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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?
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
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...
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?
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.
This is a myth. The only places where some 1 DM = 1 € conversions were attempted were bars and pubs.
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.
though even that holds its own against the M3
Drag racing hardly qualifies as holding its own. Real race cars have to turn sometimes.
I did a little fact checking before posting
Sacrilege.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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
Why should the US convert? Here's why: graph.
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