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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

#351

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

Gormo wrote: post #344
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #19

> Well, to be fair, those anti-metric folks had at least one point in their favor: Customary measures make a lot more sense to us. The author is full of it. Whichever system you grew up with will seem natural to you. This misconception comes up time and time again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7821501 The article seems like fluff; the author isn't even making novel mistakes. He even says that the metric syste…

> The author is full of it. Whichever system you grew up with will seem natural to you. This seems to be a reinforcement of the point you quoted, and not a refutation of it.

That would depend on who he's calling "us". It doesn't include me! I read "us" as "people, all people in general" and disagreed.

The statement "Customary measures make a lot more sense to us people who prefer Customary measures" is true but only as an uninteresting tautology. Do you think he meant "Customary measures make a lot more sense to us Americans" ? That is, "Americans excluding Canadians, immigrants and scientifically literate".

The statement read as "Customary measures make a lot more sense to us people who were raised on them" is true. But by not being explicit about that he is misleading.

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

#352

Post by Gormo »

ygra wrote: post #349
Gormo wrote: post #343

The biggest liability of the metric system to me is its system of unit prefixes: this is just a bizarre reimplementation of scientific notation that expresses the most significant quantitative information not as part of the actual quantitative component of its notation, but as an arcane verbal prefix attached to the name of the thing being counted. What on earth is the advantage of a notation that makes it easy to sc…

You get several related units of measurement that each have sane conversion factors. If something goes well beyond centimeters, meters and later kilometers are much nicer to handle. Inches to feet to yards to miles doesn't scale nearly as nicely because of conversion factors of 12, 3 and (I think) 1760 involved there. And since this property is shared by every unit you have the same conversion factors everywhere. No…

It seems like you have only a single base unit of measurement; the rigid powers-of-ten scaling factors prevent any other useful base units from being applied, e.g. there's nothing that approximates a foot in the metric system. So it seems a bit disingenuous to treat a centimeter as a distinct unit when it's really just 1 x 10^-2 meters.

The whole "conversion factors" thing seems like a superfluous gimmick. Why would you start working with one unit, then spontaneously decide to start using a different unit in the same context? But in the unusual circumstance where you would need to switch units, perhaps due to a shift in the scale you're operating at, the metric system still prevents you from using a unit appropriate to the context, and limits you to only scaling a less appropriate unit up or down by a power of ten.

It really is just scientific notation re-implemented in a bizarre and arcane way. With customary units, you can still represent quantities with scientific notation, and use inches, feet, miles, etc. as your base unit as the context demands, but you've still got a variety of base units to choose from, each more optimal than the others when operating its appropriate context.

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

#353

Post by Gormo »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #351
Gormo wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The author is full of it. Whichever system you grew up with will seem natural to you. This seems to be a reinforcement of the point you quoted, and not a refutation of it.

That would depend on who he's calling "us". It doesn't include me! I read "us" as "people, all people in general" and disagreed. The statement "Customary measures make a lot more sense to us people who prefer Customary measures" is true but only as an uninteresting tautology. Do you think he meant "Customary measures make a lot more sense to us Americans" ? That is, "Americans excluding Canadians, immigrants and scie…

> That is, "Americans excluding Canadians, immigrants and scientifically literate".

Well, I think it would include Canadians in most circumstances - metric adoption in Canada is only marginally more pervasive than in the US - and would also include most "scientifically literate" Americans outside the context of formal scientific research (it would seem a bit absurd to suggest that because a microbiologist measures his research subjects in nanometers, he'll somehow find it optimal to use the same unit to measure his furniture).

But, yes, as a tautology, it isn't much of an argument for or against anything, apart from being a very strong argument against artificial imposition of unnecessary changes.

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

#354

Post by chiph »

ecopoesis wrote: post #16
chiph wrote: post #7

If we went metric on the interstates, exit 880 on Interstate 10 in Texas (at the Louisiana state line) would retain it's status as the highest numbered exit in North America. Only it'd be exit 1408. (exits are generally numbered by their mile (err, kilometer..) marker in the US, not consecutively)

Not really true. In New England and most of the NE, exits are numbered consecutively, or at least started that way until ABCs got added in and others got removed.

So switching to metric would give the various DOTs in those states the opportunity to correct their numbering. They'd have fewer A,B,C exits as well, since kilometers are smaller and would increase the chance of the exit location falling nearer to a milepost.

