271–280 of 363 posts
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Inches to cm and back are actually an easy conversion so thinking in both isn't hard - 2.5cm/in, 30cm/ft. 1.6km/mi and 2.2 lbs/kg are a bit more annoying, and Fahrenheit are a freaking abomination.
C is roughly (F - 30)/2, not too bad. To make my life easier I also measure lb as 1/2 kg and driving distances as time.
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 n…
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> Whichever system you grew up with will seem natural to you Yeah. I live in Italy, but grew up in the US. I'm happy with the metric system and wished we had it in the US too, but for certain kinds of measurements, it still doesn't feel quite as natural to me. It depends entirely on how much I use something - temperatures in metric are second nature, because you feel that on your skin every day. Things like people's…
Oddly enough the SI unit is Pascal (Pa) or N/m2, not atmosphere. The technical atmosphere is: around 98KPa, it's not really metric.
There seem to have been two different atmospheres that were pretty close anyway. One being defined as air pressure at sea level, the other being defined as the pressure of 10 meters of water.
I 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…
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But the freeze/boil numbers are arbitrary as well only being true at sea-level. Where I live in Colorado, we're 1 mile (cough, 1.6 km) above sea level meaning those formulas are meaningless.
They aren't meaningless. Water boils at 95 C at your altitude - effectively the same temperature for all "common" usages. E.g. you'd still better not stick your hand into boiling water. A 99% of humans inhabit seems pretty practical to me. The freezing point is effectively identical.
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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…
> Customary measures make a lot more sense to us. Did they make any less sense in UK where they originated? Yet UK pushed through with switching to metric and went way further than US did. So this excuse isn't really valid. The real answer is, that in US politicians were too weak to push this through, because all kind of manufacturers and unions were pressuring them to stop the effort. In UK they just ignored the pre…
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As you've illustrated, we've come to value precision over intuition. The reason people using metric don't feel like they're missing something without organic units is because people who use the relics of those organic units don't use them in the fuzzy organic sense either anymore. When someone tells me "1 foot long" I expect exactly 12 standardized inches- not something roughly as big as my foot (even though, in my c…
Metric users generally do not use organic units to describe extraordinarily large objects. That's it stuff like xx Olympic swimming pools or xx football fields (american nontheless) doesn't sound natural at all. It's all in meters/kilometers, etc.
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>a rational practical reason for sticking in some cases to Imperial units That to me is the worst of both worlds. The optimal solution is to use one consistent system and the winner is pretty clear. >carpentry Certainly. The future is full of 3D printers though.
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…
The real problem though is switching costs. There are tens of thousands of planes out there and more than a million pilots. To switch all of the compasses, GPSs, flight computers, heading indicators, etc. as well as retrain a metric pantload of pilots would be ludicrous for no appreciable gain.
Canada suffered through a problem similar to this when it went metric, and ended up with the Gimli Glider. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider
Don't get me wrong though. I love the metric system and think it's great, however first and foremost we are creatures of practicality. If US dominance in the world slips over the next few generations, I would imagine it will at some point join the rest of the world and abandon imperial measurements.
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Oddly enough the SI unit is Pascal (Pa) or N/m2, not atmosphere. The technical atmosphere is: around 98KPa, it's not really metric.
kPa. Otherwise it'd be Kelvinpascals. And while pressure is often said to be x atmospheres, they usually use bar, which is an SI-derived unit (equal to 10⁵ Pa), which is close enough to the old usage of atmospheres. There seem to have been two different atmospheres that were pretty close anyway. One being defined as air pressure at sea level, the other being defined as the pressure of 10 meters of water.
Great observation! I guess I am way too used to KB and in that very case KPa would be 1024Pa which is even worse. Have an upvote.