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Mars Orbiter Lost Over Metric Conversion Error
Buxley writes "NASA is reporting that they've found the likely cause for last week's loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter. It seems one of the engineering teams was using English units of measurement while another team was using Metric units. Getting this straight is rather important when designing navigation sytems for interplanetary spacecraft, one would think." A lot of people sent this one in; thanks to all. And if this event doesn't prove that it's time for the U.S. to go 100% metric, I don't know what will. Oy!
I used to be an engineering machinist for a Swiss multinational in England. We used the "Metric inch" as we used both metric and imperial measurement. The big advantage of the metric inch is that it gives 1mm=40 thou.
The metric inch was adopted as the ISO (International standards organization) standard quite a long time ago now, though I don't know the ASA (American Sytandards Association) position on this.
However, the Oksapmin of Papua New Guinea use a baseless numbering system, where each number is one of 27 body parts.
"I'll take left ankle apples and a pinkie of oranges, thank you..."
Cheers,
-j.
>Next you'll be telling us that it makes more sense to drive on the right side of the road as opposed to the left.
It actually does. You see it's been proven statistically the left handed people often accidently turn the can _into_ traffic when they try to avoid something. And since most people are right handed, driving on the left will _increase_ the risk of serious traffic accidents.
LINUX stands for: Linux Inux Nux Ux X
FRA: STFU GTFO
That's 2% for inches.
I always find it amusing that whenever the U.S. doesn't go along with everyone else, it's "not-invented-here", "arrogance", we're "insular" or what have you. Whenever a European country doesn't go along it's "tradition", or "protecting their culture". Oh well, do what you like...
;)
BTW, when are you Brits going to get with the program and drive on the right-hand side of the road like everyone else
Another incident where incorrect metric conversions were blamed was the so-called "Gimli Glider" where, back in 1983, an Air Canada 767 ran out of fuel mid-flight. The amount of fuel on the plane had been calculated incorrecly due to a mixup in the units involved. The pilot amazingly flew the plane (now a 132-ton glider) without power and landed safely at a WWII-era airport turned racetrack in Gimli, Manitoba. An account of the incident can be found here.
I originally read about it in Reader's Digest, and, not surprisingly given their conservative bent, they claimed the accident was really the Canadian government's fault, because they were forcing conversion to the metric system.
Hopelessly pedantic since 1963.
For this purpose, english units are superior on a small scale such as this.
I don't understand where you get this. There is a finite number of "tick" marks you can make on a ruler regardless of the measurment system in use.
You can either go with 1/32nd inch increments or 1mm increments (slightly less dense). 1/2 of an inch or 1cm increments. I totally don't understand your objections on precision. Instead of saying, "1/16th of an inch!" say "2 millimeters!"
As many other posters have pointed out, it all boils down to the fact that you're accustomed to the Imperial units, so those units (and their various fractions) seem like "natural" units of measure. It's just a mind-set that must be overcome.
Survey says...
E = mgh
m = 1 kg
g = 9.8 m/s^2
h = 1 m
E = 9.8 joules
You forgot the accelleration of gravity.
I read here that imperial system was "God's".
This is nonsense. The old measurement system,
inherited from a time when science consisted in
guys trying to convert lead to gold, was
arbitrarily promulgated by various kings and
lords to be used on their territory. They
were careful not to use the same feets and
inches as their neighbours, a way to keep control
over commerce.
The French revolution ditched that system because
it wanted to get rid of every thing that could
be arbitrarily control by a tyran. Thus they designed their system in reference to given
unambiguous scales found in nature. This principle
is still there, even though the definitions have changed overtime (e.g. meter used to be defined as a fraction of perimeter of the earth, it is now a given fraction of the distance light goes in vacuum in one second, the second itself being the time it takes to I dont remember which atom to do a certain number of energy transitions).
THe Imperial system, with its different regional variations that still persist, is still promulgated by _the_ only governement on earth still dumb enough to use it. And how is it defined ? by keeping a reference, a "canonical foot", the embalmed foot of G. Washington ? No, they defined it with respect to the metric system.
It takes a decision of the US congress to _define_ an inch to be _exactly_ 2.54 cm, and you call this "God given" measurement
"English System"? What's that? "Imperial mishap"? NASA and some emperor?
Everyone knows precisely what "metric" means. To write a headline that accurately described the problem would have to include something like "English System of Measurment" or "Imperial Units of Measure", both of which are rather lengthy for a headline.
They aren't being biased against Metric, they were just trying to write a clear, concise headline that described the article in as few words as possible. Using the word "metric", while seeming to offend the easily offended (and conspiracy theorists), was nevertheless a logical choice.
The Swedes completed a far more traumatic move (switching from driving on the left to driving on the right) in a single day, without any major disturbances. The British abandoned their old currency system more or less at the same time, again without any major problems.
As far as your mum, grandma and g-friend having no clue about metric -- the move is meant to be a boon for society, and therefore taught to the future members of society; i.e. kids. People over a certain age would have to put up with the inconveniences for the sake of the good of their offspring, just like older generations of Swedes and Britons did.
If everyone would simply accustom themselves to Metric measurments, it might make the process a lot easier.
As it is now, all street signs use strictly English units. It's going to cost a lot, but I think one of the first things that should be done is to start going through and replace the existing signs with ones that also have Metric units. All new signs would have both also. Start making gas pumps and signs "bilingual".
As far as legislation goes, I would have no problem with laws that require all new signage containing a unit of measurment have that measurment dominantly in Metric. ("350mL (11.5 Fl. Oz)" instead of the other way around.) Old/never updated signs can stay the way they are for all I care, but this law would apply to both new signage *and* all government-controled signs (road signs).
Kids today spend much more time with Metric than they do with English units. Once they get out of school, however, and enter the Real World, EVERYTHING uses English units. Most kids never deal with Metric again, so they lose their proficiency and embrace English units. If we adopted a policy of signs that use both (or simply Metric), it would be very easy for kids to "convert". Yes, it will be harder for the older folks that no longer know the difference between a gram and a liter, but eventually those people will be dead, and it won't matter.
Scaling is not easy with paper as you need to multiply the sides by root 2 ( 1.41 and a bit ) it would be easier to use 1.5. It only scales easily if you rotate through 90 degrees first.
Switching to metric means picking which metric
Could you elaborate on this? What two "families" of Metric are you referring to?
and then redesigning almost everything from the ground up
Surely you're exaggarating. Tools are readily available in Metric. Machines for building parts and tools are readily available in Metric. Flip your ruler over and you've got Metric.
I do agree, though, that designs based upon existing English unit-based designs will probably need to stick to English units. Nobody's saying you *have* to convert these designs, but unless your entire business is working with older mechanical designs, you can at least start designing new things using Metric. Or don't. I don't really have a problem with firms that, for whatever reason, have to continue using non-Metric units internally. So long as it doesn't affect me (I don't have to repair or work with it). As the rest of the country makes the conversion, though, you may have a hard time finding employees who are willing to stick with those units, however.
For everyone else, for those that don't necessarily have to work with aged designs, it shouldn't be terribly difficult to switch. You'll probably find that most fresh faces are accustomed to working in both units of measure. They usually would have no qualms about working for a Metric-based firm or a non-Metric-based firm, but once they start, those units become harder to let go of.
You would think that the *International* Space Station would use the System *International* (SI or Metric) for its measurements, and partially it does. All of the non-American components are in Metric but the Americans claimed that it would be too expensive for them to retool all of their fabrication shops to Metric so all of their components are still using Imperial measurements. If nothing else this means that astronauts need to lug around two sets of tools: one Imperial set for the US components and one Metric set for the rest. Lets hope that the ISS doesn't suffer the same fate as the Mars Explorer due to Metric/ Imperial mismatches. Well it's not likely to burn up in the Martian atmosphere but I mean a tragic fate of some other sort. BTW Imperial Sucks!
Easy. Make further funding for NASA contingent upon them being able to change to metric. And all that takes is the cooperation of Congress.
Oh. (realizing what I've said) Nevermind.
--
I wasn't seriously suggesting that the article be called "English System mishap caused loss of NASA orbiter" -- this was just an example to clarify my point. A more appropriate title would have been something like "Unit mixup caused loss of Nasa orbiter". The present title isn't even accurate and is highly misleading -- at first glance it seems as though the problem was caused by some silly engineers using the metric system when everyone else in NASA was using english units (in fact it was the other way around); but maybe you think that the shortness of a headline is more important than accuracy.
I for one think that the inch is far to small.... .187265 feet and call it a mini-foot.....I'm sure if we did this we would not loose anymore rockets... :)
Lets all start using feet and then split the feet into 5.34 for a sub-measurement of
Anyway.... I think all science should be conducted on a standard system. And for scientific purposes the metric is the far easiest.
The mixup happened when doing (or failing to do) conversions between english and metric units. In my experience, it's always been common to collectively refer these conversions (in either direction) as "metric conversions."
.." might have done just as well, but *I* personally saw no ambiguity between the headline and the story itself. I read "Metric mishap" and I immediately guessed (correctly) that someone goofed while doing a conversion.
I agree that a headline like "Unit mixup
The point of a story headline is to state the topic of the article in such a way as to both interest the reader and to use as few words as is possible. I think the existing headline did that perfectly. I doubt most people will be reading it and thinking to themselves that the Metric units of measurment caused the spacecraft to be lost.
If it *really* still bothers you, maybe you should write them a letter.
I'm an architect designing buildings in Hong Kong and if I had to use Imperial measurements I'd lose my nut - totally. It's a crazy system Imagine trying to keep a running set of dimensions all adding up when you have to add 12'11" with 2'8' with 3'2" etc. In the States you have to buy special calculators to do the maths! For a country that had the wisdom to use a metric currency system 200 years before much of the rest of the world I'm amazed there is any debate.
On behalf of Canada, I'd like to apologize for the metric system, although if I remember my history, it's really France's fault. Of course, Star Trek is also partly to blame :)
Dana
How embarrasing... what else is there to say?
What does 'english measurements' mean? Here in England, since metrication everything is in metres, kilograms, etc. As far as I know the only non-metric unit officially used is time. Do they mean imperial units? If so, surely that's American measurements - they seem the only people who are still using them.
...and wasn't the Mars Orbitor supposed to be an international effort????
I wonder how much it costs companies who sell precision equipment to the US as well as to the rest of the world to maintain two bookkeeping systems? This particular incident is splashy, but there is no doubt a day-to-day cost of living a double measurement life that we never think of. Definitely, the US should convert; the argument was already there, this is just a nice incident to pin the argument on.
"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
We could use all the Nukes we've got lying about! Then all living humas would be using the Imperial system and everything would be fine!
A standard only works if everybody uses it (witness Microsoft and the broken DNS (twice now!)).
Either everybody else goes Imperial system or we go metric system. 250 Million people to learn a new system v.s. 5.75 Billion. Hmm, that'll be a tough choice!
One system is as good as another, as long as everybody uses it.
On a side point, why in the HELL wasn't this caught in Quality Controll?!?
/me GRUMBLES and goes back to trying to convert British BA thread forms to US SA threadforms for a simple metalworking project.
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
"People sometimes make errors," Pretty damn expensive mistake.
No wonder people are losing interest in space exploration, if NASA can't even send a probe to Mars. I certainly wouldn't want to be on the first manned mission to Mars
Are they really sure it wasn't the above error ? (Oh, and I have a nice bridge to sell. Toon Moene (the not-so-anonymous coward)
Well, as Roblimo said it - this is the occation to decide some standard on the area. Doesn't matter whether it's metric or English, but a standard i seriously needed!
Yeah I use MicroStation on a PC and the damn thing is designed to work first in English system and only second in Metric. You have to specify units and subunits in your design files. Any moron knows that you should use mm for everything - instead you have to use M.mm i.e 1.123m instead of the preferred 1123mm. It's a nightmare when you have to plot out. In English you use 1"to the 1' say in metric you use 1:10 or 1:100 easily converted by moving the decimal point the approropriate one or two spaces. MicroStation uses the fucking stupid metres to millimetres. ie 1:1000 is actually 1:1 ! Talk about doing your head in. Intergraph have their own plotter iplot to get around the damn thing - but hardly a day goes by without me damning the backwards looking americans. And I love Star Trek for shoving metric into everyones living rooms! I guess in the future Data is metric?
Isn't 0F the freezing point of mercury or something?
The freezing point of mercury is -40C (or -40F). It's curious that they both meet at that point, isn't it? I live in Canada, and we were in progress of converting over around the early '80s. As a kid during that time, I thought that "meeting point" was very cool. My grade2 teacher told me that the two scales meet again somewhere "near the top." But I know now that she was wrong. As they move away from the meeting point, the two scales diverge, and never get closer.
Plus as a Brit my brain works in a kind of half-metric half-imperial scale. If it's cold I'll say "it's minus 2 today" whereas if it's hot, I'll say "it's almost 80 today." Try and figure that on out!
It's worse here in Canada. My generation grew up with the metric system, but our parents are still stuck on imperial, so they always use imperial when they talk to us. You can go into a grocery store, and everything is sold in pounds and kilograms. Most stores typically prefer pounds because they're smaller and make their food look cheaper. ($1.99/lb == $4.38/kg.) For a while they were selling things in units of 100grams ($1.99/lb == 43.8/100g), but for some reason they stopped. Maybe because many people were too stupid to understand numbers as big as 100. Note that the usage of the units here is only in English-speaking regions. I'm not sure how the French handle it...
The temperature on the radio and TV is always announced in Celsius, and speed limits on roads are always in km/h. It's illegal for gas stations to sell gas by the gallon (thank God for that!).
Note that the miles are the same as in the U.S., but the pints and gallons are bigger!
I once saw an explanation for that in a book, but it's a too little long to explain here.
One other serious problem with metric's acceptance here is U.S. influence. The Americans looked like they were going to switch over, but they didn't. We get a lot of their TV shows, movies, and music, (and culture...grrr), and it's always pounds, inches, miles, etc. from them. This is very unfortunate, as lots of my friends measure things in these measurements, despite the education they were given in elementary school. Heck, a lot them say the letter 'Z' is called "zee" instead of "zed."
The only hint of acceptance by the Americans of metric into their culture I can see is the character Sub-Zero from Mortal Kombat. To me, he's called Sub-Zero because he does tricks with ice, and water freezes at subzero temperatures (Celsius). I have no idea what the American game company Midway (responsible for Mortal Kombat) thought when they named him. I realize that subzero Fahrenheit temperatures also cause water to freeze, but 32 is generally regarded as the "threshold" temperature in that scale, so I would think would get more attention. Hmm... "Sub-Thirty-Two Wins. Fatality."
I once saw a number of episodes of 3-2-1 Contact (an American kids' science show) that promoted use of the metric system, but obviously they didn't help.
Go back and read it again.
Oh, whatever.
I flipping hated my old car with its speedometer that only went up to 85. My new car (a jetta VR6) has 80 up at the top of the meter, which is a nice place for it, I think.
That isn't much difference, is it? 80vs. 85?
Anyway, wasn't there a law passed around the time of the 1970s' energy crisis in the U.S. that dictated that:
I then wake up in the hospital to find an IV line in my arm hooked up to a 1000cc bag of saline solution...
For your information: 1cc (cubic centimetre)= 1mL. That's another thing cool about the metric system: 1000cm (1000cc) of water equals 1L, which weighs 1kg.
Agreed! We gotta deport Missouri, and fast! It's the only way to be sure.
Funny you should rise the issue of the Ryder Cup. The american audience
a) Harassed the European players. Police had to remove audience at several holes before the play could continue.
b) Rushed onto the field before the game was finished. It could still have been tied.
If you consider that a win, sure. It says more about American sportsmanship than European skill at golf...
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Sure, use measurements that make sense for what you're doing. An Electron-Volt is a super useful measure of energy when you're looking at elementary particles. It's the energy an electron gets after being accelerated through a 1 volt potential, something that makes more sense than a Joule (one Kg given a one Newton acceleration).
But most of these very useful measurements are used in specialized areas that don't intersect much with other areas. You're not likely to measure the energy stored in a battery. Nor are you likely to measure your height in Au. On the rare occasions when you have to convert units from eV to J, or Au to m it's easy, one constant.
The current "metric" system has lots of flaws, no doubt. Celcius doesn't have much meaning for scientific measurements, but makes a heckuva lot more sense than Farenheit for weather forcasts. At 0 water freezes, a very important weather number. At 100 water boils (another important weather number in perspective I suppose).
The main flaw with the US Standard system is that it lacks any kind of self consistency. How many square inches are there in an acre? How many pounds of force are exerted by a one slug weight being accelerated at one foot per second squared?
Where it makes sense to keep specialized units, fine, but I'll take my monitor size in cm, my car power in watts, and my height in cm. It takes a while to get used to using a different type of measurement but it's worth it.
Isn't Slashdot the home to geeks who rebel against Microsoft? Microsoft's way of doing things is the familliar, comfortable, and completely *stupid* "Standard" way. Linux is the smart, not immediately intuitive, but *correct* "metric" way of doing things.
As a quick side note though... Anybody have an idea when time will become metric? Sure days and years make great sense from an astronomical point of view, but months, weeks, hours, minutes, and seconds are all in these ugly multiples of 60, 24, 12, 7.... Ack. The conversion might not be too painful, afterall a minute is just 1.157 millidays...
Hmm... I find this attitude very common under Americans. No personal offence, but the world consists of more than North-America. There's more out there, and they are using the metric system. So, this "bunch of foreigners" of yours happen to be the whole damn world population. You speak about the cost of moving to the metric system, but did you take into account the costs involved in *keeping* the imperial system? The tooling and equipment needed to convert between the two systems, etc. etc. costs huge ammounts of money each year again. Instead, if you go to the metric system you will have a one-time cost (which can be spread over multiple years of course), and after that... No more! Anyway, my 2cents... Grtz, Eon.
Hey, you know that driving on the right hand side is not really a standard. Japan and the rest of the commonweath drives on the left. :)
:)
Maybe they could change, but anyways, I'm not a brit. Thank you very much.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
It took over 60 posts, but they finally realized that today's thread on 'human error' causes probe crash was just a little too similar to this thread.
It's an idiom (albeit non-standard), and idioms always trump grammar. That idiom is particularly indicative of the dialect of a certain generation of Americans. Mister youse needn't be so spry concernin questions arty.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Do you realize you're a complete hypocrite? You sit there, claiming base 10 is evil and ickybad, yet there you are using arabic numerals, in a BASE 10 SYSTEM.
So tell me, why are you doing all your math in base 10 and THEN converting to whatever godawful system you choose? To me, nothing could possibly make more sense then base 10. It's how we count. It's how many digits we (usually) have.
How many inches to a mile? You'd spout some memorized value, but tell me, how easily can you count that out in your head? While if it's just base 10 metric, you move the damn decimal point. No memorization, only LOGIC.
Personally, the metric system is the best thing to ever come out of France and we (almost) owe Napolean Bonaparte a pat on the back for it.
XVIII
mr youse needn't be so spry
concernin questions arty
each has his tastes but as for i
i likes a certain party
gimme the he-man's solid bliss
for youse ideas i'll match youse
a pretty girl who naked is
is worth a million statues
- e. e. cummings
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
If they would have been using a Beowulf clustster this would have never happened!
What of time indeed? The metric unit of time *is* the second. No problem there.
The real imperial/metric problem is not that metric is easier (it may be for "in-your-head" calculations, but it makes little difference to a computer, or if you're using a calculator), but that there's two systems at all. The U.S. should switch to metric *not* because it's "easier" but because everyone else is using it. If everyone else was using imperial units and the U.S. was using metric, I'd be advocating that the U.S. switch to imperial units.
It is much easier to imagine and understand what it means to say "I am six feet tall" than it is to say "I am one hundred and eighty three centimeters tall" or "I am one point eight meters tall".
/.) for it, the Metric system does work extraordinarily well in "everyday" situations.
The hell you say. It may be easier for you because you have been raised used feet and inches, but there is definitely nothing intrinsically more intuitive about it.
The Fahrenheit scale uses (aproximately) the normal human body temperature as 100. Since most real world temperatures (like weather) are done around this temperature and above 0 (the temperature of salted ice), the Fahrenheit scale is a more convenient scale for human life.
Again, I take that you mean a more convenient scale for Americans. From my point of view, the Fahrenheit scale is a counterintuitive horror. After ten years of exposure to the Imperial system, I can deal with inches, miles, gallons and pounds, but I still can't get my head around Fahrenheit. Besides, the most significant transition point in "the real world" is that of liquid water to ice. The Celsius scale springs from this. How much more intuitive you want to get?
I guess we all have our cultural biases and try to justify them, but from a standpoint of making sense, the Imperial System doesn't have much of a leg to stand on, definitely not in the 21st Century. Take my word (and that of all the other Europeans in
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
Hello?? This happened in England a few decades ago. The metric system was not in widespread use until the last few decades. If most of the world can do it, I'm sure Americans can too, unless they have a problem with the "not invented here" syndrome, which I believe they do.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
You know, I don't buy the anti-conversion argument that it's "just not so simple to implement."
I don't think most people realize just how far the metric system has penetrated, and how familiar we really are with Metric units. Americans seem *very* willing to buy soda in 2-liter bottles, to measure snow skis in centimeters, and everyone who has ever seen NYPD Blue knows what a kilo of coke looks like. Alomost every mechanic I know has a set of metric wrenches, because many cars require them.
So the question isn't "Why haven't we switched to the Metric system?" The question is "Why are we using two systems simultaneously and not dumping the English system?"
I think it would take about 2 seconds for people to determine if they were getting ripped off at the gas pump, and really, the issue of merchants using a Metric changeover as an opportunity for price gouging is irrelevant. People don't buy gas on the basis of whether they feel the price is *fair*. They buy gas where it's cheapest or most convenient. 31 cents a liter will be more appealing than 34 cents, just like $1.20/gallon sounds better than $1.25.
And think of the excuses for speeding we would have: "Officer, I didn't realize I was doing 160 km/hr, because the km/hr numbers on my speedometer are so damn small!"
Um, then how did we ever get all those two liter soda bottles? Yes, it would be expensive to switch overnight, but not over a period of several years.
instead of 6, 12, 18, 24, 32...??? And if you can't remember the units, just remember this:
Keith (kilometer)
Hit (hectare)
Darren (decometer)
Making (Meter)
Darren (Decimeter)
Cry (Centimeter)
Mommy (Millimeter)
It's not as simple as that; aeronautics and aerospace traditionally use US/English units (because of the dominance of the US --and English-- aerospace industry). So, you get a lot of (older) engineers who can only think in English, plus a lot of look-up tables and software using metric (never mind aircraft instrumentation, etc).
;-).
There was even a near-airccraft accident some years back because ground personnel filled up an airliner's fuel tank reading the gauges in gallons, while they were in liters.
Unit conversion has always been a problem, something like this was bound to happen; that's why some of us write hacks in Javascript (shameless plug
Personally, the metric system is the best thing to ever come out of France and we (almost) owe Napolean Bonaparte a pat on the back for it.
:P~~~~
you forgot chocolate gateaux and Congnac
Personally, the metric system is the best thing to ever come out of France and we (almost) owe Napolean Bonaparte a pat on the back for it.
:P~~~~
you forgot chocolate gateaux and cognac
Canada did it in the 70's.
I still weigh 195 pounds and am 6 foot 2. But the speed limits 110 on the highway and a liter of gas is 65 cents. But I need a cup of sugar and then I have to set the oven to 425 F.
So you see this is what the metric world is like for the average joe.
Yes it didn't/is not happening overnight, but you have to start somewhere.
1 km = 1000 meters
...
1000 meters = 100,000 centimeters
100,000 centimeters = 1,000,000 millimeters
1 mile = 5280 feet
5280 feet = 63360 inches
63360 inches
Now I just wish they'd convert the time system to base 10.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
From what I remember the Farienheit scale is based of off the tempature in London England, not any greater purpose.
