Imperial is very visible in the UK (for road instances and for beer glasses in particular) but the country is pretty much metric now and has been for decades.
As a 25-year-old living in the UK, body weight is mostly kilos (that's what my doctor uses, and what I look at at the gym) except when talking to my parents. Cooking is 100% metric; I genuinely do not know what people are talking about when they quote Fahrenheit temperatures. Lengths and weights are metric, though not clothing sizes I guess. Driving distance is the only thing day-to-day where I think in old units.
Doctors and the gym use kilos for body weight, I agree but I don't really hear people ever say "I just dropped a couple of kilograms in the last month" it's always "I've lost half a stone"
I never hear Fahrenheit, which I'm glad about.
Cooking is definitely not 100% metric. The cooking shows on TV still mention cup sizes, pints etc. There's so many recipe books still in imperial and colloquially we never say a 30cm baguette or a 113g burger. It's a foot-long and a quarter pounder.
I'm British. I live in the UK. I'm in my thirties.
I do a person's height in casual conversation (on forms I write it in metres) and driving distance in Imperial measurements (often; I use kilometres when I'm talking to someone I trust to know what a kilometre is, which is generally anyone under about 40). I do depth and altitude in metres, but sometimes I'll use an old chart that has feet (or sometimes fathoms, but that's the really, really old charts). Volume, mass, everything else is metric. I know my mass in kg. I've only the vaguest idea what a "stone" is. A pound? An ounce? Those are twee measurements I sometimes see in old books. I know how much a litre is. I don't even know what the metric unit of volume is. Cubic inches? That seems clumsy even for Imperial units. At the supermarket, the unit used on the fruit, veg and meat is kilogrammes. Last weekend I was comparing pork by cost per kilogramme. Which supermarket do you shop at that uses... I don't even know what you'd use. Not stones, I guess? Pounds and ounces? I remember at about age ten someone telling me the temperature in Fahrenheit, and having no idea whether that was hot or cold. I have less idea today of what it means.
Where this is going is that I thoroughly disagree.
Additional edits, for the fun of it:
"Though I bet you don't go to Asda and ask where you can find 2.272 litres of milk." Fair enough. I do buy milk in pints. If they switched to 2 litre bottles, I'd still buy it, and frankly I'd prefer it if they did. At the moment, I have to look at the scale on the side of the milk marked in litres to see how much I'm pouring into something (because the recipe I'm using specifies litres or millilitres; maybe there's a whole dual-industry for recipes in which you get Imperial units and I get metric; I note that the recipes on the BBC list both units; Jamie Oliver's web page is metric, Delia Smith is both, Hairy Bikers are metric, I've given up looking after those high-ranking four, but I note that not one of them is this Imperial only thing you talked about).
"Do you ever do mile-per-gallon approximations for your fuel economy?" Fair enough. I don't drive so this is a closed book to me.
"Do you ever buy a steak at a nice restaurant?" Yes, often. I have never once specified a mass the steak is to have. That it is marked on the menu in crazy measurements has always seemed a twee restaurant kind of thing; cosmetic rather than meaningful. The meat at the supermarket is, of course, in kg.
"Have you ever played golf or football?" Never golf, and football not since I was about ten. Perhaps we simply move in different circles. You're with the Imperials, I'm with the metrics.
"Where are you?" Deep south. Hampshire. As a drifting aside, I note that London is now approximately 40% non-British born, so that presumably means that about 40% of people living in London have even less grasp of Imperial measurements than I do. Perhaps metric is more common in the south.
Steak update: I am sure I have specified the steak by name, and its name is "Ten ounce" or "Eight ounce" or whatever. It is as meaningful to me as "Medium bowl of custard" or "large bowl of custard", for example. If you gave me a big bucket of sand and asked me to put about ten ounces of sand in a cup, I'd have no idea at all. I seem to recall that I once saw an ounce of butter and it was kind of about "this" big". I'd probably use that as a base.
Ramsay: A ha. Ramsay, of course, is Scottish. Maybe Scotland isn't metric.
I didn't mention buying anything in the shops. I mentioned cooking, as in recipe instructions. Though I bet you don't go to Asda and ask where you can find 2.272 litres of milk.
Do you ever do mile-per-gallon approximations for your fuel economy? Cars are still advertised with mpg values.
I'd rather be with the metrics! I'm about to graduate with my design engineering degree, I'm so used to SI units that imperial drives me crazy, but I need to live with it.
Regarding the steak point, do you never ask for the 8oz or 10oz steak?
For curiosity, I'm just outside Glasgow, where are you?
Australian here. I think Australia has managed the metric conversion much better than most of the English speaking world. I found the miles usage for road signs in London odd, as well as the usage for pounds for vegetables in Canada.
Road distances & speeds : kilometres
Food measurements are always grams/kilograms & mls and litres ... except for steak & there are some hold hovers like soft drinks which are often in 330ml/600/680ml, 1.25litre, 2 litre. Milk is always litres and not just a straight conversion from ounces to litres, so always 1/2/4 litres. In addition, I think supermarkets are required to list food prices with a price/unit, e.g. $2/kg so that you can easily compare prices between brands/varieties.
Hardware supplies are in metres or dual listed.
Weight is always done in kilograms although older people occasionally will use stones / pounds (which usually requires clarification). Haven't heard them in quite a while.
Engine power is measured in terms of kilowatts. For some odd reason we have an odd unit for fuel efficiency of litres/100km. Not sure who picked this. E.g. 8.5 L /100km.
TVs are sometimes dual although mostly I'll see them in terms of centimetres although computer monitors are still in inches, probably due to the US.
I think when purchasing land it's a bit of mix as you can buy land in hectares as well as acres. There's also squares which I gather is 10ft by 10ft (which is odd and everyone I know silently guesses is around 9.something metres^2).
Not much into sports but pretty sure they use metres there too for Australian Football.
Funny you should mention beer – I've noticed an increasing tendency for pint glasses to be marked "568ml". Milk also doesn't come in pints any more, but does come in 568ml and 1 litre varieties. Still, as a nation we ask for and think of our beer and milk in pints.
This is because in both the US and the UK, imperial measures are legally defined in metric units. A pint is 568ml, by definition (well, in the UK, the US believes a pint is 454ml, but that's another argument).
