I can't help noticing this article gathers enough interest to raise in the HN ranks, but attracts no discussion (0 posts when I write this).
After decades of the same old arguments, is there anything new to be said other than things that boil down to 'I prefer metric/imperial because that's what I grew up with so its more natural' ?
I'm guessing that is only some portion of the audience, whereas I would suspect the network effect is the dominant term. Trying to push uphill against the cookbooks, road signs, local weather reports, etc is like trying to maintain one language in your head while the rest of the _local_ world is another language. Certainly possible, but is questionable use of that glucose
I had never heard of "anti-metric vigilantes" like TFA discussed, but hopefully those are just some fringe jokers designed to get article clicks, and not a serious movement
On a related note, I wish car navigation apps had a more fine-grained configuration than all-imperial or all-metric. I need the car to show speed in miles, but I don't want the navigation to use yards.
I've dealt with the British and American version of imperial measurements, and know metric. It's not exactly difficult to quantify and convert as necessary so all the culture wars confuse me.
What enrages me about the American system is more the lack of consistency. Take something like mayonnaise. One brand will be sold with a price quoted in dollars per ounce, another in pounds, and yet another in x$/yoz for some y other than 1. And one will have calories per 2oz portion, one calories per 7oz portion, and the other calories per tablespoon (0.76oz) on the label. Obviously I made the numbers up, but this phenomenon is pure insanity. And it's blatant that the obfuscation is to enable exploitation of the consumer who has to perform arduous arithmetic to compare products. At least in the (pre-Brexit) UK the yoghurt had to have calories and price per 100g on the label, whether it was a 454g (vestiges of 1lb) pot, 500g, or some other size. I prefer consistency in some unit that I can learn to chaos.
As for recipes: why insist on measuring things of totally unknown density in cups? Mass is the appropriate way to measure strawberries or lettuce leaves, not volume.
> I prefer consistency in some unit that I can learn to chaos.
Basically you made the case for the metric system! Yes, sure, technically it's not that hard to convert between units, when all you're doing is focusing kn converting units. But in real life you're supposed to use your brain to do other stuff and if you have to stop and suddenly perform a contortion to compare the price per weigh unit of one item with another item that uses another base weigh unit, well, that's now an extra step that you didn't ask for.
With the metric system it can happen that some products use grams, and some kilograms (some countries use hectograms while others prefer decagrams, for some uses like food) and you have the same potential for inconsistency, however since there are only factors of ten at play, it doesn't take many brain cycles to quickly compare the numbers in your head.
I agree, of course metric is better. My point is that perhaps things can improve in a direction that is orthogonal to the metric vs imperial/US choice and doesn't require making anyone angry.
The inherent superiority of metric is small enough that people are going to be angry about this stuff, and yet it's dwarfed by inherent idiocy of inconsistent labelling which is solvable without a prolonged culture siege.
For recipes, cups, teaspoons, table spoons, are used (not only in the US but in most countries) because they are practical and precision is not required. Many ingredients naturally vary in size anywy and it is expected that the 'cook' will adjust as they go to get the desired result.
I wouldn't say most countries. "Cup" as a general-purpose unit is very US-centric, odd even by UK standards, and unheard of in Europe. Nobody puts carrots in cups. Unless it's a liquid you'd actually drink out of a cup, you'll rather find units like 200ml or 250g instead.
'cup' specifically is not used much in Europe, I agree, but the various spoons are used everywhere.
That said, traditional recipes tend not use ultra-precise units like '200ml'... Rather practical units like "a glass of wine".
I have a copy of an old famous French recipes book (French edition) and I don't think 'ml' is mentioned once and most quantities are explicitly qualified as being approximate.
Again, this is about being practical by using measurement unit readily available and acknowledging that everything will need to be adapted, anyway. This is a kitchen, not a lab!
A cup of chopped carrots does not seem odd to me. Again, it stems from practicality. You get a cup, you fill it with chopped carrots, that's how much carrots you need. Simple.
