351–360 of 422 posts
I don't think the title is accurate. There is no super-slow "conversion" of the US to metric. There is a super-slow adoption of metric _alongside_ the "customary" Imperial system.
The US Customary system is not the Imperial system. Though they are frequently confused, since they share a bunch of units, and even more names of units with different definitions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I find the imperial system fits in better with that warmth of humanity Right, so you enjoy warmth such as: 1 foot = 12 inches, 1 stone = 14 pounds, 1 pound = 16 ounces. Lots of useless names and numbers to memorize compared to kilo = 1000, milli = 0.001. > in favor of cultural uniqueness and fun over conformity You're writing in impeccable English. As we know, English is an international language and most definitel…
Here in Canada, my family ran a fishing camp with a lot of US customers. I was talking with one of them about metric vs. US units and to demonstrate I said how about this: How many gallons in a cubic mile? And he was able to work it out in his head, and pretty quickly too. Whoa. The point I was trying to make that is than in metric (say, liters per cubic kilometer) you just need to get the number of zeroes right, but…
That's a scary ability. I wonder if that guy is equally adept at converting acre-feet to gallons, or if he's a one-trick pony.
Here's what I know without looking anything up: 1 mile = 1760 yards, 1 yard = 3 feet, 1 foot = 12 inches; 1 US gallon = 231 cubic inches (exact conversion, and a weird number at that). So 1 cubic mile = (63360 inch)^3 = 7707820032000/7 gal ≈ 1.101 trillion US gallons.
Fun fact, combustion engine displacements used to be quoted in cubic inches. Note that 61 in^3 ≈ 1 litre.
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I live in one of the most populated cities in North America. The temperature on Saturday is forecasted to go down to -18°F (feels like -29°F with wind chill). It's not at all unusual for temperatures to be below 0°F in winter in much of the world. > Once you arrive at the point where you're measuring various things, I'm not sure it matters what scale you use so long as the values align as you expect. You can't have i…
The steelman argument for Farenheit as it is, not necessarily the motivations behind it, has been fleshed out here: http://lethalletham.com/posts/fahrenheit.html TL;DR: "The remarkable result here is that 0℉ is nearly exactly the 1st percentile of daily lows, and 100℉ is nearly exactly the 99th percentile of daily highs." NB: The context is the continental US.
Fahrenheit was created in northern Europe, using the temperature of a salt water and ice mixture as the zero calibration point. It was later adjusted to define the difference between water's freezing and boiling points to be exactly 180°, since 180 is a highly composite number with many divisors. So off the bat, it's a bit odd that 0°F and 100°F would match the 1st and 99th percentiles of population-adjusted daily highs and lows in the US with that much precision. It's a coincidence already in the sense that the creator was not aiming for this.
But it's also a coincidence because they used 2018 data, which was a particular warm year on average. (2012 was warmer, but I don't see any warmer years before 2012 in the National Weather Service's table which goes all the way back to 1875.) Average temperature across the US can vary by 3° or 4°F year to year. The population adjusted temperature should vary even more because it depends on lot on which weather systems hit the major population centers that year. I'm not sure how much the 1st and 99th percentile would change if they redid the analysis for a different year, but it would probably vary by several degrees.
It's also kind of interesting that you would never have gotten this result before around 2012 or so, due to global warming.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I find the imperial system fits in better with that warmth of humanity Right, so you enjoy warmth such as: 1 foot = 12 inches, 1 stone = 14 pounds, 1 pound = 16 ounces. Lots of useless names and numbers to memorize compared to kilo = 1000, milli = 0.001. > in favor of cultural uniqueness and fun over conformity You're writing in impeccable English. As we know, English is an international language and most definitel…
>Lots of useless names and numbers to memorize Do you have problems with time too? I mean, 1 minute = 60 seconds, 1 hour = 60 minutes, but one day = 24 hours? Wtf??! And one week = 7 days! And one month is 30 unless you mean an actual month which is anywhere from 28 to 31. And the year is 365 days, unless it's a leap year with 366. How do you cope with that?
I have memorized how time and dates work, but I do not enjoy the system.