In Canada beer is sold in 532ml cans and bottles (18fl oz?). It's funny to put imported and local beer cans next to each other, although they look the same, the local is slightly higher.
That's another problem: you can re-label all you want, but the glasses, packings and tins are still the same size. Now if you are confronted with remembering 1 pint or fivehundredsixty... that compilcated other number, you will always opt for the easier one. Weather it's about remembering or mentioning. For the same reason we have more easily rememberable increments of 250ml, 330ml and 500ml.
In Franconia you still ask for a "Seidla" which traditionally is 535ml but you get 500ml. In Bavaria you still ask for a "Maß" and you get 1000ml instead of 1069ml.
I'm in the UK, 27 and still struggle at times to comprehend lbs, ounces, stone, feet, inches, yards, miles etc., when everything I was taught in school was in metres, litres, newtons and kilogrammes.
Apart from lengths (feet vs. metres) I don't really find myself needing to calculate between the different units. I couldn't tell you how many litres in a 4 pint bottle of milk (or a pint of beer :)) but all other milk (or beer) is sold with those units, so I can easily compare.
I mean, we are supposed to be metric - but there are plenty of imperial measures in use (height, is another obvious example).
Strangely enough, whilst I'm fine with lengths and distances in metres, the minute someone tries to tell me how tall they are in metres and centimetres, I'm completely thrown. It's the one conversion I pathetically still really struggle with (UK -> Poland in this case).
I had the very same problem, only in the opposite direction, living in Poland for the first 27 years of my life and moving to the UK just over a year ago.
Just bear in mind that 6ft is approximately 180 cm, anything above is above, and anything lower is lower. This gives you a first approximation with only remembering one number. Also, 4in is about 10cm and is easy to add/subtract both ways. This might not be very exact, but it will give you a quick idea.
As an example go have a look at http://gordonramsaysrecipes.com/ which hosts a collection of Ramsay's receipes. All in tablespoons, teaspoons and cups.
teaspoons and tablespoons are metric - one teaspoon is 5 ml; one tablespoon is 15 ml. I'm not sure how useful it is having a volumetric unit instead of a mass[1] unit; but that's one thing I like about US cooking. "About a cup of this; about to cups of that" - it's all nice and intuitive. I know roughly what 500 g of flour is, or sugar, but 80 g of butter is tricky.
[1] sorry if I'm using the wrong term. Friendly corrections welcomed.
> We ask for a footlong, a quarter pounder etc when we go out for fast food.
So? There's nothing wrong with asking for something called a "footlong" and getting a 30cm meal. Nothing wrong with asking for a "pint" and getting 500ml of beverage.
I don't mean that we only ask for these things, we are served these things. We are served 6 inch or foot-long subs; pints - not half litres - of beer; etc.
It's not just a simple lingual thing. We actually buy products that are divided into round imperial measurements, i.e. 1 foot, 1/4 of a pound, 2 pints, etc.
> We actually buy products that are divided into round imperial measurements ... Imperial units are absolute muck and I cannot wait for a entirely metric world.
Ah sorry, I misread your grandparent post, I thought you wanted to keep the Imperial names & sizes.
Good idea, but a bad writeup. A serious "lol" at the metric system being more precise. Easier to use does not equate to "more precise".
In many cases, the metric system is less precise, as it demands that all measurements fit into base 10. Base 10 makes it easier for us to do calculations in our head and understand, but it does NOT improve precision. In many cases, it removes precision in exchange for the base 10 ease of use.
And anyone who thinks a metric conversion will do anything for science obviously knows nothing of American science -- which has used the metric system almost exclusively for a very long time.
So before creating a petition and asking Americans to sign it, if they agree with it, we should first ask Americans if they want it? Preferably with a petition of some sort, right?
I don't think politicians would ever allow this, especially during these times, since the proposed change would cost millions in change of signs and anything where the imperial system is used.
Metrickery is a socialist plot to weaken America. First it's units of measurement divisible by ten, then it's universal health care, then gun control, and finally off to the gulag for the last remaining freethinkers.
Sadly, there are people who believe more of less exactly what I just wrote.
Actually, the "Europe is better and the US is inferior" mantra, which is very widely held in the American left-of-center, is a significant factor in all of those.
As a Canadian, I'd be inclined to call it the "every other industrialized liberal democracy on earth is better" mantra. Countries tend to converge on an optimal balance of individual liberties and social protections because it measurably works.
The US is a notable outlier, and the various comparative social and economic indicators are pretty damning evidence that the continued American insistence on an 18th century approach to governance actually is inferior to a number of other approaches that have been more inclined to take evidence-based best practices into account.
> Countries tend to converge on an optimal balance of individual liberties and social protections because it measurably works.
That's just utter nonsense. What measurement are you optimizing for?
What makes you think that moving the US to the left moves it closer to, say, Germany, instead of closer to, say, Brazil, India, and Mexico (which is what I think will happen)?
And even if it did move it closer to Germany, I wouldn't want that, which speaks to the fact that your "measurably works" claim probably refers to some non-objective sense of optimality.
> the continued American insistence on an 18th century approach to governance
That's a straw man. Predominating sentiments in the GOP are strongly contra the Founding Fathers. I mean, George W. Bush greatly expanded the welfare state.
Society should optimize for happiness. It's not measurable, but you can estimate it (for example you can estimate that average German is happier than average citizen of North Korea). My vague definition happiness is this: Let's say you must choose between 2 states of mind and you'll spend the next hour in the selected one. Before your choice, you can try each of them by clicking some button. The one that you choose has higher "happiness quotient".
So let's draft 1% of the population and place them in a large underground bunker at birth. They will never be allowed to know anything about the "real world," and they will provide all the labor, engineering, and scientific research for the other 99%, who get to everything for free. Does that sound like a good society to you?
No, because this very probably wouldn't increase average happiness:
1. The 1% would be less happy.
2. Lot of the 99% would feel guilty (which lowers happiness).
3. The 1% would probably be less productive than if they were free. So the only benefit for the 99% would be that they consume less.
By the way, this system to a certain extent exist in our society (cheap labour in China for example).
