Hopefully some future president will mandate that the federal government use metric, like Trump getting rid of the penny. The rest of society will gradually come along.
The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)
111–120 of 422 posts
Re: The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)
#112Honestly, the best way to cook is with grams. Throw everything into the same pot on a scale and keep zeroing it out. Way less mess to clean up. All the top baking recipes tend to already be in grams, but there's plenty of others out there that are not
Also a great use for LLMs. I'll tell it to convert recipes from volume to grams by estimating density. It's surprisingly accurate
Re: The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)
#113I'd part with cups and teaspoons/tablespoons and the like, but you'll pry inches/feet/yards and fahrenheit from my cold, dead hands. They're both more convenient for daily use. I think I'd prefer to keep miles as well but I don't have a good reason for that one. Fahrenheit has more precision without using decimals for the thing 99% of people are using temperature measurements for: air temp. Where I live, we generally…
An eyeballed yard is roughly the same as an eyeballed meter. An eyeballed foot is 1/3 of that. You can stick 4 inches in 10 cm roughly. And I just poke my nose out the window and look outside to see what the temperature is Freezing.... ~30°F.... ~0°C Need coat... ~50°F... ~10°C T-shirt..... ~70°F... ~20°C Melting..... ~90°F... ~30°C Rules of thumb can be learned either direction! ps HN tables are not really a thing,…
What you're ignoring is that a hundred plus or minus is a good range for average humans to grapple with and Fahrenheit splits the temperature swings in a given region across an approximately 100deg range.
So using Fahrenheit results in a pretty decent "as high as it can be without being clumsy" measurement system that covers just about all earthly temperatures.
If we only cared about increments of five or so degrees you could go higher resolution and it'd be fine because rounding would occur like we do with vehicle speeds. Or we could go lower resolution and just make the degrees bigger, which is basically what celsius is.
Re: The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Yeah, we went over the Metric System that whole year. I can still sing the "Metric Family" song from the film on metric units ("Kilo", "Milli", etc.). And to my young an impressionable mind, the U.S. was joining the rest of the world "Free World" in a kind of Star-Trek-like casting aside of the old things that divided us—joining each other with a focus on progress, science, space… I’ve always found this peculiar be…
Frank Llyod Wright lacking warmth and humanity? Never been to Falling Water?
I’ve never been but the photos I’ve seen I would describe as lacking warmth and humanity. Maybe my opinion would change seeing it in person. I’m open to that.
But the other issue with that property specifically is that it seems to be that it is built out of fear of humanity and that’s why elements of the property (again from photos) look like what you’d see in a bunker or if you were trying to hide. It lacks symmetry as well which introduces fear.
You can think of it as how one might feel looking at a painting of Dance in the Country by Renoir and Guernica by Picasso. If you find the former to be near perfection, full of vibrancy, warmth, and love you may as I do find Picasso’s work to be chaotic, disheveled, asymmetric, or even psychotic.
Re: The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on the field - it happens that 1\1000 inch is a good tolerance for many machining operations, while metric doesn't have a convient round number close enough to that range to be useful. That doesn't slow down mathinists though, they know the fraction of mm tolerance they need to use and it is what is marked on their tools.
So do I understand correctly that it's from a tooling issue? If so, thanks for that insight.
More where the marks on the tool are. The marks are arbitrary, but round inch units happen to line up better with what you normally want than round metric.
Note that machining is the only place where we work with 1/1000 - that is a fraction that looks metric.
Re: The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)
#116I'd part with cups and teaspoons/tablespoons and the like, but you'll pry inches/feet/yards and fahrenheit from my cold, dead hands. They're both more convenient for daily use. I think I'd prefer to keep miles as well but I don't have a good reason for that one. Fahrenheit has more precision without using decimals for the thing 99% of people are using temperature measurements for: air temp. Where I live, we generally…
I like this! I wonder if there's a place on the internet where I can find more of this sort of seemingly strong and well-thought out arguments for something that is so clearly subjective (if not just inferior).
