me knowing that a cup holds one cup. With both of those, we were able to relate the units to an object in everyday life.
-START BORING PART ABOUT A NUANCE THAT DOESN'T MATTER-
What makes U.S. customary more inherently relatable is where the units come from and how they make sense within our lives. As a quick and obvious example, we can all relate to cups (the objects), but whereas the U.S. customary system used a cup (object) to define the size of a cup (unit), you had to learn after the fact that 250mL is about how much goes into a cup (object), which is an arbitrary association. Similarly, no one has to teach someone that a foot measures about a foot, but you had to memorize that your hand spans about 10cm. There are numerous other examples of U.S. customary units being derived from everyday objects, but S.I. units tend not to be derived from stuff we'd actually ever encounter (e.g. the kilogram kept in a vault by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures).
Similarly, when it comes to temperatures, 0-100 is a familiar spectrum regardless of which system you use, but where U.S. customary system uses it to represent how hot or cold the temperatures that we can reasonably expect to encounter over the course of our lives feel to us, S.I. uses it to represent when water changes state. Both are relatable, but the former is much more directly relatable. Likewise, temperatures above 100F/40C tend to lose meaning to us, since they're simply hotter than we can reasonably bear, and "100" has a much greater sense of finality to it than "40" does, which makes sense, given that that's about where we stop caring about how hot something is in our everyday lives and simply define it as "too hot". The same is true at the other end of the spectrum as well.
-END BORING PART-
That said, just because I may believe what I've said here does not in any way mean that I think Fahrenheit is better than Celsius, nor do I believe that this is a solid argument in favor of Fahrenheit. It may be one (extremely and absurdly slight) advantage, but it by no means outweighs the nonsensical stuff we have to put up with, such as 32F being when water freezes, 98.6F being the normal body temperature for a person, and 212F being when water boils. And, as I'm sure you'd agree, familiarity would trump any of that temperature stuff I talked about. Who cares how final the number sounds, so long as you know what it is, right?
In fact, that's true in general for my opinion of U.S. customary. When it comes to systems, the three things that I think are important are their relatability, their familiarity, and their ease of use. Both will be equally familiar to people raised using them, so it's a non-factor most of the time. U.S. customary may be more inherently relatable, but that only helps when learning the system, not at all in everyday use. In everyday use, it simply doesn't matter if the unit of measure was derived from a cup (object) or not, so long as you know about how much a cup (object) holds in your system. As for ease of use, S.I.'s consistency blows away U.S. customary in most applications, making it the far better choice.
The US isn't the last holdout, a lot of countries use strange mixes of measurements. In El Salvador they use pounds for weight and meters for distances. I never understood why, but whatever. Last time I went to England, after they switched to metric, I still heard people telling their weight in stones. Taiwan still uses some archaic system for years. Maybe countries in Europe all use pure metric, but in most countries I've been to use some weird mix. In the US we use a weird mix too, most liquid drinks are sold in liters now (20 years ago ounces were most common, so I guess it's changing).
I guess if industry really is so worried about it, they can lobby for a change or something, and I feel sorry for tourists, but I'd guess the fact that our coins don't have numbers on them is somewhat more confusing.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
No idea about meth. I know cocaine in smaller quantities follows metric,example an 8ball is 3.5 grams which is an 8th of an ounce. I guess thats because its sold stateside and not from overseas. Maybe meth works the same way. Weird how math works in the drug world.
Well, I'm Australian and I can say it's pure metric here, and in NZ, and in every Asian country I've ever been in. Also in some other countries a lot of people might use a weird mix day to day but ~officially~ things are metric. That's what I'm talking about - the official units you see on signs and on TV etc.
The older generations (e.g. my parents) here in Australia colloquially use stones for their weight too (like in the UK). But they'd at least have a vague idea of what it was in kg too, given they've been immersed in metric for the last 40 years.
True dat.
Smart guys buy it by the case.
Yeah fair enough. Some random thoughts:
"Similarly, no one has to teach someone that a foot measures about a foot, but you had to memorize that your hand spans about 10cm. There are numerous other examples of U.S. customary units being derived from everyday objects..."
