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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

#291
Centimeter is about 2 grids in a school "checked" notebook. Everybody know after using these notebooks fot the whole education how long exactly that is. No problems with eyeballing. I have problems eyeballing an inch (only used in 5.25 or 3.14 disk sizes and in monitors' sizes).

Milimeter is close to smallest unit useful in human scale - when you try to draw 0.5 milimeter scale with a regular pen, for example, the lines will probably touch each other. You can't cut with regular tools with better than 1mm accuracy, too. Tools are commonly scaled in milimeters, and you can almost use 14 key for 13 screw etc, so no point in smaller units for regular mechanics work either.

Food stuff is bought in "dekos" (dekagrams). You say "10 deko of this meat, 40 deko of that cheese, and 1 kilo of these berries, please". Somehow hektagram haven't caught up.

Land is measured in ar (10x10 meters), hektar (100x100 meters) and squared kilometers for anything bigger. Flats are measured in squared meters (50-300 m2 for most flats).

1 kg of water (and most other common liquids, with precision good enough for cooking etc) is 1 liter, everybody know that and use them interchangeably. 1 glass is 250 ml is 250 g of most liquids and powders, people measure stuff with glasses when cooking assuming 1 glass = 250 g.

There's a joke about this 1 liter = 1kg assumption. When asked what's 10 times 100g everybody answered 1kg except Russian and Polish who answered 1 liter (because shot glasses of alcohol in pubs are sold as 100g).

1 meter is almost exactly 1 step, 1 km is how far you can walk in 10 minutes.

I don't think one system is better than another in everyday usage, except the much easier calculations in metric.

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

#292
post #272
post #205

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…

You have some really tall friends: 7feet,10inches would be uber-tall - 239cm. To convert I use some baselines 5'7 is 170, 6' is 183, then adding/subtracting inches to fit.

I think this illustrates my point ;) But since when do I get down-votes for favouring the metric system??

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

#293
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nah, "soccer fields" is a very common way to reference size/length in various European cultures.

Which ones? I've never heard it.

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

#294
post #216

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 us…

Occasionally people blurt out "venti" in a place that isn't a Starbucks. The staff always knows that means "biggest cup we've got". Conversely, if I order an "extra large" in Starbucks they always force me to pick one of their sizes and say it's freakin' nonsense name. Also, I'm in Canada (a country that uses metric) and they list their sizes in fluid ounces.

Is that a Canadian Starbucks thing? In English Starbucks I've never had a problem with asking for a "large" or "medium".

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

#295
post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, "soccer fields" is a very common way to reference size/length in various European cultures.

Which ones? I've never heard it.

Mine. I'm French. We often use soccer fields as a unit of surface.

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

#296

Could you imagine Boeing/lockheed/GM/some some oil company or any other manufacturer going up to their stockholders and saying: "This next year, profits will be significantly reduced as we replace every piece of equipment we own, replace every 1/4-20 screw with an M5, and redesign every aircraft/automobile/widget to meet new metric specifications"

I work in manufacturing, and one thing I've noticed here in the U.S. is that metric hardware (nuts, bolts, etc.) is consistently more expensive than comparable-sized imperial hardware. I've never received a satisfactory explanation why.

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

#297
post #259

> 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…

> 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.

No, the real answer is that US politicians were too weak to push this through, because the people wouldn't have it.

The people spoke.

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

#298

For me this is too much rationalization for a single fact: people hate to change, even if it is for the better. So simple. I study Chinese and I am 100% certain than the reason Chinese did not develop like the West was the printing press and the superior method it is to have to print 25-30 symbols instead of 30.000. Just look at Chinese and even Japanese delay in getting to use computers as ASCII was so simple compar…

> The Chinese writing came first, the Indian copied the Chinese language and basically improved over them, then the Greeks copied that via Persia, and then the Romans copied the Greeks.

Latin script's origins are in Egypt and Sumer, not in China. Writing was invented in the Near East about 3200BCE and about 1200BCE in China.

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

#299
post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, "soccer fields" is a very common way to reference size/length in various European cultures.

Which ones? I've never heard it.

The British press regularly measure things in football (soccer) pitches, London double-decker buses, Eiffel towers, blue whales and Wales.

The Register regularly does piss-take articles about this and even provides a handy conversion calculator.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/page/reg-standards-conve...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/24/vulture_central_stan...

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

#300
post #60
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK is a very odd place when it comes to metrication. My experience in Sweden is that things sold in the 1/2 and 1/4 kg sizes are often measured in grams or sometimes hectograms rather than kg. Meat, for example, is usually given in values which are a multiple of 25 g, even when there's more than 1kg. This bypasses the need to use low denominator fractions.

> Meat, for example, is usually given in values which are a multiple of 25 g Those used to be 28g, and called ‘ounces’.

Ounces are also anything from 27.4g, up to 100g, depending on which ounce is being used. There are loads of different ounces.
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