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Make the Metric system the standard in the United States

petitions.whitehouse.gov

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Re: Make the Metric system the standard in the United States

#461

Post by jeltz »

eloisant wrote: post #120
stdbrouw wrote: post #78

I moved from Belgium to the US last year, and one of the things that surprised me was that metric measures actually see a fair amount of use in the States. It makes a convoluted system even more weird, but it's also just plain fascinating. 2L bottles of coke and 9mm bullets, miles except when people suddenly switch to kilometers, 50 meter pools and 5K jogging runs but a 120 yard football field, 2 oz shaving cream but…

To be fair, non-metric units are also use worldwide in some specific fields. In aeronautics, height is in feet. In a boat, distance are nautic miles (not even the same miles as Americans on the road). Quick quiz: what's the diagonal size of your laptop screen in centimeters? Your mobile phone? So it doesn't matter if you use completely unrelated metrics for different things. When you want to buy a laptop you know how…

Screen sizes are actually always in mm height and width. The diagonal size is just an approximate size.

Re: Make the Metric system the standard in the United States

#462

Post by ScottWhigham »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #224
lifeformed wrote: post #126

I understand and agree that metric is strictly better, how much better is it? Do the benefits outweigh the costs of changing the whole system?

What about the recurring cost that we have now of using both systems?

I'll play along. What "recurring cost"?

Re: Make the Metric system the standard in the United States

#464

Post by fatbird »

tolmasky wrote: post #400
fatbird wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Celsius, a negative temperature means snow instead of rain, or icy streets instead of wet. Whether the ambient temperature is below freezing is pretty useful knowledge, and more clearly expressed in Celsius. As for the difference between 16 and 17 degrees, the only people who give a shit are people who know how to use decimals for their measuring purposes. In everday use, the finer gradation of the Fahrenheit scal…

The way to know whether it is going to snow or rain is to check the weather report, mainly because more factors go into that than just the temperature (for example, amount of moisture in the air, cold/warm fronts, etc -- which can lead to anything from snow, hail, sleet, or freezing rain). I imagine you are generally getting your temperature from a weather report anyways (unless you are looking at some sort of person…

It's not about whether it will snow or rain, it's about whether precipitation will be frozen or not, and all you need to know that, for precautionary reasons, is the temperature. It's not a large advantage of Celsius, but it is pervasive.

ETA: To be clear, I'm Canadian, and grew up with Celsius. Whether the temp was positive or negative was the second thing worth knowing after the actual number. It was a very practically useful bit of knowledge in everyday life, easily given and easily remembered.

Re: Make the Metric system the standard in the United States

#466

Post by mpyne »

buster wrote: post #386
Kylekramer wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is the thing: Created for still positive for the coldest days in Denmark and under 100 for the warmest is optimizing for ambient outdoor temperature. And much more human readable than heating one liter of water etc. I am not saying it is perfect, but I don't see why it shouldn't continue to be used as it is currently: F for weather reports and such while using C/K for more scientific pursuits.

Yet, it's quite handy that Celsius is based on the freezing temperature of water in winter. You always now when you'll have ice on the streets, cars, etc. :)

The freezing temperature matters far less than you think. There is "latent heat" that must be added to ice to make it melt and removed from water to make it freeze.

Just the other week we had a wintry mix of precipitation at a nice and balmy 0.5 C which resulted in accumulated snow and ice, despite never being below freezing at ground level. It even warmed up through the day slightly to 1.7 C or so but the ice and snow never completely melted as there wasn't enough heat to overcome the latent heat of vaporization needed.

And as mentioned elsewhere, it's not exactly difficult to remember "32 F is freezing", even the most dense Americans have figured that out so it's another metric solution to a problem that doesn't actually exist in America.