--
I said that because I know that they have no idea what metric measurements are. See I leave my car's LED displays to metric because I happen to use the metric system when I drive. and all three of them freak out when they look over and see how fast I am going.
Try getting your 66 year old grandmother who has been managing a farm for 40 years to switch from acres to hectares and pounds to kilos.
I wasn't being sexist...I was making a point. If the US switched to the metric system who is going to reeducate everyone.
Pardon the paranoid rancor, but Do you you expect me to believe that we've lost another Hi-tech satelite that we sent to Mars... The last one just disappeared, now this one is headed toward the sun because our best minds blew chunks on measurement conventions?? Spare Me. Someone here has got to be drunk (unfortunately it aint me). maybe I could use that excuse when I pay my taxes and pay them in pesos. Makes you wonder why we can get this right....
No where NEAR the costs being spent to maintain two systems now.
The only reason the US hasn't converted with the rest of the world was due to a stupid attempt to do it slowly (signs in both miles/km) the first time around.
That, and the fact that they can afford to waste money calculating two systems of measurement, and have a strong enough internal market for many companies to skip converting all together.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
MY convenience takes precedence over metric ideals. And millions of others here in the states appear to agree with me. So nuts to metric. It'll never catch on with the mainstream in the USA. It hasn't in the last 100 years, has it? Why shoild I expect different in the next 100 years?
Teacher education?? Granted, not everyone in the U.S. knows the metric system, but teachers certainly ought to. Saying "where will we get the money to educate teachers about the metric system" is like asking "how will we ever find the money to teach chemistry teachers about protons and electrons? We should stick with the phlogiston theory because it's too expensive to educate teachers about oxygen!"
Signs? They get replaced eventually anyway. No need to replace them all at once, but when you put up new signs use both sets of units.
And miles? Oh please. People in the U.S. don't instictively measure distances in miles anyway. Don't believe me? Go up to someone and ask them how far it is from Downtown in City X to suburban shopping mall Y, or from city A to city B. You'll get an answer in time--driving time. "How far is it from Indianapolis to Chicago?" "Three hours" is my instinctive response.
Well people. That's very very funny. Knowing that
a lot of that rocket stuff is made by the same Lockheed-Martin I would like to note a point when that stuff about Y2k comes up. Just to avoid errors from a certain UScentrism about the World.
Please remember that Russia is located at GMT+3hours. Roughly New Year will appear here 8 hours before US. So if we shoot at 8 hours before
New Year - it's our fault. If you do it at New Year then it's your fault.
Now seriously. Lockheed-Martin is a very well known company with a huge experience in rocketry. They participated in several Mars missions. And they did much more than Mars. How such an error could go up with a company that possesses some of the closest ties with NASA?
Why do we use English instead of Metric? The same reason we use Microsoft Windows. The same reason your optic nerve is wired backwards. The same reason we ever get stuck with any other local optimum: the intermediate steps between here and there are worse than how things are right now. It doesn't matter how much better things could be, because greedy optimization algorithms have rule the world. 4 billion years of evolution have gotten us used to it.
---
Have a Sloppy day!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Some time ago i read about disks being labeled as kibibytes.(in powers of 10s)
A while back, the citu government here in Louisville, KY tried putting up a few metric road signs ("Louisville - 42 KM"). There was a lot of discussion, and one night on the television, someone called in saying that the metric system was an attempt by the English to "get back their colonies." Apparently the caller believed that the metric system truly was a big consiricy. No one on air pointed out to her that the system the U.S. generally uses is often called the "English system."
Another time in on of my math classes, we were working on vectors. We drew a simple rope holding a weight from the ceiling. The professor labelled the weight as 100 pounds "using the English system." When a girl in the class heard this, she raised her hand in protest. "I do not appreciate you calling it the 'English System'. The only people stupid enough to use it are Ameicans. Why not call it the 'American System'?"
Ahh... What memories.
And, while we are at it, why not standardize shoe sizes? I work in a shoe store and it is a pain when one 9 is not the same size as another 9 from another company.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
> It is much easier to imagine and understand what
> it means to say "I am six feet tall" than it is
> to say "I am one hundred and eighty three
> centimeters tall" or "I am one point eight
> meters tall"
Hmm. Isn't this in contradiction with your speedometer example? Most adult people are between five and six feet tall so telling I'm six feet tall is sort of redundant. The real information is in the inches and fractions of inches and then the example gets more complicated. A non-American would say I'm one eighty and an American would say I'm a bit under five feet eleven. I'm not so sure which one is more complicated.
Sadly, engineering is not science, and engineers, unlike scientists, still use imperial measurements quite a bit.
I remember back when the US was pushing the rest of the world to standardize on the metric system..and a lot of countries who weren't on the metric system did switch. It turns out the US didn't follow it's own advice after all.
I believe yout point of view depends completely on your personal experience. I'm a 20-year-old mechanical engineering student in a country which adopted the metric system almost at the time of my birth (C.R.). Therefore, I have used the metric system my whole life.
...
...
Most of my college textbooks were written in the U.S., and I've had practice solving problems in both unit systems.
The metric system does prove to be the perfect choice for scientific and technical needs, yet I don't think my life would be any easier if I had to think how tall I am using feet and inches, or translating ounces into pounds in a grocery store.
Where in the world do people learn to multiply in base-twelve numbers (in the Western Hemisphere, at least)? How useful would twelve fingers be in a world where you add and multiply numbers using base-ten numbers?
The point isn't really if the English system is better than the metric one; what's really important is that all systems used in a country should be compatible with each other. And since there's no place where you add in base-ten or base-twelve numbers, the metric system turns out to be *extremely* convenient
Give it a try yourself
************************ Juan I. Del Valle juan@choriticos.net ************************
Boy we sure had a hot Thermidor this year didn't we?
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Egghead, get the hell off our planet.
Abolish tenure NOW!
Scientists *are* standardized on metric. Unfortunately, engineers are not scientists.
Well this argument is just as worthless as all the other arguments raised here. I personally can't see why a unit becomes more understandable if was based on someones foot a couple of hundred years ago or if it is based on the distance light travels during a very short but well defined time interval (which is the modern definition of what a metre is). And while we're discussing definitions I can point out that an inch (and most if not all other imperial units) is defined using the metric system. An inch for example is defined as 0.0254 metres (even in the US that is) and is thus exactly this. No matter what you say you cannot change the fact that today the inch is nothing but a weird fraction of a metre and still it is understandable for you: A weird fraction of the distance light travels during a weird fraction of a second. Perhaps simplicity in definition isn't all that essential after all.
My friend works at an airport for a rental car company, and one of there american customers complained to him that the metric system was stupid and backwards. to which he proceeded to tell her why it was a great system of mesurement, one base unit with prefixes attached depending on how much it is, everything base ten....
I learned both metric and imperial in school, and to be honest with you, I have no idea how many feet there are in a mile, and how many pints in a hog's head(yes a real imperial mesurment) but I know metric awfully well.
I am infact 198 cm tall and 78 kgs in weight. my car tops out at 135 (or so) km/h I drink 355ml cans of coke.
My parents both grew up learning imperial. they know it pretty well. me, I know metric really well. start teaching metric only in your schools, within 20 years your country will have changed it's ways.
vive la canada (and most of the rest of the world)
metalgeek
metalgeek
windows, just another pane in the glass
Don't you realize that all your pseudo-facts are completely biased by your education?
The English system is focused on the idea that humans only want to / can deal with multiples of two or three things comfortably.
Then metric wins, as there is only 1 "thing" to measure against, and 1 scale. Orthogonal design. Good.
It is much easier to imagine and understand what it means to say "I am six feet tall" than it is to say "I am one hundred and eighty three centimeters tall" or "I am one point eight meters tall"
Guess what I am 1m85cm tall and I "know" what 1m50cm tall means or 1m90cm tall. Why? because I have been raised in a metric country. 6ft. 1in doesn't mean anything to me.
The English units of volumes are done in binary (and a couple, like tablespoons, in ternary). One foot equals twelve inches and one gross equals 144 objects because these are useful numbers: lots of other numbers divide them. Humans don't do floating point arithmatic with great ease. Use a system that bumps everything up into integers. /SARCASM
Are metric-raised people superior then ? Because metric-raised handle non-integeral measures quit well, thank you. Ten has always been a stupid choice for the base of a number system.
I would gladly agree with you but for a small detail: every day numbers are expressed in base 10, which makes handling a base-10 measurement system so much easier. Base 10 is drilled into everyone's mind since their kindergarten. SARCASM and yes base 60 is so much easier, no wonder it's so easy to teach children how to read a clock !
[Comparisonn of Fahrenheit versus Celsius]
Again, you are biased by your upbringing. Metric-people have none of the problems that you attribute to the Celsius scale. And I boil water multiple times per week, I have a very good understanding of what 100C means. I have ice in my freezer and understand what 0C means. I certainly do not have a good perception of my body temperature, so 100K does not mean anything to me.
t ranks right up there with the prostate as one of the fundamental ways in which humans are "designed". We should've been built with 12 fingers instead of 10. We'd all be much better off.
Yeah right. We'd be better off without morons like you.
Reality check: metric is as easy to use (or easier) as english. You are in denial because of your education, stop deluding yourself with BS explanations of why english is "superior" or "more natural".
It's not that simple: as an aerospace engineer, I have to excuse the NASA people somewhat: the US system is entrenched in the aerospace industry. Other fields may use 9.81m/s^2 exclusively, but for us 32ft/s^2 is as common, if not more. Add to that that for some numbers, US is more convenient (e.g., speed of sound ~1000ft/s) and, even worse, that most of the aircraft instrumentation is in US/English (because of the near total domination of the world aerospace industry) and things are even more screwed up.
Having said that, I still think NASA should take a close look at their QA procs: this is not a new problem by any means...
Thank you all for pointing out my error.
The metric pocket scale has divisions only down to 0.5mm, not 0.1 mm.
Once again, thank you all for the lovely flames. My toast is properly browned.
Phil
What's with this new-fangled XXIX?
No one ever used subtraction in MY day.
XXVIIII
!
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
well france is as metric a country as you can be but when it comes to beer you can order a demi, which is half a pint, or a pinte which is a pint, or a ballon which is a quarter of pint aka 12.5 cl, which is a normal wine glass
---
Dev elpizw tipota, dev phoboumai tipota eimai lephteros http://euclidian.org
Funny, in most of Europe the Imperial System has absolutely no place at all, and people manage pretty well...
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
Yes. And isn't the English economy doing just marvelous?
Degrees make a little bit more sense, 0 when water freezes, 100 when it boils, the water part is arbitrary and 100 doesn't exactly follow the whole "10" theme but it's not too far off. If you're trying to make a standard for the ages you have to consider the amount of water in the universe, it's a rarity but it is theorized to be a needed reagent for life so maybe it makes sense. I can't help but think that absolute zero should be zero and the temperature at which helium liquifies in a vacuum should be 1, but that's just me, that stuff should be the same everywhere water doesn't always boil at 100 degrees.
Even with the oddities, it's still great. Metric won't do jack for us when we have to talk to aliens but it's amazingly simple for us to deal with. Anyhow, we missed the boat because of the new millenium coming up. Jubilee 2000 and other organizations are making a huge impact with their cause, 3rd world debt could very well be forgiven. The Euro is the new currency of Europe, just in time for 2000. We should have started metric-US-2000 and made the big push the convert over.
This is my signature. There are many signatures like it but this one is mine..
The only reason base 10 (or A, if you prefer) makes sense is because we have 10 fingers. The reason we count in base ten stems from this fact from long ago. The number one-hundred makes sense to you as an obvious marking point, because this is the rollover to the 3rd digit, and all it is is 10^2. It's just as arbitrary as using 144 or 169, which would be 100 and 100 in base 12 and base 13 respectively.
What the original poster was implying with base twelve is that you can easily divide things by two,three,four,and six. I heartily agree with this notion. That way, if you had a system where 1 bar equals 12 foo, a third of a bar is now 4 foo. Nice and simple. With base ten, one bar equals 10 foo, and a third of a bar is now 3.3333 foo, which gets tedious.
Base sixty is especially nice, because things are now divisible by 2,3,5,6,10,12,15,20, and 30. Did I miss any? Talk about flexible! That's why it's so great that a circle has 360 degrees, it is divisible by so many numbers cleanly. I think this number stems from the Babylonian calendar, which had 360 days.
In response to the gist of these systems, the English system, while ugly in many ways, does have some sense in that it's people-units. Ie, feet, hands. For a while I was a mechanic, and we used foot-pounds as units of torque. It's pretty cool, nice and quick I can get an estime that if I want to torque a lug nut to 90 foot-pounds, I can apply 90 pounds of force 1 foot down the wrench.
Of course, it is horrible inconsistent in other respects as some things arre broken into 4, some into 12, some into 60, etc. If it were consistent, like 12 inches to the foot, twelve feet to the blah, twelve blahs to the blahblah, that would be better, but now it is approaching the metric system.
Even the metric system is arbitrary, so they both their goods and bads. In general, people are not so easy to discard their old notions. A funny Simpson's quote is when the town is thinking of going metric, and grandpa simpson says, "my car gets 14 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it". And in a different one, Principal Skinner said he converted the new school clocks to metric time, and you see the clock with 10 divisions across the face. He said, "We're meeting at 89 minutes past 4 oclock" or something like that.
make world, not war
But engineers are not scientists.
What, exactly, would be the intermediate steps to reversing my optic nerve? I want to have the most optimum system I possibly can....
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Acytally it seemed it was a whole team that used the system. if it was an individual the teammates would have picked up on it and correctly switched to the perferred system english/metric/ebonics whatever. But how can the over seers of the project not notice this?
ok lets see we need 200 pounds of fuel to be stored in a 20000 liter tank. living in dilbertland i guess.
I always had problems converting the two systems, also.
And for those that are saying "The whole world uses metric, why can't YOU" well,
The whole world uses MS windows, why can't YOU- is all I got to say.
Please,
If the saving were astonomical, it would have already been done by now.
Now excuse me, I have to go pick up all those $20 bills lying around out there.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Sounds to me like metric conversion almost caused a plane crash there. Not the reverse.
The only reason we lost this spacecraft was
because we have to work on two different systems;
one *WORLDWIDE* system, and one archaic system.
Only two countries, at last look, don't use
metrics as their primary measurement system.
And guess what?? We are ONE OF THEM!!
Which makes US look pretty damn STUPID!
Why don't we go metric? It is so EASY to
figure out-- everything is a multiple of 10.
Hmmm... 5,280 feet in a mile; 3 feet in a yard;
12 inches in a foot-- Yeah, it's burned in
our engrams NOW, but do you remember the pain
in studying this?
Metrics, on the other hand, is just ONE LESS
conversion in the physical plane. Upcoming
engineers and scientists won't have to devote
so much neuron power to conversions-- they *might*
use that reserve to find some outstanding
discovery, like being able to CALCULATE A STABLE
ORBIT AROUND A PLANETARY NEIGHBOR!
Why don't we go metric? Because of cost? What
will it cost to change all of those speed limit
signs to metric (or post two measurements)? Or
change the speedometers/odometers? SO WHAT!!
Spread the change out over 10 years or so. Start
educating the babies to do metric, and let us
old farts who know English measurements die of
attrition.
Are Americans too lazy or stupid to learn a
worldwide standard? Heck, we learned the
net in amazing time.
There should be some sort of government committee
that has the power to grant exceptions to
going entirely metric. Example-- 100 yard
football fields do not translate easily to
metric.
OK, in closing we ought to GET WITH IT and
move to METRIC; the sooner the better.
Arrrghhhh!!!!!
I wasn't being sexist...I was making a point. If the US switched to the metric system who is going to reeducate everyone.
The same people to have re-educate everyone the new tax laws every year. It isn't hard. If it is, then the U.S.'s education system needs some serious re-evalutions for such an uneducated generation.
I'm an aerospace engineer who dreads using the English units. I see confusion all the time (I scare myself once in a while). It's just extra work that doesn't need to be there. The metric system is so much easier to use. What's so difficult driving at a 120kph speedlimit when the sign says 120kph. Just keep the speedometer at 120kph. Speedometer's have had kph for as long as I can remember.
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
We'll switch over to the Euro at the same time! :)
*duck*
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
You weigh 195 pounds and are 6'2" at least when talking among friends and associates but check what most forms and other information you fill out lists. My drivers licence (Ontario) puts my height at 173 (no units given) and the restrictions re mass of vehicles I can drive are in kg.
I drive x km at y km/h and purchase the gas in $/L. When I check the temperature its in degrees C. Water freezes at 0 and boils at 100. When it's hot outside it's 30-40 and when it's cold it gets down into the negatives. A cup of water is 250mL (and that's what I read on the side if I'm pouring it). If I'm cooking I turn the knob to the F measure in the book and check to see what it is in C to get an idea of how hot it is. If you give me a temperature in F or a measure of liquid in oz or gallon I'll have no idea what your talking about. Pounds feet and inches I sort of understand. Miles and mph I do a quick conversion in my head. For almost every other measure I rely entirely on the metric system.
Oh I should mention I grew up with it (born in 81) and live in a
metric country, Canada.
...but it translates exactly into 440 yards.
MoatBuilder
The posts along the lines of "if they had used metric, this never would've happened!" are absolutely idiotic. This is because even if you decide to use "metric" units, you *still* have to specify your units. I seriously doubt that all quantities in the system could or would've been specified in meters, kilogram, second, etc, units. (Even then, a conscious decision would have to be made to use these *and only these* "SI" units.) Some things would've most likely been in cm, millisecs, millivolts, etc, and one would have to know the *units* in order to do the proper conversion. One must *never* give a number for a measurement without also specifying the *units*! (Don't tell me the conversion is obvious, because software, for example, couldn't just "eyeball" the right conversion without being specifically told the *units*!) This is not the fault of the English measurement system, but of the stupid NASA project management for allowing such sloppiness as leaving the units unspecified. And by the way, saying that more people use metric, so therefore we must all adopt it, is as smart as saying that most people in the world speak Chinese, so every country should adopt Chinese as their official language. It would certainly make it easier to communicate if everyone spoke the same language. Oh, wait a minute, most countries realize this and thus encourage their citizens to learn English! Heh.
It turns out that a thousandth of an inch is an extraorinarily usefully sized increment when dealing with machined parts. (Not to mention that when you need to check clearances, a one mil shim/feeler gauge is as close as the cellophane cigarrette wrapper from the nearest smoker - try it for yourself. No idea what thickness foreign cigarrette wrappers are, but I'd chortle if they're .001"!)
.39 thousandths, and makes accurate dial calipers, etc. more difficult and expensive. This also results in a unit that does not line up well with engineering notation, where exponents are multiples of three to help avoid errors - to fix this you either need to write .001" as .0254 mm or 25.4um (micrometers) - difficult because it's notoriously difficult to type the proper "mu" on non-greek keyboards, and micrometers are both little bitty and the device you use to measure small things with. On top of that, all of these folks "think" clearances and allowances in thousandths, their suppliers provide all their engineering information primarily in English units, and parts, tools, etc. are much more available (and cheaper) in English units than in Metric. Not to mention that everything they need to hook up to is English, so they can't just switch over.
By comparison, metric units tend to be either too large or too small: A millimeter is huge (39 thousandths), a tenth of a millimeter is still way too big (3.9 thousandths) but a hundredth of a millimeter is overkill at
Most machinists and designers are proficient in both, but it's a pain. From what I've seen, the vast majority of US design engineers prefer to design in english and if the design has to go overseas for fabrication, they'll then convert and let the other guys deal with the horribly odd numbers that result.
With computers to help us, there's no real reason to HAVE to change anymore. Seriously, it's still a hassle to convert, but it's much less trouble now than it used to be. Converting would be very expensive, cause many more NASA-type foul-ups, and offer little or nothing in return. It makes about as much sense for the US to convert to Metric units as it does for the rest of the world to adopt the English language. Sure, it makes things easier, but is it worth the trouble? And the cultural issues ARE similar.
Finally, there's still a very real stigma attached to using the effete and wimpy Metric units in many US industries. I'll never forget the withering look I got a few years back when explaining to an oil tool executive that a gap was "about two millimeters" as he rejoindered, "MILLIMETERS? What the HELL?"
FWIW, I think both systems are wrong and we should base length on "Dublins" (where the Dublin would be defined as the distance between a yard and a meter at which the acceleration due to earth's gravity is exactly 10 Dublins/s^2)! THAT would make life easier for a lot of people, and is easier than changing the second, which after all is perfect at 1/86400 of a day! [grin]
Oh, and we'd have to build houses out of 5.08x10.16's (2x4's) that actually measure a nominal 4.445x8.890 (1.75x3.5)??
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
As far as the 'drag', 1/4 mile translates very neatly into 400 meters (give or take a meter or so). not a bad round number.
make world, not war
One thing I do not understand is why America cannot LEARN something new? Every generation is introduced to SI (or the Metric system) with promises that America will start using SI. Yet, have we? Instead, Americans will not go to a global standard. So, we spent some $100+ on a spacecraft. How much more does America waste because we use a measurement system that no one else uses? Frankly, I give Bill Clinton credit for the latest setback in not adopting the metric system. Remember back in '94, all highway signs were to have both miles and kilometers. Oh, no, it's too expensive and Clinton stopped the plan. Well, 5 more years have passed away. Does it have to be 20 or 100 years? America gradually slides from its greatness because Americans can't change.
Get your Kicks on Route 66
The most interesting argument I've heard about not converting to metric is that the metric system is based on an earth distance: one metre is a fraction (division of ten) from the pole to the equator. As the argument goes, this makes the metric system, albeit stanardized and easy to use, difficult to conceptualize. The English system of units is based [mostly] on human proportions (i.e., foot, yard, hand). The proposal is that English unit system is much more transportable beyond the Earth. It's much easier to conceptualize an inch, a span, a foot, a yard, or a fathom with a finger, a hand, a foot, an outstretched arm or two outstreched arms than it is to transport a fractional unit of the Earth. Just an interesting reverse perspective on the English v. Metric argument.
...only then will I believe that England has "gone metric". Actually, England looks a lot like the US; all metric in the labs and research, but conventional among the real world populace. Speed limits and distances throughout the UK are all posted in miles, yes?
0 Fahrenheit is the freezing temperature of a saturated salt solution. Now, beyond the fact that that means that if it's below 0, pouring salt on your icy walk won't help it, explain to me how *that's* a useful reference.
I agree wholeheartedly with you, and I'm an American (and I'm going to assume that there are many more Americans who would agree). I think the Americanized standard of measurement is silly. I think a lot of it was based on arbitrary lengths that were somehow agreed upon later as a definite, exact measurement. The mile, I think, was based on some race that was held back in England from some point in England to, say, the Castle of somebody (I realize this is all a bunch of nonsense to you folks, but somewhere in the back of my brain, I remember hearing this in a class I had once). I recall that we used to equate an inch with the length of our thumb (and my thumb looks longer than an inch to me), a foot was,.. well you know where that one came from, so on and so forth.
As you can see, these are all very general assumptions for units of measurement, and I don't see how anything was built if people used such a system (at least, until they standardized it). Although, I will add that I'll sometimes sit and think to myself that we're pretty neat over here because we drives so-many-miles per hour, as opposed to kilometers (they're so short!), but that's my only positive thought about our system. I think we should ditch it for the metric system; I wish we had already. I mean, it's been in use for such a long time, and we might as well get used to using it all the time. What does the "American"/English system have to offer?
Insert mind here.
How may inches are in a mile? cm in a Km?
Are idiots?
learn about how Fahrenheit was developed:
http://www.straightdope.com/class ics/a891215.html.
BTW. Celsius conversion are FAR easier the Fahrenheit.
1 calorie will heat 1 cubic centimeter of water by 1 degree celsius.