Take your pick. The US is at or very near the worst among OECD countries in: infant mortality, child poverty, child health and safety, life expectancy at birth, healthy life expectancy, rate of obesity, disability-adjusted life years, doctors per 1000 people, deaths from treatable conditions, rate of mental health disorders, rate of drug abuse, rate of prescription drug use, incarceration rate, rate of assaults, rate of homicides, income inequality, wealth inequality, and economic mobility.
Most or all of which would not be helped by liberal attempts to emulate Europe.
For example, high child poverty is to be expected in a country that harbors many poor immigrants from Latin America.
For another example, high rate of incarceration is largely to be blamed on the "War on Drugs," which has the same effect as the prohibition on alcohol did.
For another example, low rate of doctors is largely to be blamed on the fact that medicine is a guild (as in, midieval guild) where med school is super tough to get into, doesn't select for competency as a medical practitioner, and creates a "class hierarchy" within medicine where a highly-trained nurse can perform as well or better than a doctor in many common situations, but is not legally allowed to practice in that capacity.
This could go on and on.
Overall, American liberals want a society where everybody gets whatever they demand, to the degree that there is enough to go around, except the actual producers. That society already exists, and it's called India.
> Most or all of which would not be helped by liberal attempts to emulate Europe.
You mean the rest of the industrialized world, not just Europe.
> high child poverty is to be expected in a country that harbors many poor immigrants from Latin America.
You mean unlike a country that harbours many poor immigrants from Northern Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe?
> high rate of incarceration is largely to be blamed on the "War on Drugs"
Yes, and it is the conservative right that most strongly favours continuing the War on Drugs. Those left of centre liberals you don't like generally favour ending the war on drugs and following a more - dare I say - European approach to legalization. (Sadly, Canada's Republican-lite Conservative government has taken a more American approach to the War on Drugs, establishing mandatory minimum sentences and other punitive measures that have already failed in the US.)
> low rate of doctors is largely to be blamed on the fact that medicine is a guild
That's true across all the industrialized countries, but the other countries are much better than the US at achieving a higher rate of doctors and much better overall health outcomes, despite spending only 40-70% of what the USA spends on health care - and running various incarnations of universal health coverage.
> American liberals want a society where everybody gets whatever they demand
That's a lazy straw man attack. American liberals, like liberals in other industrialized countries, want their country to value human rights, pay attention to evidence-based public policy and invest enough in public social and physical infrastructure to ensure everyone has an adequate standard of living and the opportunity to work hard and prosper.
Ironically, the USA has among the worst levels of socioeconomic mobility in the OECD. Poor Americans are more trapped in their poverty than poor people in countries that do more to level the playing field so everyone has a fair chance of escaping poverty.
> despite spending only 40-70% of what the USA spends on health care
Right. And if the USA tries to emulate Europe in healthcare more than we alreay do, we will end up wasting even more money. There is no solution to be had here through more regulation.
> value human rights
> ensure everyone has an adequate standard of living
Contradiction. But providing a moral basis for individual rights requires understanding a complete philosophical system, which is out of the scope of an HN comment.
> ensure everyone has an adequate standard of living and the opportunity to work hard and prosper
You're asking something that may be outside the scope of reality.
> Poor Americans are more trapped in their poverty
As someone from a poor part of rural eastern North Carolina, all I can do is LOL at this, because it's utterly, utterly false. That is a complete myth. I mean, we already have free universal education, de jure through high school and de facto through college.
> if the USA tries to emulate Europe in healthcare more than we alreay do, we will end up wasting even more money.
The evidence is that American health care costs would go down significantly, given the clear correlation across industrialized countries between the extent to which health care spending is private and the overall cost (either per capita or as a share of GDP).
> Contradiction.
It's not a contradition, the latter follows necessarily from the former. It's why nearly every industrialized country has converged on public health, public education, public health care, affordable housing, and so on.
> But providing a moral basis for individual rights requires understanding a complete philosophical system, which is out of the scope of an HN comment.
Or we can dispense with the 18th century a priori legerdemain and just recognize human rights as a self-evident basis for a fair, just and humane society.
> You're asking something that may be outside the scope of reality.
And yet the rest of the industrialized world does a much better job of it than the United States.
> As someone from a poor part of rural eastern North Carolina, all I can do is LOL at this
The working of any given balance of liberties and social protections is a phenomenon observable only in time increments over centuries, or possibly millenia.
There are many examples of "liberal" and even "democratic" or "republican" governments / societies that lasted for centuries before failing into tyranny and / or to foreign domination. The US Constitution attempts to correct the failings of each of those examples. Saying it has worked so far is declaring the weather today, all day long, was great -- at 9:30am.
Saying the French or Germans have demonstrated their solutions, at that time scale, is just nuts.
Before we start with the standard junk about "imperial measures are better because they are easier to understand / better suited to human scale / etc." can I say nope.
The only advantage that imperial measures have (for some) is that they are familiar. That's the sum total of it. People where were raised metric find these apologies for imperial measures to be pure gibberish.
Aren't their much easier to use? Conversion between units is straight-forward, there is connection between length and volume units, and probably much more common-senses-ness. I mean, the ft+inch system for human height is absolutely horrible.
Actually, I think metric could be improved with a few imperial equivalents - A "metric foot" as 30cm, for instance - because they are convenient measurements.
e.g. If somebody asks me "How tall is that person?" it's easier to say "About five foot" rather than "I dunno, about 155cm?"
Then you would end up: "Not about, how exactly tall he is?", "Oh, five foot and 5 cm."
The 30cm unit would improve absolutely nothing, it would only complicate things. If you want to use approximate measurement, just round it to tens of centimeters. Or you can use meters with one decimal place, whatever comes more natural.
I only live in Metric-using country and I have no slightest idea how tall is five foot, whereas 155cm instantly comes to my mind as, ah, at around my eye level. It's all about familiarity.
Sure, but that's 3 digits versus 1; if the requirement is to express common, human sized-objects with rough accuracy in as few words as possible, it works just fine. Really, it's all semantics (as you say), but there are specific cases where one might be a better fit than the other. It's the inconsistencies in imperial that are truly horrible, not the arbitrary standard unit...
