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How Pirates Of The Caribbean Hijacked America's Metric System (npr.org)
If the United States were more like the rest of the world, a McDonald's Quarter Pounder might be known as the McDonald's 113-Grammer, John Henry's 9-pound hammer would be 4.08 kilograms, and any 800-pound gorillas in the room would likely weigh 362 kilos. NPR explores: One reason this country never adopted the metric system might be pirates. Here's what happened: In 1793, the brand new United States of America needed a standard measuring system because the states were using a hodgepodge of systems. "For example, in New York, they were using Dutch systems, and in New England, they were using English systems," says Keith Martin, of the research library at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. This made interstate commerce difficult. The secretary of state at the time was Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson knew about a new French system and thought it was just what America needed. He wrote to his pals in France, and the French sent a scientist named Joseph Dombey off to Jefferson carrying a small copper cylinder with a little handle on top. It was about 3 inches tall and about the same wide. This object was intended to be a standard for weighing things, part of a weights and measure system being developed in France, now known as the metric system. The object's weight was 1 kilogram. Crossing the Atlantic, Dombey ran into a giant storm. "It blew his ship quite far south into the Caribbean Sea," says Martin. And you know who was lurking in Caribbean waters in the late 1700s? Pirates.
It would be interesting to have 12 cents in a dollar; 3 dollars would make a 1 yard bill; 1760 yard dollars would make a 1 mile bill.
America is inching its way towards the metric system.
Uh, not all that much - in the UK, where the metric system is a required thing by law, the McDonalds Quarter Pounder is *still* called the Quarter Pounder, because thats its product name. Its pre-cooked weight may be given in metric, but that doesn't alter the product name. In France its the Royal for the same reason, thats its product name.
In the UK, you can still buy a 64Oz Club Hammer or a 16Oz Rubber Mallet, and a 800-pound gorilla is still a 800-pound gorilla - again, the requirement for metric doesn't change these things.
The speech from Pulp Fiction is cool and all, its just not so much based in reality.
You made it worse by skipping 22 yards to a chain, 10 chains to a furlong (metric!), and 8 furlongs to a mile...
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
If you really want to see the US move to the metric system, stop using soft metrics. People in the US think the metric system is complicated because they are always being told to convert from English to Metric measure, with the metric being non integral. No, a 9 lb hammer would not be 4.08 kilograms. it would be 4 kilograms. And a Quarter Pounder would be a 100 Grammer. If you want to think in metric, start with integer metric measures and don't worry about conversion.
I remember when Jimmy Carter was trying to move the US to metric in 1977, I saw a giant sign that said 1 inch equals 2.54 cm. Think Metric! At that moment I knew metric was dead in the US.
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Roller coasters are fun, and make life enjoyable. Driving across Kansas? Not so much...
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he's recursively dismayed at misspelling "arrrrr!"
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If the United States were more like the rest of the world, a McDonald's Quarter Pounder might be known as the McDonald's 113-Grammer, John Henry's 9-pound hammer would be 4.08 kilograms, and any 800-pound gorillas in the room would likely weigh 362 kilos.
It would be a 100 gram patty, 5 kilo hammer, or half a ton gorilla. There is no need for precise conversion, and a good easy number is what marketing people and idiom pioneers would choose/use.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Might as well, I saw something about Pirates of the Caribbean, and "America's Metric System" and then something about McDonalds.
Now, as an American I know that America does not have a metric system. There is such a thing as The metric system, but there is not an American Metric System. The metric system is a form of torture that is used on children, children who know darn well that outside of the schoolhouse adults will refuse to speak to them in Metric, and if they try it they'll be looked at with suspicion, and birtherism.
And if it is supposed to have units from McDonalds, I'm gonna call it right there and say that it is actually a European conspiracy to slander our good nation, and we should probably invade and pillage all their cheese as punishment.
But the American system sucks even for comparing similar units.
How many fluid ounces in a cubic inch? Why 0.554113, of course.
How many pounds does a gallon of water weigh? 8.3454.