Can you do the same in Imperial?
Furthermore, water being a fairly important component of all life here on earth, using it as the accepted scale is highly logical.
It makes a kind of intuitive sense that as the temperature drops in the wintertime, water starts to go solid around 0.
Furthermore, the fact that 100 is around human body temperature is pure coincidence. The scale was expanded (see article above) only to get rid of fractions.
Lazy imperial system people are forgetting that a decimal based system can handle decimal degrees just fine. If you want more accuracy, throw some extra numbers behind the decimal point.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
since first ordered by executive order--by President Jefferson.
:) If we hadn't used some of them funny units, we'd still have the orbiter . . . [duck]
A little here, a little there. Things that have advantages convert. Things that don't might never convert--what real use is there for Celisius-speak about the temperature outside. Food is now beginning to come in metric sizes, as are some common parts. When new parts are designed, they'll usually be metric.
OTOH, maybe this all just shows how dangerous shifting to that silly system is
Oh, and don't bother trying to sell me a car with a lot of cc's or liters of displacement--I want 400 cubes . . .
Are idiots?
learn about how Fahrenheit was developed:
http://www.straightdope.com/class ics/a891215.html.
BTW. Celsius conversion are FAR easier the Fahrenheit. 1 calorie will heat 1 cubic centimeter of water by 1 degree celsius.
Can you do the same in Imperial?
Furthermore, water being a fairly important component of all life here on earth, using it as the accepted scale is highly logical. It makes a kind of intuitive sense that as the temperature drops in the wintertime, water starts to go solid around 0.
Furthermore, the fact that 100 is around human body temperature is pure coincidence. The scale was expanded (see article above) only to get rid of fractions.
Lazy imperial system people are forgetting that a decimal based system can handle decimal degrees just fine. If you want more accuracy, throw some extra numbers behind the decimal point.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
When I was studying aerospace engineering, it was drummed into us early and often that the US aerospace community only uses English units (not metric). When I saw this story, my first reaction was, "why would a US aerospace team be using metric?" Then again, I headed off in a totally different direction after I graduated (law), so I can't say from experience that real-life aerospace companies all use English units. Sometimes they lie to you in school, you know? :-)
On the whole, I think that each system has its benefits and flaws (metric is easy to figure out, English allows nifty division results). The real problem stems from the two systems not living together peacefully. Expensive error, though. Alhtough not as expensive as if it had been a manned mission.
-Steve
Democracy is a poor substitute for liberty.
Can't believe you chumps fell for this. NSA knows well
how dear you slashdoters love the space program. "Give
me freedom" you cry, "unless that freedom must be
restricted for the sake of our beloved space program".
They know a simple proposal to "force" you to switch
standards - in effect, *CENSOR* your beloved US/UK units
- would be justly shouted down. But, man, don't
fuck with that space program. So if freedom of measurement
threatens NASA, then "freedom must go" so you 'geeks'
reason.
Yes you want freedom but don't know what it is or how
to get it. Thankfully, the cause of your hysteria has
been identified as *AUTISM*. The solution is simple:
go to K-Mart and buy some underwear. In the mean time,
don't force your standards of decency, measurement, or
computer operation down my throat. Lusers.
Usually Americans don't have problems with their English units because they can boss the world around, but this time it obviously got you (and the rest of the international scientific community who sure wanted that orbiter to work right).
Come on, reason along with me. Suppose you're gonna measure length. You start with inches, go to feet, then to yards and then to miles. And they're all 'incompatible' with each other.
Then you're measuring mass. You have ounces and pounds. Please!
Metric can be arbitrary but at least it's practical.
The French designed it. The Germans started using it just after some time. Dear GOD, even the English use it!
You may boss people around but at least don't be stupid while you're doing it.
Oh, and by the way.... The term 'American' isn't quite right since you don't own the whole continent (ok, you're partially excused because you're country's called the United States of America and it's not very easy to find a nationality noun for that). At least stop calling your country America and start calling it The United States of America or The US.
Thank you.
(man, that felt kind of good!)
There's also Myanmar/Burma. I think that's about it, though.....
"A child of five could understand this! Fetch me a child of five." -Groucho Marx
for using a *different* system than the Brits. U.S. liquid measure is only about .8 that of the corresponding imperial measures. This means that every time I order a pint, I get shorted by about 4 undersized/US ounces :)
I find it incredible that a serious scientific/engineering endeavor would use "English" measurements instead of metric. The next thing you'll be telling me is that they use Windows, too! So, which lab didn't use metrics?
I'm going to refrain to point out how silly your whole argument is, not to mention the many problems with it (like the fact that human activies, such as, for instance, cooking :-), use much higher temperatures that 100F, or that winters in many places easily go below -40, so the whole crap about 0F to 100F being the effective usable range is just that -- crap -- not to mention that the explanation on how these values where selected was incorrect), but let me chime in with some information:
:-)
Living temperatures are given in tenths of Celsius in any place in the world (except the US, of course). So, that's 550 versus ~100.
(8-DCS)
Surely the title for this story should read "Mars Orbiter Lost Over IMPERIAL Conversion Error"?
I can't imagine any serious scientific or engineering outfit using imperial these days.
As for "English" units, let me assure you that the only non-metric units we English still use are for roadsigns and beer. Both of which are damn annoying, 'cos only madmen can do maths based on yard and miles, and you get more in half a litre of beer than you do in a pint. UK supermarkets will be forced to use kilogrammes next year- I can't wait!
Old people reckon they "know" Imperial units better, but when you start asking questions like "How many square miles in three quarters of an acre?" or "How many cubic inches in a pound of water?", it becomes blatantly obvious that they do not.
Whereas "How many square km in three quarters of a hectare?" or "How many cubic metres in a litre of water?" are dead easy.
Christ only knows how us lot ever managed to rule an empire using a measurement system based on half a dozen different number bases. I mean, did our ancestors chop off fingers on one hand and add them to other hands in order to count or what?
If you do maths in base ten, measure in base ten. It's a no-brainer.
--
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
yes, but what about the companies that make the bottles? you can't just change a label on a gallon jug and suddenly it's a 2 liter jug.
unless you change the label to say 3.xxxx liters......
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
I really wish we would go to metric units. In engineering school, we would be do most of our work in metric units until the senior level courses where we would start using English units most of the time since that is what we would normally see after getting out of school. I find metric units to be easier to work with in thermodynamics and heat transfer problems.
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You guys are all missing the point here. The item can be measured all the way down to 1/100 of an inch, but only 1/10 of a mm. That means the inch can be broken into finer segments ... kinda like the amplifier in Spinal Tap that went all the way to 11......
No, the Farenheit guy used body temperature for 100, 'cause that was nice and warm, and he used salted ice for 0, 'cause it was the coldest thing he could find (remember, this was eighteen something) and then he fiddled with the numbers to make them come out so that freezing point of water was a whole number. It's scary they actually wasted time teaching us this trivia in high-school chemistry.
Clearly, the British System is wrong. However, the metric system presents certain problems as well. For example: how many numbers are evenly divisible into 10? Very few indeed.
Clearly we should all be using a Base12 system. Base12 numbers are better for doing math. They just seem to hit a Universal harmonic. 12 is divisible by 1,2,3,4,6, and 12. Our time system uses Base12 numbers. There are 360 degrees in a circle. There are 12 signs in the Zodiac. There are 12 months in the year. There are 360 days in a year (at least there used to be before that asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs). The ancient Sumerians, the first traceable culture on Earth, used Base12. Many ancient religions worshiped a pantheon of 12 deities. Jesus had 12 apostles. There are 12 eggs in an egg carton. I could go on.
The Aliens are probably using Base12 too. We should just all move to Base12. That way, when they arrive to recolonize the planet, we won't have to go through this conversion rigamarole again.
Of all people, NASA should be aware of this! Those dumbfucks.
The metric system is arbitary in it's own ways, but as long as we're using base 10 numerals, 100 looks a lot rounder then 144.
144 looks strange because it is a base-twelve factor written out in base ten. Let's see, in base-twelve (assuming 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B for the digits), one hundred would be written as 84, and one hundred forty-four would be written as 100.
Oops, now upon re-reading your quote for the third time I see this is precisely what you were pointing out
The good thing about using the metric system is that it's logarithmic, and very very easy to do order-of-magnitude of calculation in your head. I wouldn't want to try that with English/American/Whateveryouwannacallit.
I'd take 10^8 meters vs. 5 miles, 2 furlongs, 14 rods, 2 yards, 1 foot, and 3 inches any day! I do, however, agree with the notion that divvying up numbers does come out nicely in some non-base-ten scenarios.
make world, not war
Ummmm, 4 also goes into sixty. I'm really not trying to nitpick, but it bother's me when people get into these arguments and don't have their numbers right.
Basically with the old money system (base 12) you could divide a bill for a meal between multiple numbers of people easily. with Metric Base 10 your are all left fighting over who ordered the extra rolls. :)
This is a very real concern, and one of the reasons I prefer the US system; it makes explicit the notion that for everyday use people do not have the same measurement needs as for scientific use; and in fact that the two conflict. For everyday measurements, humans tend much more to think in terms of reference measurements and small multiples and divisors thereof. Like a half, a third, a fourth. When we need to think about big numbers of a unit, we convert into a mix of units anyway; there's good reason that nobody goes around saying that they're 74 inches tall---they'd say they're 6 foot 2, from which we mentally think ''two inches over six feet''. This may come as a slight surprise, but for someone who knows metric natively, if they're told someone is 179 centimeters tall, they don't think ''hmm, that's about... one, two... 179 cm. Ok.'' Rather, they think more along the lines of ''ok that's about 4 cm over 175 cm'', or ''1 cm below 180'' or whatever their own mental landmark is.
The other big advantage lies not so much in the system itself as in how it's used. This is the ''better accuracy'' of the US system that you occasionally hear about; a misnomer, because metric could be used this way, it just isn't. That is, it's easier to specify my precision more precisely (got that?) if I say 3/8 or 15/32; with metric you've just got the millimetre. One could say two lines were 18 and 3/4 centimetres apart, which would implicitly mean "187.5 +- 1.25 mm"---yuck---but nobody does. They'll just say "187 mm" or "188 mm", nevermind that the lines themselves are each a millimeter wide; for scientists, it's fine to specify tolerances, but it's way cumbersome for everyday use.
Overall, I have no fundamental objections to using the metric system units. They would swoop in and fill the various niches that the US system does; for small lengths there's the centimetre instead of the inch, for bigger lengths there's the metre instead of the foot and the yard. For really big lengths there's the kilometre instead of the mile. Major temperature swings will be fives of Celsius instead of tens of Fahrenheit. The litre will replace the cup, the pint, the quart, and the gallon. People would adapt to these new reference measurements easily. What I think is silly is the faux-precision most people seem to adopt when using metric... when I'm cooking, I dump a cup of water into the mix, and I'd be perfectly happy to dump a quarter-litre in; but it's ludicrous to talk about dumping "250 millilitres" (or even better, "237 millilitres") in, as if it would affect the recipe if I dumped in 249 or 252---as if I could or would even bother to measure it that precisely. It is this madness that I hope (futilely, I suppose) to avoid when and if the US ever converts to metric.
``This, too, shall pass.'' ---Eastern proverb
People are less likely to change after they become comfortable with something. How many people stay in abusive marriages because they just can't bring themselves to make a change.
I don't think in metric outside of a chemistry lab. I weigh 205 pounds I had to fire up a calculator to figure out that I weigh 92.9kg.
I'm 6'1" tall. I had to do some calculating to narrow that down to approx 1.8 meters.
What stops politicians from "Forcing" the US to change is this. Old people are uncomfortable with learning something new. After 70 years of English measurements I don't blame them. Old people also vote more than any other demographic group. Universally people who propose things that the old people don't want don't get in office. People who do things that the old people don't want they don't stay in office.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I really wish America would one day drop its absurd "middle-endian" date format: September 30, 1999
Most of the world is big-endian (YYYY/MM/DD), Europe is mostly little-endian (DD/MM/YYYY), but is there any other country in the world that is middle-endian?
Japan is almost(?) entirely big-endian: not just dates, but names and addresses too. I really dig that.
The ISO A and B series papersizes have interesting scaling properties : A5 is half the size of A4, which is half the size of A3, and the ratios of the sides are identical. (and the long side of an A5 is the same length as the short side of an A4).
This means scaling things is really easy.
Thanks, I just knew I would miss one of them! :-) I actually wrote out the prime-factorization, but just missed one of the combinations of factors.
make world, not war
AMEN! Damn euro fucks thinking they can impose their god damn metric system without representation! No measurementation with representation!
"So Bob, how many centimeters are there in an inch anyway?"
"Geez, I don't know. 'round 3, I guess."
"Okay then. 3 it is."
:)
Under Article I, section 8, the Congress has the authority to "fix the Standard of Weights and Measures." In 1866 the U.S. Congress passed a law establishing the legality of the metric system in the United States. (No other system of measurements has been established by the Congress.) We were one of the original 17 signatories to the Treaty of the Meter in 1875. In 1893, the metric measurement standards were adopted as the fundamental standards for length and mass in the United States. Congress passed the Metric Coversion Act in 1975. The Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act Of 1988 designated the metric system as the "preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce," and required that all federal agencies use the metric system by 1992.
And it isn't a problem of corporations. GM and Ford both use metric (theoretically) exclusively internally. When gasoline companies tried to switch to liters, consumers rejected it. Multinational buisnesses have been major backers of metric conversion.
So, given that we are already legally metric, how are we going to do this 2-5 year conversion you speak of? Six months in jail for small buisnessmen using Customary units? $100 fine per incident of civilians calling themselves 5'10"? Life imprisonment without parole for tecahing you child ounce-to-pound conversions?
Plus, 99% of the US would be confused...and what for?
What for?!? Confusing stupid people is its own reward.
You'll learn differently if you ever get a job in aerospace. The particular system of measurement you're using isn't important; what is important is that everyone uses the same one. Why do you assume that the metric system was the one that was "supposed" to be used? I work for Lockheed Martin, in a military space program. For orbital analysis, spacecraft telemetry, and every other measurement pertaining to flight ops, both the contractors and customer personnel use English measurements, with no confusion whatsoever. The metric system simply is not the darling of real engineers the way it is of the academicians. The fact is that everyone uses the system they are most comfortable with, be that English or metric. I see no evidence that one is inherently better than the other in all respects, other rants in this discussion notwithstanding.
It is evident that you have been brainwashed by your deficient education. I mean, really! What possible justification could there have been for neglecting to teach you about the system of measurement commonly used where your own country? That's "truly unthinkable idiocy" if I've ever heard it.
The story said the confusion was between Lockheed Martin and JPL...
The story said nothing of the sort. It did not identify where the affiliation of the two teams lay, nor did it identify which team had final responsibility for verifying the commands before they were sent, nor did it state what the acutal measurement standards for the program were, assuming that explicit standards exist. The story actually said the "spacecraft team in Colorado and the mission navigation team in California" were involved. For all we know at this point, both teams work directly for JPL. Lockheed Martin is the "industrial partner", which in this case simply means that they built the thing. As far as I can tell, they are not involved in flying it.
And the brethren went away edified.
That sounds typical. A bunch of eggheaded scientists trying to live in their own little world. Privatize the bunch. Do away with tenure.
I think \ is much harder to say than /, as well.
make world, not war
An engineer using British Imperial measurements does not deserve to leave.
:)
Not under his own power, at least...
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
Any particular reason why you didn't say your father, grandfather or beer buddy?
It sure as hell sounded sexist to me...
what the hell is up with you yanks, I mean yes I understand it would be hard for a nation whose average Jo can legaly buy a handgun to concive doing something intelligent like converting to a system used by the rest of the planet, but surely you must be able to see the cost of not , your whole imperial system (Ironic knowing the fact that you were the first colony to break away anyhow) is even now offical based on Metric standards so in other words you make life hard for yourselves by having to do everything twice.
As Abe Simpson once said:
"The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it."
The point is that it's stupid to try to fit everything onto one scale, because different tasks have different "convenient" numbers associated with them. A parsec is intrinsically useful as a unit of distance, owing to the nature of how far the earth is from the sun and some simple mathematics. The gravitational field at the surface of the earth is a certain value independent of how convenient a parsec is as a unit of distance. Atmospheric pressure at the surface of the earth is what it is independent of the above. Either you do your calculations in multiples of these units or you end up having to do them relative to some funny constant in your standard system.
As for the celsius scale, you do boil water, but that's beside the point. Most of your daily life (weather) with the celsius scale is dealing with the thirty degrees above and below zero. There are two problems with this: One, you have to deal with negative temperature values in normal situations (instead of extreme situations) and two, each degree of celsius is 5/9 of a degree Fahrenheit. This means to get the same amount of accuracy, you're throwing decimals around. It's unnecessary. And you still haven't eliminated the fact that to get to the really important (scientific) constant, absolute zero, you have to deal with an additional ~273.15 degrees. You can't win, so resign yourself to using one universal but often innappropriate scale for everything, or use lots of appropriate but often incompatible scales on an individual basis. For most science, the former is a better bet. For most daily activities, the latter is a better bet.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
6 has only one less factor than 12, and that factor happens to be 6 itself. Same is true when comparing 30 and 60. A prime factorization of 12 and 60 differs from that of 6 and 30 only in that two appears twice. Looking at it this way it seems like 6 and 30 would be the optimal choices for a base rather than 12 and 60. But alas, I can already see the answer to my own question. People more frequently divide things by small numbers than by larger ones. This means dividing by 4 is important. In fact, division by 2 and 4 are so common that we even have special names for this ("half" and "quarter") and include special symbols to represent 1/2 and 1/4 in some character sets (both on computers and the older technology of typewriters). Division by 5 happens much less often than division by four even though our chosen base 10 facilities division by 5 more easily than 4. So the extra prime factor of 2 in base 12 and base 60 makes sense after all.
I agree that it is unfortunate that we don't have 12 fingers. But I do not agree with your defense of imperial units. A system similar to the metric system built on top of a base 12 number system would be great. Overcoming the "installed base" to transition from imperial to metric has been difficult enough (and is still far from complete). Changing to base 12 would be many times more difficult. Whether it would be worth it in the long run is hard to say. The inifficiency of base 10 compared to base 12 isn't big. 10 certainly isn't the worst choice (imagine having a prime number as a base, like 7, 11, or 13). And for those intimately familiar with it, it is really very easy to deal with. Sure 12 is better, but seriously, would you even notice the greater ease when base 10 is so easy to deal with already? On the other hand, multiply that slight inefficency by 6 billion people and project that who knows how many generations into the future and it can still add up to a lot of wasted brainpower.
---
vilvoy
in my science class last year we used metric for just about everything(8th grade). I think it's about time the gov upgrade to metric. I also find it funny that England invented the English measurement system, and they have already changed to metric, leaving us in the dust. On another thought it sure is nice computers don't have stupid numbering systems. Like "my computer runs at 500 speeding hoarses" and "i have 160 handfuls of ram".
char *stupidsig = "this is my dumb sig";
Hey, good stuff there... That's a bookmark for sure. :)
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
Personally, I think there's a certain elegance to the way that you get 2363 spleenwarts to every 5 zingoids. You just don't get that with the boring old metric system.
Andrew Lankford
Oh yes, things were so much better when they had all that additional money to spend on reviews and program management. You know, back when they created the Hubble Space Telescope and the Galileo antenna.
Okay, sorry. Clearly there should be a system in place to ensure the units from contractors are clearly specified and understood. Bet there already is, actually. But the point is that adding layers of reviews and management does not have any measureable effect on success rate.
The real advantage of better/faster/cheaper is that even though your failure rate is the same, you don't lose so much each time you lose a spacecraft. So you're not tempted to spend all that money on reviews and procedures that don't actually help.
On the other hand, I happen to know that there are in fact parts of certain space agencies that could use *more* formality and discipline. (cough)CVS!(cough).
Cnn has an article on this. The title is extremely revealing of US biases. Notice it's titled "Metric mishap caused loss of NASA orbiter" and not "English System mishap caused loss of NASA orbiter", as if the problem were caused by the use of the metric system -- in reality, the latter title would have been more appropriate.
From what I've heard, the real reason for the Fahrenheit's 0 being where it is has nothing to do with salted ice. The guy (I assume his name was Fahrenheit) who invented the system didn't like negative numbers, so he defined 0 degrees as "colder than it usually is in Denmark". Maybe after that he went and found some way to define "colder than it usually is in Denmark" and salted ice did the trick.
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Yeah right. and who was first in space??? huhe!???!?!!?!?!?!?!? who has the last laff now.
Moron!
How much does USA give NASA in funding? $10billion, thats nothing, chicken feed, you guys are not serious at all. $10billion is what USA spends on the ARMY in 14days.
ofcourse blowing up IRAQ for $55 billion is money well spent.
Put $50b/yaer into nasa and then itwill shine.
Metric sucks??? What are you talking about? Whole number fractions have no place in society today. Decimals make much more sense in all calculation methods and base 10 is the best choice if you want things to divide evenly. 8?? You've got some strange notions...
Just wait till the earth orbit changes and we will get 26hrs/day or something. All clocks will be useless.
Please don't forget the rest of the world...
Seriously, I think it's not impossible at all to do the conversion, even in the US. It has happened before, in all times. The metric system didn't spread around the world in a night. Everywhere where there has been a change in measurements there have been protests. Loud, painful, and even sometimes riots.
But it always gets to the point where people start getting used to it. When they realize that it hasn't changed the world around them (physically), that using the new measurements work, and most important of all, they get a grip of how much the new measurements are, the complaints from ordinary people about the change will disappear.
When the average person understands that he is 175 cm tall and hence can get some clue about other heights in the metric system from that, and that his car can speed up to 210 km/h, and that other cars that are slower than his would speed up to some speed lower than that, he would begin to understand. It's all about people getting a grip of what the common limits, measurements and distances they use in their everyday life look like in the metric system. Once they've come to that point, the translation goes much quicker.
A (good?) proposal would hence to make people get cheap, simple translation/conversion utilities, so that they can start getting familiar with metric values, and at the same time enforce the use of metric systems in law.
The thing about conversion utilities is happening in many European countries as we speak. We have to get used to a new currency, the Euro, and even before people have their new money in their hands they can measure what their salary would be and what that bottle of cola would cost.
I don't think the "learning" of metric systems in school would be necessary to make the conversion possible. That would just mean that the US should have to wait 70 years or something like that from now before a conversion, when all of the population has learned the metric system from school... Such a time perspective is rediciolus, if you ask me. ;)
A change would have to be quick and as painless as possible. A "smooth" transition, where both systems would cooexist just causes pain, frustration and accidents like the above mentioned, just more commonly and in everyday life and in every situation, for a long period of time. Surely a quick conversion would also cause pain, but I'd prefer the quicker pain...
It could take years or decades for people to get used to a new measurement system in every aspect in the world around them, but I think that it sure would be worth it.
Help people getting used to the new system by giving them tools for conversion (or sell them cheap). Start conversion of public systems, regulations, declarations, government information and so on. It has to start with a law. I know that most Americans hate laws and regulations, but sorry folks, some things has to start with a law so that they can ever happen, and I think that this is definately such a thing.
So start it! Can't we use a global Slashdot effect to convince the US politicians? ;-)
GNU/Linux. The Freshmaker.
The problem is that we have been able to choose as a society not to change to SI in everyday measurement, because we are not only a huge market, but the world's dominant market -- we can force producers in other countries to acccomodate our own crochets, like preferring gallons and feet and pounds. There is no political consensus at this point on legally forcing conversion of everyday measurement to be SI only, and there will not be until there is some sort of social or economic crisis that forces most Americans, or at least American business leaders, to want it.
If the US switches to the metric system, the kids would have a much easier time to learn math and science. Why do people always complain that Amrican kids are not interested in math and science? Simple, the metric system is just not intuitive to them.