How about 5ft7 vs 170cm. The later seems easier to express to me. If only rough accuracy is required then you only really need to take note of the first two digits. Incidentally converting between the two is quite messy; first you must learn that 1ft = 12 inches, then multiply the 5 by 12 then add 7 then multiply by 2.54. Where as to convert a metric figure to imperial, it does not matter so much whether you are starting out in metres or centimetres.
It isn't, really. If asked about my approximate height, I'd say 'eins-achtzig' ie 1.8m (notice me omitting the unit), which in practice also has only a single significant digit (or 2 if you account for tall people) and to me isn't any more unwieldy than '6 foot'.
I was educated during the conversion in the UK and commonly switch between the two. Speed and distances for travel in miles, shorter distances in meters. Height in feet for people, meters for building etc. Weight of people in stone, otherwise normally grams, liquids in pints for some things, liters for others.
> It's confusing, but makes sense in the long run.
You're perceiving things like this because it's what you were brought up with. None of the examples in which you claim it's "natural" to use imperial units make any sense to me at all. I don't think in miles, don't know how much a "stone" is, and pints are just pure confusion - which pint? there's about 4 types isn't there?
My parents used pounds, stone, feet and inches; my school used kg, g, and cm (born in ’80). I’ve had to take a conscious decision to reset my thinking to metric only and to supply metric values when people ask for them.
This all apart from miles of course, but when all your road signs are in miles and the speed limits in mph there’s not much you can do about that. Who knows what plans there are for that switchover…
People complain about the usual issues: multiple definitions of a mile, the odd ratios between inches, feet, yards, etc. It gets even more fun in agriculture, where the bushel is a frequently used unit. Now, the bushel is a unit of volume, whereas much of the world prefer to measure their crops by weight. To convert between the two, you essentially need to use conversion ratio (or table) for the crop type, along with an estimate of the moisture content of your product. To be fair, this is more to do with a difference in measuring methodology, rather than a failure of the imperial system, but it still highlights the kind of issues that come up between the systems.
Well, at some point, that part of the world decided that they'd use weight to measure produce, as opposed to volume. So now, if you read a scientific paper from Europe, you will get numbers in KG, likely with no indication of moisture content (since they don't particularly care). So, you're left with an inaccurate conversion to bushels, or more likely, you simply don't use the paper. The same goes for the other way around; there's probably a whole lot of rework that happens due to this incompatibility.
This is fairly similar to fuel mileage, where some places use miles per gallon (distance per volume) while others use litres per 100km (volume per distance). Changing systems is fairly irrelevant though, since you can still measure your mileage in kilometres per litre if you want.
No, it's different. distance / volume vs volume / distance are just inverses. Weight vs Volume are completely different measures and can only be compared by knowing the specific properties of the contents. Some recipe books have conversion tables for using depending on _what_ you're measuring.
My point is that changing the units doesn't have to change how you measure it. You can measure in kg or L just as easily, it's literally a number conversion. Whether or not you change how you measure it is a much more localised form of standardisation.
To be honest, although I know the obvious benefits of metric, I still prefer imperial simply because of its messiness. I realize the system is archaic, etc., but I still like that connection, as attenuated as it may be, to our ancient past. Use metric for all scientific purposes, etc., but keep that connection to the natural world.
I suppose I like it in the same way I prefer natural languages to some artificial languages like Esperanto, etc. - or our base-60 time units as opposed to some other decimal-based system. :)
Is there a large contingency of people in the science and engineering world not using metric?
Like a previous commenter said, all my science labs in high school and college used metric. I imagine legitimate research and engineering labs in America are also using metric.
That's great that you feel that way but a unit systems is suposed to efficiently communicate information. Using an archaic unit system because it makes you feel hipster isn't a good idea.
After some time agonising over those in the last year, I can assure you they're still used for Superbowls and years, as well as name ordinals and many other things :)
Have you seen the people on Mythbusters flail about while trying to convert using units like inch-pounds and miles per hour and fluid ounces to cubic feet? There's a reason science insists on using the metric system.
The metric system is relatively ancient, dating from the late 1700s.
Considering the amount of scientific discovery since that point, yes, it is ancient. Surely 90% of our scientific knowledge has come past the point in which it was invented.
>We 've already settled on using English for everything on the net
You understand that you're just saying this in an english-speaking world and if there is anything against your argument it just won't come up here at your feet?
I 'm not from the English-speaking world and that holds for a huge number of people here and in the wider internet. English was the lingua franca before the internet and is the default language of the internet. Using it guarantees that the maximum number of people will understand you.
These "apologies" are not gibberish. Measurements units are like words in that they are conventions that enough people agree with to make them useful as a way of communicating. Measurement units exist to help us quantify our world and if two systems do this equally well then there is no recompelling reason to switch.
Besides which, what problem would be solved in the process? People will use whatever units they prefer anyways at the end of the day. As a negative, forcing top-down change would irritate people.
"Familiar" is a bit off target because it implies that use is a matter of individual choice.
The system is embedded in standards, such as SAE. It is embedded in industries such as construction. It is embedded into statutes, regulations, and deeds for real property.
Yes, the system is familiar, but wiping the slate clean and starting anew is not a feature of stable democracies.
> (The Imperial system) is embedded in industries such as construction. It is embedded into statutes, regulations, and deeds for real property.
So is the metric system now in most of the world.
And where the non-metric world has to interact with the rest of us, metric is embedded in their processes too. E.g. science done in the U.S. and engineering goods made for export in the US. This comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4996646 discusses some of the same issues.
The system is embedded in standards, such as SAE. It is embedded in industries such as construction. It is embedded into statutes, regulations, and deeds for real property.
I knew a civil engineer who first worked in the private industry and later got a job at the DOT.
At the construction company, they did everything in metric internally. Once a design was finalized, they would convert everything to imperial and submit to the DOT. DOT is behind the times, she thought.
When she got to the DOT, she learned their procedure. Before engineers got started reading the plans, a secretary would translate units from imperial to metric for internal use.
The fact that an old contract specifies units of rods and farthings is not an argument for anything other than defining official conversion factors between the old way and the new way.
Why can't the existing code be modified by simply replacing old units with metric ones denoting the same quantity? If necessary, use a high level of precision in the expressions, and over time, have an initiative to slowly and gradually normalize those quantities to simpler numbers.