Yep, agreed. Though who on earth has a foot that's actually a foot long ... them's some giant feet!
"0-100 is a familiar spectrum regardless of which system you use, but where U.S. customary system uses it to represent how hot or cold the temperatures that we can reasonably expect to encounter over the course of our lives feel to us, S.I. uses it to represent when water changes state. Both are relatable, but the former is much more directly relatable. Likewise, temperatures above 100F/40C tend to lose meaning to us, since they're simply hotter than we can reasonably bear, and "100" has a much greater sense of finality to it than "40" does, which makes sense, given that that's about where we stop caring about how hot something is in our everyday lives and simply define it as "too hot"."
Funnily enough, here in Australia, many people use similar logic to justify use of degrees C. 0 C, or slightly below, is about as cold as most are ever likely to encounter here, so it has that 'finality' that you mention for 100 F on the 'hot' end of the spectrum. And 100 (or 40 C for that matter) isn't a good 'final-ish' temperature here as it is common, even regular, for temps to well exceed that in Australia in summer (as it is in many places of the US, e.g. Nevada and other south-western states).
I don't think like that though as I live in one of the few places in Australia where sub-freezing temperatures are common, and have also lived in a colder part of the US for a period, where 0 C would be considered a very warm day in winter and where you go well into the negative-double-digit temps as measured in either scale. I recognise that the above paragraph represents a product of Australia's hot and dry climate. Obviously Asia and Europe get significantly colder and still use Celsius, which I agree is less intuitive in that kind of climate than the 0-100 F scale.
End of the day I just wish everyone used the same system, even if that system isn't perfect. I think what irritates the rest of the world about the US measurement system is more a matter of "gah, why can't they be ~consistent~ with everyone else" rather than "why can't they use the metric system (specifically)". I think we'd have the same feeling if the US used metric and everyone else used some other system... :) The result would be the same - every time I visit the US it's like I've stepped into some alien world where everything is different for no good reason (this applies to MANY things other than measurement systems - the US just seems to dislike 'standards' in general)
Because you really can't tell a temperature from cold, pleasant, hot with less than 200 digits variations between then?
Also, defending C or F is retarded. Go with K.
They stole that from the Greeks.
(Who stole it from the Phoenicians.)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I feel sorry for the Grid Iron player. A national game! :)
Could be a mind f**k for the players, coaches, fans, owners, etc.
How will the game be changed?
If the length of the field is increased to 100 metres, then they will have to run approximately 28 feet more for a touch down, which equates to an extra 2 feet 4 inches for a down.
If the field length remains at 100 yards - approximately 91.5 metres, do you keep 10 downs of 9.15 metres to get from one end to the other, or do you have 9.15 downs of 10 metres? The latter looks like a problem for a keen observer to solve.
Would the stadiums have to be rebuilt to allow the increase in length to 100 metres?
And what about the statisticians - how will they cope with any measure based on distance?
Get ready to cream your pants:
http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_52_0/doc/html/boost_units/Examples.html#boost_units.Examples.DimensionExample
and http://se.ethz.ch/~meyer/publications/OTHERS/scott_meyers/dimensions.pdf
Base 12 would be a much nicer base for measurements because it evenly divides 3 and 4; something 10 cannot do.
Table-ized A.I.
I realise that the headline is meant as a joke anyway, but I think it can reinforce a misconception that may be to blame for much of the resistance against metrication: Contrary to what many people think, you don't have to suddenly change the way you speak. Nobody wants to do that.
The really extreme style of metrication where 7-mile-boots would become 11-kilometre-boots was tried during the French revolution. It went so badly that they had to revert to a complicated system of customary units that was a compromise between metric and the old units. Only decades after that were metric units accepted by the population.
