Death by Inches: The battle over the metric system in America
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Re: Death by Inches: The battle over the metric system in America
#2I see we're still perpetuating the "DVORAK is inherently better than QWERTY" myth, as well as "QWERTY was designed to prevent key-sticking" myth. And I don't want to know what it suggests about the author that he still has Tommy Lee's penis on the brain. That is your go-to inch example?
I had always intuited a higher opinion of Slate, just because I had friends I respected who read it, but the more I actually read it myself, the more it seems barely above the likes of BuzzFeed or HuffPo.
>> "when a foot is 12 inches... it gets tough to do quick mental calculations.'
Except, you know, when you want to easily divide by three or six. Or by two or four and end up with integer results. But why would anyone ever want to do that in normal, day to day living?
Re: Death by Inches: The battle over the metric system in America
#3I have some difficulties with the issues described in the piece.
"A yard is the distance from your sternum to the tip of your outstretched hand."
According to folk belief, it's the distance from the tip of Henry I's nose to the end of his thumb. According to an early definition, "It is ordained that 3 grains of barley dry and round do make an inch, 12 inches make 1 foot, 3 feet make 1 yard."
Who here has an idea of the size of a grain of barley dry and round?
At 39.3 inches, a meter is just slightly longer than a yard, and for "traditional purposes" where the sternum/fingertip approximation is good enough, a meter and a yard can be used almost interchangeably.
Somehow all those people using metric in their daily lives don't feel like they are missing something special by having "ancient, organic" units. (BTW, at what point does something become "ancient"?)
"Or don’t bother, because the definition completely changed in 1960"
The yard definition 'completely changed' in 1959, when it defined as exactly 0.9144 meters. Before then it was different in different countries.
Since the yard is pegged to the meter, this means that the yard is now legally defined as the time light travels in 1/274130223.5952 seconds.
"The first third of the 20th century, for instance, saw some quite serious efforts to rationalize our systems for dates and times."
As well as the 1700s, when France ran under a rationalized calendar, which provided the name for the Thermidorian Reaction. This is part of the same movement that brought us the metric system, so I think it's odd to exclude that very serious effort.
Re: Death by Inches: The battle over the metric system in America
#4The article uses "Anyway, we have calculators now" as an argument for decimalization, but I see it as an argument against it. The less people do math on paper (or in their head), the less need we have to tie our system of measurement to the number of fingers the human hand happens to have; calculators divide by 12 as easily as 10.
Re: Death by Inches: The battle over the metric system in America
#5I see we're still perpetuating the "DVORAK is inherently better than QWERTY" myth, as well as "QWERTY was designed to prevent key-sticking" myth. And I don't want to know what it suggests about the author that he still has Tommy Lee's penis on the brain. That is your go-to inch example? I had always intuited a higher opinion of Slate, just because I had friends I respected who read it, but the more I actually read it…
It doesn't say that Dvorak is better than QWERTY. It links to an article in The Atlantic titled "The Lies You've Been Told About the Origin of the QWERTY Keyboard". Quoting from it, which quotes from elsewhere:
> ... the QWERTY system emerged as a result of how the first typewriters were being used. Early adopters and beta-testers included telegraph operators who needed to quickly transcribe messages. However, the operators found the alphabetical arrangement to be confusing and inefficient for translating morse code. The Kyoto paper suggests that the typewriter keyboard evolved over several years as a direct result of input provided by these telegraph operators
That's why the Slate article says "the QWERTY keyboard was designed for a different age (to suit the quirks of telegraph operators)", and does not refer to the myth about key-sticking.
(Personally, I thought the same as you, and it required a closer reading to understand that my thought was incorrect.)
The discussion about mental arithmetic concerns conversions between different scales, like foot and mile, not in fractions of a foot. If you have a surveyor's wheel marked in feet or half-rods and want to measure 1/4 mile -- how long is that?
That said, see my other post for aspects about this article that I didn't like.
Re: Death by Inches: The battle over the metric system in America
#6I wish the article had touched on temperature systems; I feel like Celsius is metric at its weakest. Farenheit has beautiful bands:
0's: So cold you have trouble doing anything and just want to warm up immediately
10's: Wear a ski jacket with hat and scarf and gloves
20's: Wear a ski jacket and hat
30's: Wear a ski jacket but leave it open
40's: Wear a wool overcoat
50's: Wear a heavy jacket
60's: Wear a light jacket
70's: Leave the jacket home
80's: Wear shorts
90's: So hot you have trouble doing anything and just want to cool down immediately
100+: So hot it's off the scales
Re: Death by Inches: The battle over the metric system in America
#7If we went metric on the interstates, exit 880 on Interstate 10 in Texas (at the Louisiana state line) would retain it's status as the highest numbered exit in North America. Only it'd be exit 1408.
(exits are generally numbered by their mile (err, kilometer..) marker in the US, not consecutively)
Re: Death by Inches: The battle over the metric system in America
#8Everyone seems to be missing the most obvious reason to convert.
http://gizmodo.com/5786004/these-are-the-three-countries-who...
We're a global economy. By the ends of the century, India and China will have pushed us down to at least #3.
Re: Death by Inches: The battle over the metric system in America
#9I wish the article had touched on temperature systems; I feel like Celsius is metric at its weakest. Farenheit has beautiful bands: 0's: So cold you have trouble doing anything and just want to warm up immediately 10's: Wear a ski jacket with hat and scarf and gloves 20's: Wear a ski jacket and hat 30's: Wear a ski jacket but leave it open 40's: Wear a wool overcoat 50's: Wear a heavy jacket 60's: Wear a light jacket…
Anything feels right when you are used to it, for the rest of the world Celsius feels right, you could say it's because you know anything starting by "minus" is cold as well as any single integer (0-9). Some sort of familiarity-bias.
Re: Death by Inches: The battle over the metric system in America
#10This whole article just feels like fluff. The very first "fact" about the origins of the qwerty keyboard are completely wrong. The Wikipedia page doesn't have a single mention of telegraph and has a complete history of its development. A history can be found in this 1996 article among others http://reason.com/archives/1996/06/01/typing-errors/.