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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

#201

Post by phaemon »

jwecker wrote: post #186
phaemon wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's really only one unit for length: the meter. Centimeters aren't a different unit, they're "hundredths of a meter". You can call your lengths of timber "frobs" if you want, even in public! You could have people order them that way and sell them that way. The only requirement most places have is that you also specify what that is in meters so that people who don't know what a frob is, know what they're buying. I…

You mean similar to how stock prices used to be demarcated or how foreign exchanges use 'pip' values? ;-) ( http://www.cringely.com/2012/09/05/ticked-off-how-stock-mark... ) Seriously though good question. First though it made me realize that you never see prices in thirds of a dollar- as if everyone avoids it and have simply gotten used to avoiding it. I can't imagine a situation where ease of dividing by three for…

> I certainly wouldn't advocate a unit that's defined as one 60th of a second

Veering sharply offtopic, seconds are actually called seconds because they're "second order minutes". So, just as a minute is 1/60 of an hour, a second-order minute is 1/60 of 1/60 of an hour.

In the past, people have indeed used "thirds" (1/60 of a second) and in the 13th century, Roger Bacon went as far as using "fourths" (1/3600 of a second)!

Re: Death by Inches: The battle over the metric system in America

#202

Post by Houshalter »

langarto wrote: post #40
upofadown wrote: post #17

Since our civilization seems to have moved to binary for actual computations I wonder if we will someday go back to thinking in terms of halves, quarters, eighths, etc. of some standard unit. Then people would mock the metric system for being implicitly based on the biological accident of ten fingers...

We should abandon base 10 and use base 16.

Why not base 8? It's closer to 10 and doesn't require 6 more numbers, but 2 fewer.

Re: Death by Inches: The battle over the metric system in America

#203

Post by Houshalter »

I prefer Imperial but I'd be willing to switch, provided we also switch to a new spelling and time system.

It's funny the same people that make fun of the Imperial system also cling to bad standards because they are more familiar and have a high switching cost.

Re: Death by Inches: The battle over the metric system in America

#204

Post by nice_uname_nerd »

Havoc wrote: post #194
nice_uname_nerd wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly disagree. Using the right tool for the right job is worth far more than enforcing arbitrary universal consistency. In a math course, you'd measure angles in radians so you're dealing with nice small multiples of pi. I think it'd be downright dangerous to use radians in a fighter jet, say, when the precision you need is much better provided by degrees. Imagine if we enforced only one programming paradigm, s…

>Using the right tool for the right job is worth far more than enforcing arbitrary universal consistency. Except units of measure are not "tools"...they are ways of communicating information. And when each person feels the need to enforce their own version of "right tool for right job" then things like the mars orbiter incident happen. >Imagine if we enforced only one programming paradigm, since they're all equivalen…

>units of measure are not "tools"...they are ways of communicating information.

How you communicate information is important and has real impacts. Given a graph, you could choose to encode it as an adjacency matrix or as a collection of adjacency lists. Both convey the same information, but nobody would say we should pick one and only one. I disagree with the assertion that measurement units aren't tools or that they are exempt from similar consideration.

Sure, the Mars incident is a call for consistency, but it's a call for consistency inside NASA. That shouldn't affect carpenters who need divisibility by 2, 3 and 4 more than they need 5. Or those who like to use inches because theyre significantly larger than centimeters and consequently easier to approximate by eye.

Re: Death by Inches: The battle over the metric system in America

#205

Post by watson »

I think the "but it's easier to visualize" claim is BS.

I would argue that it's just as hard for a person who's is used to the metric system to visualize inches, feet and yards as it is for a person used to those units to visualize centimeters and meters.

It's all a matter of which units your brain is used to thinking in.

When I speak to my US friends and they say stuff like, "I'm 7 feet and 10 inches tall", I have no internal visual metal picture at all. But if I say, "I'm 193 cm tall" I would guess they don't have either.

Re: Death by Inches: The battle over the metric system in America

#206

Post by whiddershins »

It drives me crazy that people think base 10 systems are so great. The choice of base 10 is so deeply irritating to me. Divisions of 60 are fantastic, obviously, and we all benefit from being able to divide an hour in to 5ths, 6ths ... Meanwhile splitting a check three ways is likely to always be uneven.