This is huge. In a way it doesn't matter whether the units are horsepower-seconds and farthings per cubic barleycorn or whatever, as long as they're consistent. But conversions are so much easier in metric that it ends up being a win for that alone. "recipe says 250g flour... I'll buy a 1kg bag" whereas the imperial equivalent requires you to know a long list of conversions between random units. As well as sometimes density, other times the "normal density" or something. That way you can buy a 1lb bag of flour to get 2 1/2 cups (or whatever, I have no idea how many cups of flour there are in a pound).
And all the same colour and size. I've never handled dollars but I'd imagine that would be annoying. I like that I can tell a 20 and 50 euro bill apart even when I'm totally drunk.
I come from a funny-coloured-currency country but lived in the USA for a while. And, yes, it's very confusing dealing with the money there. You'd think you had loads of money in you wallet because it was straining your pocket, but it was just 25 one-dollar bills. With coloured bills, a person naturally tends to organize them a bit so you can tell at a glance whether you have enough money for lunch or not.
The other thing is that bills feel sort of greasy or dirty. I'm not sure I can quite describe that, though.
We used to have paper bills where I live but now it's plastic ones. They took a while to get used to because they are stiff and hard to organize. Then again, I almost never use actual currency anymore. It's all payment by phone or card.
If the UK are so inclined, they should return to the old currency measures of pounds, shillings, pennies, half pennies, farthings, thruppence, sixpence, florin, half crowns and crowns.
[The Wizarding Currency of the Harry Potter series was presumably a parody of this but based on 1g = 17s*29k = 493k; 17 and 29 being somewhat less useful divisors, though in practice one could presumably divide physical quantities by 18 or 30 and price on the 17 or 29 scale. 29 does have the occasionally useful property of being the number of days in February in a leap year.]
Thruppence is a somewhat inconvenient coin to pay with at a toll booth from a vehicle travelling at the 133619.661 furlongs per fortnight speed. It helps to travel prepared and dispense the required number of thruppence into little cloth bags beforehand – to throw them at the cashier without having to slow down.
> “When I came to look closely at it,” he told me later, “the more it appeared to me that the European project was a deliberate attempt to reverse what happened at Babel.
Curiously, the European Parliament building is based on Peter Bruegel's Tower of Babel [1].
I suspect the issue is simply that there really isn't a driving force behind making "everything" metric anymore.
The original impetus in the 1970s was that it was costing a lot of money to maintain multiple systems in manufacturing.
CAD systems and automation make a lot of the issues moot. Everybody mostly converged to metric and let the CAD system put things in English for where you touch the legacy systems. CNC machines don't care whether you feed them metric or imperial units.
So, we're left with "imperial" in the US in things like highway signage, consumer recipes (businesses needing recipes already run by weight for consistency so the switchover isn't that relevant--scales easily do both), and housing construction. Note that there is expense in updating these to metric with no particular advantage accruing from doing so.
I note that one of the areas I never thought would become metric, consumer groceries, seems to be starting to change. Once this occurs, I suspect cookbooks will also start to change.
> CAD systems and automation make a lot of the issues moot.
Only sort of. Threads are probably the easiest counter-example, because single point cutting is much the same on CNC or manual lathe and while the CNC one can easily swap from 60 threads per inch to 5 per mm or whatever, cutting a 60° thread using a cutting tool that doesn't have a 60° point on it means another pass on every thread. Meanwhile the "imperial standard" is a loose collection of every thread ever and good luck to you.
The big win is communication. With metric it's rare to be working in metre-newtons per farad-volt-second but with imperial often the conversion from energy to power involves going from pound-feet to horsepower (etc). Much easier to say or write "1234 joules over 18 seconds is 89.2 watts". It's one less conversion as well as less to say, and that matters when you're stacking many of them then trying to use units to verify that it makes sense.
You also have the joy of "the hole for a 17/64ths Whitworth tap is 47.2 thou" or whatever other imperial nonsense machinists have to deal with. Meanwhile metric bunnies say "6mm tap therefore 5.1mm hole". Sure, you need a special drill bit in both cases, but honestly I'm just guessing at the imperial size and if I'm out by an order of magnitude I wouldn't know. But just guess... is 5.1 less than 6, yes or no?