Re: Make the Metric system the standard in the United States

#467

Post by chestnut-tree »

Svip wrote: post #218
tokenadult wrote: post #198

From the petitions.whitehouse.gov petition kindly submitted for comment here: "The United States is one of the few countries left in the world who still have not converted to using the Metric System as a standardized system of measurement. Instead of going along with what the rest of the world uses, we stubbornly still adhere to using the imprecise Imperial Unit - despite the fact that practically every other country…

The UK and the US is essentially the same story. The British seemed furious that the EU mandated use of metric internally. But it did not force the UK to change its road signs (still in yards and miles) or what beer comes in (pints). Nothing really changed, other than confirming by directive that EU member states uses the Metric system with one another. There are still Brits who complain that the weather reports are…

Weather forecasts in the UK changed to Celsius in the early 1960s (over fifty years ago). I don't know of anyone in the UK who complains about reports no longer being in Fahrenheit.

Liquid goods in the UK are listed in milliletres or litres. In the US, fluid ounces (fl oz) are still commonly used. (The exception in the UK is pints for beer and milk).

Similarly, walk into a UK supermarket and solid goods are labelled in grams and kilograms. In the US, it's common for goods to be listed in pounds (lbs) or ounces (oz).

Also in the UK, dimensions for goods/products is always in metres, centimetres or millimetres. A lot of people still use feet and inches to describe a persons' height.

So yes, we do use a mixture of metric and imperial in the UK. However, the UK and US are not "pretty much the same" when it comes to metric.

Re: Make the Metric system the standard in the United States

#468

Post by ithkuil »

xefer wrote: post #51
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #14

Before we start with the standard junk about "imperial measures are better because they are easier to understand / better suited to human scale / etc." can I say nope . The only advantage that imperial measures have (for some) is that they are familiar. That's the sum total of it. People where were raised metric find these apologies for imperial measures to be pure gibberish.

To be honest, although I know the obvious benefits of metric, I still prefer imperial simply because of its messiness. I realize the system is archaic, etc., but I still like that connection, as attenuated as it may be, to our ancient past. Use metric for all scientific purposes, etc., but keep that connection to the natural world. I suppose I like it in the same way I prefer natural languages to some artificial lang…

On the other hand, it's also nice to feel that historical connection with people in our past that decided to embrace rationality as a value.

Re: Make the Metric system the standard in the United States

#469

Post by krschultz »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #202
krschultz wrote: post #145

Most of the comments in this thread are talking about the units for personal height, weight, local road signs or for the weather forecast. Those are by far the least important things to be worried about. All of those things are local and there is no carrying cost for them. There would be a cost to change all those signs and forecasts - for no real gain. However, dimensions of physical goods are a constant recurring c…

THe 'sets of tools' argument is kind of spurious. I already have a box full of wrenches; I'd need some more in the box. Nobody argues 'lets get rid of 5/32 bolts, so I can get rid of that wrench'. Its the mental effort to rationalize them that is the real cost. Lets see, slightly larger than 1/4 - is it 7mm? or 8? or 9/32?

I was talking about the factory floor. Even if we switched to metric tomorrow, you would still need wrenches to work on things made before the switch.

But cutting tools are consumable. You need new drills, taps, dies, and cutters all the time. Manufacturers have to stock twice as many because of metric and imperial. Those are big ticket expenses.

Re: Make the Metric system the standard in the United States

#470

Post by mpyne »

mikeash wrote: post #196
eloisant wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, non-metric units are also use worldwide in some specific fields. In aeronautics, height is in feet. In a boat, distance are nautic miles (not even the same miles as Americans on the road). Quick quiz: what's the diagonal size of your laptop screen in centimeters? Your mobile phone? So it doesn't matter if you use completely unrelated metrics for different things. When you want to buy a laptop you know how…

Nautical miles are used in aviation as well. In both cases, the use actually has a very good, albeit obsolete, reason: one nautical mile is equal to one arc minute of latitude on the Earth, to within reasonable accuracy. Very handy for navigation, at least when you didn't have a magic black box to do it for you. I previously had a flight computer with two displays, each of which showed the distance to the next waypoi…

> But there are constant, ongoing costs to having mixed units, potentially including lives lost (and certainly very expensive space probes lost).

In engineering there is never an excuse for not knowing the units of measure of a value in use. That probe would have been brought down just as easily by mistaking a 'kg' parameter as 'g' as it would have been by mistaking a 'kg' parameter as 'lbs'.

What's worse, in engineering there are multiple metric standards of measure (c-g-s, m-k-s, subatomic measures, etc.) There's no way around it, you have to know your units.

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