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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.
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 :)
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?
Or perhaps certain campaign sponsors have spoken many times...
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.
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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
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!
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...
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.
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Don't worry, they're safe. Many American sports cars are using suspension technology that was developped by the Romans.
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?
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.
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.)
Yes, please, let's give Congress another way to ignore the bigger problems of the day...
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=-
perhaps the people have spoken...many times...
Yes, and their voice was "Ooh, change makes my head hurt. Leave me alone and give me tax cuts and reality TV".
The last days of the empire, indeed.
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.
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.
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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
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).
Which is plainly wrong. Every unit was defined to be connected to the Meter (which is why it is called "meter", latin for "measure"). The metric ton for instance was defined as the mass of water in a cube of 1m x 1m x 1m. Thus 1 liter (1 dm) of water weighs weighs 1 kg, and 1 cm of water weighs 1 g. The meter was defined as the 10 millionth of the distance between Northpole and Equator. Only when the first units of Meter bars were founded and handed over to the national measuring bodies, one found out that there was a small mistake in measurement, and the new meter was about 2 millimeters short. But then it was too late to change that, and the meter was kept.
Args, Slashcode ate my exponents. 1 liter is 1 dm^3, and 1 cm^3 of water weighs 1 g.
though even that holds its own against the M3
Drag racing hardly qualifies as holding its own. Real race cars have to turn sometimes.
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.
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.
Irrelevant? If I want to know if it's going to freeze, I just look at the temperature, and if it's below 0C, it's going to freeze. If I boil water, it will start to boil at 100C. I don't measure my body temperature that often, and I don't feel too cold that often. But I cook my eggs every weekend, and if I have to take care because of freezing rain on the streets, I have to check every day during winter. So give me 0C and 100C (and I can remember the 273,15 K for 0C, thank you very much), and get lost with your 32 F and 212 F - they are just not interesting.
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.)
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."
I did a little fact checking before posting
Sacrilege.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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
That, or they said that there is little benefit for the man in the street to convert and there are giant costs involved. So, with little benefit in one hand and a giant cost in the other, what would you do?
You consider the future. Who was it who said "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish"?
The fall from enterprising pioneers to decadent reactionaries went quickly - a mere two generations.
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.
Please read this, it explains it clearly:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-paper.html
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
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.
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.
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.
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.)...
How is division by halves any more clumsy in metric than in fractional measurements?
If I'm measuring something that's 105 mm and I need to halve it, it's pretty easy to know straight away that it's 52.5 mm
How is this any harder to measuring something that's 4 and 3/16 inches and having to find half of that?
Cooking is very easy in metric.
1 litre of water = 1000 ml = 1 kg
1 teaspoon = 5 ml
1 tablespoon = 20 ml
1 cup = 250 ml
4 cups = 1 litre
1/2 cup = 125 ml
Regarding the trusty ol' 2x4 lumber - it's not actually 2" x 4" anyway, they're more like 1 1/2" x 3 x 1/2" which works out to be 38 x 89 mm.
I think the equivalent of a 2x4 here though is a bit bigger at 50 x 100 mm and then the stud framing is generally on 400 mm centres.
As for 2 inches less a sixteenth (which, being 1 and fifteen sixteenths, is pretty clumsy to say) would be 50 mm less 2 mm and that works out at 48 mm, or if you're saying it, forty-eight mills (yes, I know a mil is officially defined as 1/1000 of an inch, but if you never use inches, the shorthand way of saying one millimetre is one mill)
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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.
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.
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.
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.