In some cases, traditional units remain in use because they are more convenient than metric. This is a world-wide phenomenon, not just US/UK. In Japan, people still size farm fields in -tsubo and rooms in -jō.
Secondly, the world-wide conversion to metric is less thorough than claimed. In less developed countries, daily practice less often conforms to official documentation.
US and UK pints are different. The ounces used to weigh metals aren’t the same ounces as used to weigh pretty much everything else. Aside from that, I can deal; teaspoons and tablespoons are perfectly cromulent measurements for use in the kitchen, as long as you’re measuring something that’s actually ok to measure by volume.
Of course this is all in the kitchen, but IME most things that need to be measured precisely are already metric anyway. Except for fasteners and machining; the incongruity of my torque driver taking bits that are 3/8” square on the drive side and metric on the fastener side is amusing. What’s not amusing is finding the bits anywhere that’s not overpriced (and overseas)
I feel people against global, or at the least, European unification of stuff, whatever they are, laws, units, currency, probably never went abroad for a prolonged period of time. Once you did, and you have to deal with everything from cultural shock to tax returns, you will change your mind pretty quickly (not even mentioning the language barrier).
Celsius? No way! Fahrenheit is a great scale for people. Under 0 is way too cold and over 100 is way too hot. -20c and 50c just don’t capture the range people can tolerate as well.
And having the freezing point of water at exactly 0 °C is also both neat and relevant in winter. Having the boiling point (at standard pressure) at exactly 100 °C might be a bit less relevant during day-to-day life, though occasionally it's still useful.
Ok since everyone here is a fan of metric, can we also do away with imperial time? What is this nonsense, 1 minute has 60 seconds, but all of a sudden a day has 24 hours and a week 7 days? Why the arbitrary ratios?
Compare to how 1 metric minutes is 10 metric seconds, 1 metric hour is 10 metric minutes, one metric day is 10 metric hours, one week is 10 metric days. How many metric seconds are there in one metric week? Well 10000 metric seconds, or 10 kiloseconds, of course. See how the conversions are so much easier in the metric system?
Afaik, that's sumerian time, not Imperial time. They used the thumb with the finger phalanges, giving 3 * 4=12 options. Together with 5 fingers on the other hand, they got 12 and 60 as bases. I don't know why they just didn't do 12 * 12. The 24 should be looked at as 12 am and 12 pm, the day starting at noon, so it's more like minus 12 to plus 12.
But as we're engineers, lets do a back of the envelope trial:
You're mostly stuck with days, months and years because of astronomical facts.
Seconds are close to heartbeats which has some psychological nicities: People used to count short times in heartbeats. You might be able to redefine a second as 10 millidays.
Weeks tend give decent divisions between work and free days. I remember reading about the USSR messing with the week rythm to get more work time, and it severely backfired in productivity. So you'd need to find a way to give about 8 days in each month as new weekend. Numbers 30 and 8 are hard to decimalize. Maybe define a week as 10 days, with day 1 of the week a holy day, and 1 or 2 more day in the week that workers can choose themselves. I don't see weeks getting much better like that.
The french did give it a try in their revolution, but I don't know why only that part of metrification failed.
Very true, of course. People used feet and heartbeats because that was the only thing available. Even so, we need something in that timescale, and millidays are way too fast for a human to count. Feel free to suggest something better, as I have no idea.
36 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 45.1 ms ] threadAfter decades of the same old arguments, is there anything new to be said other than things that boil down to 'I prefer metric/imperial because that's what I grew up with so its more natural' ?