Now let's try metric:
How many cubic centimeters in a milliliter? 1.0000.
How many kg in a liter of water? 1.0000.
Britain is metric. We still order a pint of beer and our road signs and speed limits uses miles... but we are metric. My pants are still measured in inches, and most people would order construction materials by the inch and foot, even if the plans were drawn up in millimeters. I could tell you my tyre pressure in psi, but wouldn't be sure about the Kpa. Apart from that though, we are definitely metric.
That is why we still celebrate talk like a pirate day! To commemorate the day we defeated the metric system!
A pint is a pound, the world around.
One pint of water weighs 1.04375 pounds.
There are 231 cubic inches in a gallon.
Cool. That is handy when you need an 11th of a gallon, which is exactly 21 cubic inches.
A hunk of meat sold by the 16 oz pound -- who's prime factorization is 2^5 -- is much easier to divide into smaller bits than one sold a measure of 10 units, who's prime factorization is 2 and 5.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Roller coasters are fun, and make life enjoyable. Driving across Kansas? Not so much...
No doubt. Footlong hotdogs couldn't exist in the metric system. That alone is enough reason.
My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it.
I'll consider metrics when the clock, day, and calendar are also 'neatly' divided by 10.
The first iteration of metric, right after the French revolution, included a ten-hour day of hundred-minute hours, with hundred-second minutes. The months were renamed from the antique Romanesque hodgepodge to be more logique: March became Germinal, the month when things grew, October became Brumaire, the foggy month, and November became Nivôse, the snowy month.
But people wanted quarter-hours and all the other integer divisible units they were used to, and the month-renamers were reminded that, malheureusement, the new month names only made sense in Paris. In places like Martinique and Réunion, the new names made no sense.
There's a reason these are called "customary" units. They were contrived to be convenient for highly specialized and closely related tasks.
For example a rod was the typical length of a medieval ox-goad. If you laid out a line 40 rods long, you've got a furlong, which is about the length of furrow a man with a single ox could plow without giving his animal a rest. If you lay out a rectangle 1 furlong by four rods, you have an acre, which is about what he could plow in a day.
Customary units are far more convenient for the tasks they're optimized for. But it's the modern need to do more complex calculations relating things across problem domains that makes them awkward.
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I was in the first grade in California when they started teaching us the metric system. That went on for a couple of years, but we returned to "English Measure" after Nixon left office. I didn't see Metrics again until I took trig.
Here's a paragraph from Nixon's letter to Congress:
5) An important step which could be of great significance in fostering technological innovations and enhancing our position in world trade is that of changing to the metric system of measurement. The Secretary of Commerce has submitted to the Congress legislation which would allow us to begin to develop a carefully coordinated national plan to bring about this change. The proposed legislation would bring together a broadly representative board of private citizens who would work with all sectors of our society in planning for such a transition. Should such a change be decided on, it would be implemented on a cooperative, voluntary basis.
Source: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu...
Oh, while I think of it, there's an old joke, one form of which goes "Which weighs more, a pound of gold or a pound of feathers?"
The feathers weigh more than the gold.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
But at what error margin? The age of that ox alone would probably the difference if it could be 3 or 5 furlongs per day. So yes, these make sense as units of comparisons like an whale weighing something like x-hunderd small cars or how many Libraries of Congress a USB Stick can hold. But not as actual measurement.
bickerdyke
Nobody says the metric system is difficult. What they say is that is different, and that there is no compelling reason to change. There is no denying that changing would have an enormous price tag, but nobody ever can list a single benefit that the average American would see from the change.
The only people that claim something is too hard are people such as yourself who can't seem to wrap their heads around anything that isn't a multiple of 10, and apparently also suck at fractions.
And nobody ever says 1mm is 3/64 of an inch. 1mm is 1mm, and 3/64 is 3/64 and they are not used interchangeably.
Customary units are far more convenient for the tasks they're optimized for. But it's the modern need to do more complex calculations relating things across problem domains that makes them awkward.