Here is how metrication has been done everywhere ever since the French realised that even a revolutionary terror regime couldn't make people switch units directly: For the most important units you introduce informal customary units of roughly the same size but with a nice factor. Say one (metric) inch = 2.5 centimetres = 1/4 decimetre, 1 yard = 1 metre, 1 mile = 1.5 kilometres, 1 gallon = 4 litres (a compromise between US and imperial, closer to the US gallon), 1 pint = 1/2 litre (a similar compromise between US and imperial pints, very close to the US pint), 1 pound = 1/2 kilogramme (close enough for everyday life, and equal to the informal pound of Belgium, Netherlands, Germany etc.). Of course even those units which are not treated this way remain in common parlance in expressions such as "miles and miles". In Germany, hardly anybody knows how much a Meile is or was, but it doesn't matter when we still say "meilenweit" to indicate a long distance.
gallon, quart, pint, cup, ounce, tablespoon... all different names for what is really just volume -- why not stick with one of them and use multipliers for the larger and smaller sizes? There's also the advantage of the metric system that the cubic centimeter corresponds to 1 mL, so there is no real need for a separate volume unit (the Liter, originally the equivalent volume of a kilogram of water, being a cubic decimeter, is a secondary unit).
I'll agree however, that the inch can be somewhat convenient in metric and powers of 2: 1 inch is very close to 2^8 / 100 mm, which makes 5/8 inch very close to 16 mm. Provided the need for precision isn't too strict. Which also applies to binary representation of the decimal fractions, where the inaccuracy should be small enough so it doesn't matter for the job at hand. Most measured or calculated values won't have a nice exact representation in any numbering system anyways.
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
Our Norwegian equivalent of the 2x4 is still called "to-tom-fire", which refers to wood with cross-section 48 mm by 96 mm after adjustment. I'd think it is similar elsewhere in Europe; that size of lumber is specified in millimeters.
Even though we've been using metric for more than a century, a few inch-measurements mostly in building materials remain, names for lumber sizes and pipe threads.
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
Having once learned the so-called Imperial, US, system, here are some answers and translations:
The Ampere and Second are the same in SI and in the US systems of measurements, so the Coulomb would be as well. Sometimes the electron charge was more useful.
The force unit is pounds, abbreviated lb. The gravitational acceleration is 32 feet/second^2, and the mass unit is called the slug. Just like there is occasionally talk about the kgf (kilogram-force) in the metric system, there is also talk about the "pound-mass" in the US system, at the risk of confusion.
The electronic and electrical units were all SI- so the units were F/m and H/m (as well as Ohm*m for resistivity) -- no inches there. However, when specifying the sizes and shapes of microstriplines, inches were sometimes seen for lengths, widths, and thicknesses, in addition to millimeters calculated from the wavelengths of the RF signals. Wavelengths were calculated in millimeters using c=3*10^8 m/s, then converted to feet or inches as needed for antenna construction.
The US unit of work is foot-pound-force per second. (lb*ft/s) One of these would correspond to 1.3558 W. Horsepowers and BTU/s are other units that could be encountered.
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
It's been tried. IEC-60906-1 is currently used in Brazil only. In Europe there are still several different plugs and sockets in each country, although some of these can be interconnected.
Then there's all the various micro-usb variations for low-power ...
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
What? cm is a perfectly good SI unit, and in fact seems to be the most reasonable ones for dealing with snow, since you'd most often not deal with more than a meter, and millimeter accuracy in measuring snow depth is illusory anyway.
0 being "kind of cold", aka freezing point of water, is very useful. Before I left home this morning, I had a glance at the thermometer, and it read +3 C. Since we've had snow for a few weeks now, above 0 equals "it is slippery outside". No need to remember that "slippery roads" happen at around 32 degrees, it happens at around 0 degrees.
Not to mention that your 0 F ="very cold" is extremely arbitrary. -10 F and +10 F are also "very cold".
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
The company I work for makes custom equipment for OEMs - mainly off road. Only a few ever ask for to make anything in metric, though quite a few times we've reverse-engineered metric equivalents back to inch.
Why? Mainly the cost of the custom steel we have to use. Sure, you can get metric sized - if you commit to buy a few literal tons per size. Or, you can just convert and use the existing inch-based materials we already have in stock or in the pipeline with the steel mills.
Another example: SAE J1926 specifies that new designs should use the metric version of these ports. I've never *ever* seen one specified or requested.
And all I can say is that anyone who is Canadian can get off their damned high horse.