Time is my biggest sore point. For starters, doing any kind of arithmetic is an exercise in pain. For example when I rent a shared bike, the system tells me the start and end time to the second - for example, from 13:26:08 to 15:54:39. To calculate the duration, I have to combine the HMS into linear seconds, subtract the two linear timestamps, and then reformat it into HMS notation. Similarly, if I have to calculate ratios, percentages, histograms, etc., then HMS notation just gets in the way.
Have you ever tried writing logic to deal with HMS before? Here's an exercise for you (which I completed this month): Given a non-negative integer number of seconds, write out the number as a string formatted in DHMS format such that the leftmost unit cannot have leading zeros (so no 0m23s, no 09s) except for the special case of 0s, the string must be fully reduced (e.g. 83s -> 1m23s), and any non-leftmost unit must have full leading zeros (e.g. 1h2m3s -> 1h02m03s). The logic is pretty horrendous. The alternative, if everything was expressed in linear seconds, is completely trivial.
The second sore point about time notation is that although sub-second units (ms, μs, ns, etc.) are fine and dandy, any SI super-second unit (kilosecond, megasecond, etc.) is never used in practice and also has no alignment with days and years. This isn't merely a theoretical concern because that's how we get non-SI units like km/h, kW⋅h, and light-year. If ks was useful and popular, then km/ks just simplifies to m/s, whereas km/h = 3.6 m/s and kW⋅h = 3.6 MJ. Personally, I would've preferred the day to be subdivided into either a thousand or a million ticks, especially because I strongly prefer power-of-1000 prefixes (so milli- is good, centi- is bad).
As for dates, we can't get around the fact that there are roughly 365.25 days per tropical year. The Gregorian calendar is hacky because February is shorter than other months, a leap day is put at the end of February instead of the end of December, and the naming is shifted so that Sep (number 7) = 9th month, Oct (number 8) = 10th month, Nov (number 9) = 11th month, Dec (number 10) = 12th month. I think the least bad solution is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar .
>> Lots of useless names and numbers to memorize
You are correct to point out that time units have many weird names and conversion factors. Now on top of that, try learning all these names and conversion factors:
• Length: 1 mile = 1760 yards (let's skip furlongs and chains even though they are part of the derivation of the mile), 1 yard = 3 feet, 1 foot = 12 inches. Then there are industry-specific measures like mils in machining, points in typesetting, nautical miles.
• Volume: 1 US gallon = 4 quarts, 1 quart = 2 pints, 1 pint = 2 cups, 1 cup = 8 fluid ounces, 1 fluid ounce = 2 tablespoons, 1 tablespoon = 3 teaspoons. Also, 1 US gallon = 231 cubic inches exact, surprisingly. Throw in some more industry-specific units like cubic feet of water, cubic inches of engine displacement, acre-feet of rain, cubic miles of dirt mined, barrels of oil...
• Mass: 1 short ton = 20 hundredweights, 1 hundredweight = 100 pounds, 1 pound = 16 ounces, 1 ounce = 480 grains; also, 1 stone = 14 pounds (pervasive in UK but nonexistent in US).
• Power: horsepower, BTU/h, ton of cooling, possibly foot-pound-per-second.
The point is, all of the above names and numbers are completely arbitrary and you have to learn them all from scratch. If you aced the test on units of length, that has told you exactly nothing about the units of mass.
It should go without saying in the metric system, the following series mean exactly what you think they mean:
• Length: ... nanometre, micrometre, millimetre, metre, kilometre, megametre, gigametre, ... .
• Volume: ... nanolitre, microlitre, millilitre, litre, kilolitre, megalitre, gigalitre, ... .
• Mass: ... nanogram, microgram, milligram, gram, kilogram, megagram (metric ton / tonne), gigagram, ... .
• Power: ... nanowatt, microwatt, milliwatt, watt, kilowatt, megawatt, gigawatt, ... .
• Frequency: ... nanohertz, microhertz, millhertz, hertz, kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz, ... .
If you know how many metres are in a kilometre, you know how many hertz are in a kilohertz - you didn't need to learn anything new. You just needed to think for two seconds upon the first time you heard that prefixed unit.
