I'm mostly happy enough with the metric system (though I feel like things might be nicer if we had started out using base 12 instead of base 10) in most areas, but I'm not sure I'm convinced about switching to Celsius. I very rarely have to talk about temperatures exceeding 100F, and when I do, they typically range from around 200-600F anyway.
My ideal temperature scale would be one where 0 is 0C and 100 is roughly 100F. Using celsius, you're basically leaving 60% of the 2-digit portion of the scale unused.
Celcius makes sense, because 0 degrees is water freezing temperature which is the whole point. So for the rest of the world -1 is negative temperature and +1 is positive. What could be more obvious than that?
I'm struggling to think of a common use case that makes heavy use of the "40-75C" range of the Celsius scale, and even for cooking you're mostly looking in the 150C-300C range, which is no more convenient than using 300-500F.
There's no particular reason to be hung up on where water boils when it's not creating a particularly useful scale. You could just as easily set 100 to be the point at which proteins denature (~75C).
"Too expensive" is also often used, which completely ignores the expense that every other country also incurred.
My parents were teenagers when New Zealand went metric (and adopted decimal currency). They can still remember the musical jingles associated with helping people convert between common reference points (a pound of butter etc). They have also told me that most people just embraced it, recognising the benefits of the change. My grandparents still used imperial units into the 80's but have fully converted now.
According to the article, it's about screw thread measurements. And the cultural aspect. The fact that the abbreviation for the system is SI which is short for a French phrase makes it seem foreign. And FRENCH. Which many Americans seem to hate.
Given how much manufacturing has been outsourced I doubt this would still hold weight, and honestly at this point I imagine most international toolmakers are building in mm and simply providing the ridiculous fractions of an inch measurement for American markets.
If the metric system had no value then the map would be reversed. It's already here being used by many industries, almost every other country has adopted it (to varying degrees), and there is a cost to not adopting it.
While it's a no-brainer that the US should adopt metric, that map isn't the reason. The same argument could have been made against adopting metric when it was first invented.
The reason that it should be adopted is simply because it's a far simpler system to use and understand. Units of measurement have simple relationships with other units, and there are standard prefixes.
I actually find it quite sad. Not being able to think about these things in a simple way makes learning much much harder for children, and even for adults there is no way someone using imperial measurements can perform operations anywhere near as quickly or easily as someone using metric. This is especially true of unit conversions. Not using metric makes you ostensibly dumber.
For many of us outside the US, the continued use of imperial measurements is thought of as akin to eschewing cars in favour of horse drawn carriages. For those in the US, how it is viewed from the inside?
I wonder how much this reason alone is responsible for comparatively poor results of the US in science education. It's obviously far from the whole reason, but I can't help but think that young kids would be turned off learning all of these esoteric and arbitrary rules.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 36.6 ms ] threadMy ideal temperature scale would be one where 0 is 0C and 100 is roughly 100F. Using celsius, you're basically leaving 60% of the 2-digit portion of the scale unused.
100°c is boiling water (at ~sea level).
There's no particular reason to be hung up on where water boils when it's not creating a particularly useful scale. You could just as easily set 100 to be the point at which proteins denature (~75C).
My parents were teenagers when New Zealand went metric (and adopted decimal currency). They can still remember the musical jingles associated with helping people convert between common reference points (a pound of butter etc). They have also told me that most people just embraced it, recognising the benefits of the change. My grandparents still used imperial units into the 80's but have fully converted now.
According to the article, it's about screw thread measurements. And the cultural aspect. The fact that the abbreviation for the system is SI which is short for a French phrase makes it seem foreign. And FRENCH. Which many Americans seem to hate.
If the metric system had no value then the map would be reversed. It's already here being used by many industries, almost every other country has adopted it (to varying degrees), and there is a cost to not adopting it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_dollar#Introductio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_New_Zealand
The reason that it should be adopted is simply because it's a far simpler system to use and understand. Units of measurement have simple relationships with other units, and there are standard prefixes.
I actually find it quite sad. Not being able to think about these things in a simple way makes learning much much harder for children, and even for adults there is no way someone using imperial measurements can perform operations anywhere near as quickly or easily as someone using metric. This is especially true of unit conversions. Not using metric makes you ostensibly dumber.
For many of us outside the US, the continued use of imperial measurements is thought of as akin to eschewing cars in favour of horse drawn carriages. For those in the US, how it is viewed from the inside?
I wonder how much this reason alone is responsible for comparatively poor results of the US in science education. It's obviously far from the whole reason, but I can't help but think that young kids would be turned off learning all of these esoteric and arbitrary rules.