Which is why, in the US, scientists use metric and everyone else, for normal everyday life, continues to use the convenient units they always have.
Arrrgh, yes. Because "a McDonald's Quarter Pounder might be known as the McDonald's 113-Grammer, John Henry's 9-pound hammer would be 4.08 kilograms, and any 800-pound gorillas in the room would likely weigh 362 kilos", while (failing in) an attempt to show knowledge of the SI system, is severely lacking in basic math.
For colloquial measurements, no one would do conversions with 3 digits of precision. It might be a Hecto-Burger, or a 4 kilo hammer, or a 400 kilo gorilla. (does anyone say "kilogram" instead of "kilo" when the context makes it obvious that the reference is to weight [or mass, for the truly pedantic]?) Trying to play the 3 digit conversion game indicates an agenda designed to make it seem the SI system is more complicated than imperial units. Hint: it's not.
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I got tired of subtracting 273.whatever all the time. Just give me Kelvin instead.
>Fahrenheit makes much more sense than Celsius for weather, because Fahrenheit is scaled better for weather temperature.
This is exactly wrong. Celsius is perfect as it's based on water at standard pressure. If it's below zero, normal water will freeze. If it's 100, water boils. It's very intuitive.
>This means when you say the 20s in Celsius, it means a wide range of temperature.
Oh noes! A degree centigrade is about twice a degree Fahrenheit. This is not the end of the world. The swing on your thermostat is less sensitive than that.
>On Celsius, 35-100 is wasted since few places get that hot
If it's over 35c, you're probably dying as your body fails to dump enough waste heat to keep your core temperature low enough. Maybe it's a dry heat, though.
>There is something artificial and Orwellian about metric, Its a synthetic system, a poor fit for everyday use
You are mistaking your personal comfort with 'fit'. The place metric generally fails is in having a convenient measure of human height. The best it can do is the decimeter, which puts the 'standard human' at around 18 decimeters. Still, the inch is too broad a range, and it's not too difficult to measure yourself in centimeters. You get used to it.
Where the imperial system simply cannot compete is in powers of ten... because it doesn't believe in them, adding conversion factors between scales that metric simply doesn't need to worry about.
It's only half bad. The difference between celsius and kelvin is a scalar offset. Celsius also has the convenient feature of having the freezing point of water at zero. The one that's all bad is farenheit. You have to add AND multiply to get something sensible.
Funny, height is one of the arguments I'd use FOR metric (I live in Canada where we tend to use feet and inches for height, but I have lots of European friends who look at me like I'm stupid when I use them).
One-eighty is a perfectly good height in centimetres. What's weird is using two different units: 5'11". That's, um, 12*5+11 = 71 inches. Or 5.9 feet.
It's 12 pence in a shilling, 20 shillings in a pound.
The reason a foot is divided into 12 inches is because it lets you divide a foot evenly in half, thirds, quarters, sixths, or twelfths (eights are also possible with only a half inch). So dividing a foot into 12 inches lets you hit 3 of the most common subdivisions (half, third, quarter), and 4 of the 5 smallest subdivisions (sixth, missing fifth) using only integers.
Dividing units into 10 only gives you 1 of the 3 most common subdivisions (half), and only 2 of the 5 smallest subdivisions (half, fifth) using only integers.
English unit subdivions weren't picked at random. They were selected because they're more practical. A foot is 12 inches for easy subdivision. The English units of volume are based on halving (easy to do if you don't have standardized containers but you do have a scale) - a gallon is 2 quarts, a quart is 2 pints, a pint is 2 cups. An acre is about how much land a peasant could work in a day, and the furlong is defined based on an acre (1 furlong x 1 furlong = 10 acres). Likewise, a mile has 5280 feet because that's 8 furlongs. You'll also note the mile subdivides as integer feet into 10 of the smallest 12 subdivisions (only a 7th and 9th of a mile is not integer feet).
