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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

#231

Post by anotherevan »

chrismcb wrote: post #136

One of the biggest arguments for metric (other than the rest of the world uses it) has been that it is easy to convert from liters to kilometers. In your day to day life, how often do you need to convert from one thing to another? For most people, the answer is they don't. Occasionally in cooking you need to convert, other than that you rarely need to convert. So don't go and switch the system just because something…

Another advantage is that a metre is a metre everywhere, and a litre is a litre everywhere (spelling notwithstanding.)

A lot of the imperial units are regional. A tablespoon may be either three or four teaspoons. Who knows how much a fluid ounce is.

One very real PITA is reading cooking recipes and having to do some deduction to figure out how much the units actually are.

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

#232

Post by bronson »

phaemon wrote: post #193
bronson wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oops, I'm sorry for the edit. You & I had the same thought: singling out 2.4 was just muddying things. Calling the unit the "2.4" sounds great. But that doesn't sound very metric to me...

Perhaps not to you, but most folk I know (in the UK) aren't quite so hung up about it. I'll sometimes refer to a half-liter as a pint, or a liter as a "couple of pints", or a meter as a yard. Though the pint is by far the stupidest unit. Why on earth wasn't it standardised at 500ml? It would have fixed pints, quarts and gallons all in one go! I know, you can think up immediate objections, but having 568ml to the pint…

Nah, I just couldn't picture anyone doing woodwork in hundreds or thousands of units (now, where did I get that idea...?), or dividing base 10 units. Since it sounds like wood is sold and worked in base 12, I'd use metric no problem. But that makes the difference between imperial and metric pretty arbitrary, doesn't it?

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

#233

Post by oldmanjay »

Havoc wrote: post #211
nice_uname_nerd wrote: post #204

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…

Wow, I would not have believed someone would make the argument that everyone needs to use metric because some day we'll all be in space until I read it. Thanks for broadening my horizons.

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

#234

Post by amag »

jwecker wrote: post #115
Havoc wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 would love to hear from someone who does carpentry (or some craft-like equivalent) with the metric system- specifically what kind of ruler/tape they use and whether it has a special 1/3 and 2/3 mark on it (since you don't want to have to eyeball 0.33333....) or if they just avoid dividing things by three altogether. Because the truth is, your perspective is a political one more than a practical one. The whole idea…

I've done a bit of carpentry around my house. Since I live in Sweden I always use the metric system.

For me the focus on division by three is a bit strange. Sure I sometimes need to divide by three, but I also need to divide by five, or two or seven. I guess the thing is that our building standards are expressed in the metric system, so it makes sense thinking about them in terms of meters or centimeters. US building standards are expressed in the imperial system, so it makes sense to think about them in feet and inches.

Why would I want a unit that's 1/60th of a meter when I have a perfect 1/100th of a meter? A third of a meter is 33.3cm, working with wood you don't need more precision than that, if the decimal sign makes it difficult to do calculations, just step it up to 333mm.

I'm not a carpenter by trade but I guess that a professional carpenter here learns quite well how to divide by three even in metric. I see this argument popup every time there's a discussion about using the metric system in the US and I find it weak. For me this argument only sounds like "but it's hard to learn something new".

I'm sure there are pros and cons with both the metric and the imperial system, but in the globalized world we live in, the fact that The Rest Of The World uses the metric system should be a pretty convincing argument to use it in the US as well. I mean after all, The Rest Of The World has accepted English (in one form or the other) as the Lingua Franca in order to make communication across borders easier. You don't see us whine about stuff like "but in Swedish I can much more succinctly express that it's my paternal or maternal grandparent I'm talking about, so I don't want to use English".

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

#235

Post by kps »

letney wrote: post #173
kps wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed —​ you can't even represent 0.1 in IEEE floating point, so who in their right mind would try to build a measuring system on tenths?

> "you can't even represent 0.1 in IEEE floating point" Not true, the IEEE 754-2008 standard provides a Decimal Floating Point specification in binary. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_floating_point#IEEE_754...

Ah, well, you're the best kind of correct. IBM even have instructions for it.

I'll counter with the Ferranti Orion (1959) which had mixed-base operations (primarily for £sd accounting).

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

#236

Post by vacri »

anotherevan wrote: post #227
amenghra wrote: post #224

I remember listening to this podcast a while back: http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/why-isnt-the-u-s-...

I remember listening to that podcast and being quite annoyed by it. One of the protagonist's who was obviously in favour of sticking with imperial units kept smugly saying the US is already metricated. Comes across disingenuous as best. The US rarely uses metric in it's popular culture. Weather reports are in Fahrenheit, movies almost always use miles and pounds. By any measure of cultural output that they export tha…

Temperature is a weird one, and shows the difference between 'metric' and 'SI unit'. Fahrenheit is neither, and for me is far from intuitive. Celsius is a metric unit, but it's not the SI unit, which is Kelvin.

Celsius certainly makes more sense on the human scale than the other two - the general public is familiar with 'water freezes' and 'water boils' - but it's a neat example of a metric unit not being the SI unit.

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

#237

Post by teamonkey »

ScottBurson wrote: post #114
teamonkey wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The knot isn't quite as arbitrary as most imperial measures. 1 knot = 1 nautical mile/hour 1 nautical mile ~= the distance travelled by someone at the equator in one minute due to the Earth's rotation Since navigation at sea was strongly dependent on the position of the sun and stars, it makes sense to use a unit of speed that makes your calculations easier. Even for modern navigation it makes sense to use a unit of…

> 1 nautical mile ~= the distance travelled by someone at the equator in one minute due to the Earth's rotation No. It's approximately one minute of arc , that is, 1/60 of one degree. In fact the speed of the earth's rotation at the equator is more like 15 nautical miles per minute.

Yes, you're right of course. The Earth rotates through 15 arcminutes in 1 minute.

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

#239

Post by anotherevan »

RVuRnvbM2e wrote: post #54
BruceIV wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll bite (and I grew up in one of the colder parts of Canada, so I'd call 0F a cold but not unreasonable winter day). -30: Avoid going outside, if you do don't leave any exposed skin -20: A cold winter day: toque, scarf, mittens, winter coat and boots are must have -10: An average winter day: same load-out as above, but you'll be more comfortable 0: A mild winter day: snow possible, you may leave your winter jacket…

LOL. I'm in Western Australia: 15: Winter. Probably rain and wind. 20: Cool Autumn / Spring, you might need a jumper outside. 25: Vaguely warmish, t-shirt weather. 30: Getting warm, wear shorts and t-shirt. 35: Beach weather, avoid going outside for too long if you're in office attire and don't want sweat patches. 40+: Hot beach weather, stay out of the sun (or in the water) in the middle of the day.

Victoria, Australia here. About the same, except we can get three or four of those all in the one day. (The running joke is that if you don’t like the weather in Melbourne, wait.)

I’ve lived in both the low and highlands of Papua New Guinea and they have two types of weather: dry and wet. In the lowlands you do not go outside without wearing a hat as the sun will actively try and kill you. When a PNG friend visited us in Melbourne, it was a 30°C day, we were in shorts and t-shirts, he was in jeans and wearing a parka to keep warm.

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

#240

Post by anotherevan »

adventured wrote: post #221

I agree the US should fully adopt the metric system, it makes logical sense. And Europe should abolish about three dozen major languages that should no longer be in use and adopt English (or perhaps Spanish). Why does Bulgaria need its own language? Or Romania, or Sweden? Why does French still exist? We're talking about efficiencies here, right? What's less efficient than people not being able to easily communicate b…

Please describe the sacred cultural issues around retaining imperial units of measure.
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