>seemingly strong and well-thought out arguments for something that is so clearly subjective
Any platform where snooty articulate people congregate will have such arguments by the bushel.
Re: The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
A big part of it is certainly what you're used to. The other part, which I'm sympathetic to, is that for human scale everyday things, Fahrenheit 0 degrees lines up with really darned cold, 100 degrees with really hot outside of an oven, and the degree size is about twice as granular as Celsius. And while Celsius degree size is indeed widely used in engineering calculations, you're often using Kelvin as the absolute t…
0 lines up with freezing point is very intuitive.
Perhaps, but useless for most purposes. You need to know how think of a coat to wear and you need a mental map from some number to some coat. It doesn't matter what the scale is, just that you have that map.
Re: The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)
#118The US being stuck in imperial is such a meme nowadays with "freedum units" and the like. It's yet another odd thing that makes it easy for the rest of the world to laugh at the US. In these isolationist times I doubt this will change soon though, but it'd definitely help international collaboration.
Everyone who wants to collaborate internationally is already doing it. Science in the US is entirely metric. Construction and domestic measurements are the two biggest holdouts and honestly they’re both negligible. Given the proliferation of global manufacturing, most businesses are converting at the end before retail for US customers. If the government was competent, they could rip off the bandaid and everyone would…
The unit itself doesn't actually matter. Even industries with the least precision set their stuff up with so much precision that the unit you use basically doesn't matter.
Your machine may spit out widgets that are plus or minus an inch. But when you set up the machine you set it up to the 1/16 regardless. Swapping all that to metric doesn't actually change anything other than the number the guy setting it up dials it in to.
Re: The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone born and living in a country that uses the metric system, I do not understand a bit of what inches and feets mean. Tell me something has 10-15 cm, and I know what it means. I measure 173cm, I know what one meter is about. 5'10? What the hell is that?! 5 feet and 10 inches? Some people have small feet, some have larger. And what is an "inch"? :) Oh, and fahrenheit, what the hell it means? 0ºC means ice, 100…
That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m saying that a system where the majority of air temperatures in the vast majority of the country fall between 0 and 100 is slightly more convenient than one in which they fall between -17 and 37. 0 is really cold it doesn’t frequently get colder than that in most of the country. 100 is really hot, in most places it doesn’t get hotter than that. Feet are slightly more convent for…
Saying "I'm 5 feet 11 inches" requires about 3 digits, saying "I'm 180cm" also requires that many digits. It takes about as many syllables as well, because in practice you say "five-(feet)-e-leven" or "one-eighty" (Note that I don't know how to say US customary units out loud)
Re: The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
An eyeballed yard is roughly the same as an eyeballed meter. An eyeballed foot is 1/3 of that. You can stick 4 inches in 10 cm roughly. And I just poke my nose out the window and look outside to see what the temperature is Freezing.... ~30°F.... ~0°C Need coat... ~50°F... ~10°C T-shirt..... ~70°F... ~20°C Melting..... ~90°F... ~30°C Rules of thumb can be learned either direction! ps HN tables are not really a thing,…
What you're ignoring is that a hundred plus or minus is a good range for average humans to grapple with and Fahrenheit splits the temperature swings in a given region across an approximately 100deg range. So using Fahrenheit results in a pretty decent "as high as it can be without being clumsy" measurement system that covers just about all earthly temperatures. If we only cared about increments of five or so degrees…
Eh, all the degrees (Celsius, Fahrenheit, Réaumur, etc) are all about equally bad. Nicest thing that can be said about Celsius is that it's decimal, connected to water (0=freezing, 100=boiling) so it plays well with the rest of metric.
Kelvin is actually the most practical of the lot, FSVO [1]. It's not a 'degree', because it's anchored at absolute zero. It's just a bit unwieldy for our day-to-day, with room temperature at 293K. But I can imagine if people were to grow up with it, it wouldn't be too bad even then.
[1] eg. "Why can an aircon still heat the house at ten degrees below zero?"- "Well akshually, you still have 263K of heat energy to pump, not an actual problem"