Know what is worse than imperial? A random mix of metric and imperial based on which country the components were bought from, how the old engineers are "used to" doing things, and the cycle of the moon. Which is exactly what our software had to handle when we started selling it in Canada.
A fellow-pupil of mine at school had an easy answer:
"A newton is the force of an apple hitting someone on the head".
I don't think he passed his physics exam
In reality, the US does have a dual system of measurement, and that is what's costing the US so much. The general population may think everything is in USC, but a lot of engineering is done in SI units, or in some cases, in a mixture of the two systems.
For example, PCB boards in the USA are designed in mils (1 mil = 0.001 inches), and yet many electronic components are sized in metric. This results in rounding errors and parts that don't quite fit and need a lot of manual corrections. More info here. http://themetricmaven.com/?p=454
Actually, there's also a third system in use too, but that's mostly hidden from the general population. Roads in the US are measured and constructed using Ramsden's chain, which is 100 US survey feet, where a survey foot is slightly different from a regular foot. Each foot is divided into decimal fractions. But then, for long distances, they actually measure it with GPS, which gives readings in metres that then need to be converted for entry into the design software. It gets even more complicated that that, and that's explained in more detail here. http://themetricmaven.com/?p=465
By reading this signature, you hereby agree with the content of the above comment.
Our roads in North America in general are much more straight than turn
Speak for yourself flat lander. I live in the mountains...there are no straight lines here.
Back in the 1990's my father's factory, they made train parts, was bought out by a German firm. After a while all measurements had to be done in metric. They had special classes to teach these men, most 40+ year old with high school educations at best the metric system. He said once you allowed yourself to change how you thought, it was no big deal. This was from a man that only finished high school because his parents wouldn't sign the paperwork for him to enter the USMC before he was 18! He's close to 80 today and still uses metric for most of his work around the house. I always felt if someone like him could be converted then anyone can learn and use the metric system.
You nailed it. The running cost of maintaining dual systems is less than the cost of repurchasing and retooling all the equipment. It's amazing how much equipment is in use in America that would be cost prohibitive to refit to metric or SI.
The US is SLOWLY (as in glacially slowly) making it's way to metric. The more we open our borders and tariffs to outside trade, the more we slide into step with the rest of the world.
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
to http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/, i.e. a faculty website of http://www.cira.colostate.edu/people/view.php?username=Hillger of Dr. Don Hillger, a Colo St meteorologist.
As long as the "U.S. Metric Association" continues to run out of the digital equivalent of a man's garage, and with a ~1999 web design to boot, it will not be taken seriously.
This is the definition if you're doing physics. It is not the definition if you're buying and selling stuff.
There is only one definition each for mass and weight and that is the physics one. This is the definition behind laws used to govern trade - or at least you had better hope it is because otherwise the first lunar colonists are going to be able to fleece earth-based merchants!
my point is that 'g' cancels and all that you're left with is mass
Actually your point clearly was that a balance measured mass as opposed to a spring scale which measured weight. I quote:
A balance scale is used with calibrated weights of known mass; it's measuring mass, not force.
Which is wrong - it measures force (weight) by comparison and uses it to calculate mass assuming a constant gravitational field and no other forces acting. This is a less stringent requirement than a spring scale - which assumes a particular value of a constant gravitational field - but the essential idea that you are using weights, not masses, is the same.
A) It's easier to work with.
B) It's a global standard.
C) It's cheaper.
D) It's more accurate in everyday use.
E) The US has a mix of units used in engineering and science. This cost money and causes confusion.
They reason have been gone of ad nausium.
I am a middle aged American.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yes, but id we were on a standard, then it wouldn't even have been an issue at all.
Maintaining two measurement system cost them money and is another point of failure.
Hey, why don't we all wear bear skins and use stone knives. Those worked perfectly fine for our parent and their parents!
That is what you sound like.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Watch out. Give them an inch and they'll take a mile.
Sadly, many companies can not afford to re-engineer their products and buy all new tooling.
