321–330 of 363 posts
The beauty of the old system was that it mapped onto the everyday experience of farmers. I am sure hundredweights and furlongs and so forth all made lots of sense. But units have to cross cultures and times — the only intuitive units left to boast about are the foot and the yard, which are 30cm and roughly a meter. Indeed, we are probably taller now than when the yard was defined to the extent that the meter is proba…
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There are costs to sticking with the imperial system. Non-US buyers want metric products which fit with their existing tooling. The factories of the world want all-metric manufacturing, which reduces costs. Error from unit conversion is a real problem. Designing new products in metric wouldn't require old products to be replaced with imperial. Each product line has it's own special repair kit, spare parts, already. I…
Ireland also went metric. We switched road speed limits in 2006ish, so all the signs say "km/hr" so you don't forget (it's also helpful to tell when you cross the border unto hr uk). Beer is sold in 568ml (1 pint), but milk is sold in litres.
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Fahrenheit is absolutely bizarre outside US, scaling is so arbitrary it's not funny.
Could you explain what you mean? I think my comment does a pretty good job of demonstrating that the scalig is nicely suited to the temperatures a human being experiences over the course of each year.
There's easily enough precision in the Celsius scale for everyday measurements, so it all comes down to what you're used to.
In an age where everyone carries a computer in their pocket, the metric system's only advantage (that it makes converting units easier) is irrelevant.
Having a computer in your pocket is never going to change that.
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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...
Even though I'm an ex-physicist where nearly everything was done in metric, I'm decidedly anti-metric. Most of the metric system has no empathy for the everyday life of humans and is better suited for making scientific equations easier. It is roughly the equivalent of choosing esperanto for consistency.
I grew up in a metric country. The metric system is totally fine for everyday use. We know that 1.8m is tall, that anything below 5 celsius is cold, and that 100kg is heavy. The only downside is that some stats are only published in imperial units - fuel efficiency being the worst offender.
And also, where I live 5 celsius is flipping freezing. Under 15 is cold!
Since our civilization seems to have moved to binary for actual computations I wonder if we will someday go back to thinking in terms of halves, quarters, eighths, etc. of some standard unit. Then people would mock the metric system for being implicitly based on the biological accident of ten fingers...
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-integer_representation#Base... [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_computer
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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...
I was under the impression El Reg does it as a joke to the US.
http://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2010/may...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_units_of_measur...
I like the one suggested in the book Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, of measuring faith in Alps.
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I grew up in a metric country. The metric system is totally fine for everyday use. We know that 1.8m is tall, that anything below 5 celsius is cold, and that 100kg is heavy. The only downside is that some stats are only published in imperial units - fuel efficiency being the worst offender.
It really isn't the point that you can learn those things. People can also learn phone numbers and SSNs but we still use names. Wouldn't everything be much easier if we just referred to each other by our unique number? Addresses are also superfluous, just lat+lon with a unit # should be sufficient. Imperial measurements and their now American counterparts are based on human experience rather than something convenient…
In everyday use, I don't care if something is one and 3/5ths of some part of somebody's finger - I'm used to metric so it looks about 4 centimetres...
I'm not a builder, but I've never once heard any hint from my friends in construction that using millimetres has ever been a problem for them in their work, as they are used to it and the construction industry in every other country except the US is geared towards metric...
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 li…
> Food stuff is bought in "dekos" (dekagrams). Where? I've lived my whole life in a metric-using country and I'm fairly sure I have literally never heard of that unit until just now... Our food here is all in grams (i.e. a 100g packet of chips, 300g steak) or kilograms (1.5 kilo bag of rice).