Base 12 or 60 end up being more precise in every day life, and i wish whoever thought up the metric system had been smart enough to realize that.

Re: Death by Inches: The battle over the metric system in America

#207

Post by slyall »

hrbrtglm wrote: post #25

I love the metric system for no better reasons that it's the one I always used as a french, it just seems as natural for me as my ten fingers, I never really thought about it. Yet, I can understand why some would not change their “English customary measures”, they must feel it the same way, thinking it's as natural as their feet. For instance, our screens size (TV, computer, phones) are expressed in inches for whatev…

My screen to paper size conversion:

15 inches is almost exactly A4 landscape 17 inches has a 2cm gap around the edges 19 inches has a 5cm gap around the edge 24 inches is A3 landscape or 2.5xA4 in portrait mode.

Re: Death by Inches: The battle over the metric system in America

#208

Post by Taniwha »

If I visit Starbucks they sell something called a "Venti" it's part of Starbucks attempt to change the language of coffee so that their regular customers can't order elsewhere.

"Venti" is of course Italian for 20, let's ignore the fact that Starbucks appear to invalidly trademarked a number, when I find myself stuck with a Starbucks in an American airport I love to ask "that's Italian for twenty, twenty what?" the usual answer is "fluid ounces" .... but "that can't be true, Italy uses the metric system, it must be litres or millilitres ..." usually they choose "litres", it is a big cup

Of course the American fluid ounce is a weird thing, different from the Imperial fluid ounce (which is exactly 1oz of water at 62F)- a strange historical thing due more to British Kings monkeying with the tax system than anything else

Re: Death by Inches: The battle over the metric system in America

#209

Post by pbhjpbhj »

ygra wrote: post #196
cdash wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is still widely used in the UK.

The UK converted to Metric recent-ish-ly. Once the people who grew up with the old measurements die out it'll get a bit saner, I guess.

From 1965 to 1975 was the intended program.

In practice there are still some throw backs (pints of milk or beer) except that EU directives mean that the 4 pint milk container has to be labelled 2.27 litres, etc..

Switching my mental model of pricing of fruit was quite hard but it's really annoying now that supermarkets still list imperial prices alongside (and occasionally in breech of regulations, alone). Metric prices are larger numbers and they want to convince us they're not overcharging. Unfortunately my regular supermarket have taken to pricing by the item or bag for fruit - causes no end of problems, all the bags are different weights. More expensive items in 800g bags (or 750g), less expensive in 900g or 1kg. Good for keeping my mental arithmetic going though - which is cheaper those apples for £1.20 a bag on 3-for-2 or these for 40p each with a coupon for 10% off ...! /rant

Re: Death by Inches: The battle over the metric system in America

#210

Post by lmm »

raldi wrote: post #13
Sharlin wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, to a non-American like myself the Fahrenheit scale feels weird and arbitrary (and yes, I understand the "human scale" argument, just don't buy it") while the Celsius scale makes sense.

Could you say a bit more about why you feel it makes sense, perhaps with a chart like the one I wrote up?

As a Brit:

-20: Inside a food freezer.

-10: Ski trousers weather. Doesn't happen where I live.

-5: There'll be snow, or at least frost. Hat & gloves weather. Happens one or two days a year.

0: Freezing, usefully. Full-length coat.

5: Pretty cold - not unusual for a winter day. Fridge temperature. Don't forget your jacket.

10: A warmer winter day, or typical early spring.

15: Spring/Autumn; temperature where I'd stop bothering with a jacket.

20: "room temperature" for science (though many actual rooms are a degree or two higher than this). Comfortable.

25: A sunny summer's day. Pleasantly warm.

30: Starting to get towards uncomfortably hot. Notwithstanding this year, I'd only expect a few days this warm in a year.

35: Doesn't happen where I live. You want to be in the pool or somewhere with AC when it's this hot.

40: On a person, serious fever.

60-70: Nice for a sauna. Warm drink (e.g. tea)

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