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Make the Metric system the standard in the United States

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

#531

Post by geon »

tedunangst wrote: post #272
masklinn wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is exactly the problem with the imperial system. You have multiple units for the same thing, and when they are multiples of each other, it is in base 12. That's when you're lucky, can also be 3 (yard to feet), 22 (chain to yard), 10 (furlong to chain), 8 (miles to furlong, and that's why a mile is 5280 feet), 5 (gill to fluid ounce), 4 (acres to rod, gallons to quarts), 14 (stones to pounds) and probably every…

Imagine if we measured time using units of varying multiples. Every time a friend tells me "see you in two weeks", I'm like really? 2 times 7 times 24 times 60? Fucking asshole, do I look like a calculator?

For time, you need a system that let you easily express the year cycle, since the the climate affects a lot of things from economy to sports.

We need to be able to easily count days, since we sleep at night. (It would be very difficult to change to, say, a 20 hour cycle.)

We could skip the month, week, hour, minute and second, but the year and day are essential.

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

#532

Post by hm8 »

StevenXC wrote: post #473
jerf wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the imprecise Imperial Unit" The word "imprecise" is also factually incorrect. AFAIK, all Imperial units are now defined in metric. An inch is not "approximately" 2.54 centimeters, it is defined to be 2.54 centimeters, or, if you prefer, 2.540000000000... centimeters. A pound is defined as 0.45359237 kilograms. It may be very precise specification of a value that is unpleasant and hard to work with, but there is no…

I prefer 2.53999999... centimeters, but to each their own.

That'd be 2.5400000000.... cm

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

#533

Post by RyanMcGreal »

javert wrote: post #398
RyanMcGreal wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most or all of which would not be helped by liberal attempts to emulate Europe. You mean the rest of the industrialized world, not just Europe. > high child poverty is to be expected in a country that harbors many poor immigrants from Latin America. You mean unlike a country that harbours many poor immigrants from Northern Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe? > high rate of incarceration is largely to be bla…

> despite spending only 40-70% of what the USA spends on health care Right. And if the USA tries to emulate Europe in healthcare more than we alreay do, we will end up wasting even more money. There is no solution to be had here through more regulation. > value human rights > ensure everyone has an adequate standard of living Contradiction. But providing a moral basis for individual rights requires understanding a co…

> if the USA tries to emulate Europe in healthcare more than we alreay do, we will end up wasting even more money.

The evidence is that American health care costs would go down significantly, given the clear correlation across industrialized countries between the extent to which health care spending is private and the overall cost (either per capita or as a share of GDP).

> Contradiction.

It's not a contradition, the latter follows necessarily from the former. It's why nearly every industrialized country has converged on public health, public education, public health care, affordable housing, and so on.

> But providing a moral basis for individual rights requires understanding a complete philosophical system, which is out of the scope of an HN comment.

Or we can dispense with the 18th century a priori legerdemain and just recognize human rights as a self-evident basis for a fair, just and humane society.

> You're asking something that may be outside the scope of reality.

And yet the rest of the industrialized world does a much better job of it than the United States.

> As someone from a poor part of rural eastern North Carolina, all I can do is LOL at this

The plural of anecdote is not data.

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

#534

Post by hm8 »

dreish wrote: post #492
DannyBee wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside of cars, roughly every power tool, piece of electronics, cabinet (35mm), etc needs metric sockets or hex keys. I have built plenty of complex machinery. It's actually significantly easier for me to source 50mm flywheels/pulleys, or v-belts, or whatever, than it is to try to get someone to give me reasonable tolerances on imperial. While it's true machining is done to thousandths of an inch in the US, most of…

What does it mean to say that "the 1/2-inch chuck/collet/whatever is really machined to 12.7mm"? 0.5 inches is exactly 12.7 mm, so what else would it be machined to?

Yes 0.5 inches would be exactly 12.7 mm but that comes from the way the inch is now defined (which is 1 in equal to 25.4 mm) as opposed to the earlier definition (i.e. 1/12th of a foot (this definition being the older imperial definition). machined to 12.7 mm simply means that the original imperial definition is abandoned for imperial units and although the chuck/collet/etc is still sold as 0.5 inch chuck/collet/etc; when constructing it, it was measured in the SI units of mm for precision purposes.

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

#535

Post by mjen »

EliRivers wrote: post #66
jamesjguthrie wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that the UK is metric at all. They try to teach us to think metric in school but in the real world almost everything is still imperial. We hear imperial units every day in this country. We hear it when we discuss body weight, driving distance, cooking, size of most things, etc.