Look at the stock market: they still use things like 1/32 and 3/16, it's just ridiculous. When you see a stock price change from 7/32 to 3/16, it's not even instantly clear if the stock has gone up or down!
When people use the metric system, science and math just become so much more intutive. Similarly, people brought up with the octal or hexadecimal system would be great computer scientists. I wished we would all use a hexadecimal system when I tried to learn transforming a decimal floating point number to binary!
Slashdot sucks
The "advantages" of the metric system are not really all that useful. Yeah, sure, we all know 100 cm to the meter, 1000 meters to the km... but the important question is "who cares?" I personally have NEVER had to convert between inches and miles, or feet and miles for that matter. They are simply used for different things. And base 10 really is so arbitrary anyway... I'm partial to base 16, but there are good arguments for both 12 and 60, and all of them are better than 10.
;-)
Centigrade is useless too -- who cares what temperature water boils at for most things anyway? I just put it on the stove and when it bubbles I add the pasta.
There is no reason for people to use the rigid base 10 system, when we can easily specify a third of a foot, or a quarter inch. For me, anyway, thirds and quarters are easier to multiply and divide in my head -- there is almost no chance of being off by an order of magnitude. I can instantly tell you there are 80 quarters in $20.00, but I would think twice before saying that's 200 dimes. Again though, when was the last time you needed to know how many quarters or dimes in $20.00?
Granted, this may not apply for scientific purposes where it is necessary to convert between different types of units quickly, but still... what self respecting engineer doesn't carry an HP48 with him at all times?
My 20 m$ worth.
Just fill the bottles part way!
If you don't believe me go ahead and call an applications engineer at Starrett and ask them what reason their customers give most often.
Being lazy and stupid?
"Lost probe was model of NASA's faster, cheaper space missions"
Here's the link to the story.
I am a firm supporter of the faster, cheaper, and better program. Imagine sending hundreds or thousands of different probes throughout the cosmos instead of a couple of ultra-expensive manned missions to Mars just so we can strut around the surface, pat ourselves on the back, plant a flag in the dirt, and go home. Scientific discovery should be the driving force behind our space missions, not nationalistic bravado.
You, my brother, are Da Man !!!!!!!!!
US will convert to the metric system when Europe wins another Ryder Cup. You got it...when hell freezes over.
Brought to you by someone with too much time on his hands and the letter Q.
a pretty girl who naked is
is worth a million statues
Have the folks on segfault.org heard this one? They are always obsessing about girls naked and petrified.
It can't be that hard, All the drug dealers and junkies have learned how to use it!
100% of the science end is metric and has been for decades. NASA itself is metric. It was Lockheed Martin, the major contractor which wasn't.
So where are we going to get all the money to go metric?
What are you talking about? All the money is already metric. We have 100 cents in a dollar, and use base ten to count it, don't we?
:P
If you want to spend $500+ and get a glass ruler that comes with a magnifying glass, there are microrules that have 1/1000 inch and 0.025 mm graduations, in which case the metric graduations are a hair finer. But I wouldn't carry one of these in my pocket! (See page 1788 of the McMaster-Carr catalog.
*** Work like a king, command like a slave, create like a dog.
There's been a lot of talk here about scientists using the metric system--that's only sort of true. At least in physics, there are those who insist on SI units (Systeme International, e.g. meter,kilogram,Kelvin), some who hang on to CGS (centimeter,gram) units, and a bunch of other unrelated units that are incredibly useful.
What is called the metric system seems to mash together the SI and CGS units, plus the celsius temperature scale and the use of liters for volume. In order to get the easy conversions to work right, you have to stick to either CGS or SI else powers of ten end up missing. The celsius scale (my least favorite of the metric units), by the way, doesn't give any of the easy conversion advantages that the rest of the metric units has; its thermodynamically irrelevant. The celsius scale doesn't work for equations (e.g. PV=nRT) involving temperature. The SI unit of temperature, of course, is the Kelvin.
I'm not aware of any weather forecasts, anywhere, that use Kelvin. I also think kilowatt-hour is in widespread use worldwide for electric power, even though Joule would be the strict SI unit. Likewise kilometers per hour instead of meters per second.
Units really get hairy in electrodynamics. Experimental physicists work with SI units almost exclusively, as that's what lab equipment is made in. Except that magnetic fields are sometimes measured in gauss instead of Tesla. Theorists, on the other hand, often use CGS because the calculations are more elegant. But everyone uses liter, even though its not really SI.
Torr, the unit of pressure, is still in widespread use (1 torr = 1 mm of mercury), although bar and millibar are creeping in. Angstroms are in widespread use and likely always will be.
Physicists would be lost without the electron volt (1eV=1.602e-19 Joule). Atomic mass units (amu), astronomical units (au=Earth-sun distance), light-years, and parsecs are similarly very useful and in widespread use. Furthermore, if you look at graphs in physics articles, you'll often find the raw quantities multiplied or divided by constants such as the Bohr magneton, Planck's constant, or the Boltzmann constant.
By far the most useful way to state the speed of light is one foot per nanosecond. Likewise, the speed of sound in air is roughly one foot per millisecond.
The choice between Kelvin and Celsius is mostly a matter of convenience. Chemists use Celsius almost exclusively, physicists--especially those working at low temperatures or with thermodynamics--use Kelvin.
The point of all this is that practicing scientists use units that are appropriate to the problem. I think we should be comfortable in a variety of units and be able to convert when necessary. I'm perfectly happy with camera lenses in millimeters, monitors in inches, the weather in Farenheit, my experiment in Kelvin, cars in horsepower, light bulbs in watts, and everything else in units that makes the quantity measured easier to think about.
*** Work like a king, command like a slave, create like a dog.
You've scratched just the surface of the cost of "going metric". A bunch of schoolteachers is the cheap part of it.
Billions of dollars of tooling and equipment would have to be changed. In order to make a bunch of scientists and foreigners happy.
I'm sorry. Why should the US economy go into the tank because a bunch of Europeans discovered they have ten fingers and decided to rip their infrastructure to hell?
Responding to a troll with a bigger troll isn't a great policy. No other space agency in the world can get itself a cool billion dollars to play with. That's what makes the difference, not any degree of know-how.
I can see that many people here are lost with proper physical units. Instead of metric system we should talk about SI -system. A "meter" is only one unit in SI-system. Meter was properly defined in 1983 in CGPM (Conference Generale des Poids et Mesures). One meter is that length which light travels in vacuum in the time interval 1/299792458 seconds. Second is defined to be certain number of Cesium-133 atom's cycling periods.. SI-units are good because they bind together the physical properties of known universe in sensible way. Maybe the hardest unit to define is the unit of mass (kilogram). It is defined with a prototype mass held some where (don't ask). About the so-called english units (that they also use in USA)... They're highly impracticable since they don't scale with each other. Try to compare cubic feet and a gallon. Also converting feet to inches is no way a simple thing. Since we have omitted 10-based number system in our daily lives, the SI-system has defined prefixes (mega,giga,micro) to be powers of 10. It's trivial to convert kilometer into meters since the kilo only implies factor of 1000. Converting miles into inches is difficult. Converting masses in SI-system is simple, 1 kilogram is 1000 grams..
Actually, those are really 2-liter milk jugs and 1-liter milk cartons. They just have print on them as to the non-metric sizing.
Just switch em over and print dual measures. Forget about produce and gas - those are the only things people flip out over - but do everything else.
Will in Seattle
I agree. No way does it cost that much! Canada managed to do it quite nicely in the seventies, and do you know why? The govt printed a ton of booklets, and pamphlets. I still have one helpful cooking one, that explain that a quarter cup of butter was about two finger widths :-) not to mention passing out free measuring spoons :-) Everyone else did it handily. And are we metric nations not better for it? Why be one of only four countries (the other three are small island nations) to use Imperial and get with the program!
It takes two generations to convert minds to metric. As for petrol, who cares? When I buy my gasoline, I fill up the tank or buy $20 worth of it. How many Imperial (or US) gallons, pints or liters I get is pretty much irrelevant.
And on that little amount we have the most extensive space exploration program ever done by any nation.
Go ack to your smelly unwashed wool sweaters frenchie.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
(300 Mm/s = 300*10^6 m/s = 300*1000000 m/s = 300 000 000 m/s, but you should already know that)
GNU/Linux. The Freshmaker.
Of course the other way around this problem is to change our number base. For instance, we could do everything in base 12, and to hell with the rest of the world (then we get all the magnitude issues taken care of). The French, with their brand new prime meridian, would applaud this sort of bold forward thinking!
METRIC!!! The only way to go!
What complete hogwash. And the distance from the tip of my nose (quite a nice large one I might add) to the tips of my finger should be a yard. Royal measurements should have been abandoned long ago due to their intrinsically irrational basis. Your argument amounted to nothing more than "because it just feels better." While base 12 or 60 might work better mathematically, let us all at least admit that segmenting things out to tens, while awkward to say some things, at least can be figured out more intuitively. If I know the root words I can figure out the number. What is it about the word "foot" or "yard" that donotes distance any more than "bleem" and "flurb" do?
However, you darn sure know how long 10 centimeters are, don't you? Tell me I need 1 liter of water but I have to use a mililiter spoon to measure and I can tell you exactly how many spoons to fill. I couldn't even begin to tell you how many cups it takes to make a gallon. If it involves memorization to learn and cannot be "intuited" then it is a waste of time.
To say that we are lazy is true. I believe that humans are inherently lazy which is why they wont switch. I am an American and I believe we are probably more lazy than most become we expect to be given things that we demand due to some God given right. We might deserve it, but not because we just "ought" to and not because we are Americans. If we deserve color TVs and microwaves and decent service in restaurant then so do the "lesser" folks you sneer at when they come to our country. Especially those funny foreigners who measure things logically.
One of us needs to smoke a little more...why thank you!
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Twisted Little Gnome - The Podcasting Network http://www.twistedlittlegnome.com
...metric. I'm sorry, but its fricking true.
;)
:)
ESPECIALLY for anything going on outside our planet. Metric works very well with scientific notation, which is a near must when dealing with astronomical values. Try typing in 80 zeros
I'm a red blooded american, but for my experience with research, it rings true.
Fire the fool[s] who used english. **Very** few advanced fields can justify using english! Architecture is the only widespead advanced trade I can pull of the top of my head. Yards of all things...this almost smells of Spook BS(TM). Maybe Mr. Probe took some images on shit on mars that everyman shouldn't be seeing.
It doesn't take a ROCKET SCIENTIST to figure all that out.
Anonymous Coward, get it?
Anonymous Coward, get it?
Not bad spelling, bad typing
I work in Engineering in the US and we work
almost entirely in the metric system. We have
to do conversion to the brits system for the
general population who is too dumb to be
able to accept to get out of middle ages and
use a modern measuring system.
Whatever happened with Nasa shows the ridicule
of the whole thing. It is clear in all of our
contracts with the US government that we deal
strictly in metric. For a contractor to use
the wrong system of measurement in a contract
is purely idiotic and heads should roll.
The funny thing is that the USA was one of the
first to sign the switch to the metric system
last century along with France.
Since congress listens too much to idiots the
complete adoption may take another century.
Don't forget french fries and french dressing. They go great together too.
Brought to you by someone with too much time on his hands and the letter Q.
The basic reasons are:
- maintaining two systems is costly and an unnecessary source of errors
- working together on international projects is easier if people use one system
and you won't see the whole world go to 'imperial' units.
So assuming this, the argument for the US to switch to the metric system as soon as possible is:
it saves money, since switching won't become cheaper, and at the moment the US are maintaining an obsolete measurement system.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
This pretty much sums up the fallacy of the metric proponents.
Their goal is to bash down the real world into their grand vision of perfection. Reality is made up of many fundamental values that don't evenly divide into each other. No calendar (metric or otherwise) can magically fix the FACT that a year simply cannot be evenly divided by the day. There is no fundamental upper constant for temperature (0 Kelvin is nice on one end, but for the other end ???) PI will never fit well into any integer base counting system (be it 10 or 60 or 12 or whatever).
But metric proponents see their system as the One True measuring System. The System is Right! The System is good! We must convince heretics of our One True Way! Any component of reality that can't be reconciled is looked at with gritted teeth as the above poster demonstrates. It would be changed if possible, but stands as a monument to the simple truth that "one size does not fit all".
In fact, the metric system is full of arbitrary constants. Celsius (or is it centigrade?) is no better than Farenheight. The boiling and freezing points of water aren't fundamental constants of the universe. And the meter? The pole to the equator through Paris divided into 10 million parts?! WTF is that? Such a distance changes every second with erosion and rain, and tides and whatnot! Wildly inaccurate! Now the meter is defined by some number of wavelengths of light which is reproducible, but the "some number" was chosen to keep the meter close to the original arbritrary definition. The foot can also be described as x wavelengths of light. Does that make the foot a good measurement now? There's no fundamental quality to length here.
Metrics only claim to fame is base 10 units. Well, millifeet and kilofeet would exhibit that same benefit without the need to create a new unit, would they not? Why didn't we standardize on that? The decision seems almost based on pride and political motives so that "we" can prevail over "they".
Metric zealots need to realize that their system is as arbitrary an any other and possess no unique synchronization with universal karma. It's just a totally arbitrary system like all the others.
Metric zealots are also a lot like the computer-geeks. Upgrade they say! The new system is better. Well that might have some merit to it, but so much of history has already been recorded in other units. And backward compatibility, which makes the upgrade-heads wince, is a fact of life. Upgrades result in nasty messes. This is why when the foot was redefined to be based on the meter (a mistake, IMO), we ended up with a horrible kluge, namely "the foot" and "the surveyor's foot" becuase millions of building and structure blueprints were built on the old measurement and must continue to be accurately dealt with and maintained into the future. How many days ago was January 1, 1650? Are you sure? There's that nasty calendar switch in there (see September 1752) that has to be taken into account, along with leap days, and leap seconds. The names of the months themselves bespeak of earlier kluging (SEPTember, OCTober,NOVember, DECember are Latin prefixes for 7, 8, 9, and 10, yes? Yet these are our 9, 10, 11, and 12th months!) And all this because we won't accept having a year with a non-integral number of days.....
The only thing the world needs is to agree on one measuring system. Any measuring system would work as well as any other for this task. Metric, is looking to fill this task, but has only done so by random chance, and by various gov't fiats, not because of any imagined, god-like, universal constant based nature inherent to the metric system itself.
In the end, I support metric, because switching to it will trouble fewer people than switching to something else at this point. That's the only reason to support metric today.
Good day people.
Yep. So now you've introduced a new +/- 20% tolerance slop in anything that is designed anywhere. Wonderful. I can't wait to see what kind of hard drives your "system" can manage to build. Spin one up and watch it shake over the wobbly table it's sitting on.
Dumb, really dumb.
also are scared of Kelvin
I like Centegrade tempeture. I like Kelvin too. But what I can't wait for is a metric system of time.
Kelvin tempeture is even better. Today it is about 270 K outside. God I hate winter in september.
--
Y2K is a one time cost, too
Apples and Oranges.
I'd love to see us go metric, but I think we're about 200 years too late to make a conversion without destroying the economy.
So what you are saying is that all the other countries in the world (I think there are one or two minor exceptions) managed it but we can't?
The UK and Canada switched in the 60's and 70's...when we were supposed to...hardly 200 years ago. The treaty of the metre was only signed in 1875. Again...not 200 years ago. It wasn't even standardized to SI until 1960! I sugest you read this for a history of metric.
Well, NASA has just been inconvenienced to the tune of several million dollars...
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
There is a real and compelling reason why we have not gone metric -- It is possible to verify measurements down to 1/100 inch with a pocket scale, but only to 1/10 mm. Thus, a shop worker can make finer adjustments on-the-fly with the English system than with the metric system.
Umm... Let's think about this for one moment. 1 inch = 2.54 cm, 2.54 cm = 254 mm.
1/100 of an inch is 2.54 mm. You say that a pocket scale can measure to 1/10 of a mm. I believe this is a typo, and you mean 1/10 of a cm.
Even so, 1/10 of a centimetre is 1 millimetre.
1/100 of an inch is 2.54 millimetres.
Oops?
------
If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
http://nodis.hq.nasa.gov/Library/Directives/NAS
JPL IS privatized. JPL employees are NOT Government employees. They are employees of the California Institute of Technology, a private university. In JPL's Prime Contract with NASA, JPL business has to be at least 80 percent NASA business.
Though one of my pet peeves with the signs is that while they ARE metric, they are actually afterthought conversions from US units. An example street speedlimit sign says:24 kph (15 mph). (Converted metric units from "round" US units)
--Carlos V.
It should have been 1/1000 of an inch which is smaller than 0.1 mm. It sounds stupid, but this same fact has been told to me by some more experienced scientists when I was working for an astronomy lab a long time ago. The true issue is the technological capabilities of common milling machines and other such kinds of mechanical devices. The reality is that 1/1000 of an inch is just the proper units where the uncertainty in manufacturing turns out to be. 0.1 millimeters is too crude, though I don't really see why they don't go to five hundredths of centimeters instaed of thousandths of an inch. But in any case, celestial mechanics and rocketry with anything other than standard metric units is VERY STUPID. Note this was a Lockheed fault, not a NASA fault, except for not catching them. Good plug for Strongly Type-checked languages, e.g. Eiffel!!! ;)
And herein lies the problem with America... It's a body of "ME" people. Thinking nothing other than their OWN convenience, their OWN financial gain and status.
We're eager to see you pony up YOUR money to pay for our part of it. Because, we're not particularly inconvenienced. You are the one who seems to be.
I was under the impression that twelve would be divisable by 1,2,4,4,6 even under base12,base16, or base60.
I don't understand your point.
Ideology is for ideots.
Sigh. This is what happens when you let microsofties post...
Wow! You really got some metric people mad, guess they're really passionate about their units of measurement. I personally don't care whether i have to use the metric or english or whatever, seems all pretty arbitrary, except when it comes to the temperature scale. Outside of a chemistry class i have yet to find that the boiling point of water is easier to deal with at 100' then it is at 212', i don't usually have to make to many calculations to boil something it just sort of happens. When you have a range of degrees from 32-212 it gives you finer degree of control in setting your climate controls then 0-100. I like the room to be around 72'F, to get that same temperature in C i would have to resort to some fractional degree, making it tedious to get the temperature just right. So i don't know if your whole argument about non-metric units being more human friendly is correct, but i believe the Fahrenheit system is more human-centric because a change in 1'F is about as subtle a temperature change that a human can feel.
It wasn't until i was well into being a teenager that i taught myself all the non-metric units--because in school all that was ever taught was metric (and yes, i did go to school in the US). How the hell do you get to design flights for spacecraft and not know that you're supposed to use metric units?!!?! This is just bizarre, truly unthinkable idiocy. If that was my project i had just pumped years into i would be thinking lawsuit, heads should literally roll over something like this. The story said the confusion was between Lockheed Martin and JPL, anybody know who the stupid (i mean guilty...) party is? My guess is it would be Lockheed Martin, but you never know...
As long as I can occasionally get three sheets to the wind, I'll be happy ;)
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
But just you wait. A good conspiracy takes over the world in small steps.
Once those points on the metric agenda are complete, then next up would be
In Engineering field, METRIC MAKES SENSE .
/. community tries to justify use of English system even in Engineering field. But fact of life in US engineering society is that the Metric is gaining significant grounds.
I was raised in metric world.
It is quite amusing to see many people even in
When I visit local (Yes, I live in US now) customers to do presentation on our products, they sometimes like to be explained in Metric. Honestly, there were some strange occasions. I tried to explain things in mil (1/1000th of inch) then customers asked me to convert them into micron and mm.
Yes I have to admit that when I visited Auto industries in D---, those Engineers, though with Ph.D., asked everything in English system. Maybe that's why the can not sell cars abroad well (I drive 100% AMERICAN CAR, please, no flame.) My observation is that no matter how well US cars are made recently, incompatibility hurts its access to the world market.
Let's take a look at semiconductor industries. It was 8 inch wafers but now people are talking 300 mm wafer as next generation. Reference to 12 inch wafer is significant decline. You will be surprised how many industrial equipments in those US fabs are using Metric system (sometimes implicitly).
I also remember in my Grad school days that my fellow ChemE student (US born) telling me that he is much comfortable using Pascal (Pa) than pounds per square inch (psi) for some engineering calculation. I do not blame him. (Try converting from psi to another English unit is the nightmare.
I do understand feeling towards English system for day-to-day units. Basically, you like what you are grown up with. Humans are conservative, or lazy animal. For you 6 foot something tall makes sense. But for me 170 cm is my height. I have to check my drivers license to know my English unit height (based on observation of California DMV official).
Also remember, so many Engineering graduate students in US are foreign educated. Those foreign educated Grad student have very little sympathy for English system. Consequently, they will influence all of the US Engineer in the long run. This is another factor for Metric invasion.
Anyway, admit it. In Engineering field, METRIC MAKES SENSE .
I know if you want to talk to your machine shop, you have to tell them in English system. But most of the engineering work has to be in Metric to be efficient. That's my opinion.
Some history lesson:
There was forced conversion to Metric system under American occupation with severe penalty in
Japan 50 years ago. Thanks to those Americans! Now all Japanese Engineer does not need to waist
their time with traditional units.
To get American to convert completely to Metric, maybe we need Martian invasion , since
there will not be Russian invasion. Ha, ha, ha,... Joking.
Sounds to me like bone-headed lack of metric conversion almost caused a plane crash there. Isn't that the reverse?
Thank you. I am getting sick of everyone that is so pro-metric. Metric makes sense with our number system, but necessarily the way we think. We think in terms of fourths and thirds, and they are better divisors anyway. I like the merits of the system that developed from use -- not just from one man. Most of the time I don't think, "That's would be just fine; if only it were a tenth that size." 3/4, 1/2, 2/3 -- They are natural. The best answer would be to change our number system to base 12 -- think about all the advantages 12 has. That won't happen, and neither will the American's change to the metric system.
Guess what? I got a fever! And the only prescription.. is more cowbell!
The slashdot headline "Metric conversion error" proves that it is indeed Metric which messed things up. (If it had been problem with English units, the headline would have been read "English units conversion error.")
Saying we lost a spacecraft because NASA can't convert units is just plain absurd. We've lost so many Mars missions this must be a cover up for something that's happening or something we've found out there.
Saying NASA can't convert between Metric and English units is like saying the CIA has old, out-of-date maps. Uh, oh... wait
----
Life if possible, art at any cost.
I think you do Americans a disservice. Most of them aren't as stupid, ignorant and pig-headed as you portray them.
Get this:
My Jeep Grand Cherokee not only has a US/metric speedo and fuel computer, when you switch the system to metric it changes your mileage computer, trip odometer, outside temperature, service reminder mileage and (get ready) the digital temperature of the climate controls.. When I went to Montreal for the Jazzfest last 4th of July weekend, we had a ceremonial 'switching-of-the-systems' at the border.. Threw me off for a little while, but once I figured out how to dial '22' into the climate control and that idle drives the efficiency computer towards an asymptote of 0 I was fine.
_And_ it can be set to display controls in Deutsch, Espanol, Francais, and Italiano..
Now all Jeep needs to do is opensource the code for all those doodads, so I can add features like tilt side mirrors when in Reverse, screensavers for the overhead console, Valet mode, etc...
The Amis should use the units everyone does in the world! Deserves them right!
Yep, that's why we're the sole superpower on the planet. Ya wanny play economic ball with us? You'll do it our way; on our terms. If not, you get to be another cool third world country that wouldn't change the world if it dropped off the face of the earth.
We're arrogant because we can be; because we're right; and because we both know it.
I wish I got paid to forget to convert units. Unfortunately I have to settle to do that for free
in a high school physics class. My question is how stupid can you be to forget a simple procedure like that, when as a engineer you have had "don't forget to convert to metric units" pound into your skull year after year....even a high school student wouldn't forget to do that....