I was raised metric, but still find utility in the imperial system under some circumstances. I use my anatomy to measure things all the time while out on the farm, for instance. You could say step off 914cms, but I think 30 feet makes more sense in the context since you are literally counting your steps.
If you have precise measuring tools at your disposal, then I'm inclined to agree though.
We are constantly needlessly introducing math across all of our industries that have international partners by keeping our current system. Your point to which I was responding was that you feel it is more natural to measure in units of feet. I was pointing out to you that you can make the same measurement in a convenient unit in the metric system. We can have ease of use in both cases with the metric system.
But it doesn't matter anyway. You could sit and invent an infinite number of cases when using the imperial system "feels" easier. None of these invalidate the conveniences of the metric system, nor do they remove the compelling motivation to setup our system in line with that of the rest of the world to stop the waste of money, material, and time the is now spent on conversion, dual labeling, and confusion.
Communicating the number of steps to, say, position your tractor in the field is a long way from having international partners and dual labelling. It is still not clear to me why one would introduce the metric system into the specific case when the simplest form, the length of your foot, will do perfectly.
My foot is not one foot long, so your customary measure and mine don't match. One of us will need to convert, and we'll need a conversion table for each person.
Unless all of the people you deal with have nearly the same foot size, it's easier to deal with a single reference measure. But hey, if you and your mates want to say that the tractor is 30 feet, 20 cubits, 10 yards, 5 fathoms, or 1.8 rods away, then more power to you.
Everyone who works on my farm has a foot that is approximately 30cms, so it works great. If we all had 15cm feet, then we'd say you need to step off 60 feet in the aforementioned example. It is not strictly bound by the imperial system, it just so happens that the imperial system maps fairly well to what is practical in the field without any tools, so it is what we reference. I see no benefit to introducing the metric system here, despite using it in all other areas of life.
I think GP meant you wrote "step" but you are talking about "foot". Namely, you can count 90m putting your feet in front of each other 30 times.
If instead of putting your feet in front of each othr you actually take a step you should get closer to 1m.
(most people I met measure distances with 1m = 1step when playing european football, for example and you have to be at X meters from the ball por something)
A metric user would measure the same distance to "approximately 9 meters" by taking 9 large steps. This is a very common informal method of measuring distances.
It seems more practical (and certainly faster) than to measure the distance to "approximately 30 feet" by putting one foot just in front of the other 30 times.
A small anecdote. My father was very accurate and fast to measure distance in meters using his steps. Very useful in construction. You would not use centimeters in this use case.
I didn't think there were people that really tried to defend the imperial system on anything but familiarity. not very happy of having been proved wrong.
From what I've experienced, we use the imperial units for the same reason we use degrees over radians: the units allow for common use of integer multiples of simple fractions. For some people, a simple fraction of a relatable unit really is easier to deal with than a base ten decimal, and a lot of labor out there simply doesn't need higher precision.
Of course, once you enter any sort of engineering work, well, simple fractions often won't cut it and it's far, far easier to simply use a decimal number. And then there's no reason not to use metric measurements.
10 can be divided in third and quarter fine. It does 10/3 and 10/4=2.5. Well, 10/3 isn't round so people don't like it but neither is 1/3 of an inch. It's not because a lot of operations suddenly become doable with numbers that you magically lose the usage of fractions.
First of all, I think it's a poor example. A full circle in degrees is an integer while in radians it's not even a fractional number (it's an irrational number)!
Also, I don't get the thing about fractions. Decimal numbers are fractions as well.
Reasonably scaled measurements are very useful, though. Everything in astronomy is measured in scaled units. Mass is in solar masses, interstellar distances are in parsecs (well kiloparsecs) or light years, planetary orbits are in astronomical units. Similar, a lot of atomic physics uses angstroms.
Of course, that doesn't apply much when the difference is only a factor of 2, like the pound/kilogram difference, but even there people cheat a bit by just saying "kilo."
> the units don't matter. What matters is picking a system and sticking to it
That is exactly the problem with the imperial system. You have multiple units for the same thing, and when they are multiples of each other, it is in base 12.
You could settle on feet and have kilofeet and millifeet, and you'd have a sensible system (apart from being incompatible with the rest of the world).
It's easy to get dismissive about having multiple units, until you run into the contexts where they really are useful. Following up the example in one of my other comments: adopt the meter and the kilometer, or the foot and the kilofoot, and it won't matter to navigators, because they'll still use the nautical mile unless you literally put a gun to their heads, and if you do put a gun to their heads they'll show you why it's a much more practical unit for what they do.
>they'll show you why it's a much more practical unit for what they do.
Why? Why is it more practical? How is it better other than being more familiar? It blows me away that people can make the argument as it being "better".
> That is exactly the problem with the imperial system. You have multiple units for the same thing, and when they are multiples of each other, it is in base 12.
That's when you're lucky, can also be 3 (yard to feet), 22 (chain to yard), 10 (furlong to chain), 8 (miles to furlong, and that's why a mile is 5280 feet), 5 (gill to fluid ounce), 4 (acres to rod, gallons to quarts), 14 (stones to pounds) and probably everything in-between.
Imagine if we measured time using units of varying multiples. Every time a friend tells me "see you in two weeks", I'm like really? 2 times 7 times 24 times 60? Fucking asshole, do I look like a calculator?
Were time conversions as common or necessary as other unit conversions, you can bet your ass decimal time would have more takers.
Even so, varying units does restrict how we can express time. Even if someone tells you something as simple as "half a week", you have to ask for clarification. And while "a week from now" translates to a date, forget about "a month from now." That could mean half a dozen different things.
Does anybody use "hour" in anything other that whole multiples, halfs, and quarters? This divisiblity of 60 seems nothing more than a curiosity; minutes are used for everything else, even 3/4ths ("forty five minutes").
When someone tells me "half a kilometer" assuming they really mean 500m would usually be a dreadful mistake. It means "some uncertain distance you can probably walk". Decimal units don't magically make people more accurate.