That said, the 1/4 mile is often considered the ultimate test of a car, and I'll mention about the first fucking thing they do on Top Gear UK with very nearly every-single-car they bring on there. If they do a comparison test its always either 1/4 mile, standing mile, or 0-100 and back to 0, which are all essentially the same thing.
Firstly, they're not the same thing. The 0-100-0 challenge is a much more complete test of the straight line ability of the car seeing as it's likely to involve more than just first and second gears and also the brakes.
Secondly, the straight line test is often not treated totally seriously by the Top Gear crew. The important test is the timed lap around the track. The best M3 has a time of 1 minute 25.3 and the best Mustang has a time of 1 minute 28.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOwSPccbzl4
It holds it own on a road course with a professional driver.
You have to convince "The man on the street" before we can convert. If you have to go through the conversions and listen to the complaining for ever transaction it will cost far more than we'd save by being standardized with the rest of the world. Until we are really standardized I'll have to put up with a mixture of the American and SI bolts and fittings in cars and much of whatever else I purchase and it's a royal PITA to fix hybrid instruments using multiple standards, or to have to explain what those metric units are in inches, feet yards, miles, grams and KG. Of course we still have parsecs, etc... Then you have to spend valuable time listening to complaints you can't walk away from even in industry. We may be able to force the official conversion, but it'll do us no good to get in sync with the rest of the world if we can't communicate with our own people!
What do you mean "faked up to kilo"? I know full well that I weigh ~90 kilograms (or 95,000 grams). That's the great thing about metric, that it's easy to just change orders of magnitude with a change of the prefix. There's no faking going on, it's working as designed.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
The currency is metric. The USA is not using pound, shilling,pense, half penny, etc.
The way to do it is to follow Canada's method.
start with posting dual temperatures (Celcius and Fahenheit)
next start with weights and some measures. Manufacturers will be happy because 3.8 litres is a equivalent to a USA gallon, so the price of gas will be cut by 25% and expressed as litres. Ditto for milk, and everything else liquid (such as booz)
After that, car speed indicators are essentially electronic and reprogrammable. Ergo, switch them to Metric display. Old bazoos will not have that option,so provide a sticker with conversion.
We drive at 100km speed limit on highways. That is 62.5mph.
There is a process to follow to join the world. Every significant manufacturer who exports from the USA to other countries needs to use metric.
The USA lost a satellite when it was constructed (programmed) in feet and inches, but the partners in the satellite program used meters and centimeters.
Meter, centimeter and millimeter how easy can it get?
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
As I mentioned "in general" the mountainous region makes up far less of the land... and the euros have twisty roads due to old buildings and congested population centers more so than mountains, though they also have more than their fair share of those. I don't live in flat country either, but even here there are more straight roads than you see much of in britain. Also has to do with more cities in north america being engineered instead of just built.
"far it was to Chicago in inches" :)
and if you are going to Chicago in winter... you have to take shrinkage into account
Thats actually kind of sad. I expected a much bigger gap. 2.7 seconds isn't much.
Also as I recall they only ever ran one Mustang around the track and that was a base model GT, which again is 30k less than the M3.... 30k for 2.7 seconds(which I'm now certain could be made up for in horsepower and a good set of tires, since its only 2.7 seconds...) is a lot of money. Especially when at 60k you're talking you're only 15k away from Porsche territory.
I kinda like the Fahrenheit scale for temperature. I'm an SI nut on all the other basic measures. Celsius is good for chemistry, Kelvins for physics, but Fahrenheit for humans. 0 was supposed to be as cold as he could get in his lab (salt water freezes, drivers beware), and 100 was body temperature. Okay it's not quite 100 but that was the original intent which makes the scale pretty good when talking about the weather.
I should also mention that most people want to convert pounds into kilograms, which is nonsense (well except on the Earth at sea level). Pounds convert to Newtons, and slugs to kilograms.
Oh, the one other thing that the US customary measurements are good for is the speed of light, approximately 1 foot per nanosecond.