According to the bbc,
"separate review committees have already been formed to investigate the loss of Mars Climate Orbiter - the internal JPL peer group and a special review board of JPL and outside experts. An independent Nasa failure review board will be formed shortly. "
Of course, they may well come to the reasonable conclusion: use only metric measurements. But has anyone thought about how a ridiculously bureaucratic organisation such as NASA can implement these changes before the sun runs out of fuel? A compromise solution may be necessary, which is probably how they got into this sort of trouble in the first place.
Actually, the meter was originally defined as 1/4e7 of the distance of a great circle around the earth. i.e. the circumference of the earth is 40,000,000 meters. The standard for the meter was a metal bar with two marks on it for a long time. After that, the standard was a certain multiple of a wavelength of the emission of a specific gas. The latest definition is based on the specific distance traveled by light in a vacuum. In my opinion, one of the greatest (and least appreciated) measurements is the nautical mile. at 6000 feet, the nm is exactly 1/21600 of the distance around the earth. Those who follow navigation will know that the nautical mile is useful because it's the distance of a minute's arc of latitude (or longitude, whatever N-S lines are). That makes marking distances on a plot really easy, if you have a navigation chart. Then again, these comments are coming from a Navy guy, and a pilot, so YMMV. --- Michael Perkins MIDN 2/C USNR
In any school I've been to or heard of, this was punishable by death (well, not quite, but you'd look pretty dumb).
I never even *thought* of leaving out a unit. That way lies madness...
While I agree that the metric is system is undoubtly superior with regards to length, volume, etc measurements since everything's divisible by 10. You can't make the same argument about temperature measurements. Actually, I think that Farenheit is superior since 0-100 F roughly corresponds to the "normal" tempature range, or physiological (0 - too cold, 100 - too hot). OK, maybe making 0 is fine for the freezing point of water, but making a 100 for the boiling point of water is just too high. I don't think I could ever get used to 30 (or whatever, I'm too lazy to do the conversion :) being hot.
;) 100 second minutes, 100 minute hours, 100 hour days, 100 day years, and radians!
Now we just need to get rid of our overly complicated sixty-based time and angle measurement systems
I really wish we could use Metric system like everyone else.. It is not like its HARD. Its harder to learn American Measurements..
I completely agree with you, but I think that you fail to see that this little wisedom is not only true for development teams in a project, a corporation or even a country, it is also true for the whole wide world. As long as different units are used, there will always be mistakes. Information travels globally these days, and people work together globally. Technologies and information come from all parts of the world. So to make sure we're using the same units is exactly what people have tried to do with the use of the metric system worldwide. Let's see if the US can do it too.
GNU/Linux. The Freshmaker.
Good thing there's no life on Mars... They'd be LAUGHING their a** off at us right now.
I keep telling everyone that Metric's the way... and I *still* can't find any reason why we shouldn't start converting over NOW.
I'm honestly surprised that NASA and it's associates weren't all using Metric anyway... aren't most scientific using Metric anyway?
Anyway, if anyone has *any* reason why we shouldn't be moving to Metric in the US....
_________
My name is Aaron Landry, and I approve this message.
We've tried to switch, but it's realllly hard. Too many of the empirical equations that we use are based on english units, and while not impossible to switch, no one wants to rework these out.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
The government will start with your house, dude. Stand back, because the crew will be by tomorrow to rip out all the screws and nails. You say your walls have 2x8 studs in them? The crew with crowbars will be by later this afternoon.
You car's speedometer has bigger imperial than metric numbers on it. A can of spray paint can fix that. And don't you go claiming your classic Mustang is exempt.
It sure is easy to tell which people who post on Slashdot have never been out in the real world. Grow up College boys.
We'll have to update the old saying dating back to Apollo 13:
Square metric pegs in a round imperial hole.
I would have thought that NASA would have learned from the Apollo 13 and Hubbles glasses fiascos.
This isn't their first mistake like this either. If memory serves, didn't they "miss a planet" a while back when software on one of their probes used an integer instead of a real number (or insufficient precision, at least) in its navigation system. I can't remember if it was Mars or Venus (ack - could it have been one of the original Surveyor moon probes?)
:)
Don't forget, being 0.1 arc seconds off on your course is acceptable if you're flying around your country. It's somewhat of a disaster if you're travelling significant inter-planetary distances
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
Fight Metric, We don't need a foreign Ruler!
Quack
It has been mentioned many times before that metric is commonly used by scientists and engineers. What the article doesn't say is what the exact problem was. It hints at a distance computational type error, which seems kind of stupid. But if it were an error like a metric vs english nuts and bolts that would be a common one.
Some areas of engineering use predominantly english even though it may seem silly to us.
-- Moondog
Uh, it'll hardly be "in the tank". Every other country realized how meaningless the imperial system is and changed. Why does America have to be so thick-headed about it?
I'll put into words that you can relate to:
"It will be more convenient for YOU and it will save YOU quite a bit of MONEY in the future.."
There. I included the 2 of the most important words in the U.S. dictionary. (the only one being more important is "ME").
1. Have the E.U. sue us for losing a space probe. Just find a US lawyer - he'll come up with some plausible reason.
2. Stop giving US "English" non-metric measurements on all non-US produced goods and materials. Sue us in WTO over "unfair restraint of trade".
3. Refuse to loan money to US firms which don't do business in metric.
4. Require all printed material being sent to other countries to be taxed if it isn't in metric.
5. On the US side - just announce all new interstate highways must have dual metric and mile measurements. Don't convert gas. Leave it in gallons.
6. At grocery stores label all boxes with dual measurements until 2002. Don't convert produce - in 2002 require dual listing of price per kilo and price per pound.
7. Bribe politicians. Unneeded, but they like it.
Will in Seattle
conspiracy types should re-check good old Graham Hancocks book "The Mars mystery". "..NASA has a "duty to withold" certain categories of information." He argues that the Mars Observer probe (1992-93) was not lost as claimed by NASA but possibly re-directed onto a secret mission. No doubt the same has happened with Orbiter. ;-)
.... these people aren't exactly Rocket Scientists after all..... oh, wait...nevermind....
01101100 01101001 01101110 01110101 01111000 01110010 01110101 01101100 01100101 01110011
There are chemical engineers in the rest of the (metric) world too, who have presumably figured out the appropriate constants. It's just a matter of using them.
[TMB]
My physics teachers always used to fail me on my assignments, many years ago, unless I explicitly stated the units in all my caculations...
Hmmm...
Guess they had different physics teachers..
Malk
should be the universal system of choice but there are cultural problems in America that keep us from moving to metric. Most of it has to do with old ideas of individualism. People want to be individualistic yet want to communicate with the rest of the world. Scientific measurements cant besome roll your own system used exclusively in your country, come on NASA get with it.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
This has to be the stupidest thing on earth. What a stupid reason to lose so much time, money and effort. What a waste. I guess space-teme curving dark matter is not the culprit here. Just a lack of grey matter.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
There's really no excuse for us to be using English when the rest of the world, including US
engineering schools, have all gone MKS.
Tell that to the roughneck mechanic who fixes the transmission on your American car, egghead. Watch him laugh at the rube.
This has to be a joke. I cannot believe the foolishness. The space program has lost so much of it's luster, and you have to wonder why. Is it underfunding or a blasé on the part of Americans?
Meters. Because it's such an intuitive system of measure.
>>>
The only reason base 10 (or A, if you prefer) makes sense is because we have 10 fingers. The reason we count in base ten stems from this fact from long ago.
>>>
That's like saying the only reason we speak through our mouths instead of communicating by making farting noises with our armpits is because we have vocal chords. And so speaking is just an arbitrary method of audible human communication which isn't necessarily better than others.
>>>
In response to the gist of these systems, the English system, while ugly in many ways, does have some sense in that it's people-units. Ie, feet, hands. For a while I was a mechanic, and we used foot-pounds as units of torque. It's pretty cool, nice and quick I can get an estime that if I want to torque a lug nut to 90 foot-pounds, I can apply 90 pounds of force 1 foot down the wrench.
>>>
There's nothing about that wrench, or the units used, that's in any way human-oriented! Now if you could accurately apply some specifed number of foot-pounds of torque, for example, by POUNDing on the wrench at an "average" strength, at a distance equal to the measure of your FOOT, then it could be truly human-gauged. But otherwise, it's just as arbitrary as a kg-cm.
Yep. I can't seem to handle these stupid fractions. Thank God the stock market stopped it..when I plan to invest that's the only thing that terrified me...fractions...an inch is 1/12th a foot which is 1/5280th of a mile. Ohh base ten...at least that I understand. America's dumbing down of the school system will be complete with simple base ten measurements and not fractional measurements...after every state takes away evolution the only thing left is to speed up the degridation of class quality. Evolution is considered a religion as creationism is a religion. BUT I beleive that evolution is the method of God. And the solar eclipse is a gift too...ohh well I'm going to get a huge flame ball thrown at me. :P I hate you Pascal with your stupid triangle {1,32,496,4960,35960,201376,906192,3365856,1051830 0,28048800,64512240,129024480,225792840, 347373600,471435600,565722720,601080390,565722720, 471435600,347373600,225792840,129024480, 64512240,28048800,10518300,3365856,906192,201376,3 5960,4960,496,32,1}
Erm to be fair that's to do with everyone using miles per hour, and that being how people perceive speed. And it's not like kilometres per hour is terribly metric - how far do you go in 2 hours, 20 minutes....?
The scientific community also has an obsession with Latin. The rest of us aren't really that impressed.
Blast a few eggheaded scientists off the planet.
Because they think that the glassware in their laboratory defines what the people who make the food they eat should use as units of measure.
NASA has been 100% metric for at least a decade, though they do not require their contractors to work in metric, they do require data to be delivered in metric. As far as the navigation team, JPL is in Pasadena, LM is in Colorado (among other places). As for preferred units, metric is more convenient for dynamics, since the measurement system is consistant. On top of that for some reason it seems engineers use a slightly off conversion for 1/g when using inch units. It does make everything slightly conservative.
And here in my U.S. schools, both public through the 8th grade and parochial high school, all we learned were metric units. (Admittedly, my schools were all due north of a major Canadian city, but they are in the U.S.)
Now, the Detroit area is economically dominated by three major automakers, all of which switched to metric units years ago. Detroit is on the border with a metric-using country. My schools all taught metrics. The U.S. government, as pointed out above, has been pushing the metric system.
And despite all that, nobody here uses metric measurments.
Conversion cannot be done by fiat unless the government decides to punish use of non-metric units. Otherwise, people, we're just going to have to live with the slow evolution towards metrics (at least people buy 2-liter bottles of Pepsi, right?)
We talk about mass in pounds, but typically use "snails" or lb-s^2/in. 386 lbs = 1 snail. Then again I've seen mass MOI's in terms of lb-ft^2.
Since when did we all become greater than thou. If it werent for NASA where would space exploration be in ther first place? And, can you enginner a martian climate orbiter?
I'd really like to see it. It would be a good example of how not to design software and how not to document the design of the software.
A simple code review would have caught the error.
Ok, I'm going to say it, If they'd Open Sourced it this wouldn't have happened either.
Later,
MarkV.
One thing some folks seem to be having difficulty understanding is that we (Americans) LIKE being different, even if it is somewhat illogical. America was pretty much founded by a bunch of outcasts who thought everyone else could just, basically, go ***&($# themselves.
I'm telling you: the U.S. will never go metric entirely. You have some real anti-change folks here. Logical, intelligent, rational, scientific arguments fade away in the face of these folks. You're talking about folks in my neck of the woods (Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas) where bringing up evolution, even in a purely innocent sense, is likely to get you an argument, and if you think only a few would start talking creationism, think again. You'd be on the minority side of that argument at your average dinner party.
It's like soccer.... folks in almost every other country love it and think it is the greatest sport in the world, so most Americans hate it. I just heard a caller on a sports call in show talk about soccer, only to be followed by six people who called in for the express purpose of saying he was an idiot and soccer sucked
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
So where are we going to get all the money to go metric?
Who is going to pay for teacher education, then new text books and finally teaching the kids. Also how many road signs in the United States will have to be changed? Here is a more sinple answer. How many millions of dollars will it take to replace all the gas station signs in the US?
Do you think my mother, grandmother or girlfirend have the faintest idea how long a kilometer is? How many people out there in the US know the metric system?
Alot of products have both systems of measurement on the package already but where is the money going to come from for education and replacment.
If you remember back a few years, Air Canada had a 767 run out of fuel. It landed as a glider (and has since been known as the "Gimli Glider" on an abandoned military airstrip.
The reason? The fuel crews couldn't figure out whether to fill the airplane according to metric or english measurements. The 767 used metrics, the rest of Air Canada's fleet was still english.
Air Canada was lucky - airplanes can land, provided they find a runway in time.
NASA wasn't so lucky. Reports I read said the probe shot through Mars' atmosphere and likely is now orbiting the sun.
Measurement mixups can ruin anyone's day.
One problem with the Imperial system is that the inch is the smallest unit of length. Once you go smaller than the inch, there's no true standard about how to subdivide the inch. An Imperial socket set is probably calibrated in 1/32 inch steps. The standard separation in computer parts is 1/10 inch - for example, TTL chips. Printers print out documents with 1/300 inch precision (300 dpi). With Metric, there's a firm standard about subdividing the unit.
One contributor has pointed out that Metric uses multiples of ten, and not many numbers divide into 10 easily. One uses Metric to measure things, not to divide numbers. I prefer to remember multiples of 10 rather than the seemingly random measures of the Imperial system. The numbers 2, 3, 4, 5+1/2, 8, 12, 14 and 20 all find a home in some Imperial units: 2 pints = 1 quart, 3 feet = 1 yard, 4 quarts = 1 gallon, 5+1/2 yards = 1 rod/pole/perch, 8 furlongs = 1 mile, 12 inches = 1 foot, 14 pounds = 1 stone, 20 fluid ounces = 1 U.S. pint.
Americans, who were one of the first countries to use a decimal currency system and who have successfully attempted some spelling reform of the English language, should have little trouble adapting to the Metric system when it is eventually introduced. If Americans wish to "go Metric" in the future, I would advise them to study how Metric was introduced in other countries to see what methods worked and what didn't.
If I could change one thing in the world, I would make the inch equal 25.6 millimetres instead of 25.4 millimetres. Then:
1/2 inch would be 12.8 mm
1/4 inch would be 6.4 mm
1/8 inch would be 3.2 mm
1/16 inch would be 1.6 mm
1/32 inch would be 0.8 mm
and so forth. One wouldn't need to buy a new set of wrenches then!
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
The meter was originally defined as 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the equator to the North Pole, thru Paris. But, since this is not very easy to measure to a large degree of acuracy, and it is subject to small changes, it was redefined as the distance light travels in 1/c seconds. [c ~= 3*10^8, but I dont know all the digits off the top of my head.]
Another thing: Your statement that the AU is metric because it is based on the distance from the Sun to the Earth does not make any sense. The metric system (or SI actually) is mostly based on physical constants, of which this distance isn't one.
Fucking stupid American. What can you say? /. ignoramuses.
With their unix morons and
btw, don't bother to retort. Go get a Ph.D. in some respectable European country before opening your month.
Xah
xah@best.com
http://www.best.com/~xah/PageTwo_dir/more.html
Why not switch to base 360 then, and get even more flexibility? Never mind that it's hard to find 60 unused and visually distinctive symbols which are easy to read and write, and that it's harder to mentally perform arithmetic in base 60 than base 10.
The best, then, would be base infinity. It would be divisible by anything, and it would greatly simplify calculus. :)
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
It's just these sorts of instances which make me proud to be an American.
Simpler?
Cheaper?
Less error prone?
Who cares! That's why I use hexidecimal for all of my Imperial measurement needs!
Maybe they should label each value with a unit. Instead of writing, distance from Mars = 50, they should say distance from Mars = 50 km.
While for most purposes I agree that the Celsius system is superior, for weather the Fahrenheit system still seems better. It allows people to say things such as "the weather is in the 90s today" and people know what you mean. In Celsius you'd have to say "the weather is in the mid 30s" or something, since 30 and 40 are certainly not what you're referring to.
With some practice I suppose it isn't that bad, but the greater precision of the Fahrenheit units (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit for every degree Celsius) makes smaller changes easier to understand.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
One of my first surprises upon going to work in the Space Shuttle program was that it used English units -- throughout. That might be understandable given that the shuttle program began over three decades ago. But I must admit that even in my cynicism about NASA's ways of doing things, I am surprised to find that we are still using English units. They shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a modern engineering project. And those older systems -- software, telemetry systems, deep space network, etc. -- that must interface with modern systems should be updated. There's really no excuse for us to be using English when the rest of the world, including US engineering schools, have all gone MKS.
--JT
It is possible that even if the Colorado and California teams did use incompatible units, that that may not have been the actual cause of the crash. Wait for the final investigaion to be completed before pointing fingers.
They originated from England (Just like the US, hence the term "English" or "imperial" units...) and you're not QUITE right- in the UK, distances appear to not be measured in kilometers, they appear to be measured in miles and speeds are measured in miles per hour. I know, I was just over there for a week and a half touring Scotland.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
and you fucking /. moron shut you beer hole. Have you researched into exactly what happened?
/. morons speaks a mile a second.
Xah
xah@best.com
http://www.best.com/~xah/PageTwo_dir/more.html
Since the US doesn't exclusively use metric,a better system than metric would be good. A system based on relativity theory wouldn't work until some philosophical logic and unification occur.
Most of your driving is done between 0 and 60, maybe. I live in and work around Boston, though. I flipping hated my old car with its speedometer that only went up to 85. My new car (a jetta VR6) has 80 up at the top of the meter, which is a nice place for it, I think.
I don't agree with your assertion that the english system is easier for humans to deal with, either. It's just a matter of what we're all used to. Personally, I wish we'd (americans) just bite the proverbial bullet and switch for most things. It's already been happening for years, as others have pointed out. For example, I go down to the store and buy a 2 liter bottle of dr. pepper(tm). I then mix that dr. pepper with my 750mL bottle of jack daniels'. I then wake up in the hospital to find an IV line in my arm hooked up to a 1000cc bag of saline solution...
Hrm. Maybe the metric system is evil, after all.
--
A host is a host from coast to coast...
A host is a host from coast to coast...
Unless it's down, or slow, or fails to POST!
You'd think that the two teams would talk to eachother to know what they were doing. Maybe next time NASA will include a metric>U.S. converter on it.
"After exactly 49.7 days of continuous operation, your win95-based computer may stop responding" -Microsoft
I hesistate to post this because it's not only not insightful, but redunant.
.02
1) Someone should be hung by their toes.
2) We *do* need to convert to metric. I can gush about it's merits but I don't suppose I need to with this crowd. Unfortunately, people in this country are still baffled. If I tell someone to travel 3km and then look for a Texaco, I get some pretty darned strange looks. Dunno.
My
Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
Bah. /'s statements are on-point - what didn't you get? / acknowledges that base 10 is suitable for math.
btw, / is a very hard sig. to pronounce
Bah -- none of these new-fangled measurements for me! We should use the old units the way God intended. I weigh XVII stones and stand nigh XXIX nails high.
The scientific community all over the world works primarily in metric units. Why that isn't the standard as a matter of policy is a mystery to me. As it is now, if you're talking gallons you have to specify U.S. gallons vs. Imperial gallons. Sure, the inch is defined by an act of Congress to be exactly 2.54cm. That doesn't take away the fact that the U.S. in general has clung to it's use of statute miles, and other odd measurement systems for all the wrong reasons.
The historic reasons for use of these systems no longer serves it's purpose. Reasoning that Americans will have difficulty converting is an additional load of "hooey."
After a 2 to 5 year transition period passes the use of metric measurements by the general populace will be second nature. Conversion of food and other material measurements will be a cost savings for goods producers as well. There are real costs related to labelling in multiple scales.
The computing industry has shown time and again... Standards Are Good! Use them and be happy.
D. Keith Higgs
CWRU. Kelvin Smith Library
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
Nah, even the old Pentiums could have got this one right. This is just poor management. I've still got one of the old P60 FDIV error machines running on my company LAN, and I've never seen the slightest problem...that's a lot more than I can say for NASA engineering ;)
(I know, I know...offtopic)
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
Nasa should send the people who used the english unit system off the planet for forever.
Since when a scientific experiment use english units. The ONLY standard in scientific research is the metric system.
I can't believe they lost a spacecraft because of that kind of error. They should be awarded the Dummy of the year award!
Even the Astronomical Unit (AU) is metric, as in it is based on the distance between the earth and the sun, which means it is based on the sun's gravity.
the metre is based on the distance from the equator to the poles (or something like that)
miles per second?
metres per second?
notice how they always use metric in Star Trek?
my dick is a nice 8 inches. Beats those European 8cm'ers.
Xah
xah@best.com
http://www.best.com/~xah/PageTwo_dir/more.html
>It is much easier to imagine and understand
>what it means to say "I am six feet tall"
>than it is to say "I am one hundred and
>eighty three centimeters tall" or "I am
>one point eight meters tall".
I tend to agree with this point. I do wish the metric system had a unit of measure closer to a foot. The decimeter doesn't quite do it. The issue I see is that the length of many commnon objects can reasonably be approximated in terms of an integer number of feet. I'm almost 6 feet tall. My desk is four feet wide. My tv is maybe two feet accross. When you switch to metric, the length of all these common objects becomes some fraction of a meter.
The fact that anyone involved with this program was doing ANY calculations in English units is simply unforgivable.
I mean, TOTALLY unforgivable. Feet, inches. Give me a break.
And the fact that NASA did not set a standard is all the more idiotic.
-josh
looks like /. censored my post again.
/. ers go foot all the way.
fucking
Xah
xah@best.com
http://www.best.com/~xah/PageTwo_dir/more.html
It's obvious that we need to go 100% metric, but this is a sign that we need to change the space program in the US... NASA itself is ineffecient - we need more companies doing space work.
( excuse the flame-bait nature of the mail - I'm pissed)
What a crock of crap.
You have simply justified a system that you were bought up with. The same way I defend Metric because the system makes sense *to me*
15 stones ? what the hell unit of measure is that ? 76 F how hot is that ?
You dressed up a lame arguement in suedo science, the bottom line is, USA has not gone completly metric because the government there ( rightly ) suspects the average American unable to cope with the change. That is because the average American is insulated and ill-educated about the rest of the world.
Billy-Bob in bumf*ck Alabama who take up arms before he'd understand that 21-23 Degrees was average room temperature.
( once again blame Vodka. This seemed like a good Idea at the time )
In stock values, differences of less than an sixteenth of a dollar aren't particularly meaningful. Allowing them to exist is just begging for more churn which only lines brokers' pockets and causes more daytraders' suicides. At least that's my prejudice.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Billions of dollars? Ha. I've got some close friends who own a machine shop and they tell me half the things they do are done with the metric system. The other half is a pain in the ass.
There is a real and compelling reason why we have
not gone metric -- It is possible to verify
measurements down to 1/100 inch with a pocket scale, but only to 1/10 mm. Thus, a shop worker
can make finer adjustments on-the-fly with the English system than with the metric system.
If you don't believe me go ahead and call an applications engineer at Starrett and ask them what reason their customers give most often.
Phil
I am quite aware that the rest of the world uses the metric system. My car has metric parts on it for pete's sake. I keep wrenches for both metric and the US system. Personally I find that the customary bolts rust to metric sizes quite well. Let me ask a question here, If Canada and some parts of the world can learn dual languages, why not let the US have dual measurments? I find that in daily use the US system works very well. Long distances get measured in miles, short ones in feet, shorter in inches. I went to school back in the late 70's through 80's. We learned metric alongside the customary system. In the lab classes I used metric, everywhere else I used the US system, just the same as if I went to France or Germany I would be expected to know the language. So for all you conversion advocates, I will continue getting 20 gallons of gas, driving 20 miles to work at 60 miles an hour, using a 3/16in screwdriver and likeing it! I ask you, in this present day, is the unit of measurement really important? If the measurement is not what you need just convert to what you want and go on. By the way I know how to use and the difference between milli- centi- and kilo- meters, doesn't mean that I like them.
