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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

#221

Post by adventured »

I agree the US should fully adopt the metric system, it makes logical sense.

And Europe should abolish about three dozen major languages that should no longer be in use and adopt English (or perhaps Spanish). Why does Bulgaria need its own language? Or Romania, or Sweden? Why does French still exist? We're talking about efficiencies here, right? What's less efficient than people not being able to easily communicate by sharing a common language.

I always get a kick out of bringing this up, because while it's extraordinarily logical to narrow down dozens of languages to one or a few, people lose their minds about it and regard it as a sacred cultural issue that is to never be touched. Whereas converting to the metric system... well but of course, that only makes sense!

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

#222

Post by XorNot »

jeroen wrote: post #220
XorNot wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also because using the metric system you simply take shorthands. 1 inch? About 2.4 cm as far as anyone cares in a casual sense. A meter is about the length of your shoulder to your hand, or a slightly stretch stride. It's actually easier for me to eyeball a centimeter then an inch because I see and use the centimeter all the time. The idea that the units themselves matter is absurd - when you're eyeballing it, you're…

It seems more logical to me to go with 2.5 cm. It is closer to the truth (2.54 cm) and easier to calculate with.

Don't know why I wrote 2.4 - I was reading a bunch of other things up the page, but you're right.

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

#223

Post by vidarh »

phaemon wrote: post #193
bronson wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oops, I'm sorry for the edit. You & I had the same thought: singling out 2.4 was just muddying things. Calling the unit the "2.4" sounds great. But that doesn't sound very metric to me...

Perhaps not to you, but most folk I know (in the UK) aren't quite so hung up about it. I'll sometimes refer to a half-liter as a pint, or a liter as a "couple of pints", or a meter as a yard. Though the pint is by far the stupidest unit. Why on earth wasn't it standardised at 500ml? It would have fixed pints, quarts and gallons all in one go! I know, you can think up immediate objections, but having 568ml to the pint…

> Why on earth wasn't it standardised at 500ml?

Because you'd have a revolution on your hand when people realized they were being served less beer.

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

#226

Post by vidarh »

letney wrote: post #169
MrJagil wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, and to my big surprise, "fishes" is quite correct!

"fishes" refers to multiple species of fish, while "fish" is the correct plural form of a school of a single species.

That distinction is likely to die out, given that lots of other English words that used to predominantly or only use the same form in singular and plural are steadily moving towards separate plural form.

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

#227

Post by anotherevan »

amenghra wrote: post #224

I remember listening to this podcast a while back: http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/why-isnt-the-u-s-...

I remember listening to that podcast and being quite annoyed by it. One of the protagonist's who was obviously in favour of sticking with imperial units kept smugly saying the US is already metricated. Comes across disingenuous as best.

The US rarely uses metric in it's popular culture. Weather reports are in Fahrenheit, movies almost always use miles and pounds. By any measure of cultural output that they export that I've seen (and Australia is a huge consumer of US popular culture) they do not use metric.

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

#228

Post by Natsu »

ScottBurson wrote: post #128
Natsu wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code is a weird one because there are times when it's correct (e.g. "encryption codes"). But when it's used to mean "software" it should never be "codes", IMHO, though I guess there's a minority in disagreement.

I understand why you would think so, as I haven't heard the usage anywhere else in the software world that I've been, but it is a standard usage in that community; it's not hard to find examples [0] [1] [2] [3]. [0] http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/f_src/f_src.html [1] http://www.unige.ch/~hairer/software.html [2] http://www.mcs.anl.gov/project/openadf-automatic-differentia... [3] http://math.berkeley.edu/~strain/…

I most often hear it from programmers who are not native speakers of English, so it always sounds wrong to me.

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

#230

Post by vacri »

_ZeD_ wrote: post #132
bronson wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think that working in hundreds of centimeters is easier?? I guess the system one first learns is the system that feels easiest.

You miss the base-10 point: you can switch in zero time from 240cm to 2.4m and vice-versa, as you can switch in zero time from $2,40 to ¢240 when you expect ¢60 in return. And you can totally ignore the "2", and focus on the "40" part, if you care about the precision, in zero time, and switch back to a global view.

The other thing is that if everything is in powers of 10, then complex calculations are done that require multiple units, it's much easier to calculate. You don't need to keep a dictionary of 'conversion factors' to have these complex calculations make sense.
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