When someone says "half a quart" who the fuck knows how much that is? I sure don't, and I'm American. Hell, even a regular quart throws me, all I have there is a vague notion that milk is sold in that amount. When someone says "half a liter" you can be sure they mean 500ml, and you can instantly know how much that is in any kitchen measuring device you have.
Suppose I am recounting a dish I made to someone over the phone in two realities, one with Imperial and the other with metric.
Imperial universe: "Okay, now add... say... a third of a gallon of milk" "...third of a gallon.. eehh.. half a pint of milk.
Metric universe: "Okay, now add... say... 2/3rds of a liter." "Two thirds of a liter... 666 ml it is then."
In the imperial universe poor conversations force two inaccurate estimations. In the metric universe only one of the parties is being dreadfully inaccurate.
Imperial is defined in terms of metric units, so it is possible to be as accurate in imperial. The difference between imperial and metric is that imperial adds mental overhead that in practice reduces accuracy.
One third quart = 2/3 cup. I have a 2/3 measuring cup in my kitchen.
I've never heard anyone say a third gallon, but just convert to ounces. 128 / 3 = 48. That's 3 pints, btw.
Of all the "math is hard" arguments, I think the kitchen measures are the least convincing. Everything is a power of two. You can halve or double a recipe without even thinking.
All of these conversations, even with special cases already marked on kitchen equipment, are all more complicated than the stupidly simple equivalents. Why in the world would you choose imperial over metric, unless you are just an old curmudgeon?
You can think the arguments for metric are weak (most of the world disagrees...), but the arguments against it are nonexistent.
(Dividing by two is just easy in a decimal numbering system as it is in a hybridized decimal system, so give me a break)
The cost of switching is non zero. I'm not bothered by metric, I can deal with it just fine. I'm just not bothered by standard units. I would never propose switching to standard from metric, but I just don't see what all the fuss is about.
Switching would be done in a lazy manner. I can't see how the cost would be prohibitive, plenty of other countries have managed it so surely America can too.
It never gained much hold, probably for two reasons
- its units were too far off the customary units, hard to convert, and didn't fit into the neat 10^3 system. The other units (metres, kilograms) were close or easily convertible into what they replaced (ell and pound, both at approximately 0.5 metres/kilograms).
- the number of days in a year is set, so you never end up at a neatly decimal system with e.g. 10^3 days in a year (and even worse, it's a weird fraction leading to leap years and seconds)
Why is ^3 neat? 10 for the radix is standard all over the world now, except perhaps in IT where there's some competition from 16.
But 3 for digit groups isn't very standard. East Asia uses groups of 4, so 10,000 and 100 million are standard. India uses lakh and crore, i.e. the oddball groupings 3, 5, 7, etc.
It's frustrating that the same people who push weird systems (ounces, the old money in UK) instead of metric units and decimal money are comfortable doing all kinds of mental arithmetic, but freeze when as soon as you involve a decimal point.
People who have no trouble with the concept of "half of a third for four people taken out of this bag of potatoes" get stuck on "0.25".
For all the people who answered my post - I agree that metric and SI are the sensible way forward. I'm kind of relieved that some sections of US[1] industry are choosing to ignore the international market or to lumber themselves with extra costs for both systems.
[1] Because I'm not in the US; I'm European and I want our industry to do well.
We have 10 fingers and that's probably why base10 is somewhat naturally wired into our brains.
I'd like to remove 2 fingers and go to base8 but can't quite settle on the right ones.
Thumb is out of the question because it's what sets us apart, lets us use tools and so forth. Next finger up is usefull for pointing, not getting interrupted while on the phone and most importantly pulling triggers...seems valuable enough.
Finger #3 has too much social importance due to it's use as a universal sign of diagreement.
Finger #4 seems to be of mostly sentimental value if you're married I could see this one as a viable candidate.
Finger #5 is freakishly small compared to the rest but it is also very valuable for swearing.
So I think I'd propose removing both fingers #4 on birth from here on out or I suppose we could keep it as is. Occam's razor would suggest keeping it as is but could also be used to cut off the fingers.
Too many choices...which makes me wonder if binary isn't the way to go after all.
I'm not sure that base 10 is wired into our brains. It's probably the case that we're just used to base 10. The reason why it's can be so hard to read numbers in base 8 or some other base out loud is that you have to convert it to base 10 to say it because we use . . . base 10. (Though you can get around this by reading the numbers as though they were in written base 10---I had a professor who did this with hexadecimal.)
The argument goes the other way: there will always be numbers that do not divide your base. We can not get around that. Thus if we want to reduce the number of special cases, instead of going for high divisibility, we should go for the lowest divisibility.
I recommend base 11, since it's the closest prime base to the customary base 10.
Instead of a measurement like 7/16 inches, we'd use something like say 11.1 millimetres (or a little more than a centimetre in everyday use)...
Maybe it's just that I'm so used to decimal measurements, but whenever I see plans that use fractions of inches, it looks confusing and imprecise... Coming from a decimal background, I don't really feel like using a fraction is ever better than using a smaller unit unless you're making an estimate (ie, "about half a kilometre").
It's not really "standard junk" though. Imperial measures are standardized human units. I have a foot that is about a foot, a knuckle that is about an inch, a stride that is about a yard. One day carrying a gallon of water a decent distance I realized that this was about the max amount the average person could carry comfortably over distance.
That is what kills me about the metric system. It seems to intentionally ignore the human scale. Why is 10 centimeters not a standard unit of measurement, and this is the important part, that is marked on every ruler and tape measure? The same for 10 Milliliters, 10 grams and 100 grams. Over the entire metric system the base 10 increments that are human scale are always ignored. The liter is the only one that comes close. Why is this?
Until the human scale is taken in to account I'm perfectly happy using more than one measurement system...
related question to people from the US: did you actually learn the metric system in primary school? did you learn it besides the imperial units? I believe as Tloewald pointed out that the adoption really depends on whether people are learning it and not what politicians declare to be the standard.
You learn it, but academically. Growing up with everything in feet, miles, pounds, etc... you get a feel for whether to put on a sweater if it's supposed to be 60 degrees out or not, or how long it might take to drive 10 miles on the freeway, or about how far 20 feet is. So even for someone like myself who has lived in Europe for a long time, metric units don't feel quite as 'native' or ingrained, except for temperatures, because you deal with those every day.