An LED bulb advertised as 2000 lumens (lm) can be easily rewritten as 2 kilolumens (klm) if you wanted to. A power bank marketed as 20000 mA⋅h can at least be simplified to 20 A⋅h (and 72 kilocoulombs if you get rid of the hour).
I noticed a couple of years back that my "U.S. Customary" wrenches weren't fitting my new plumbing fittings which were definitely not metric, but metric wrenches did. Probably made in China.
Then last summer I noticed something similar with lag bolts. The U.S. Customary socket fit the head, but it was nearly identical to a metric one that fit just a little better. The threads are designed to go into wood, not a nut, so if they were metric you'd never even know.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The things that make the metric system superior to prior systems are: • Using a uniform set of prefixes to designate multiples and divisions of the base units. Having one unit of say, volume (the liter), and then using prefixes when we need smaller or larger units is way better than having cups, pints, quarts, gallons, pecks, and many more. • Having those prefixes mean powers of 10. That fits in well with our use of…
What precisely is "better" about that? It's more predictable over -- some things that you don't know how they're going to scale? Again, the general thrust of "imperial" is better -- base your units on "utility of the most people using them the most for real life things" Do whatever you want for distances between stars, but no, walking off a room in "feet" can't be beat.
Actually, this is very problematic as well. As it stands, astronomical distances are quoted in single/thousands/millions/billions of kilometres, astronomical units (Earth-Sun distance), parsecs and kilo- and mega-, and then light-years (and thousands, millions, billions).
I would strongly prefer to use metric units: metre, kilometre, megametre, gigametre, terametre (AU is around here), petametre (parsec and light-year is around here), exametre (about a thousand light-years), zettametre (about a million light-years), yottametre (about a billion light-years). The scale ends there because the observable universe is about 886 Ym in diameter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I find the imperial system fits in better with that warmth of humanity Right, so you enjoy warmth such as: 1 foot = 12 inches, 1 stone = 14 pounds, 1 pound = 16 ounces. Lots of useless names and numbers to memorize compared to kilo = 1000, milli = 0.001. > in favor of cultural uniqueness and fun over conformity You're writing in impeccable English. As we know, English is an international language and most definitel…
The pre decimal systems were built with lots of prime factors. The divisions were less obvious but arguably more convenient (it's often simpler to separate something into 8ths than 10ths, and so on).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s funny because when I work with Fahrenheit I just work with 5°F ranges to compensate for the approximate mental math required. Eg very quick mentally, 100°F = 37.778 °C (thanks autocorrect) = (100-32)/2 = 34. But if it was closer to freezing say 42°F =5.556 °C (again) so 5°C. So arbitrarily we could say 57°F was 12°C =53.6 °F actually. But a true Canuck knows knowing the temp is barely half the battle, what’s t…
(F - 30) / 2 = ~C C * 2 + 30 = ~F
(C + 40) * 9/5 - 40 = F
Takes advantage of the fact that -40 F and -40 C are the same.
Remember it as (move origin -- convert -- move origin back).
I find it easier as a I don't have to remember precedence rules and the multiplication is obvious.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I find the imperial system fits in better with that warmth of humanity Right, so you enjoy warmth such as: 1 foot = 12 inches, 1 stone = 14 pounds, 1 pound = 16 ounces. Lots of useless names and numbers to memorize compared to kilo = 1000, milli = 0.001. > in favor of cultural uniqueness and fun over conformity You're writing in impeccable English. As we know, English is an international language and most definitel…
Here in Canada, my family ran a fishing camp with a lot of US customers. I was talking with one of them about metric vs. US units and to demonstrate I said how about this: How many gallons in a cubic mile? And he was able to work it out in his head, and pretty quickly too. Whoa. The point I was trying to make that is than in metric (say, liters per cubic kilometer) you just need to get the number of zeroes right, but…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I enjoy the warmth of the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second, or as me and my friends call it: a Meter.
Handily enough the speed of light is about a foot per nanosecond, give or take. A nanosecond doesn't sound like much, unless you start to work out, for example, how many bits are inside your 40Gbps USB-C cable at the moment (they do travel at less than the speed of light).