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The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)

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Re: The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)

#411

Post by sarchertech »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #409
sarchertech wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When defining a scale from scratch only for the purpose of defining how the temperature feels it a human, you don’t think human body temperature would factor in? > What are you even talking about? -17 is a complete irrelevance to me, it does not happen, It lines up with 0F, which in most of the US is about as cold as it gets. You could be more specific and lick the weight 95% percentile coldest yearly low and get -19…

> It lines up with 0F, which in most of the US is about as cold as it gets. "most of the US" . And yet you think that a group of aliens looking at planet Earth would anchor on that region. This makes no sense. It is what I meant by "parochial". > The specific number is irrelevant. Lets set the zero point to an irrelevant number, it's be great! > does mean that there are objective advantages to it for some purposes. S…

"most of the US" . And yet you think that a group of aliens looking at planet Earth would anchor on that region. This makes no sense. It is what I meant by "parochial".

Then imagine a group of Aliens is building a scale for the United States of America, which in context is the only relevant country since this entire discussion is about the US switching to Celsius. It doesn’t actually have to be aliens. Just a neutral party with no bias towards an existing scale.

> I can. But if you don't know better than to avoid focussing on that, you're missing the mere familiarity that was emphasised repeatedly.

Familiarity is obviously the reason that the US is a metric holdout. No one has ever argued otherwise.

The only point I am making in this entire forsaken thread is that for the very specific purpose of air temperature in the United States, F has a nice advantage to C in that the numbers normally line up 0 to 100 and that all other things being equal humans find scales from 0-100 pleasant.

Multiple People in this thread who have no familiarity with Fahrenheit have agreed with this.

Because it is slightly nicer scale in this specific place for this specific purpose, no one is going to voluntarily switch the way that some people voluntarily switch to grams when baking or mm when working with small objects.

Re: The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)

#412

Post by jxdxbx »

rob74 wrote: post #12
c048 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only in certain fields. For most interactions divide by 10 is far easier than divide by 12, and you'd end up with far, far more "eyeballed" measurements. So no, as a human being, I'm fine with base 10.

Or you'd have to go all in and write numbers in base 12 too, then dividing by 12 would be easier...

Yes, I think we should be all in on base 12. 10 is just the arbitrary number of fingers we have. Poor choice! 12 is much more composite.

Re: The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)

#413

Post by jxdxbx »

nayuki wrote: post #206
jxdxbx wrote: post #2

The metric systems's worse flaw was doubling down on base 10 instead of the plainly superior base 12.

I hope you're comfortable with changing literally every number in society to base 12. My house cost $42A765_12. My SSN is 399-AA-5866 and phone number is (289) 257-B84A. The distance to the moon is actually 50A693_12 feet. I used the additional symbols A and B as per usual notation, but it's okay if society agrees on some other symbols for the extra two digit values. If you don't make the base of the number system ag…

Yes I am literally a member of the dozenal society

Re: The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)

#414

Post by jxdxbx »

timbit42 wrote: post #330
wongogue wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you include the tip, you can do base 16. Let’s go hexadecimal all the way.

No. Base 16 is only divisible by 1, 2, 4, and 8, while Base12 is divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6. Of course, Base 10 is only divisible by 1, 2, and 5. Switching from Base 10 to Base 12 would be difficult. Instead we should go back in time and ensure we evolve with 6 fingers on each hand and foot.

This is an excellent compromise

Re: The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)

#415

Post by iggldiggl »

pandaman wrote: post #361
nayuki wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you have problems with time too? 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 t…

I don't know what do you do, but most people need to know how many yards (or inches, or feet, or chains, or whatever) in a mile as often as they need to know how many seconds, minutes, or hours in a quarter i.e. never. Yet it's the strongest point proponents of the metric system have, so makes me wonder why are they so agitated? For the record, I am from a metric country and immigrated to the US as an adult. I still…

> Miles are great to estimate time of travel by car, take 1 minute per mile of distance on a highway and 2 minutes in the city and you will be pretty close.

That might be true where you live, but it's hardly a universal constant. 1 minute per mile might be sort-of-universal for long distance Interstate driving, but then again, you can just as easily phrase that as ~1 hour per 100 km in metric.

I'm rather doubtful about your 2 minutes per mile (= 30 mph average speed) figure for "city" driving, though – how's that even possible when urban maximum speeds are usually in the 25 – 40 mph range, and that's not counting time lost for traffic lights and other intersections, general congestion and parking?