I can't remember if it was primary school or high school, but I learned it. It was not beside the imperial units. Those were learned first (and very early) while metric was taught as a part of science classes.
You learn it, but you don't use it practically outside the classroom. So the units don't get ingrained in your thinking. You really need to use the units for cooking, for personal measurements like height and weight, for driving, for weather, to really get used to them.
I'm surprised paper hasn't formed a larger part of this discussion.
The 'A' system for paper has many advantages, and actually would be something that could be accessibly changed (all printers and scanners handle it just fine).
The ISO system in general, ISO 216 and 269 provide 3 series (A, B and C, A is the base series, B is the geometric mean between two sizes of the A series, C is the geometric mean between the A and B series at a given index, and is thus mostly used for envelopes for the A series: an envelope Cn will hold an An sheet without folding, and of course a Cn envelope will fit an A(n-1) folded in two)
The way I explain this one to my European friends is:
Do you remember the transition to the Euro? How you had to mentally convert prices at first? And how old people had more difficulties with it in some cases? Now, imagine that, not just for one unit, but weights, lengths, temperatures and volumes, all at the same time.
Well, you don't have to be so drastic. Just teaching metrics in all schools and requiring their use in higher education would be enough for the next decade or two. Only then you can start thinking about something as the petition asks.
Metric is taught and used in school (middle, high, university) in the US for any sort of math or science, leastways anywhere I’ve ever been… If I were using any kind of tools to measure things and make calculations, I’d use metric, but in daily life, viz. in speech, it’s easier for me to just use the familiar imperial—especially if I want to make myself easily understood to normal people.
quite frankly this is deceitful, a lot of Americans already use the International System daily for their work, and I would bet that a very large number of Americans have some knowledge of it. Whereas the Euro was completely new, the International units have been here for years.
I'm telling it like I see it, please do not ascribe malice to what I'm writing. I wish we had the metric system in the US, but the units just aren't as meaningful as familiar degrees F, pounds, inches, feet, miles, and so on. That's true for me even after having spent a lot of time living here in Italy, to varying degrees, depending on how much I use a given unit.
I can't speak for most people, since I'd be happy to change, but my guess is their thinking is along the lines of "it ain't broke, so why should we fix it?". For most 'everyday' use, the defects of the imperial system are most likely not that visible: if I have to guess how far something is in miles, it doesn't matter much if I say 2.5 miles or 4 kilometers, since I'm basically sticking to one unit and fractions thereof. Where the metric system starts getting a lot nicer is if you have to be more precise and mix and match units, or deal with multiples. In other words, estimating my height at 5'10" is fine for most people, but "how many davidw's would it take to cover a football field" is a problem much easier solved with the metric system.
It sure does. And I understand the issue that lies therein.
But, if the rest of the world is to ask of the US to switch to the metric system, there will be a time when the authorities have to enforce the system onto the citizen.
Sometimes, the greater good of the community does not align with that of the citizen. We Europeans have switched from our country's respective currency to the Euro not to please us personally but for the economic good of the whole European Union. (Whether it has succeeded or not is another debate altogether.) It sure wasn't easy for the ol' timers, but now it's all behind and even my parents don't think back in Francs when they have to pay their baguette and wine.
> We Europeans have switched from our country's respective currency to the Euro not to please us personally but for the economic good of the whole European Union.
The behind-the-scenes motivation wasn't about the common good, it was about the French trying to gain formal influence on monetary policy. The Germans had to agree in exchange for the French consent to German reunification. (Before the Euro, the rest of Europe was more or less reduced to copying German monetary policy, or face devaluations.)
> We Europeans have switched from our country's respective currency to the Euro not to please us personally but for the economic good of the whole European Union.
The behind-the-scenes motivation wasn't about the common good, it was about the French trying to gain formal influence on monetary policy. The Germans had to agree in exchange for the French consent to German reunification. (Before the Euro, the rest of Europe was more or less reduced to copying German monetary policy, or face devaluations.)
They (I'm swiss, so I wasn't affected that much by the transition) had a double display (prices in french francs/ deutschmark / lira) for quite some time before and after the introduction of the actual currency (coins and banknotes). It's not a perfect solution, of course, but the point is that the transition wasn't abrupt.
No really, the worst thing that ever happened to metric system conversion was getting endorsed by the UN. That was the kiss of death. We created the UN, we host the UN, we fund the UN, and we hate the UN. Anything backed by the UN gets turned into the UN trying to take over the US and creating a new world order.
And after the debacle with the, UN-based, ITU trying to take over internet governance metric will never get a serious political foothold in the US.
Oh, the problem with the Euro was that they raised prices everywhere where they introduced the new currency. What was previously 0.8€ becase 1€, 28€ to 30€ and so on. Economic power also moved from individual countries to the ECB in Brussels. If the US started using SI (Systeme International), it's not like you would be subject to a metric-controlling organisation in Paris. :)
Actually, they didn't raise the prices on average. (There were even some papers about it. And not too much actual power shifted to the ECB in Frankfurt, since the other European countries were reduced to copying German monetary policy (or face humiliating devaluation) long before.
That's ACTUALLY where Le gran K is still stored. (outside paris)
It's the last artifact of a physical object used to measure all others. And that fucker changes weight too, so the kilogram ISNT stable. Its just like all those nasty imperial measurements used to be.
Would indicate that the process has being going on for some 40 years and is still not at all complete. That to me indicates that it's not "easy" either.
When do you even deal with these things on a day-to-day basis? These days most people buy prepackaged stuff from the supermarket. I don't think many people go to market stalls and struggle telling the merchant how many potatoes they want. I mean, some do, but it's rare enough that they would probably figure it out quickly.
It very likely is never going to happen. The main reason for resistance apparently is the various land boundaries that would have to be re-scaled to metric, which would be a source of endless legal wrangling. Already houses in the US have the longest history attached to them, sometimes all the way from the homesteading days if the plot is old.
I've used both metric and imperial, for construction imperial is lots easier, for physics and other things that involve frequent conversions metric is far easier.
The Canadians officially have metric, try buying a 250x125 sheet of plywood. Everybody will look at you as if water is burning.
How many European countries are there? How many of them have had the same government for 230 years?
