Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
>Sure, the Mars incident is a call for consistency, but it's a call for consistency inside NASA. No its not. Realistically space travel is going to be a humanity as a whole deal, not "inside NASA". Remember that the USA is like 4% of the world population. Even if the US contributes 10x more than everyone else per person that still puts the US in the minority. Consistency here is not a "nice to have"...its mission cri…
I think it's a fair bet that when spaceflight becomes widespread and commonplace, we're going to have many discrete groups of people developing, producing, operating, and maintaining their own particular spacecraft independently of each other, and not "humanity as a whole", as a singular undifferentiated mass, working on a single uniform spaceflight project.
Consistency within a specific project is clearly necessary; uniformity among distinct projects is, speaking at the macro level, a liability. Variation is an evolutionary advantage; artificial uniformity slows progress.
> So you propose teaching your future carpenters and space engineers different units of measure?
Why would this even be a question? Should programmers only be familiar with one single programming language? Should people in general only ever learn to speak a single verbal language? Is there ever an advantage to only being familiar with a single set of tools, and ignorant of all others?
> Nobody is eyeballing anything in the modern world.
Most people are eyeballing most things in the modern world. It's only in the case of activities on the scale of building spaceships and 10-nm-process integrated circuits that people require the level of precision that you're talking about. The vast majority of human activity remains outside of these domains.
The original article was about American resistance to adopting metric units as a default practice in day-to-day life, and not about the use of the metric system by people engaged in highly specialized disciplines. It'd be a bit absurd to suggest that the measuring units selected for high-precision work by the small set of people currently working on microprocessor design are necessarily the optimal ones for e.g. baking a cake or tiling your bathroom. In the latter use cases, one could make a very compelling case that units optimized for alignment with intuition are vastly more useful than ones optimized for micro-scale precision.