521–530 of 589 posts
The US didn't adopt the metric system because it was considered blasphemous since the French used it. I'm not joking. We got screwed by a bunch of demagogues.
The US officially adopted the metric system in 1975 with the Metric Conversion Act.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre_Convention [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendenhall_Order
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My cupboard has cups in all kinds of sizes. Which one is the right one to use as a measurement? And for baking there's quite a big difference if my cups are 150 ml or 350 ml, especially when paired with counted ingredients like eggs. That's the problem with cups.
All of your regular coffee cups are exactly 250ml. Regular people use them for basic baking all the time, like making pancakes. 'Cups' are still better measures than ml because even you, in your self-acclaimed ignorance have a sense of how much a cup is whereas people do not have any idea how much '300ml' is. Canadians have no clue what 10ml of anything is. Canadians will continue to use feet and pounds for personal…
I don't order beer at all, but around here it's usually ordered as 500 ml (a little further south, especially around October, they tend to order 1 liter).
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Additionally, base 12, would not act like 12 does in base 10, thus if base 12 is your key point of reference, a foot should be 10 in base 12 for inches..... I honestly cannot make any sense of this part of your argument. The symbols 10 would only look like ten they would still mean a dozen and the properties would remain the same. Furthermore people don’t think in twelves because we are not taught in a dozenal number…
He is saying that you need twelve digits to actually use base 12 and that in every base N with N>1 you write N as 10 (eg in hex 10 is A and 16 is 10)
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We just report it to the degree (high of 34 tomorrow, 32 the next day). That's really plenty of resolution for non-scientific measurement.
And is also more resolution than the error warrants
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A yard is three feet, or about the length of a man's stride. A quart is about the maximum amount of whiskey one can drink without dying. A pint's a pound, the world around. My favorite is the cord, which is 128 cubic feet, or more often a stack of firewood 4 feet tall by four feet wide by eight feet long.
A yard is not just a measure of length, but of volume and in a manner, constitution if you will, as it is also 2 1/2 pints[1], good sir or ma'am. Oy! 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yard_of_ale
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They're globally standard, decimal, and internally consistent. One never needs to wonder how many meters in a kilometer or how many grams in a kilogram. They have some human usable qualities as well; it's convenient that water freezes at 0°C and that a kilogram of water is also a liter.
Are they globally “standard?” China uses Mou to measure land area. A pyeong is used in Korea for housing floor area, the British use pints in the pub and stone when weighing themselves. The US uses feet and pounds. We use clocks that have 60 seconds, 60 minutes, 24 hours, weeks, months. If we want to be consistent, “minutes” should perhaps be 100 seconds, for instance. Horses are measured in “hands.” “Global standard…
Plenty of people are "bilingual" with metric and local. Canadians are universally bilingual with metric and imperial. It's not that hard.
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Buy an imperial rule. There's some inches that are sub-divided into tenths (maybe 1/20), and others sub-divided into sixteenths (maybe 32nds or 64ths). Often with heavier markings on more significance. For easy division and fractioning of whatever it is you are doing. If it's imperial only (v. rare nowadays) there's usually a coarser scale or two for easier subdivision or when the 16ths and finer just don't matter. B…
As someone who does a lot of woodworking in a metric world: the common fractions (e.g. 1/3) are not a problem at all, they are periodic. Adjusting my saw to 333.33mm or 6.66mm is something I do quite often. If you use fractions often or work with weirder fractions anybody who is worth their grain of salt will build custom temporary rulers or helper systems anyways. And then it won't matter at all if your unit is hype…
My point is a system with less need for that because it can handle more common divisions easily would be good.
> I can see how anybody who grew up with inches likes that one better
I tried to be very explicit in that I was not promoting the imperial system. I'm not even promoting imperial distance over metric distance. I'm purely using feet because there's a base 13 for inches to illustrate how a full base 12 system might work. Feet and inches are much worse than metric even in this case because that conversion only happens at one spot, not at regular orders of magnitude.
All I was saying is that since it's a fact there are some things that can be done in base 12 that can't be done in base 10 but not the other way aroubd, it would be really interesting (and extremely unlikely) if we somehow shifted to a base 12 metric-like system. That wouldn't be imperial (which has a different conversion every time you blink).
I learned a lesson though. People are very protective of the metric system. Even opining about fictional future possibilities with mathematical facts will lead to downvoting into oblivion and people misinterpreting clear assertions as something they aren't.
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> "It cannot perfectly represent the amount" you say, and then perfectly represent the amount. Actually, I said "It cannot perfectly represent the amount (1/3)", so I specifically game an example immediately after the statement of exactly what I was talking about, which you then ignored and used an example for a different item to represent erroneously. What's up with that? > You represent a quarter as the fraction 25…
> No, I represent a quarter as 25/100's to show how it would be accurately represented in metric. 1/4 meter is not pure metric, it's applying a non-metric modifuer to a metric amount. The metric representation of 1/4 meters is 25 centimeters, which is 25/100. What? Fractions aren't exclusive to the imperial system. 1/4 of a metre is metric, just as a 1/4 of an inch is imperial. Everything below is a perfectly legitim…
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I think this is exactly the rationale. But, from a more practical perspective... If instead of g/mol, we referred to molecules/g -- we would end up populating tables and charts with really big numbers. This would make lookup tables hard to read, difficult to publish, and hard to work with. Imagine if you had to do math with a bunch of 10^23 exponents all of the time. Instead, it was agreed to effectively pull out a c…
> Imagine if you had to do math with a bunch of 10^23 exponents all of the time. What if it was just set to 10^24 then? Much easier to remember and serves the same purpose. If it was 1 it would work too, since the SI system already has a way to deal with large numbers: prefixes. So we might wrote Ymol for yotta mole = 10^24 mol.
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The imperial system is not good for construction. Try measuring a 2x4 sometime. It's just an established convention. And it sucks.
A 2x4 is cut to 2" by 4" wet and shrinks when it is dried. I'm no huge fan, but this is not an issue with the imperial system.