... of course I meant ~95 kilograms back there. :-)
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
This is now no point to this process. Automated conversions are now done at the back end of systems and applications anyway, so a metric standard is no longer necessary. So what if you buy a liter of gas in France or a gallon in the U.S.? The value of the unit of measure is still charged to your credit card either way. Other units of measure such as distance for example, can be measured in Klingon kellicams for all it matters, and there is an app for that also.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
1) Penny wise and .454kg foolish .454kg of cure ...
2) Go the extra 1.61km
3) Give him an 2.54cm and he'll take a 1.61km
4) Came within an 2.54cm of it
5) An 28.3g of prevention is worth a
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
That's what kills me about these arguments. The USA is controlled by the people with money. Your money people decided it was time to change. If our money decides it's not cost efficient to convert, we will never convert since there is zero benefit in the daily life of an American. It makes since in scientific matters as uniformity and precision are a must. When I buy a pair of pants or a shirt, I need to know inches because that's what they're sold in. When I buy gas, the people that sell it to me measure it out in gallons. What's the chances a guy with $10k in tools is going to replace one tool at a time that is in a different system than the everything else he already has? Zero. On the personal scale, any measurement system, once learned is just as "simple" as any other because it becomes intuitive long before you're an adult. Talking shit to Americans because they use the system that our overlords demand us use is just pointless.
F for temperature (because 98.6 isn't any worse than 37.0)
But 0 and 100 makes more sense than 32 and 212...
It doesn't make any particular sense to calibrate your scale to the boiling point of water. There are so many things to measure temperature of (I measure my own temperature more than I measure water), so either way you end up having to remember random numbers for most things you measure.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It definitely does make sense to calibrate your scale to the freezing point of water, though, since that's something that we face regularly (at least in half of Europe and Canada). The other point is pretty much arbitrary, yes, but I would argue that having it at a nice round number like 100 makes more sense than 212 (or a delta of 180).
It definitely does make sense to calibrate your scale to the freezing point of water, though, since that's something that we face regularly
Yeah, you are right.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Europeans get all snooty about speaking two or three languages. Of course they have to, every road sign is in three or four languages and if you miss your turn off on the way home you drive across two borders and have to show your passport before you can turn around. I know two measuring systems, quart or liter, yard or meter, I can convert to what ever fits best. It's like irregular verbs or word gender, you just know which one is right.
True, but misses the point. The point is that the word "weight" refers to a type of force in physics and to mass in trade and law.
No, actually that is not the case see this. UK law clearly differentiates between mass and weight but gives incorrect usage legal protection:
"the weight of any thing may be expressed, by reference to the units of measurement set out in Part V of that Schedule, in the same terms as its mass."
otherwise you could end up with lots of stupid law suits simply because people were not careful about mass vs. weight. So sorry but, at least in the UK, you are completely wrong. The law does recognize and understand the difference between mass and weight but, very sensibly, also realizes that many people remain ignorant of this and so gives them legal protection when they get it wrong.
According to Genesis 6:15 the ark's dimensions are 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits tall. That makes the total volume 450,000 cubic cubits. A cubit is generally understood to be approximately the length from elbow to finger tip, about 18 inches, just under half a meter. Whose arm is that based on? I don't know. In some countries it may have been the king's and varied depending on who was on the throne.
To estimate a distance to something.
Mostly they will still do it in meters 50 years later
When you want an artillery shell to land "where you're not at" these things sink in pretty well.
Anyone with a few functioning brain cells can cope with different units of measurement.
You can buy inch size Allan keys or spammers pretty much anywhere in the world, and metric one in the USA without to much trouble.
But try finding a particular 6-32 replacement screw anywhere outside the us - pretty near impossible !
Metric woodworking generally uses measurements which allow you to divide easily.
For example, a metric door would be 2100mm x 900mm (82.67" x 35.43" or a little less than 7' x 3').
You can divide both 2100 and 900 easily into halves, fourths, thirds, sixths, and twelfths. (2100/12 = 175, 900/2 = 75)
Metric panels (plywood, etc., drywall) are generally 1200mm (a little less than 4 feet).
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
will be the 1/4-20 thread in the bottom of a camera.
In Canada, shouldn't they be measuring snow in meters?
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
What is the point of going fast? You're not going to get anywhere other than the next traffic jam any the quicker.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"