Moron! I remember NASA in the late 60's, early 70's.....foreigners everywhere! If the space program had relied on US-only talent, it would still be trying to learn how to fly a kite! If there is one thing that the US does well, it is to buy the best talent money can buy. Ever check those tests were they rate students from all over the world,....the US always ranks somewhere between third world countries.
It turns out that the folks doing the measurements were using Celsius degrees, and they settled on 37 C as a value. Now that makes sense - it implies only two digits of precision, which is reasonable. But when you translate that to Fahrenheit, you get that 98.6 number, with that extraneous digit of precision. So there.
On another note, the temperature -40 is universally unambiguous in the three most common temperature scales. It's the same temperature in Fahrenheit and Celsius, and impossible in Kelvin. :-)
--
Do I look like I speak for my employer?
Metrics are the way to go, and I hope that we make the transition 100%, but I don't believe engineers were using English measurements. I've seen 30,40 year old physics text books, and they used metrics. It's just so standard in science, even in the US to use metrics. I think NASA made this one up.
To give some background, I am a New Zealander where we use the metric system. The feet and inches are I agree easier to work with on a daily basis, and we do sometimes use them, and occasionally miles. But the integration of all the units is so much easier with Metric. A Joule is the energy lifting one kg one meter in the air. One litre of water weighs one kilogram. Area is measured in Hectares (about 2.4 Acres), which is 100m by 100m (by memory). E=mc^2 (with no messy conversion) It just is all so much cleaner in metric, and when you want to make your message clearer you can use the other conversions. Andrew
I always thought that "scientific" organizations already were standardized on metric. Even in the USA.
Ever since my high school chemistry class, all my measurements were done in metric. I just thought it was the "scientific way".
Re metric time: there's always the swatch beat internet time. The day is divided into 1000 units (beats). No timezones, which is nice for networked and space applications.
:-)
A place to start, anyway. At least you can buy watches that display it.
The modified julian day is another standard in use, particularly in astronomy.
Hey Rob, can we get these added to the slashdot date formats, along with unix epoch?
As a scientist I've always leaned toward keeping the second as a fundamental unit, just to make converting easier. Makes things like 'standard business hours' hard to support, but that's an outdated concept anyway.
India did it in a couple of years.
...wasn't that they were using two different systems.
The actual problem was that they were running their metric conversion software on an old Pentium with the FDIV bug....
(*grin)
--
I work at JPL. THhe damned imperial system is so annoying for a person (me) that just came out of school where they're teaching a metric system (thank God). On top of that, buying parts from outside manuf's costs more if it's metric. Another hindrance in the changeover. Everyone talks in "mils" at work. Now, you tell me, WTF is a mil?!?! (of course I know, do you?)...
Q: What do you think about American Culture?
A: I think it's a good idea.
(adapted from Gandhi)
I noticed this the hard way a few years back when I bought an Alfa Romeo 164S (awesome) that had a digital climate control, switchable from english to metric.
It became obvious fairly quickly that switching to "F" just twiddled the display, and the thing was still using Celsius to decide what to do. This is a big problem, because Celsius degrees are just simply too big to use for controlling the temperature if human comfort is what you're after. (Each Celsius degree is nearly twice as large (9/5, actually) as each Fahrenheit degree.)
It does seem that many "foreign" thermostats use Celsius degrees, giving them about half the resolution of American thermostats... Still, if I could buy a new Alfa here, I would - I loved that car!
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
The proper unit for measuring angles is radians. 180 degrees is equal to pi radians.
Using anything else for doing scientific or mathematical work leads to the necessity of conversion factors, and much double-checking to prevent errors.
the only tool in this job is you. you count dollars in metric don't you? don't seem to lose many that way. not like your spacecraft anyway.
Pretty much everything related to space and orbital mechanics is done in the metric system. Especially when working with any international project.
:-)
Time for the U.S. congress to outlaw using any non-american system, and to limit the export of any strong measurement system.
Really, it will be interesting to see who finally gets the blame, other than the obvious hand waving and blame sharing. Final result will be a big report with no one team to blame, just a recommendation to increase the funding of the review process.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Here in New Zealand we have been metric for ... I dunno, I long time - well before I was born. But some things remain in your culture anyway - if you ask me how tall I am I would say "five eleven". I think the really big benefit is the reduction in education time and money. I once heard that it knocked a year of the learning of maths and measurements. It's just so easy: learn a few prefixes and a few units and you can talk about anything from the weight of a spec of dust to volume of the sea. Measurements are fundamentally a simple thing - why make it more complex than it has to be? That's just bad design.
Let's not forget what happened to another spacecraft that was lost because of Fortran implicit typing. Someone used a variable called IVAR when performing floating point operations in a program which was compiled with implicit typing- meaning that all variables that start with I... get declared as type integer. Well, integer data types don't mix too well with floating point operations, and the thing was lost in space, or so I remember.
Anyways, from what I know of it, it got NASA on the ball to fix the problem, and so this might too as well.
More like Rock Stars, perhaps... I'm guessing that there might have been a Spinal Tap member involved! ;-)
Pull something 1 Meter with the force of 1 Newton in one second. Now you've done the work of 1 Joule with the power of 1 Watt.
And now do this with feet, pond, calories or whatever...
So if the U.S. goes metric, will we have to go back and rewrite all those Beach Boys, Jan & Dean, and other surf rock hot rod song lyrics?
Well as long as we're counting up, I'm sure something like base 2*3*4*5*6*7*8... At least then it's nice and divisible =)
The metric system is arbitary in it's own ways, but as long as we're using base 10 numerals, 100 looks a lot rounder then 144.
Then again, aren't people scared of big round numbers? Fear the number 2000, it's biiiiiig and rooooound (Poor Dilbert/Dogbert refernece)
In the UK we refer to English units as Imperial units. While they have the same names as the US versions, the sizes are slightly different.
(e.g. our pint is 20 fl oz, not 16, our ton is 2240 lb).
Imperial measurements were abandoned by schools during the 70's when I was a child. However, they are only now being phased out in retail: it was only a couple of years back when meat started to be sold by the kg rather than the lb.
People still talk about a pint of milk, although it is almost always a 1/2 litre. There are some bizarre mixtures: fabric comes in 45 or 60 inch widths, but is now often priced by the meter lengthways.
Most nuts and bolts, and also spanners, are now metric, although a full toolkit still comes with both - a bit of a waste I guess.
In my scientific work I use the electron as a unit of charge and the angstrom as a unit of distance.
The unix `units' program is always handy if you need to convert forces from hundredweight furlongs per fornight squared into something useful.
Oh really, is that what you think? Funnily enough, that's exactly what we did in Australia in 1972.
People still talk about being six foot two, or the temperature in summer reaching the century, but apart from various linguistic idioms like that, metric is firmly in place. Hell, people still talk about two bob, a synonym for shillings, and Australian currency went decimal in 1966.
It just takes a little willingness on behalf of the population... something we are led to belive that the US apparently lacks.
The combined population of Western and Central Europe is much greater that the US. They're all in metric. If you want to deal with those markets you're going to have to stop with this Imperial shit and use metric, otherwise your infrastructure is going to gather rust as it deals with an increasingly small proportion of the world market that is the US domestic market.
C.
I sometimes write stuff
uh... didnt the soviets get to space first?
The one I used in school (not too expensive, I paid it myself) went down to 1/10 of a mm. Even for a beginner it was no problem doing 1/5 of a mm, which is still better than that 1/100 of an inch
Og gods what a silly thread that guy started.
Gallons are now litres (let's just not get into the different sizes of European vs American gallons). Given that, we still talk about miles per gallon.
Packaged foodstuffs are now labelled with (kilo)grams. Milk is still pints, as is beer (although that keeps getting threatened by Europe).
Maybe using kilometres rather than miles, and saying I'm 1.?? metres tall rather than just shy of 6 foot might make sense, but in the end it's what you're used to. Heck I measure my weight in stones, and I've no idea how that converts into kilos/pounds whatever! The UK is (un)fortunately becoming European, that doesn't mean we won't at least try and stick to our mix 'n match usage of units.
Farenheight is based on 100 being about the human body temp? If I ran a temp of 100 I'd be worried!
Anyway, how big _is_ a loaf of bread?
What's worse, ignorance or apathy? Who knows, and who cares.
As for recipes, it would be expressed simply as "2 ½ dl" or "2.5 dl" (i.e. in deciliters, not in millilitres).
This has created a lot of bickering about Imperial and metric measurements. But misses the point. The real reason for the failure was due to a break down in commiuncations between the spacecraft navigation team at JPL and the spacecraft control team at Lockheed Martin in Denver. This was the first time a private contractor had such a key role in mission operations in a scientific misson. Mostly they would just build the thing then hand it over to NASA. The seems to have been a failure of management to fully accommodate this new structure and properly integrate the NASA and private contractor teams. After all, converting from metric to imperial is not exactly difficult, but having two key teams from different organizations and a thousand miles apart properly working together is
I'm ready for it! My '84 Camaro has both Imperial and metric measurements on my speedometer and for my fuel tank... I'm ready! ;-)
Seriously, though... We (the USA) should convert to metric, NOW. This is plain silly...
My car gets 20 rods to the hogs head, and thats the way I likes it!
Blar.
FYI: The russians where first in space, and the main reason for the giant NASA budget during the 60s was that you guys (USAmericans) where afraid of beeing beaten by the russians. Besides, you should realize that this would not have happened if USA had used metric system. And you don't have the budget to do these things alone these days.
There are many metric units out there, and a lot of possible unit systems that one could define. Actually using some of the more obscure units (dynes and ergs for example) requires arcane knowledge, just as using drams and chains does.
SI has a handful of base units: meter, kilogram, second, Kelvin, and 3 more related to electromagnetics. Celsius, Newton, Joule, and Watt are common derived units. They work without conversion factors. Angle measure is unitless by definition, whether radian or degree. Radians work without conversion factors, degrees have to be converted.
There is no other base time unit, large units of time are expressed in seconds or powers of 10 seconds. Same with small units (milli-seconds, nanoseconds).
The SI unit system is good for math / science / engineering because it eliminates confusion and conversions. NASA uses SI. The generic "metric" system has some of the same pitfalls as english units do.
The misuse of pounds and the annoying use of lb-force vs lb-mass (with its problems with g, that led to the use of the slug) is well more dangerous than the use of Kilograms......we DO have a specific unit for force, and that's called a Newton...
I hesistate to post this because it's not only not insightful, but redunant.
.02
1) Someone should be hung by their toes. How the **** are we suppose to instill confidence and support for manned travel to Mars when we can't coordinate grade-school metric conversions on a orbiting probe?
2) We *do* need to convert to metric. I can gush about it's merits but I don't suppose I need to with this crowd. Unfortunately, people in this country are still baffled. If I tell someone to travel 3km and then look for a Texaco, I get some pretty darned strange looks. Dunno.
My
Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
No matter what.
No matter how mant precautions
No matter how many checks and list you go through
Mr. Murphy will be there.
You think the accidents in Russia and Japan were
bad, just imagine if this would have happened on
the Cassini probe as it swung past the earth.
>The metric system simply is not the darling of >real engineers the way it is of the academicians.
In your sourroundings, I dare to say.
I would even dare to say that to the rest of the world (including most of non-US engineers, if not all) it's a unpleasantness at best.
"Hey, (foreign name here), what was a (imperial unit here) in (metric unit here)."
>What possible justification could there have been >for neglecting to teach you about the system of measurement commonly used where your own country?
>That's "truly unthinkable idiocy" if I've ever heard it.
Guess what has happened centuries ago in other countries? In Germany, it's common to use "PS" instead of KiloWatts speaking of cars, but thats just a kind of atavism. It's not taught by school,
you just happen to get used to it. There is no rational cause why to use it.
Like the Imperial System, it's not superior because of the base or the scale, it's just common used and thats why you have a more intuitive grasp about it.
Not teaching it, means the next generation will get more and more used to the metric-system and will get a more intuitive grasp too.
Especially, if your using computer and your working globally, a specified standard must exist.
That is the "SI" (systeme internationale).
Simplified example for Computer:
I type
Location:
Object x y z
A 10 9 0.8
B 10 8 1.0
assuming that you'll know that x, y, z are in meters, because everyone in my souroundings will asume it too.
You will see it as feet, for the same reasons.
Normally, such asumptions aren't a fault their making communication effective, because I don't have to explain everything.
We're all writing english, that's another standard,
we've agreed upon.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
This statement is all right and good except that it is a bit naive. Although the US is non-standard by following it's own measurement systems for lenght, volume, and weight, it is not necessarily bad. Ask just about any professional machinist what measurement system (s)he uses and you'll find more often than not that they use the US "Standard" system over the Metric. A machinst friend of mine claimed, "it's more accurate." Now, as someone acquainted with the more complicated mathematics, I understand measurement systems as nothing more than numbers. Accuracy in and of itself does not lie in the system used to express the measurement. Speaking practically, however, it seems that the US has found its niches. Its not surprising either, we've had a couple hundred years to get used to it.
As a scientist, I realize that the US mesurement system is not used in all aspects of life in the US. Step into any chemist's lab and you'll find beakers labled liters and milliliters. You'll find scales labeled Kilograms, grams, and micrograms. Factors of 10 are convenient indeed when it comes to science.
Hey, I'm all for such a conversion, but such a conversion would never be 100%; at least not for quite a few years. Just think about how the less honest business "entrepeneaurs" would take advantage of the mass confusion caused by such a conversion. Gas would be sold in liters instead of gallons, a two or ten cent raise in price per liter may go unnoticed (initially). Everything would be thrown out of context for US residents. Every industry would be impacted. For the price of conversion, the rewards would be ill received.
Yes, it's simple to say that the US should convert to metric, just not so simple to implement.
assert(expired(knowledge));
It's a joke. j-o-k-e. You know, ruler as a measuring device or ruler as one who controls a nation and they're both the same...oh nevermind. If I was more awake I'd name that clever construct of language, but I'm not.
Blar.
Didn't the French introduce that disturbing
metric system (after they had done that revolution
and cutting a couple of people some heads shorter)?
Sounds like a long term communist plot to me.
Do you have any idea what it would take for the country to suddenly go metric? That type of change would be catastrophic. Plans would fall out of the sky (how many liters in a gallon?). A change of this scale would take generations.
The sensible thing would be to use base 8, after all we all have 8 fingers. Only the French would consider thumbs fingers :-(
So, what do you use for the unit of mass? Slugs? Lb-mass? What is the official "American" mass unit? Just curious. I'm a US citizen, but I must admit, I don't even know.
As a REAL engineer at a semiconductor company, I've found that metric units definitely make my life a lot easier. But, there are still a lot useful non-metric units that I doubt will ever go away. (i.e. kcals, eV, Angstroms, atm, torr, Ha, amu, etc...)
"Cats. Can't live with them and the fur's too thin for a rug." - Mercedes Lackey
It is much easier to imagine and understand what it means to say "I am six feet tall" than it is to say "I am one hundred and eighty three centimeters tall" or "I am one point eight meters tall".
...the Fahrenheit scale is a more convenient scale for human life.
At the risk of repeating what others have already said, this is just plain untrue. It may seem more intuitive to you, but that's simply because this is what you've been brought up on. I've been studying in the US for almost 4 years already but I still don't have an intuitive grasp of how long an inch or a foot is, or how hot say 70 Farenheit is. The 'human' defense for the English system is just plain bogus.
"The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets 40 parceps to the rad... and thats the way I like it!" -Grandpa (Abe) Simpson
Something to that effect, someone correct =]
-Ecc
While we're reminding the Americans that their measurements are non-standard.
Americans - STOP USING NON-STANDARD PAPER NOW
Everybody else on the planet is using a paper standard that
- Looks nicer (A4 ratio is pleasing to the eye)
- Has an ISO standard
- Scales nicely (envelopes to posters in one simple standard)
- Just Works (TM)
Please catch up to the 20th century and next time buy A4. Government studies show you'll SAVE money too!
>>
So why is it so wrong that celsius is based on the freezing and boiling point of water? Because temperature MATTERS to humans and the state changes of water have nothing at all to do with us.
>>
But they are easily OBSERVABLE. If I have a kettle of water on the stove, I can tell you when it reaches 100 degrees Celsius. If I look outside the window from my warm house and see that the lake is frozen, I know that the temperature (near the surface of the water, at least) is 0 Celsius or less.
After all, i know i lost a lot of points for not labeling my answers and specifying units!
The US switched to the Metric system in the year 1866
Here are links to the appropriate legal documents:
Metric Act of 1866 page 1
Metric Act of 1866 page 2
You can get a chronology of the metric system here:
Timeline
-- Tov Are Jacobsen
The cause of the near-crash was partly due to a faulty fuel gauge AND the fact that B-767s as the first to use metric. Read about it.
The World should really ditch imperial once and for all.
---
That is NOT true, kg-cm is not a measure of torque, it would be N-m. Kilogram is a measure of mass, pound is a measure of force.
You are correct, however, in relating the arbitrariness. One who is used to his/her weight in Newtons would do just as well in that same situation.
make world, not war
I wrote this song once. Please forgive me:
Sorry about that
jsm
That's not really metric, either. Let's switch to stardates!
BTW, don't you just hate that stupid `Internet Time' Swatch marketcrap?
Bullshit. We do stuff (in Europe) for DLR, NASA, ESO, and I haven't seen crappy English units in any project documents.
Get a grip and come back to the real world for a minute. Only the US uses imperial measurements across the board, and the UK should have bitten the bullet before I was born. So it's convenient - so what. It's archaic and stupid and you are coming up with reasons to support your own luddite preferences.~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
As my MCSE friend says: "I'd rather no
>While for most purposes I agree that the Celsius system is superior, for weather the Fahrenheit system still seems better.
Word up: That's only because you're used to it.
> It allows people to say things such as "the weather is in the 90s today" and people know what you mean.
Really? I'm people (but not American) and I don't have a clue what you mean.
>but the greater precision of the Fahrenheit units makes smaller changes easier to understand.
This is more than offset by the fact that the zero point and scale are arbitrary. In Celcius, 0 = freezing, 100 = boiling. What could be simpler? If you want precision, use a decimal point.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
The french journalists liked that news a lot:
...here the guy takes two big rulers. One is yellow and one meter long and one red and one yard long ...it required a lot of precision... ...a mistake that would not be tolerated from a primary school kid... ...350 millions lost...
INTRODUCTION:
-since the french revolution scientists worldwide use the metric system. But the anglo-saxon are weird. Some of them drive on the left side. And they still use inches and yards.
MAIN COURSE:
-as you see one yard is 9 centimeters shorter than one meter. NASA had two engineering teams one in california the other in...
DESSERT
-and so the NASA engineers were very unhappy, and they were red (showing the one yard ruler) with shame and confusion.
BIG LAUGH
---
---
Dev elpizw tipota, dev phoboumai tipota eimai lephteros http://euclidian.org
"Humans are pretty smart animals. I think we
can switch systems if we really need to."
Umm.. you haven't seen a windows user have you?
Seconded. As far as temperature goes, the celcius system is vastly better if you live somewhere with snow. Plus or minus tells you what you'll be driving in or walking through on the way home from work. As for distance, I'll take the metric system anyday. I can remember getting my first geometry set and having the inside lid conveniently list all the American and Canadian conversions. 8 rods to a chain, so many chains to a furlong... Over on the other side, a neat row of tens and half a dozen greek prefixes that are, coincidentally, the same ones as the weights. I'll take that over pounds, slugs, and chains anytime.
Mike Hoye
Yet here I am, 20 years later, and almost everything is still in gallons, miles, pounds, etc. Sure, most of the consumer goods (food, shampoo, etc) come with both types of units, and once in a blue moon I'll see a road sign with kilometers next to miles, but overall I'm very disappointed with the situation.
If we're going to change, then we might as well do it well. The best way to learn a language is to immerse yourself in it. Similarly, I think that the best way to switch units is just to universally do it and let everyone adapt. Humans are pretty smart animals. I think we can switch systems if we really need to.
-- $SIGNATURE
JMC
The UK conversion is still only partially complete. It will finish eventually, but the last little nagging things take a long time.
The most obvious example is the road signs. You won't see metric road signs in the UK this millenium.
The Pint of Beer in a pub is still a pint, but a measure of Vodka is now 25ml
Almost all groceries are now sold by the kg or the litre. Corner shops often still have imperial scales though.
And motorists may put 5 gallons of petrol in the tank, but the prices are in litres.
The US should start now, or they won't complete metrication before 2100.
It's _embarassing_ to screw up like this, and you knew it was gonna happen a lifetime ago...
> "Metric system? My car gets 12 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way i likes it!" Jeez, thats pretty crappy mileage! You need a tuneup or something. 1 Rod == 5.5 yards 1 Hogshead = 52.5 gallons 12 rods/hogshead = .0000714 miles/gallon, thats 3.77 feet per gallon Unless of course you are using a pre-1824 hogshead, which held 63 gallons -:) Cheers Eric
>don't americans get taught the 'metric' system in >school ? No we don't. I in fact have taken two (2) college physics courses and I have never learned the metric system. A kg or a meter is just some unknown measurement to me. I got A's in both courses so I don't ever plan on learning the metric system. Skidmore College Student Saratoga Springs, NY, 12866 USA
Mind you, I've never worked on a NASA project. Maybe things are different in that world.
And the brethren went away edified.
There have been, over the years, reasons for me to believe that Americans are paranoid of "outside control." here was once an article in High Times magazine, of all places, about the notion that going to the Metric system would put American under the control of some kind of Big Brother. I once heard (many years ago,) an editorial on WFMT radio, a local classical-music station, about how wonderful it was that the conversion effort failed. There was some jabberwoky about how an inch is about the width of a craftsman's thumb. Bleh!
How wide is a craftman's thumb after he misses the nail? What about a woman's thumb--is that Metric, by chance?
I'm getting real tired of not knowing which screws to use.
--------------Rev. C.C.Chips---------------- For the real truth, visit
Metric bolts come is stupid sizes. Yoo big or too small. Threads always too fine. Standard hardware is much nicer.
I'm telling you, things just haven't been the same around here since that damn merger.
And the brethren went away edified.
There is a huge resistance to SI units in the US space business, but lessons like this one and the cooperation required for what's left of the International Space Station should help pave the way. Commercial aerospace companies are also more likely to use SI.
:v)
What galls me is that Americans refer to imperial units as the "English" system. The English switched to SI units years ago; even my father's pre-war UK schoolbooks are in SI units.
But conversion to SI units took time. I am reminded that some years ago a friend of mine went to buy some hosepipe and asked for a 25 yard reel. "Sorry Sir, we've gone metric". OK, then I'll have a 25 metre roll. "What diameter Sir, 3/4 or 1/2 inch?"
Vik
That's BARTENDER over here my American cousin ;-)
Hmm, I may be wrong, but I thought the Farenheit scale was based around the mercury thermometer. Isn't Zero degrees F the freezing point of mercury or something?
Plus as a Brit my brain works in a kind of half-metric half-imperial scale. If it's cold I'll say 'it's minus 2 today' whereas if it's hot, I'll say 'it's almost 80 today'. Try and figure that on out!
I drink pints of beer but put litres of petrol in my car, though I think of how fuel efficient it is in terms of miles per gallon. Note that the miles are the same as in the US, but the pints and gallons are bigger!