I'm guessing that is only some portion of the audience, whereas I would suspect the network effect is the dominant term. Trying to push uphill against the cookbooks, road signs, local weather reports, etc is like trying to maintain one language in your head while the rest of the _local_ world is another language. Certainly possible, but is questionable use of that glucose
I had never heard of "anti-metric vigilantes" like TFA discussed, but hopefully those are just some fringe jokers designed to get article clicks, and not a serious movement
What enrages me about the American system is more the lack of consistency. Take something like mayonnaise. One brand will be sold with a price quoted in dollars per ounce, another in pounds, and yet another in x$/yoz for some y other than 1. And one will have calories per 2oz portion, one calories per 7oz portion, and the other calories per tablespoon (0.76oz) on the label. Obviously I made the numbers up, but this phenomenon is pure insanity. And it's blatant that the obfuscation is to enable exploitation of the consumer who has to perform arduous arithmetic to compare products. At least in the (pre-Brexit) UK the yoghurt had to have calories and price per 100g on the label, whether it was a 454g (vestiges of 1lb) pot, 500g, or some other size. I prefer consistency in some unit that I can learn to chaos.
As for recipes: why insist on measuring things of totally unknown density in cups? Mass is the appropriate way to measure strawberries or lettuce leaves, not volume.
Basically you made the case for the metric system! Yes, sure, technically it's not that hard to convert between units, when all you're doing is focusing kn converting units. But in real life you're supposed to use your brain to do other stuff and if you have to stop and suddenly perform a contortion to compare the price per weigh unit of one item with another item that uses another base weigh unit, well, that's now an extra step that you didn't ask for.
With the metric system it can happen that some products use grams, and some kilograms (some countries use hectograms while others prefer decagrams, for some uses like food) and you have the same potential for inconsistency, however since there are only factors of ten at play, it doesn't take many brain cycles to quickly compare the numbers in your head.
I would say doing some forced arithmetic might do a little good.
My post is slight sarcasm but it's quite egregious to compare working out simple arithmetic to a contortion of the mind. Have more faith in humanity.
The inherent superiority of metric is small enough that people are going to be angry about this stuff, and yet it's dwarfed by inherent idiocy of inconsistent labelling which is solvable without a prolonged culture siege.
That said, traditional recipes tend not use ultra-precise units like '200ml'... Rather practical units like "a glass of wine".
I have a copy of an old famous French recipes book (French edition) and I don't think 'ml' is mentioned once and most quantities are explicitly qualified as being approximate.
Again, this is about being practical by using measurement unit readily available and acknowledging that everything will need to be adapted, anyway. This is a kitchen, not a lab!
A cup of chopped carrots does not seem odd to me. Again, it stems from practicality. You get a cup, you fill it with chopped carrots, that's how much carrots you need. Simple.
This is huge. In a way it doesn't matter whether the units are horsepower-seconds and farthings per cubic barleycorn or whatever, as long as they're consistent. But conversions are so much easier in metric that it ends up being a win for that alone. "recipe says 250g flour... I'll buy a 1kg bag" whereas the imperial equivalent requires you to know a long list of conversions between random units. As well as sometimes density, other times the "normal density" or something. That way you can buy a 1lb bag of flour to get 2 1/2 cups (or whatever, I have no idea how many cups of flour there are in a pound).
That being said, I met only a handful of people who classed themselves as pro-brexit and look how that turned out.
I look forward to adding fractions of 16ths while shopping for plums
The other thing is that bills feel sort of greasy or dirty. I'm not sure I can quite describe that, though.
We used to have paper bills where I live but now it's plastic ones. They took a while to get used to because they are stiff and hard to organize. Then again, I almost never use actual currency anymore. It's all payment by phone or card.
(Edit: spelling)
1 pound = 20 shillings
1 shilling = 12 pennies
1 penny = 4 farthings
3 pence* = 1 thruppence
6 pence = 1 sixpence
2 shillings = 1 florin
5 shillings = 1 crown
(so 2 shillings + 2 thruppence = 1 half crown)
Bless.
*pence = plural of penny.
And it's good for practicing arithmetic. ;-)
[The Wizarding Currency of the Harry Potter series was presumably a parody of this but based on 1g = 17s*29k = 493k; 17 and 29 being somewhat less useful divisors, though in practice one could presumably divide physical quantities by 18 or 30 and price on the 17 or 29 scale. 29 does have the occasionally useful property of being the number of days in February in a leap year.]