Until standardized measuring instruments became cheap and commonplace, English units were simply superior. Metric is only superior today because the biggest difficulty in modern usage is doing the math by hand (or in your head), not obtaining tools to measure things accurately. Even on computers, if you're doing sequential calculations without using infinite precision, English units are superior to metric - they accrue less roundoff error. Computers store numbers in base 2, and many English unit conversions will resolve down to at least base 4 before hitting a fraction and thus losing precision in binary representation. Except for a half, metric unit conversions don't fit at all into base 2, so lose precision with almost every calculation.
British currency went decimal in 1971 (100 pence to the pound.) Before that, there were 12 pence to a shilling, and 20 shillings to a pound.
And there were other quirky amounts:
2 farthings = 1 ha'penny
2 ha'pennies = 1 penny
3 pennies = 1 thrupenny bit (or thrupence)
2 thrupences = 1 sixpence
2 sixpences = 1 shilling (or bob)
2 bob = 1 florin
1 florin + 1 sixpence = half a crown
4 half crowns = 1 ten-bob note
2 ten-bob notes = 1 pound (or 240 pennies)
1 pound + 1 shilling = 1 guinea
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
We're over 200 comments in, and still no mention of The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster's revelation that the cause of global warming is the decline in the number of pirates.
And there we have it my friends. Not only did pirates cause the adoption of the imperial system in the USA, but the metric system causes global warming! Think of the children!!!eleven
[Poe's Law disclaimer: yes, I'm kidding.]
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
IMO, America can easily move to liter for liquid measurements -- most Americans already are familiar with 1 and 2 liter beverage sizes.
A US liquid quart is 0.95 liters, close enough that most people probably wouldn't notice a difference in everyday use.
Celsius gets everything wrong. 0C is too high -- you have to deal with negative numbers a lot more often. 100C is way too high and also pointless -- you can see water boil. And the result is that temperatures you care about are in a narrow range.
I disagree. Celsius has plenty of precision for everyday use, the difference between 25C and 26C matters just the same to normal people as the difference between 77F and 78F. If you do actually need more precision, you use decimals like you would in Fahrenheit, because I sure as hell hope you don't use fractions for temperature.
0C also makes a lot more sense than 32F for the freezing point of water, as it has a big correlation with weather. If the temperature in Celsius on the forecast is negative, I can probably expect my car to be frozen and the roads to possibly be slippery. If it's -2C, it's probably not too bad, if it's -10C or below, it's probably going to be more severe. 0C makes for a very nice and convenient delineation.
Eat the rich.
Customary are far more convenient for the tasks they're optimized for.
The Farenhiet scale is another example, where the definitions make the scale a strong mnemonic for certain situations:
* 100 was set as a best guess at the time for the human body's internal temperature. (They got within a fraction of a degree.) When temperatures approach or exceed 100 F, it isn't enough to just relax when you're getting overheated. You must stay hydrated or suffer heat stroke and risk death.
* zero was set at the coldest temperature they could easily and repeatedly generate in a lab: The melting point of pure ice saturated with salt (at sea level pressure, etc.) This is important when driving in states that salt their roads in the winter. When the temperature in degrees F goes negative the salt stops working. Drive VERY carefully or you end up in the ditch, risking death.
Given that those situations are deadly AND rare, it'37.s nice that these easy to remember round numbers flag them. Meanwhile, the boiling and freezing points of water (212F and 32F) are used often enough that they get memorized. With C, 100 and zero are boil and freeze, but will you remember 37.777... and -17.7777 as important numbers for heat stroke and deadly road conditions?
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All of that, and you still didn't answer the basic question: why do it? OK, the UK made the change. Exactly what impoved in anyone's life as a result of that change?
You've done 2 coast to coast trips and didn't see a single speed limit sign? Not a single '1 mile to next exit' sign? No 'Big City 43 miles' signs? No 'Deer crossing next 2 miles'? No 'Left lane ends 1000ft'? None? You must be the most unobservant person ever, I hope you weren't driving.
Where the *hell* did you get that idea? Exit numbers are sequence numbers that don't indicate any distances.
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