Go into a British pub, and you'll find that beer, lager and cider are sold in pint/half pint measures, yet spirits are sold in shots of 25ml. Soft drinks are also sold in measures of ml.
The really odd one is if you buy a shandy (beer and lemonade). I believe this HAS to be sold in a metric measure.
Remember the present day rockets are an outgrowth of what was learned in the V2 program( a german program). So you might want to get off your high horse before you fall.
...because I can say that my height is 64.16 attoparsecs on the cosmic scale or 19.8 gigaangstroms on the atomic. (I know I'm a geek.)
Simple measures are easy to convert - a simple numerical factor, usually not too hard to find to sufficient precision. No-one has mentioned the hassle it is to convert useful values (constants, heats of combustion, thermal conductances etc) which are composite quantities, from one system to another. You look for a factor to tell you how much heat will flow through your wall, say, and the US books tell you something in (BTU/hr)/(sq.ft . degree F), and an SI list will have J/m^2.s.K . OK, if you are comparing walls with other walls, the task is not hard, all the values are in the same scale, even if they are the ones you are not comfy with, either way round. For calculating anything across disciplines, SI makes life a whole lot easier. (By the way, there are at least 6 different BTU's for a start!) As anyone involved in developing technology will tell you, interdisciplinary regions are where the action is, so why not lubricate understanding by using SI where it really helps?
Miles, gallons, pounds etc are rarely the basis units used for anything composite & important, so they don't often enter into the sort of conversion trickery above. I'm all for keeping sensible measures for daily life. Someone is 5 feet 6 inches, rather than 173 cm; we like to have small absolute values for casual measurement and conversation. Litres/gallons is borderline - we changed over and there is a psychological element to not seeing £3.50 per UK gallon ($5.70 !!)if you can remember thinking that £1.00 was damned expensive!
Shame we had to waste a hundred million dollars (that's some wierd currency, right, like real pounds and pence but smaller?) to get the issue on the air. No doubt there will be the usual US-style fundamentalists on either side, when a very happy middle position is possible and already well-populated - the UK seems to manage, mostly SI but Imperial for 'homebrew' stuff.
As a last tease, when is the US going to drop MM/DD/YY date format - now that one really is dumb, and don't get up on your hind legs to tell me it isn't, 'cos you know that the DD/MM/YY(YY!) order, or its inverse, makes more sense.
Where did the US system come from, anyhow? Was it transfer from "Jan 4th, '02" or similar?
Ooh, I'm dying for a sig...
Except that the if the balon (quarter pint) is 12.5 cl, then the pint is 50cl, and hence half a liter and not a real pint at all.
I've gotten used to the centiliter thing, even though it seems only to be used in Wine
a bottle = 75 cl.
a magnum = 150 cl.
...
a nebuchanezzer = 1500 cl
It's a nice system, but my local American grocer converts everything into the American ounce equivalent, complete with three digits after the decimal point. To make matters worse, they calculate the unit cost (so many cents per ounce) as though I was somehow both crude enough to buy wine by the ounce, and too stupid to notice that wine bottles come in standard sizes.
That last bit notes one of the genuine problems with switching systems. Which metric? In the engineering world the problem is not measurement. It is the set of standard sizes. The English system for nuts and bolts has 1/4", 3/16", 1/8", ... Those are standard diameters. Conversion to metric does not mean using 6.35mm bolts. It means using either 6mm or 7mm bolts. Virtually every aspect of a machine gets re-designed. And there is not one metric. There are at least two standard metric families.
This is some of the genuinely valid sources of resistance to the change. Switching to metric means picking which metric, and then redesigning almost everything from the ground up. It is happening, but ever so slowly. It happens when a new model or product line is done from the ground up. In space systems most systems are life extensions of 30 year old designs.
Hmm, all the money used to build that thing could be used to educate the very-dumb-americans to stop using their very-stupid-measurement-system
:)
(ok, moderator, put a minus on my message - I bet you're proud you can't say what 6' are in the metric system
I just wanted to point out that I don't think Canada is actually quite there yet. For some reason, it seems we still like to use imperial to measure our food and ourselves.
It is my generation that learned metric from day one in schools, and so when our kids want us to measure them, we'll be happy to use metric. Our parents were still more familiar with imperial, so that's what they used to measure us.
As for gas, speeds, temperatures, etc, our parents seem to have adapted well. No one really has any trouble visualizing these metric quantities anymore, do they?
BTW, Canada is masculine. It's "vive le canada."
The USA is the only country that really explores space, or does anything worthwhile for this planet. Example: Linus lives here now because he knows that the USA is the only place that counts.
World, enjoy your metric system before we take it away and beat you senseless with it.
If we had not let foreigners play with our spacecraft, they would not have been able to mess it up. Quit your whining, you people would not be near space if it were not for the USA space program and our crushing of the Soviet Union, forcing them to rent time to third rate euro trash just to make ends meet.
Yes I am serious.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
While it may be smart for the scientific community to standardize on the metric system(and most have-I used metric back in high school chemistry), suggesting the entire US population switch is stupid. Just because this latest screw-up makes a good case for standardization doesn't mean that it should be applied to everyone. Changing the signs, books, etc would be very expensive as someone already pointed out. Plus, 99% of the US would be confused...and what for? So we can make them be like everyone else in the world? That doesn't float to well with Americans. After years of knowing the speed limit is 65mph, I dont want someone telling me other wise, and I think most average folks feel the same. It's a part of the culture, something that won't change because a group of people thinks "it makes better sense." I'm already frustrated when I drive by the bank and have to deal with "24C" . sheesh.
That we still do our own thing, unapologetically, because we *want* to, the rest of the world be damned. While all of Western Europe is scrambling to throw away their national identities to join the EC, while they're giving up their own currencies for the Euro, while the UK is ceding their sovereignty to the EC and letting the EC tell them who to put into their armed forces, and while Europe has looked to the US to fight its wars for it from the beginning of this century to the end, I've gotta say that I'm proud to be an American.
The fact is that the US is the only Superpower in the world (well, at least until China gets its act together), so we're *not* going to be forego the comfort of *our* people just to please everyone else. Europeans might be eager to be part of one homogeneous mass of people, but that's totally anathema to the United States -- simply put, the day that this country decides that it wants to be assimilated into a "New World Order" like the Europeans is the day that this country becomes a loser.
Sure, people might complain that we don't play nicely with others, but they're just going to have to deal with it, because the US is impossible to ignore. It's not because we're trying to antagonize other countries, but simply because we believe in putting our own people first (No matter how much dickheads like Bill Clinton might make it seem otherwise). Then again, I don't see those other countries complaining too much when they're asking for our financial aid or wanting our military to fix the problems in their own backyards.
There's a reason why people risk their lives everyday trying to get to the United States, and it damn sure isn't because they're looking for a country that's just like all the rest.
It's the USA's planet, everyone else is just a guest, and it's worth losing a space probe every now and then just to remind people of that fact. Now cue National f***ing Anthem already! :)
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
AMEN to the metric conversion thing. I find it really hard to believe that with the internet becoming more and more mainstream, and with the whole ideal of a global community, we're still separated by an ancient system of measures. I don't mean to say "Ha! We Canadians are better than you ignorant Americans." (and, yes, I know that not only Canadians use the Metric system) But come on. Get with it. Most of you HAVE to admit that the Metric system is superior.
just my $1/50
"Metric system? My car gets 12 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way i likes it!"
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Or better. Get all the women on our side by convincing them they will weigh less in metric. 125lb=56.70kg 250lb=113.40kg etc,etc.
A kilogram is the weight of some brick somewhere in France(?).. I think. In any event, that's all fine and dandy. A Kilogram is actually the weigth of a liter of water, and a liter is exactly 10cm by 10 cm by 10 cm. Water freezes at 0, boils at 100. What could be more simple?
Oh, that's fine, change us over to metric, then we'll just have to change again when the 12-fingered aliens take over.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
If the US goes metric the only "tricks" that will go on will be the ones played by oil companies at the gas pumps just like what happened during the last big metric push in the 70's. Screw the metric system! I'll keep my gallons, feet, and miles thank you very much. The only people that use the metric system are illegal drug dealers. Metric units are like toy units. Try again. And yes we ARE the greatest nation on Earth because we go the extra mile. You lazy kilometer crawling cretins. So what if some space probe blew up? We'll send up another one someday maybe. Then again who's bright idea was it anyways to send some probe to Mars? Who needs that? Mars is a barren lifeless desert. Funding such a pure science project like that's a pretty strange thing for "backwards-thinking, penny pinchers." to do. I say let the rest of the world foot the bill. They all run on their wonderful metric system should be no problem for them.
it's better to have tried and failed than to have not tried at all.
Uh, correction. You're the only superpower left because the other one shot itself in the head. Sure, winning by default is still winning, but it's not something to gloat about.
Besides, you're only a superpower because most of the rest of the world doesn't mind it. In fact, they're quite happy for the US to shell out the money for their fleets of carriers and subs to police the world. Particularly Europe is fond of their trans-Atlantic "partner" to do the things it ought to take care of itself.
The US could only fight about 2-3 major wars at once by their own reckoning. This means that they can't seriously piss off more than about 2-3 influential entities. As long as they behave in ways that Europe, Russia and Asia (the main other military powers) don't mind too much, things are fine. Within these confines, the US can do "anything they want", which isn't really saying too much.
If they REALLY wanted to take advantage of their supremacy in a spit-in-your-face way that was meant to show THE WHOLE WORLD that they can't do anything about it, the 2-3 war limit would quickly be reached. And isn't the proof of the pudding in the eating?
Say the US decided to annex Mexico and Canada, so that they own the whole North American continent. This would piss off Russia and China majorly, and even prissy Europe wouldn't just take it. Tri-lateral hostilities against the US would almost certainly ensue. Contending that the US could win this conflict borders on the grotesque.
Of course, contending that such a thing could ever take place is equally grotesque. However, such incidents have taken place many times in history: the Babylonians, the Romans, the Ottomans, the French under the Napoleons, Germany, who all conquered very substantial parts of their respective world. They also (save maybe for the Romans) showed that it's impossible to really win in this game. However, they PROVED that they were the biggest kid on the block for a while. In order for the US to claim the same--as they do--they would have to engage in similar activities.
Which of course they won't, much to their credit. However, as long as they don't, their claims of supremacy are nothing more than dick waving. So maybe they should stop.
Again though, when was the last time you needed to know how many quarters or dimes in $20.00?
The last time I did laundry before buying my own washer and dryer.
- government gets tax dollars for new signs, books, etc.
- publishers get to make millions and millions on new editions of all their textbooks
- universities get their cut of the textbook dollars
- sign makers make a fortune
- businesses get to save money by not maintained 2 systems
I don't live in the US nor am I an economist, but logic says that nearly all these costs would be soaked up by the public, everyone else will have a heyday with it all."The voices in my head say crazy things"
to get the country to go metric. Sure, it will probably never happen, but what if:
We get some pro-metric headlines, like "English System of Measurement Cause for $125 Million Wasted Taxpayer Dollars!!" That'll get the attention of Joe Sixpack, who don't want no damn Measurement System wasting HIS hard-earned money.
Then we start explaining how kilometers are better than miles, because 100 of the one is MUCH easier to travel than 100 of the other. Same for the pounds/kilograms argument. You weigh HOW much??
As for inches/centimeters . . . well, there's some obvious psychological tricks to be used there. On guys, anyway.
I'm tellin' ya, this is a primo opportunity to get the metric foot (oooh! How's that for a phrase?) in the door. Use the ignorance of the general populace against it! It could happen . . .
Too bad the "Greatest Nation on Earth" is full of stubborn, backwards-thinking, penny pinchers. *sigh*
Now the obligatory humor, courtesy of Grampa Simpson: "The metric system is the tool of the devil!! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!!!!"
--
Okay, I got Linux installed. So where's the free beer everyone keeps talking about??
If you said you were One Eighty to an American (being one myself) I would have to assume your weight was 180 lbs. Then I would say...ok now how tall are you :)
Bullshit!! It's a lot easier to blame inadequacies on some simple oversight (which, if you evaluate these things seem quite strange given that this is a mega-billion dollar agency with more built in checks and balances than the federal government) than it is to simply admit that sometimes we just don't know what we're doing. Seems weird they went this long into a project with daily communications and all, and then noticed they were talking two different languages ONLY after the space craft disappeared. Stupid is not the word. Coverup is the word. ---nedy. "We know what we are, but know not what we may be." ---Shakespeare, Hanlet IV,v.
I'd like to point out that the reporting on this story is very muddy. None of the science writers seem to know how to use the words force, velocity, impulse, or energy correctly in a sentence, nor which units go with which measurements.
I'd like to offer the following as evidence:
Their computers used the metric term newtons, or grams per second of force, to send final course and velocity commands to the Mars-bound spacecraft.
A newton is not a gram per second!
As a result, JPL engineers mistook acceleration readings measured in English units of pound-seconds for a metric measure of force called newton-seconds.
Force is not measured in newton-seconds!
The navigators, in turn, performed their analysis of the spacecraft's position in space based on the assumption that the descriptions of these firings were in metric units of force per second (newtons). In fact, the numbers instead represented pounds (of force per second).
A pound is not force per second!
But, basically, Lockheed was providing the JetPropulsion Laboratory with data on the amount of energy imparted to the spacecraft by its thrusters that are fired periodically. This was measured in pound-seconds, Hinners said.
Energy is not measured in pound-seconds! Perhaps an energy change was indicated by a reading in pound-seconds, but it's erroneous to write that energy is measured in those units.
It looks to me that either a Reuters, AP, or some press release initially confused impulses with force, and the error has propogated through every major news organization in the country. Either that, or quite a few science writers would seem to think that the general public has no real idea about what they're reading and couldn't care less if it's technically correct. Something should be written about the correct relationship between force, impulse, and energy using the words correctly in a sentence, along with the correct units of measurement so that some education of the American public comes of this.
Or it could be that I'm being too nit-picky. Sue me for being an engineer...
Robby
Despite the "I am serious" comments, I think I win the "spot the troll" competition.
:-)]
You should have read your history books -Other countries can quite happily get into space for themselves.
How did the Americans get into space in the first place ? They asked a guy called Werner von Braun and his merry men to help them. Where did Werner get his experience ? At Peenemunde, designing V2 rockets [for Germany]:-).
Arianespace and numerous other non-American organisations will happily send your sattellite into space for you, and we Europeans are, I believe sending probes into the remote reaches of space just like the Americans. Europeans even occasionally have exploding spacecraft, but are sensible enough not to have people on board when they do so.
Oh, yes: who got into space first ?
The Soviet Union
First man in space ?
The Soviet Union
Longest stay in space ?
The Soviet Union [probably just Russia by then though
'nuff said really.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
I think all this discussion is hilarious! How many people work on programs coded in a single language? I have one beast that has stubs in COBOL, Fortran, C, C++, Pacal, and VB. Yes, it would be easier if it was all in one language just as it would be easier to use on standard measurement. The truth is we'll never get there and we are all already used to working with multiple languages and/or measurements in our daily lives. So whats thebig deal?
Have you ever tried to express the wavelength of visible light in the English system ? I guess it would be something like nanofoot ... but wait, arent we mixing to different bases now ? As long as you are using an numeric system with base 10 it's clear that this is the system of choice for science. And if we use the same system in normal life stupid errors like this wouldn't happen.
>The solution, in my view, is obvious...
Yeah! Nuke Hawaii and give Alaska back to the Russians!
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
In Emacs, that is. Citzens, it is in the name of Equality, Fraternity, and Liberty that I inform you that today is:
Décade I, Decadi de Vendémiaire de l'Année 208 de la Révolution!
Even Imperial aren't standard.
If you sell US pints in an English pub you'll have a riot!
Tom
For those of you who need a convenient reference, look at your speedometers. Most US and Canadian cars contain both scales. Note that 60 MP/H is somewhere close to 100 KM/H on your speedometer. This should give you a clue. A Unit-Conversion calculator or a program for your computer might help you until you become literate. Seriously... It's a bit passe to be struggling along in Imperial when the rest of the world has said nuts to Ozzes and Libs. How many pints are there in a bushel, anyways? :-)
The escape velocity is of course the same, but if you calculate it in the metric system, you don't have to do a single unit conversion!
Of course some citizens of the self-proclaimed "Greatest nation of earth" like to think that everything should be like in the U.S...
BTW: According to your logic the Imperial system causes highschool shootings, we don't have that problem over here!
Not coward, just don't care to be flamed by more people with similar arguments!
Calorie?? CALORIE????!! And you claim to support
metric units? I'll measure energy in joules,
thank you very much.
...the comment is a drastic oversimplification.
For example, it's not likely the two teams *didn't know* the other was using different units.
What's more likely is a so-called "bulletproof" set of conversion libraries were *ahem* not so bulletproof.
Given the complexity of the task at hand, this kind of mistake could have been anywhere -- it's obviously a dumb mistake. How hard is it to write a set of routines to convert between the two systems? A jr. high scriptkiddie could do it.
That said, it would have been better to standardize on one system, since reducing code size probably reduces the probability of bugs, or at least reduces the time required for review.
Oh yes, I'm a little suprised that NASA would design a system that allows irrational/illegal instructions to be accepted without confirmation.
"Are you sure you want me to dive into this thick, hot atmosphere at such a steep angle? I probably won't survive..."
I don't write code anywhere near as critical as NASA's, but I don't let my users enter destructive commands, either.
But isn't 1/10 of a mm actually smaller than 1/100
.254 mm
.1 mm
.1 mm is a smaller unit of measure than
of an inch?
(1 inch)(2.54 cm)(10 mm)
------------------------- =
(100)(1 inch)(1 cm)
1 mm
------| =
10
By my math
.254mm and would allow for more accurate measurement for the engineer at Starrett...
David
You don't have to build the jugs differently for heaven's sake! Just build them as before but label them as e.g. '28.4 liters' until you some time in the far future actually decide to upgrade your production chain. Then you can pick some nice round number as the new size if you so want.
One negitive aspect of moving over to the metric system is that of prices which we buy things in volume - the best example I can think of for this would be gasoline.
:)
Britain has been suffering from this unforseen phenomena since they converted to the metric system. Think about it... if you raise the price of a gallon of gas 1 cent, it doesn't end up being that much more for twenty gallons of fuel. Raise it one cent per liter and the change becomes a bit more significant. Raising the price of fuel 5 cents per liter doesn't sound like that much to those used to paying the per gallon price, but in reailty it's quite a hike.
If and when the US does move over to the metric system this will certainly be one of the bigger drawbacks (until everybody gets used to it, that is!). Oil companies *will* take advantage of this, as will other entities. The government is another that comes immediately to mind. Hiking taxes even higher than they already are without the average consumer realizing what happened. The taxes on fuel in states like Hawaii and especially California are already astronomical as it is.
Just a thought
--SONET
http://www.hbcsd.k12.ca.us/peterson/technology
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do. --Benjamin Franklin
First let me say that I support the metric system and would like it just fine if i never saw a english unit again in my life.
"The English system is focused on the idea that humans only want to / can deal with multiples of two or three things comfortably. Then metric wins, as there is only 1 "thing" to measure against, and 1 scale. Orthogonal design. Good."
I think he meant to say that we are more comfortable dealing with multiples of 2 or 3 than multiples of 10. For example: 2 cups to a pint, 2 pints to a quart is a nice clean way of dealing with things. We, as humans, understand halves intuitivly. Tenths, on the other hand, don't come naturally. If I show you 2 objects and ask "is this one one tenth the size of that one?" you would have trouble determining if it were closer to a tenth, than, say, 1/15. If I do the same experiment for halves, you would have a much easier time. The problem is that instead of using a factor of 2 across the board, they decided on 8 ounces to the cup and 4 quarts to the gallon, not to mention 40something gallons to the barrel and god-knows-how-many drams to the ounce.
Which leads me to my next point: flexability. Even if the English system had a constant ratio between its units (making the need to memorize "whatever,8,2,2,4,40something" unnessasary) you have the problem of running out of units for large and small values. If I want to express a large amount of fluid in the english system, I am forced to name a large number of gallons. If I want to express a small amount, i have to name a small fraction of an ounce (or dram or something). Since each size unit has a seperate name, you can't extend the system, you are stuck in whatever range of values were useful when the system was invented. In the metric system, for each quantity, there is one word to remember (i.e. liter) and for each order of magnitude there is one word to remember (i.e. kilo). In the english system, there are (number of quantities)*(number of sizes) words to remember, much worse.
So the prime weaknesses of the English system are inconsistancy, inexpandablity, and large numbers of words to memorize. The strength is ease of visualization for everyday objects.
This in mind, I have to completely agree with the point that we would be better off with 12 fingers. Base 12 arithmetic is MUCH easier than base 10... If you learn it from birth. And the metric system would be even better if we used base 12. Not only would you get the advantage of conversion by shifting decimal point, but you would get the ability to subdivide into 2,3,4 and 6, not just 2 and 5. This would allow for easy science and good cake recipies (nobody wants to use fractional amounts of sugar).
I just read this to my wife who is a Social Worker and gives various Human Resources Seminars, she said: "They could use a Social Worker!" ... She's formulating a communication-skills workshop for Rocket Scientists.
// Zarf //
-
[signature]
And if this event doesn't prove that it's time for the U.S. to go 100% metric, I don't know what will.
Your analytical skills are sorely lacking. It could just as easily be argued that 100% English is the way to go.
The problem was not using English instead of metric. It was the mixture.
This is not a laughing point. This goes straight to the heart of analytical skills. You are using the "facts" to prove your opinion, not looking at the evidence to see what conclusions are warranted. Think about this the next time you debug a program or system. It's a real life skill, and you just failed the test.
--
Infuriate left and right
What about 40 m/s? ;-) That's 144 kph or about 90 mph. Now that will get you somewhere, in a reasonable amount of time.
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
the Fahrenheit scale is a more convenient scale for human life.
Next you'll be telling us that it makes more sense to drive on the right side of the road as opposed to the left.
To me, living downunder, 40 degrees means its fuckin' hot, below 0 means its fuckin' cold, and 300 kph is fuckin' fast.
On the other hand, I know that 100 F is hot, but I don't know how hot... I know that 30 F is cold, bu I don't know how cold, and I know that 300 mph is really fucking fast but unless I convert it to kmh I can't really appreciate it.
It all comes down to what you're used to.
M@T
'sapientia potestas est'
This has the classic look of disjointed process management. It doesn't really matter which system was used, rather that they weren't consistent. The blame here goes to the project management, not the engineering teams. A reasonable (IMHO) guess here is that each team produced what they were asked, complete with solid QA work, but little or no integration testing was done.
And I always thought project managers were a joke .....
1898--Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders storm San Juan Hill in the penultimate act of the War with Spain. A victory over a metric-impaired army! Afterwards, the troops celebrate with gallons of beer and quarts of whiskey.
1918--The end of the Great War. The USA comes to the aid of the Old World, which got itself into trouble because of their metric leadings. It seems the French troops couldn't load their 7.62 mm rifles because everybody was expecting to receive 7 or 8 mm bullets. Troops from "over there" save the day with .30 caliber bullets (clearly, rounding to inch form is superior here!).
1969--US technology triumphs with a manned landing on the moon! No metric-loving country can claim that, esp. those Russkies. After all, the astronauts only had to go 25,000 mph to get to escape velocity, while the metric nations had to get to 40,000,000 meters per hour. Since everybody knows that 25000 early 70s--USA starts promoting metric system
later--Richard Nixon forced to resign
late 70s--Pascal invented
80s--SF 49ers win Super Bowls
80s--space shuttle explodes. Rumors are it was built using metric system.
90s--liquor sold in easy to factor 500 ml and 1750 ml containers, leading to street gangs and cocaine use.
You see, when we were purely metric and we had four dozen stars on the flag, life was swell. But as soon as that metric stuff crept in, such as those 50 stars, life went downhill.
