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Petition For Metric In US Halfway To Requiring Response From the White House
fsterman writes "Without any prompting from the U.S. Metric Association, a We The People petition to standardize the U.S. on the metric system has received 13,000 signatures in six days. That's half the number needed for an official response from the White House. It looks like ending the U.S.'s anti-metric alliance with Liberia and Burma (the only other countries NOT on the metric system) might rank up there with building a death star."
Too late, we're already on the metric system. The Metric Conversion Act of 1975 and designated the metric system as the "preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce."
The rest of the world uses metric, the efficiencies of mass manufacturing mean that it costs more to create version using imperial units. Switching is a one time cost, the savings are cumulative so eventually (given a ROI higher than inflation) you should make your money back.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
How exactly do you think the UK went metric? By killing everyone who grew up on imperial, and forcibly breeding the children in 1969? Seriously mis-understand how this is done dude..
they legislated the problem away 73-80. I was in the cohort who left school friday being taught inches/ft and came back monday alive on cm/meter. I've never regretted learning the 12 and 20 times table.
You'll be telling us people can't learn to drive on the other side of the road next (despite two economies having made the transition in the last 50 years)
Europe is 5.9 times larger than Alaska.
Europe has an area of 3,930,000 sq miles.
Alaska has an area of 663,268 sq miles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska
Sure, we run our CAD programs in imperial, but guess what? That Chinese fab house rounds all your drill sizes to the nearest 0.1 mm, and that 1/16" board is probably only 1.5mm. And any machine shop worth its salt has a full set of tools in both imperial and metric, because anything we import is metric and they have to make compatible parts. I'm pretty sure at least foreign makes of cars use all metric parts even when assembling in the US, so they are compatible with the rest of the supply chain--it is U.S. makes that suffer by requiring "special" parts, or metric-imperial adapters and crap, unless they switched already too (ha!). It ought to be an obvious business decision even without government intervention, but there is just too much inertia for everyone to switch unless they do it at the same time.
Simple would be relative. In the west, we use Arabic numerals, which are base 10, or powers of 10. Systems such as binary are base 2, or powers of 2, and after working with it for a while you can figure those numbers in your head as easily as anything else. We divide those into nibbles, bytes, words, dwords, qwords, etc. A kilobyte is 10 bits, which doesn't fit into those divisions, but we stick that label on it anyways.
Imperial lengths work in a similarly awkward way, and are countable in powers of 3. For example, 12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to a yard, 1780 yards to a mile. Mass appears to go into powers of 14. I don't think that was by design, but it is one way to look at it.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
Also, In temperatures, 0'C is Freezing point of water, 100'C is boiling point.
In Volume/ Mass/ Weight, 1000sq/cm = 1 Litre = 1 kg of water.
All these have practical applications in real life.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
E= mc2 certainly does have an arbitrary constant embedded within it -- if expressed in metric units the speed of light is an arbitrary constant. For this reason most high energy physics uses so called 'natural units' where the speed of light = 1 and units of mass are the same as units of energy (i.e. the electron rest mass is 511 kilo-electronvolts). And what is an electronvolt of energy? -- it's the energy which one electron-charge gains accelerated through one volt. Notice that the only metric unit referenced in this usual measure of mass is the volt; no kilograms or units derived from kilograms. So once you get deep into the 'hardest' of the hard sciences you don't find metric units used for much -- that says something about the arbitrariness of metric units (and their more exactly defined successors, the SI units).
Aside from the earth not being spherical, its size isn't static either.
That's why the meter is no longer defined by a distance of a physical object - it was defined as 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red emission line in the electromagnetic spectrum of the krypton-86 atom in a vacuum, until 1983 when it was defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1299,792,458 of a second. (more info here)
And water at what temperature?
Unless you're a scientist, you generally don't need to account for the small change in density over temperature. If you are a scientist, then you know it's 4 degrees C and you're already using the metric system.
Yes, we drive in miles. Stones and pounds are on the way out, ditto feet and inches which are only used to measure people. Anyone born before about 1960 tends to use stones and feet exclusively, anyone born after about 1980 uses metres and kilos. Those of us on the cusp tend to switch depending on who we are talking to.
Fahrenheit (I even had to go and look up the spelling) has completely disappeared. I have absolutely no idea what the weather in Fahrenheit means other than doing some mental arithmetic.
The mile will probably stay for motoring. Much like the guinea and furlong for horse racing and the chain for cricket. I don't know if the pint will finally disappear in the pub. I suspect not but the gill has gone. L.s.d. is not even on the radar of most people born before about 1980. With the replacement of the shilling coin in 1990 and the florin in 1992 the final links and reminders of our old money system escaped from public consciousness.
Tim.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
It's convenient for political organizations to pretend everyone agrees with them.
As of this writing (January 2013) the United Kingdom still uses MILES to measure distance, MILES PER HOUR to measure speed, STONES and POUNDS and OUNCES to measure weight, and FLUID OUNCES to measure volume.
Certainly not true. I've not seen stones, pounds and fluid ounces used in years. I guess people born before the mid-60s might still use them in conversation, but younger generations don't and you won't find them being used in any kind of technical or commercial setting.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
I'm sure it would not stop right wing newspapers like the Daily Mail, Telegraph, Express from freaking out if ever the UK went the whole hog but it really is no big deal.
Switching from driving on the left to the right could be a tad harder though...
letter being 8,5x11 inches in north america but 15cm x 30 cm in Europe.
That would be a very elongated piece of paper.
A4 paper is 210x297mm, and is never called "letter", always A4. The odd lengths are because the ratio of the sides is 1:sqrt(2), which means an A4 sheet cut in half (called A5) or doubled (called A3) has the same ratio as the A4 sheet, so a document can be very easily scaled or reduced to a sheet twice/half/etc times the size.
A0 has area 1m^2. Paper weight is measured in g/m^2, i.e. the weight of a piece of A0 paper. Since A4 is (A1-half, A2-quarter, A3-eighth) a sixteenth of that, I know that each sheet of A4 paper in the ream by our printer (80g/m^2) weighs 80/16 = 5 grams.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3074/why-arent-two-by-fours-two-inches-by-four-inches
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'