I'm British. I live in the UK. I'm in my thirties. I do a person's height in casual conversation (on forms I write it in metres) and driving distance in Imperial measurements (often; I use kilometres when I'm talking to someone I trust to know what a kilometre is, which is generally anyone under about 40). I do depth and altitude in metres, but sometimes I'll use an old chart that has feet (or sometimes fathoms, but…

Australian here. I think Australia has managed the metric conversion much better than most of the English speaking world. I found the miles usage for road signs in London odd, as well as the usage for pounds for vegetables in Canada.

Road distances & speeds : kilometres Food measurements are always grams/kilograms & mls and litres ... except for steak & there are some hold hovers like soft drinks which are often in 330ml/600/680ml, 1.25litre, 2 litre. Milk is always litres and not just a straight conversion from ounces to litres, so always 1/2/4 litres. In addition, I think supermarkets are required to list food prices with a price/unit, e.g. $2/kg so that you can easily compare prices between brands/varieties.

Hardware supplies are in metres or dual listed.

Weight is always done in kilograms although older people occasionally will use stones / pounds (which usually requires clarification). Haven't heard them in quite a while.

Engine power is measured in terms of kilowatts. For some odd reason we have an odd unit for fuel efficiency of litres/100km. Not sure who picked this. E.g. 8.5 L /100km.

TVs are sometimes dual although mostly I'll see them in terms of centimetres although computer monitors are still in inches, probably due to the US.

I think when purchasing land it's a bit of mix as you can buy land in hectares as well as acres. There's also squares which I gather is 10ft by 10ft (which is odd and everyone I know silently guesses is around 9.something metres^2).

Not much into sports but pretty sure they use metres there too for Australian Football.

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

#536

Post by userulluipeste »

Kylekramer wrote: post #281
acangiano wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much better visual evidence: http://signword.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/423399_101506340...

Pretty weak argument for Celsius. Why should people care that the boiling and freezing points are simple? That is almost irrelevant for the most common uses of temperature reporting. People care about the ambient outside temperature (which Fahrenheit seems optimized for), not the effect it has on the state of one particular compound.

It's not weak at all. I don't know about you, but I'm surrounded by decimal measure systems and I find other old/weird legacy systems brain-damaging (please don't bother mentioning exceptions, I'm aware of their existence even in the metric system territory). I prefer the centigrade over something else anytime. The fact that Celsius have chosen 0 and 100 for for freezing and respective for boiling normal water in normal atmospheric pressure outweighs any other possible reference in regard to its relevance to a human.

I'll sum up for you: normal water, normal pressure, normal reference-peeking, and normal and logical 100-sized interval reference.

EDIT: fixed a typo

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

#537

Post by userulluipeste »

Thrymr wrote: post #260
jzwinck wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course not: sovereign currencies have well-known benefits. Multiple systems of measurement are only a hindrance, a friction.

The friction of unit conversion is much lower, though, because they are constant and don't have transaction fees. The number of centimeters per inch or pounds per kilogram is the same today as it will be next month or next year.

...actually NASA proved that kind of friction to be very severe: http://articles.cnn.com/1999-09-30/tech/9909_30_mars.metric_...

Just think that it also could have affected people...

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

#538

Post by userulluipeste »

return0 wrote: post #380
xefer wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's a load of fun until you try to create an international website selling clothes, or food recipes, or even has dates on it. We 've already settled on using English for everything on the net, why not settle on common language about measures too.

>We 've already settled on using English for everything on the net

You understand that you're just saying this in an english-speaking world and if there is anything against your argument it just won't come up here at your feet?

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

#539

Post by astrodust »

bcgraham wrote: post #417
astrodust wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen the people on Mythbusters flail about while trying to convert using units like inch-pounds and miles per hour and fluid ounces to cubic feet? There's a reason science insists on using the metric system. The metric system is relatively ancient, dating from the late 1700s.

A system of measurements dating back 300 years is not ancient by any sane scale. It's still the newcomer to the set of systems of measurement.

Considering the amount of scientific discovery since that point, yes, it is ancient. Surely 90% of our scientific knowledge has come past the point in which it was invented.

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

#540

Post by pakmans »

pakmans wrote: post #290
Kylekramer wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty weak argument for Celsius. Why should people care that the boiling and freezing points are simple? That is almost irrelevant for the most common uses of temperature reporting. People care about the ambient outside temperature (which Fahrenheit seems optimized for), not the effect it has on the state of one particular compound.

Kelvin should be the logical choice for temperature: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin

... or not: http://www.nature.com/news/quantum-gas-goes-below-absolute-z...
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