Checking a few destinations around where I live in Germany, non-Autobahn cross-country driving is closer to 2 minutes per mile rather than 1 minute per mile (and highly variable depending on your exact destination, so no point trying to estimate driving times to the nearest minute, anyway), and never mind actual urban driving.

Re: The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)

#416

Post by pandaman »

iggldiggl wrote: post #415
pandaman wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what do you do, but most people need to know how many yards (or inches, or feet, or chains, or whatever) in a mile as often as they need to know how many seconds, minutes, or hours in a quarter i.e. never. Yet it's the strongest point proponents of the metric system have, so makes me wonder why are they so agitated? For the record, I am from a metric country and immigrated to the US as an adult. I still…

> Miles are great to estimate time of travel by car, take 1 minute per mile of distance on a highway and 2 minutes in the city and you will be pretty close. That might be true where you live, but it's hardly a universal constant. 1 minute per mile might be sort-of-universal for long distance Interstate driving, but then again, you can just as easily phrase that as ~1 hour per 100 km in metric. I'm rather doubtful abo…

>That might be true where you live, but it's hardly a universal constant.

I have not said it's a universal constant, it's true in the US, where we use miles. ~1 hour per 100km is not as easy.

I cannot say I care much if you are doubtful, especially if you live in Germany and not in the US, I doubt many people in the US will care about your doubts too.

Re: The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)

#417

Post by iggldiggl »

pandaman wrote: post #416
iggldiggl wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Miles are great to estimate time of travel by car, take 1 minute per mile of distance on a highway and 2 minutes in the city and you will be pretty close. That might be true where you live, but it's hardly a universal constant. 1 minute per mile might be sort-of-universal for long distance Interstate driving, but then again, you can just as easily phrase that as ~1 hour per 100 km in metric. I'm rather doubtful abo…

>That might be true where you live, but it's hardly a universal constant. I have not said it's a universal constant, it's true in the US, where we use miles. ~1 hour per 100km is not as easy. I cannot say I care much if you are doubtful, especially if you live in Germany and not in the US, I doubt many people in the US will care about your doubts too.

Even in the US I'm doubtful about 2 minutes per mile being true for actual "city" driving if you live in a bigger conurbation.

Re: The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)

#418

Post by iggldiggl »

bluGill wrote: post #71
altern8 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't base 10 easier because you just add/remove zeros, and also we have 10 fingers to count..?

No, converting units is not a useful exercise. airplanes are measured in mm - even the full length is in mm not decameters or even hecameters (i had to look those prefixes up, spellcheck doesn't even know the word, but I think they are correct)

Vehicle drawings (maybe mechanical engineering in general) might be in millimetres, but a lot of civil engineering works in metres, so when designing some bit of infrastructure to fit certain kinds of vehicles, I do need to convert between the two, and the easier, the better.

Re: The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)

#419

Post by iggldiggl »

bluGill wrote: post #45
Ronsenshi wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example? I can't imagine calculating conversions between inches and feet to be easier than using millimeters/centimeters/meters. Or using mostly millimeters in construction in Europe. You have one unit to deal with that generally tends to be integer value. No need to fractions.

You don't convert. Airplanes are designed in mm and you never need meters. Houses are in inches - we say 92 5/8. Or sometimes 2 feet 3 inches. Our measurement tools have both marks so we can do it without coversion.

Airplanes might be designed in mm, but airports are most likely designed in metres, and whoops, suddenly you need to convert between the two.

Actually civil engineering as a whole is probably a relatively mixed bunch – vehicles drawings (when you need to design the infrastructure to fit specific vehicles for example) and other small-scale details might be dimensioned in mm, the standard curbstone naming system in Germany is based on centimetres, while infrastructure design itself (definitely including the CAD drawings) usually works in metres.

Re: The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)

#420

Post by nayuki »

nayuki wrote: post #233
ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote: post #223

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.

For those who don't know: The original definition of a metre is 1/40 000 000th of a full circle of longitude of Earth. That was considered not accurate enough, so it was redefined as the length of a certain metallic bar kept in Paris. Then it was defined in terms of wavelengths of krypton light. Finally, it was redefined in relation to the speed of light. But each time the metre was redefined, the new definition was…

More on the backward compatibility of the metre, this video released 7 hours ago explains it nicely: https://youtu.be/PWbfVcDcfFw?t=1039 Joseph Newton - "Cursed Units 3: The British Empire Strikes Back".

Other parts of the video highlight the insanity of inconsistent and shifting definitions of imperial units such as the mile, gallon, fluid ounce, pound-force/pound-mass, etc. It's one big damning essay against pre-metric units.

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