Curiously, the European Parliament building is based on Peter Bruegel's Tower of Babel [1].
[1] https://mattbell.org/why-is-the-strasbourg-parliament-based-...
The original impetus in the 1970s was that it was costing a lot of money to maintain multiple systems in manufacturing.
CAD systems and automation make a lot of the issues moot. Everybody mostly converged to metric and let the CAD system put things in English for where you touch the legacy systems. CNC machines don't care whether you feed them metric or imperial units.
So, we're left with "imperial" in the US in things like highway signage, consumer recipes (businesses needing recipes already run by weight for consistency so the switchover isn't that relevant--scales easily do both), and housing construction. Note that there is expense in updating these to metric with no particular advantage accruing from doing so.
I note that one of the areas I never thought would become metric, consumer groceries, seems to be starting to change. Once this occurs, I suspect cookbooks will also start to change.
Only sort of. Threads are probably the easiest counter-example, because single point cutting is much the same on CNC or manual lathe and while the CNC one can easily swap from 60 threads per inch to 5 per mm or whatever, cutting a 60° thread using a cutting tool that doesn't have a 60° point on it means another pass on every thread. Meanwhile the "imperial standard" is a loose collection of every thread ever and good luck to you.
The big win is communication. With metric it's rare to be working in metre-newtons per farad-volt-second but with imperial often the conversion from energy to power involves going from pound-feet to horsepower (etc). Much easier to say or write "1234 joules over 18 seconds is 89.2 watts". It's one less conversion as well as less to say, and that matters when you're stacking many of them then trying to use units to verify that it makes sense.
You also have the joy of "the hole for a 17/64ths Whitworth tap is 47.2 thou" or whatever other imperial nonsense machinists have to deal with. Meanwhile metric bunnies say "6mm tap therefore 5.1mm hole". Sure, you need a special drill bit in both cases, but honestly I'm just guessing at the imperial size and if I'm out by an order of magnitude I wouldn't know. But just guess... is 5.1 less than 6, yes or no?
It’s worse. The drill size for a 7/16” coarse tap is ‘U’.
Secondly, the world-wide conversion to metric is less thorough than claimed. In less developed countries, daily practice less often conforms to official documentation.
Of course this is all in the kitchen, but IME most things that need to be measured precisely are already metric anyway. Except for fasteners and machining; the incongruity of my torque driver taking bits that are 3/8” square on the drive side and metric on the fastener side is amusing. What’s not amusing is finding the bits anywhere that’s not overpriced (and overseas)
Celsius? No way! Fahrenheit is a great scale for people. Under 0 is way too cold and over 100 is way too hot. -20c and 50c just don’t capture the range people can tolerate as well.
Compare to how 1 metric minutes is 10 metric seconds, 1 metric hour is 10 metric minutes, one metric day is 10 metric hours, one week is 10 metric days. How many metric seconds are there in one metric week? Well 10000 metric seconds, or 10 kiloseconds, of course. See how the conversions are so much easier in the metric system?
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/32127/decimal-time-how-f...
But as we're engineers, lets do a back of the envelope trial:
You're mostly stuck with days, months and years because of astronomical facts.
Seconds are close to heartbeats which has some psychological nicities: People used to count short times in heartbeats. You might be able to redefine a second as 10 millidays.
Weeks tend give decent divisions between work and free days. I remember reading about the USSR messing with the week rythm to get more work time, and it severely backfired in productivity. So you'd need to find a way to give about 8 days in each month as new weekend. Numbers 30 and 8 are hard to decimalize. Maybe define a week as 10 days, with day 1 of the week a holy day, and 1 or 2 more day in the week that workers can choose themselves. I don't see weeks getting much better like that.
The french did give it a try in their revolution, but I don't know why only that part of metrification failed.
Ah yes, reminds me of the argument feet are better because it's a more human measure than meters (cf surely you're joking Mr Feynman)