think renaming a software library is hard? try changing units of measure!!!!!
I think that's what they did in Canada and it worked out great as far as I can tell (except that they had a silly clock based on 10 hours instead of 12 IIRC which had little to do with metric units and nobody wanted it nor was it compatible with the rest of the world).
I once tried to imagine a metric time system, with a deciday of 14.4 minutes. I realized that it would never catch on, because a half-hour TV show would have to be cut to 28.8 minutes losing at least 2 commercials.
As an example of a problem that can occur: Client wants to survey the elevations of a parcel of land for building a house. The surveyor goes out and collects data with gps survey equipment, which produces a .csv file of northing,easting,and elevation values relative to some National Geodetic Survey benchmark. The engineer imports this .csv into his cad software, produces a grading plan .csv file. The earthmoving cont…
seems like an issue that surveyors and engineers should be well acquainted with.
If someone had told me this statement was part of a Monty Python script, I'd likely have believed them.
I don't see anything wrong with "truth in comedy".
A part of me believes that's how comedy works: if it wasn't true you wouldn't be laughing, and another part of me is laughing because the same truth is sad.
That's not hard to imagine. Quick, what's 1/3 of a meter? The sometimes problem with metric is it's base-10. The prime factors of 10 are 2 and 5. Feet are in base-12, which has the prime factors 2 and 3. Three is much more useful than five. There are marks on your measuring tape at exactly 1/3 of a yard or 1/3 of a foot. Metric is often easier and more convenient, but not always. So, in the US, we tend to use metric…
My wife's family, who almost all have university degrees, who were all born and raised in the US, and who are very familiar with the imperial system NEVER seem to be able to do math with it. They ask me, a European raised with the metric system, for help. Find out how many fl oz of milk are in a measuring cup graduated in units of cups? Ask mrb. Convert my daughter's height from feet/inches to inches? Ask mrb. Conver…
I once worked with a guy who had just bought a surplus cylindrical water tank, and wanted to get an idea of what it would weigh when filled. I asked him for the dimensions and multiplied each by 2.5 to convert to approximately centimeters. Then I multiplied the diameter by 3, approximating pi. I converted each to the nearest power of 2 so I could multiply by adding the exponents. Assuming 1 cubic cm of water is 1 gram, I had the log2 weight in grams. Then I subtracted 10 to divide by 1024, getting approximate kilograms. Then added 1 to get approximate pounds. Finally took 2 to the power of the result. By the time he finished telling me the dimensions, I had an answer for him.
Imagine it being 2020 and not using the metric system.
That's not hard to imagine. Quick, what's 1/3 of a meter? The sometimes problem with metric is it's base-10. The prime factors of 10 are 2 and 5. Feet are in base-12, which has the prime factors 2 and 3. Three is much more useful than five. There are marks on your measuring tape at exactly 1/3 of a yard or 1/3 of a foot. Metric is often easier and more convenient, but not always. So, in the US, we tend to use metric…
Feet and inches aren't really in "base twelve", because it's not a positional number system. For example, what's 1/3 of an inch?
I think we'd be better off using dozenal numbers, but that ship sailed a long time ago.
Imagine it being 2020 and not using the metric system.
The metric system doesn't really have anything intrinsically better about it. Sure the power of ten thing is convenient, but really that is just sticking to one unit and adding a prefix. You could call "thousandths of an inch" a "milli-inch" and it'd be about the same. Fahrenheit is absolutely a more useful human-scale measurement than Celcius. The boiling point of water is mostly irrelevant to everyday life. At that…
The boiling point of water may not be useful on a day-to-day basis, but the freezing point certainly is. 0C is a lot less arbitrary than 32F. Other temperature mileposts are just a matter of getting used to them; 100F is pretty hot, as is 35C.
I think you underestimate the usefulness of powers of 10.
Mildly surprising that we are not just using meters at this point.
The situation is far more bizarre than "use" or "not use." As I understand it, America uses something along the lines of "converted metric units" - i.e. the entire imperial system is defined according to metric/SI. Some subset of public records have been, supposedly, converted to metric. If you have a recent car, it should have km/h alongside mph (in a smaller font, or as a different digital readout). You'll find met…
I suppose it depends on what your goals are; despite being officially metric, my Canadian and British friends still seem to exhibit a melange of imperial and metric in everyday life.
I notice sometimes when watching British television that stones are commonly used as a unit of weight, which is interesting because it's imperial, not metric, but I've seen never it used in American contexts.
That's because we don't use the Imperial system. The system we use is called "US Customary".
I don’t really mind that we’re not on the metric system. I just wish our measurements were consistent as they increase. E.g. foot, kilofoot, etc. instead of foot, yards, miles.
And base-2, rather than the computer-unfriendly base-10. Aaaaactually ... with a bit of squinting the U. S. customary volume system(s) define a complete set of base-2 nouns (which could be used as prefixes): tbspn oz jill gill cup pint quart half gallon peck kenning bushel rundlet barrel hogshead butt tun Where each item below the next item is exactly 2x the previous one. It turns out there's also some base-3 stuff (…
Fractional lengths in the US are commonly in base-2, ie, 1/2", 1/4", 1/8", 1/16", etc. Still annoying to remember that the next socket up from 1/2" is 9/16".