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

#355

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

Gormo wrote: post #353
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would depend on who he's calling "us". It doesn't include me! I read "us" as "people, all people in general" and disagreed. The statement "Customary measures make a lot more sense to us people who prefer Customary measures" is true but only as an uninteresting tautology. Do you think he meant "Customary measures make a lot more sense to us Americans" ? That is, "Americans excluding Canadians, immigrants and scie…

> That is, "Americans excluding Canadians, immigrants and scientifically literate". Well, I think it would include Canadians in most circumstances - metric adoption in Canada is only marginally more pervasive than in the US - and would also include most "scientifically literate" Americans outside the context of formal scientific research (it would seem a bit absurd to suggest that because a microbiologist measures hi…

Sure. Though I wouldn't categorise the USA (and to some extent Canada and UK) finally getting on board the same metric bus as the rest of the planet as entirely "unnecessary".

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

#356

Post by vpeters25 »

Natsu wrote: post #74
vpeters25 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The author is full of it. Whichever system you grew up with will seem natural to you This is true to at least my case: grew up under the metric system and after 15 years living in the US, still have to mentally convert dimensions to metric in order to make sense of them: - If you point at something and ask me how far it is, the first number that comes to my mind is in meters, then I say that number and add "yards"…

Just FYI, "feets" isn't a word. The plural of feet is feet :) Similarly, "softwares" isn't a word either, but I hear it a lot. There's only software. I say this because it's a common mistake among people who speak well, otherwise.

you know, i rewrote that post several times, rephrasing and correcting it yet I failed to spot "feets".

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

#357

Post by lutusp »

dalke wrote: post #3

I have some difficulties with the issues described in the piece. "A yard is the distance from your sternum to the tip of your outstretched hand." According to folk belief, it's the distance from the tip of Henry I's nose to the end of his thumb. According to an early definition, "It is ordained that 3 grains of barley dry and round do make an inch, 12 inches make 1 foot, 3 feet make 1 yard." Who here has an idea of t…

> Since the yard is pegged to the meter, this means that the yard is now legally defined as the time light travels in 1/274130223.5952 seconds.

s/time/distance/ ?

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

#358

Post by lutusp »

keithpeter wrote: post #30
dalke wrote: post #3

I have some difficulties with the issues described in the piece. "A yard is the distance from your sternum to the tip of your outstretched hand." According to folk belief, it's the distance from the tip of Henry I's nose to the end of his thumb. According to an early definition, "It is ordained that 3 grains of barley dry and round do make an inch, 12 inches make 1 foot, 3 feet make 1 yard." Who here has an idea of t…

UK: we work in Imperial but things are officially priced in metric, except for beer. Petrol is in pence/litre. So you get price per lb and per kg. Lengths are in millimetres on builders plans (to avoid mistakes with decimal points) but road signs are in miles. Makes teaching basic maths to adults a bit more fun... http://sohcahtoa.org.uk/pages/maths_market-metric-proportion... You would be surprised how many people h…

> The low denominator fractions make a lot of sense for a lot of people.

There's a funny story about fractions and innumerate Americans. The McDonald's hamburger chain had a successful product in their 1/3-pound hamburger, such that they decided to upgrade to 1/2 pound. But the marketing campaign failed and they couldn't figure out why, so they interviewed their customers. They discovered that people thought 1/2 pound was smaller than 1/3 pound, on the basis that 2 < 3. True story.

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

#359

Post by Havoc »

Gormo wrote: post #341
Havoc wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> No its not. Realistically space travel is going to be a humanity as a whole deal, not "inside NASA". 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, worki…

>Consistency within a specific project is clearly necessary

I'll concede that it only matters within a project...but projects invariably consist of many people and each of them "think" in their unit of measure. Sure you can mix them and hope they remember to "think" in metric at 1AM when pushing for a deadline, but really...

>Is there ever an advantage to only being familiar with a single set of tools

Thats the thing. These are not tools. They are units of measure. Aside from the odd instance where its easier to divide by X all you're gaining from using many units of measure is chaos.

>Most people are eyeballing most things in the modern world.

Definitely. Eyeballing happens regardless of unit of measure. And usually when someone is eyeballing it its not life/death.

>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

Absurd indeed, but not what I was getting at. Units of measure is something thats internalized from a high-school age. So unless you have a way of splitting the kids between space engineers and carpenters at that age then why tech imperial? And even if you could split them, the mix of units of measures employed nationally would be much worse than randomly picking one.

I get that Americans are attached to imperial...its just very difficult for everyone else to under why given this: http://i.imgur.com/YJzhkZl.jpg

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

#360

Post by MrJagil »

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.

Awesome!Though, which one should you use if both are correct?

"... plenty of fish(es) in the sea." for instance?

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