The solution, in my view, is obvious...
i suspect we are being lied to...
I give credit to NASA for at least admitting they goofed. It would have been a lot easier to hide the cause or just point all the blame at Lockheed.
Think about all the design verifications that some poor souls are going over for the polar lander right now.
From what I know the SI unit is the 'metric' units. SI = Standard International - means that they are the units that should be used whenever you do scientific work - don't americans get taught the 'metric' system in school ? I can understand that it's not easy when you are used to feet and the like in everyday situations but... DUH!..
Why should the U.S. go metric?? Everyone knows that the U.S. is the leading country in the world, and that everything we do over here must be right! =P Thus, everyone else should go to "English" measurements (or is that "American" now?).
Seriously, though, miscommunication is bad, but...I really like inches, feet, and miles. There's nothing like watching a quarter-mile drag, and what would we do with football? 100-meter fields? I don't think so! And a car going 100kph? Bah! I sit tapping my fingers (thumpety thump) at 100kph, wondering when the car is gonna start moving.
No, if you want to measure it in the laboratory, then metric may be nice, but in real life, give me miles and miles and gallons and gallons!!
Matthew Vanecek For 93 million miles, there is nothing between the sun and my shadow except me. I'm always getting i
Well then convert =)
60 F is around 15.5 C. Not cold, but somewhat chilly.
I personally can get along pretty well in both systems, since I live in the US and have spent quite a bit of time in Greece. I still don't like Celcius's lower precision, since having to use half a degree (i.e., saying it's 16.5 out) is more annoying than using smaller degrees and sticking with integers (like Fahrenheit does).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I'm just passing you a quote from this year's CIA World Factbook 1999, and what is said there about US and use of metric system. We all other countries are waiting, why is it taking so long?
Since Imperial units are so much better than metric, would you support substituting US dollars and cents by pounds, shilling and pennies?
How many guineas rich is Bill Gates?
--
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
just makes me wonder...
everyone here was so cocky about the 'infailability' of the cassini probe, and now this...
???
A W S ----------- QABO : BALA
I say we all (those of us who see it as a good
idea) just start using metric in everyday life.
A quiet revolution. Americans have forced
english down everybodies throats, but they will
not (thank goodness) be able to do the same with
our backward measurement system. So lets take
/. metric.
I once read that the Soviets knew that the inner measures of computer boards were based around inches. So they instead of using metric or Imperial, created the "metric inch"= 25'4 millimeters exactly. Then Soviet clones were like rest-of-the-world's but the parts weren't interchangeable.
How many verstas did the Sputnik go misguided?
--
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
1 km = 1000 m = 1000 * 100 cm = 1000 * 100 * 10 mm. And, 1 cubic cm of water weighs 1 gram. A "liter" = 1000 cubic cm = 10*10*10 cm^3 weighs 1 kilo. Basically you have your connections between distance, volumen and weigth there, in easy to use and understand (with the decimal system) "steps". I do not think yars, feet, miles, inches, gallons, quarts, stones, etc have such easy "steps".
How is it that to run an OS designed by a Finn on hardware (monitor, diskette) made in Taiwan using Japanese technology, you measure it in _inches_?
--
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
It's a sad day when most moderators who are so keen to think of themselves as being intellectually smarter (on average) than the common Joes would moderate down good points made about the metric systems. Linux users who employ English system should at least make an attempt to think critically of the other's point of view.
your observations are as far away from the real world as one can get. NO matter what system is used, you have an internal meaningful representation of an abstract number in your head because you have grown up using that system. To me (European), 6 ft tall has no meaning whatsoever (despite your mathematical prove that it is easier to comprehend), unless I start !calculating! and think "mmh.. that's about 1.80 meters, better don't mess with that guy". Same with temperatures. Same way if I tell you it's 21 celsius outside today. It's a cultural thing first and foremost.
Anyway I'd suggest we start using base 2 right now, I mean you can count to 1023 with ten fingers then (sorry, old old joke from 1st day at university). and you could print bit patterns on consumer products instead of barcodes, whow cool, everyone could read it instantly!! and you could indicate your height (meta-)metric with just eight fingers (or just seven, if you're very small or work in a saw mill, hahaha!)
I thought, the imperal (dump the work english, cos we want rid of it!) was invented because putting 12 different peoples feet end to end, and taking the average was relatively similar accross the kingdom. It was designed in the days macro sized measurement, and is rather unsuitable for micro measurement, smallest unit an inch???
Imperial is designed for fractions, adding lots of fractions can give very exact answers over decimal, but also can be very hard to do.
My grandfather could add 3 columns of pounds shillings and pence. I kind of noticed the dollar was rather base 10.
Metric was designed for a mathematical purpose, and it the perfect tool for the job, imperical was not. As to which base you use, really! They picked base 10 because people were used to base ten. The base picked is rather a non argument, because people generally do imperical in base 10 too, except my grandfather of course! Imperial is even worse because it does not have a standard base!
And the units are the same accross the world, as they had to be developed.
There of course there is the problem of 1 billion being a million million, however amercia who don't use the system, call it 1000 million.... Strange but true, and we had to change.
The English system is focused on the idea that humans only want to / can deal with multiples of two or three things comfortably. Therefore, each class of jobs gets its own particular unit of measurement. It's one philosophy, and it's the one that ultimately wins out with human nature. It is much easier to imagine and understand what it means to say "I am six feet tall" than it is to say "I am one hundred and eighty three centimeters tall" or "I am one point eight meters tall". Combine that with the fact that most people misuse kilograms as a unit of force, and we're all better off using pounds or stones anyway.
The English units of volumes are done in binary (and a couple, like tablespoons, in ternary). One foot equals twelve inches and one gross equals 144 objects because these are useful numbers: lots of other numbers divide them. Humans don't do floating point arithmatic with great ease. Use a system that bumps everything up into integers.
Ten has always been a stupid choice for the base of a number system. The Babylonians had a much better idea with base 60; look at all the numbers that evenly divide into 60 (and look at our system of time and try to think whether it would be better if we only had 10 "hours" in the day instead of 24 or 100 "minutes" instead of 60.
The convenient thing about the metric system is that it is focused on the idea of orders of magnitude, and since lots of science is also concerned with orders of magnitude, that makes the metric system appropriate for scientific applications. The problem with using the metric system in our normal daily existence is that most humans only have to deal with one or maybe two orders of magnitude as they go about their day. For the few instances where that stops being true, using a different system of units wouldn't kill anyone.
Why does the celsius scale define 100 to be the boiling point of water at one atmosphere? Because it's a convenient constant and lots of laboratory conditions are done near that temperature. But notice how it's done in terms of 1 atm and not 1000 pascals or some such power of 10. There exist these fundamental constants in nature, and lots of them don't have anything to do with each other. Yes we can measure charges in units of coulombs, but since most of nature is constructed in multiples of the electron charge, you still have factors of 1.6x10^-19 in your equations. You're not eliminating complexity; you're just pushing it around. No system of units will eliminate all of this kind of complexity. You might as well use units that are convenient for humans.
The Fahrenheit scale uses (aproximately) the normal human body temperature as 100. Since most real world temperatures (like weather) are done around this temperature and above 0 (the temperature of salted ice), the Fahrenheit scale is a more convenient scale for human life. An analogy: it's like the differene between using an analog car speedometer that goes between 0 and 85 or one that goes between 0 and 140 mph. Since most of your driving is done between 0 and 60, and rarely if ever above 80, all that part of the scale above 80 is just wasted and it squeezes the part we care about into a smaller space that complicates interpolation and other visual interpretation of the value displayed.
It ranks right up there with the prostate as one of the fundamental ways in which humans are "designed". We should've been built with 12 fingers instead of 10. We'd all be much better off.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
All the geeks at NASA are invited to my house for beer & pretzels while we watch tapes of 'Metric Marvels':
...
... ...
Now a miler runs in miles, you know,
That's hardly any news.
But Meter Man runs in meters,
Which we ought to learn to use.
So watch them very closely,
As they run their hard-fought race
You'll learn some metric distances
By following their pace.
A meter's just a little longer than a yard.
That's not very hard.
Lay a thousand meters end to end
Then you've got what's called a kilometer,
One Kilometer
Now they're on your car's speedometer.
Given that it would have been possible for both teams to work with whatever units they wanted, as long as they'd agreed on a conversion function between them, it's obviously not the fault of the measurement system.
This was a human error, a tiny glitch in the communications between two programming teams. This happens all the time in software and the only scalable solution is proper testing.
I don't think NASA tested this part of their software.
The physics of modelling a satellite going into orbit aren't that difficult, so why not build a test harness which could simulate all the inputs the satellite would receive (inertial guidance etc), and could take the output from the guidance system (start firing this thruster now, stop firing now)
Since you're in a simulation and the "player" (satellite navigation system) is a computer you can ramp up the rate at which the clock ticks. In this way NASA could have tested that the Mars Climate Orbiter navigation system worked. The level of certainty would be based on how good the model was.
How do you build a good model? Testing of course. E.g. start small, check that when the nav system says fire this thruster, check the engine management subsystem throws the switch, check you can model the body in freespace firing it's thrusters and ending up where it should. Slowly add in more complexity (but keep running all the simple tests too) e.g. gravity, change in rotational inertia as fuel is consumed. Test it can hold an orbit round a model planet, check it can change orbits etc.
Testing this kind of thing would be challenging and fun, there would be parts you'd think were not testable. But if the solution is not testable by a computer how can you hope to solve the problem with a computer.
This has been cross posted Here and Extreme Programming Discussions
What do people think would be hard to test about putting a satellite in orbit around another planet?
Don't forget that while it is true that SCIENTISTS use the metric system in R&D, NASA is NOT a scientific/R&D organization, they are primarily an engineering and development organization that supplies services for a lot of R&D. The fact is that most engineers working in the US (especially those over 40) have been trained primarily in the ENGLISH system of units. Most of the engineering fields are now a mess because the science half of the picture is in metric, but when the engineers have to translate their work to the 'real world' a conversion to english units must be made so the shop floor guy or assembly tech or manufacturing plant will understand what is going on.
Unfortunately government mandated conversion to the metric system has flopped at least twice partly because of inertia, and partly because Americans don't like to do what the government tells them to. There have also been riots and protests against adopting something the 'Godless French' invented (see Martin Gardner for some interesting histories here).
It would be nice to have a mass conversion to metric, and it would solve a lot of problems (but not all - ever try to use Japanese metric bolts on a French bicycle????) but I don't see it happen until we get teh schools teaching only metric. And we can't even get them to teach evolution.
First the screen enlagring lens, now this... :)
The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it.
-Abe Simpson
And why aren't we all using radians for angular measurement? Or something with (power of 10) degrees in a circle?
This is sad and funny at the same time, I guess.
Here's a particularly interesting quote:
"People sometimes make errors," said Dr. Edward Weiler, NASA's Associate Administrator for Space Science. "The problem here was not the error, it was the failure of NASA's systems engineering, and the checks and balances in our processes to detect the error. That's why we lost the spacecraft."
Ok, this is a reasonable tone for a public statement. I just have to imagine the tone at the moment of discovery when their internal review uncovered this:
"WHAT!!! Do you have any idea how this is going to make us look!!?? We are going to be the laughing-stock of the scientific community over this! MY GOD! Get me the head of the dumbass who's idea it was to use inches feet and yards to compute the %^&@$# trajectory of an interplanetary vehicle!"
Man, I wouldn't want what's left of _that_ guy's career!
Canada switched from English units to Metric about thirty years ago (before I started school, anyway). There was not mass confusion. Nothing blew up. There was an education campaign, and the media reported (eg. weather reports) in both for a few years. Here in the UK, they've done a partial switch, due to EU regs. All food items are labled in Metric, and you get both Celcius and Farenheight in the weather report; but distances are still labled in miles, and beer still sold in pints. Believe it or not, people are flexible enough to deal with this without their brains seizing up.
ai731
--
"I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent"
The whole Metric vs. English measurement is really bogus. The obvious issue here was that there was poor communications between JPL and their contractor.
I mean, even if the measurements were in the correct measurement system, without clear communications, you won't know exactly what the hell they are for. If JPL did not know for a fact that the numbers they were pushing into their system were the correct data, *including* the units of measurement, then they have no excuse for allowing that data into their system.
Obviously, they need better ways of communicating information with their contractors, including bundling of the measurement system, and some sort of failsafe test that would prove that the numbers they entered were correct.
Otherwise, even if you stipulate that everything sent to you be in metric, you still may screw up when someone submits something in mm when you expected cm.
But this /may/ be a case where lightweight processes failed. Keeping measurements coherent is pretty basic stuff, folks. Most domestic industries that use Imperial units also have to cope with metric units if they have any international business. Dual unit systems are utterly mundane, common, accepted complications of engineering in the U.S.A. Looks like somebody -- probably many folks -- were blind on this one.
This disaster is not proof that Imperial units are evil. It may however cast an unfortunate shadow over the leaner, meaner modern NASA. I hope they don't have too much of a cow over it.
I think it's obviously clear that we need to switch to binary.
Most computers use it with the greatest of ease.
I'd love to type a url that's something like:
http://www.00010001110001010110001.com/
Do you really think that this is the problem? These guys have been doing this for a long time. There has to be another explination for loosing a satellite. Great excuse though.
Once in a while you can get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right. -Hunter/Garcia
When you come right down to it, the 34 Million miles from Earth to Mars (54.4 Million Kilometers) which the probe traveled was actually only off it's mark by 50 miles. So a $125 million dollar probe burned up in the atmosphere. It would be like trying to back your uncle's Astin Martin into the garage and missing the door opening by a centimeter, then it bursts into flame and self destructs. Damn, those Brits think of everything, don't they? ---nedy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Groucho to Margaret Dumont: "I can see you and me married. I can see you bending over the stove. I can't see the stove."
?????
They will take my pint glass from my cold, dead hand!!! A "half a litre" would be the sort of drink you'd expect to buy at The Blue Oyster Bar, not the Kings' Arms. Buying a "half" in public is not the done thing in every pub I've been in; reactions vary from laughter to offers of physical violence...
The EC has taken so much from us, and given back so little (except all that wonderful red tape); don't allow them to break this bastion of English social culture.
Unless you want to order ein Glas Bier für eine Frau et un paquet des chips s'il vous plait, next time you're down the pub.
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
I am an American, and I know the metric "SI" system quite well. It's all you deal with in chemistry and physics. Newer USGS and DMA maps use it. It's what the military uses. It's taught in schools. Every other modern country in the world uses it. It's all over the place. Any American who doesn't know the metric system, and some of the basic conversions (volume, temperature, mass, and distance) from the American measurements to metric and vice-versa is plainly ignorant.
I'm an American who's not ignorant.
I'm also an American who believes that we should be using the metric system. Sadly, it's probably too late for us.
But maybe I can teach you all a little bit about why the metric system is better. Do you know what the mass in ounces of one cubic inch of water is? Probably not. But even a child can learn the relation in metric: One cubic centimeter of water has a mass of one gram. Easy.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Indians use both Metric and Imperial according to occasion...the carpenters and builders find Imperial more useful because factoring the foot is more convenient than a meter 1/2, 1/3 1/4, 1/6 foot are all integers in inches. But fluid measurements and long distances and weights are in Metric. The result is peculiar, most people can convert daily use measurements on the fly in their heads. And I find it as easy to check out a five pound bag of sugar in the states because I convert it anyway... MAYBE WHAT WE NEED IS THE CAPABILITY TO THINK BOTH AT THE SAME TIME...or is that too much to ask from our educational systems?
I'm American and have to work in English and Metric units all the time. I deal mostly with temperatures and am happy with the Celsius scale. It is so much more intuitive and easier to understand. I hate watching the weather and see 32deg (without units!) and think oh HOT!, but it is actually freezing.
What I can't understand is Americans aversion to the 24-hr clock or "military time" as Americans love to call it for some reason. I guess they think the rest of the world is run by generals and dictators? That damned am/pm just bothers me, especially for digital clocks, where the symbols are so damned small, you have to judge am/pm by day light. Worse yet, 12am and 12pm are ambiguous and do not exist.
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
Oops sorry, suffered from dain brammage:
You see it's been proven statistically. That left handed people often accidently turn the car _into_ traffic when they try to avoid something.
Not much improvement... damn!
LINUX stands for: Linux Inux Nux Ux X
FRA: STFU GTFO
[]
:-)
> By comparison, metric units tend to be either too large or too small:
That's funny: I've never heard someone complain about the metric system here in France with units being either too small or too large. And no, I don't think that it is because it was invented here.
The only reason of your problem is that you are not used to the metrical system, that's why you feel it is "unnatural", trust me I don't have at all this problem.
> With computers to help us, there's no real reason to HAVE to change anymore.
It is not a computer problem but a human problem... What do you think ? That at the NASA, they don't use computers.
> Converting would be very expensive, cause many more NASA-type foul-ups, and offer little or nothing in return.
Any change is painful, but after the change is completed, it would prevent this kind of error.
> It makes about as much sense for the US to convert to Metric units as it does for the rest of the world to adopt the English language.
A language is different from a metric system, it is easier to change the metric system that the whole language, and BTW what is the language I'm typing in right now ? Esperanto ? No, it's English so in a way the rest of the world IS adopting English.
I don't claim at all, that the metric system is the perfect system, but if look at it without the NIH syndrome, it is quite coherent, and useful. (me i would like to have a system in which the speed of light is 1
Oh, BTW I do remenber another mistake from the NASA when they used terrestrial miles instead of nautical miles (or vice versa) while they were trying to rescue a spaceship...
In Europe, we are on the verge of changing of currency unit, it won't be easy to adjust to the Euro, but it'm not too worried. The US could change its unit system if there was a real will.
Didn't the two groups specify UNITS anywhere in their communications?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
It seems rather ironic that is called the "English" system when we English have been more or less metric for some time now.
I still drink pints and am six foot tall but when I arrive at work I deal solely in millimeters and microns...
Just because it's old doesn't mean it's bad. :)
:)
:)
Actually I recall a really old news story written around the time Englands Currency changed (1969/1970) about how Metric would work out worse for people.
Basically with the old money system (base 12) you could divide a bill for a meal between multiple numbers of people easily. with Metric Base 10 your are all left fighting over who ordered the extra rolls.
Think the system was based on your fingers, but you can count in base 12 (or base 13) on your fingers if you use the three parts of each finger as one unit. If we had an extra finger we could do base 16
Personally I prefer Hex.
Perhaps the Powers that Be are afraid that once people get used to the idea that it is possible to make changes to the Stupid Things In Life, they won't stop at just trivial things like measuring systems.
NASA has had a rule of using metric for years. This was a case of the outside private contractors who built the probe not using them, and the cuts in NASA's funding causing NASA to have to cut corners to do anything at all (ie, fewer quality checks). If the US govt continues to cut NASA funding, they can expect more embarrasments like this one.
I find it extremly difficult to learn and use two differant systems of mesure in school. It is probably at the root of American student's poor performace. Juggling the both of them is extremly confusing. I firmly believe that the failure of the U.S to switch places a handicap on all students that have to deal with it.
I am all for converting to metric -- it simply makes more sense! For whatever reason, we have an easy time thinking in multiples of 5 and 10 and the metric system is made explicitely to mimic that.
That is, all of the metric system but temperature. The celsius scale is just plain wrong!
Now all measurements are inherently arbitrary. We simply agree on a set reference point and go from there. Meters are the length of a light wave. A kilogram is the weight of some brick somewhere in France(?).. I think. In any event, that's all fine and dandy.
So why is it so wrong that celsius is based on the freezing and boiling point of water? Because temperature MATTERS to humans and the state changes of water have nothing at all to do with us.
When Farhenheit(sp?) was picking the reference points for his scale, he did the logical thing and picked points on the far ranges of livable temperature for humans. Anything less than 0 is *really* code and anything greater than 100 is incredibly hot (kinda... I'd peg 110 as being the upper limit if I did my own scale). We are used to dealing with a scale from 1 to 10 or 1 to 100 with 1 (or 0) being the lowest and 100 being the highest in whatever.
The celsius scale doesn't take this into account at all. The upper limit of what we can stand is around 45 or so. 45?? Where's the significance there?
This means that the entire USABLE range of celsius is -10 to 45. There are two problems with that: they are meaningless (remember: 1 - 10 or 1-100 makes sense -10 to 45 doesn't) and they don't have a fine enough grain.
That is, there is maybe 55 degrees that encompasses the entire usable scale. That's simply not enough to work with. We can feel a huge difference between 40 and 45 degrees C.. much bigger then is warranted by 5 units.
So, yay to converting to liters and meters and boo to converting to celsius!
JPL is especially committed to metric - on their campus in Pasadena, even the street signs are metric! Maybe they (JPL/NASA) should have caught it, but I would say most of the blame lies with Lockheed Martin.
Just that they do stuff the REST OF THE WORLD collectively can't figure out. Troll.
There was an experiment where they were to bounce a laser beam from Mauna Kea off a mirror on the shuttle. Someone entered the mountain's height in feet where it was expected to be in miles, and the computers dutifully rolled the shuttle to point at a 6,000+ MILE high mountain. Oops.
Its that the english system doesn't consistantly use a single constant unit to measure length, volume or anything else.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
US exhanges will in the summer be moving to using units of 5cents from 1/32nds of a dollar.
Apparently its to save money.
What is 1/16th of a dollar anyways?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
1) I studied engineering in the U.S. and ALWAYS was required to use the metric system of measurement. 2) If these scientists are capable of so a basic a flaw in their calculations then how can we believe they are capable of even finding the cause of the error? 3) If this is the reason they use publicaly, it is going to be really rich to find out the true reason. 3) Didn't I give reason 3 already? 4) error, error, errorrrrrrrrr
As other replies to your post say, you are counting in the wrong direction, trying to find the precise (exact) metric dimension to an English unit you are used too. You have to think the other way since the rest of the world works in metric.
I work on several space station projects, where dimensions are nice round centimeter or meter dimensions (because I work with international partners). Now I have to work with 3.28ft and 39.37in instead of 100cm. English units just aren't useful.
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
The problem with Climate Orbiter, from what I've heard was that they reported a weight in pounds (pound-force), and NASA assumed Newtons.
Who invented this English system of measurements with pound-force, pound-mass and slugs? Newtons and kilograms is all I need. If you think English is easier, I hate to know what OS you use.
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
I think NASA ought to adopt the Three-F system for all future missions. I'm sure this would alleviate the confusion that the metric system causes, and you wouldn't have all those nasty fractions that the english system is prone to create.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
>A parsec is intrinsically useful as a unit of distance, owing to the nature of how far the earth is from the sun and some simple mathematics.
No the distance between the sun and the earth is 1 Astronomical Unit. A parsec is the distance you get when you stand on both poles and intersect two lines that both bend 1 arch second from each other(of from each pole, always forget).
LINUX stands for: Linux Inux Nux Ux X
FRA: STFU GTFO
The further from civilization you get the more white signs in mph you see, but km is what we are actively supporting
True enough lots of household terms are imperial, x stones (but on the other hand I havnt a clue how many pounds are in a stone, or have any idea of how to convert pounds to anything, so american jokes about someone being x no of pounds are way over my head). I couldn't tell you how big a gallon is either. I might sometimes use inches for rough and ready figures, and because my screensize is measured in it :-)
But for anything else metric is used, for anything even vaguely technical, engineering scientific or craftsman, anything that requires a miniumum of accuracy then you need metric.
So in short we still use miles in everyday usage, but outside of that things get metric damn quick.
Question by the way, did america ever run their monetary system with imperial style units, i.e the ancient pre-decimal system used here until the 70s, something like 212 pennies to a pound, with a multitude of different units inbetween, none of which with a 10 of anything mapping to anything else, complete nightmare, but folk cried having to go decimal, as decimal was "too complicated to understand", insanity!
C.
I sometimes write stuff