The US surveyed and then subdivided much of a continent into townships. Land was sold and granted by the section, halfs and quarters thereof. Flying over the Midwest, the manifold rectangles on the ground show how problematic even the slightest of conversion errors would be.
Maybe it's technical debt. But it exists because the legal system is stable.
We got to do a little do-over due to an ambitious little French upstart called Napoleon. That reboot fixed a lot of our problems. The US never got to even think about a do-over until they were so invested in Imperial that changing was very hard.
I was reviewing some old deeds that a relative had. A particular inclusion of land was expanded (they transferred some land to expand a township cemetery). The deed before the transfer is specified relative to survey markers and such. The deed after the transfer gives the corners as lat/long coordinates.
I guess there is some room to argue about the representational accuracy of a chosen coordinate system, but it would take quite a bit of a crazy to keep on pursuing it (especially in areas where public roads already impinge on things far more than an inch or two).
Of course it would still be pretty pointless to engage in a wholesale conversion of all that information (and I guess the lat/long stuff isn't really metric...).
> The Canadians officially have metric, try buying a 250x125 sheet of plywood. Everybody will look at you as if water is burning.
Really? I picked up a 1.5m^2 sheet of aluminium for a project fairly recently (Australia). I have literally 0 idea what that is in feet/inches/furlongs.
At the risk of being lumped in with the negative/unhelpful/HN-is-on-the-decline comment crowd, and I hate naysaying here but...
Seriously?
1) If you haven't seen enough of these White House Polls go by yet (and there is a never ending list of inanity, for example: http://www.modernman.com/12-dumbest-whitehouse-petitions/) let me clue you in. They do nothing. Nothing. No one reads them. Just go back to wishing on a star.
2) The belief that something like this would ever be on the White House's radar/todo list is honestly just retarded.
3) Why is this even here? This isn't Reddit. The focus of HN is pretty nebulous these days but this is well outside the realm of entrepreneurship and programming which I believe has always sort of been at the heart of HN.
It does have a lot to do with programming actually. I'm building an international application and I have to convert all my dimensions and weights to make it work in the US.
No. It has as much to do with programming as currency conversion does. It's a problem involving numbers that people occasionally solve with the use of code. By your logic beanie babies have a lot to do with programming because someone built a site to list and sell them online (ebay).
But hey, the metric system seems more sensible to me too.
Edit I don't mean to come off as a jerk. I haven't slept yet and just got a BS call from m boss so I'll probably read this later and wish I were more diplomatic.
Everytime I try to use data that comes from public US sources, it's a PITA to deal with Imperial Units. It does have an impact on programmers/developers/engineers/etc.
Just reading news about weather or some climatic phenomenon, all in Fahrenheit. Wth, Fahrenheit.
"President Andrew Jackson in the main foyer of his White House had a big block of cheese. The block of cheese was huge — over two tons — and it was there for any and all who might be hungry. Jackson wanted the White House to belong to the people, so from time to time, he opened his doors to those who wished an audience.
It is in the spirit of Andrew Jackson that I, from time to time, ask senior staff to have face-to-face meetings with those people representing organizations who have a difficult time getting our attention. I know the more jaded among you see this as something rather beneath you. But I assure you that listening to the voices of passionate Americans is beneath no one, and surely not the people's servants."
englilsh units aren't any less precise than SI/metric ones. They're just more awkward and less used worldwide. The cases which I find particularly irritating in US units are lb mass vs. lb force, and HP/BTU/foot-pounds/calories/Calories (and kWh) when all you need is a J.
I moved from Belgium to the US last year, and one of the things that surprised me was that metric measures actually see a fair amount of use in the States. It makes a convoluted system even more weird, but it's also just plain fascinating.
2L bottles of coke and 9mm bullets, miles except when people suddenly switch to kilometers, 50 meter pools and 5K jogging runs but a 120 yard football field, 2 oz shaving cream but eye drops come in a 20ml bottle and so on.
I'm an American that grew up during the time they "tried" to go metric and none of this surprises me. Volumes are tricky for me, but I have no problem going from imperial to metric. Most other countries see the US and are like, "why aren't you using metric?" and we're like, "what's in it for us?" We learned metric in school and it's great, for exact measurements. Sometimes you just want to use what you have and not think about it. I don't know what 310mL is, I know how to measure 2 cups of water with...2 cups of water.
Speaking of globalization, TVs are still sold and classified in inches :-)
To be fair, non-metric units are also use worldwide in some specific fields. In aeronautics, height is in feet. In a boat, distance are nautic miles (not even the same miles as Americans on the road).
Quick quiz: what's the diagonal size of your laptop screen in centimeters? Your mobile phone?
So it doesn't matter if you use completely unrelated metrics for different things. When you want to buy a laptop you know how many inches you want. When you swim, you know what a 50 meters pool means. But do you care how many laptop diagonals you're swimming? Probably not.
Now back to US switching to metrics: I think the real argument in favor of sticking to imperial is the cost and risk of the switch. Risk because confusion between metrics could lead to a catastrophe (example: filling the tank of a plane with liters when it should be the same number of gallons).
Nautical miles are used in aviation as well. In both cases, the use actually has a very good, albeit obsolete, reason: one nautical mile is equal to one arc minute of latitude on the Earth, to within reasonable accuracy. Very handy for navigation, at least when you didn't have a magic black box to do it for you.
I previously had a flight computer with two displays, each of which showed the distance to the next waypoint. One showed the distance in nautical miles, the other in statute. I could never remember which was which, and always had to look at both and see which number was bigger.
Silly measuring systems. We should measure everything in planck units.
Personally, I think the cost argument goes in the other direction. It's true that there would be costs to switching, even potentially lives lost. But there are constant, ongoing costs to having mixed units, potentially including lives lost (and certainly very expensive space probes lost). To me, that says that we should switch as quickly as possible to stop that ongoing cost. It may cost more up-front, but the cost of switching eventually ends, while the cost of staying as we are never stops.
> But there are constant, ongoing costs to having mixed units, potentially including lives lost (and certainly very expensive space probes lost).
In engineering there is never an excuse for not knowing the units of measure of a value in use. That probe would have been brought down just as easily by mistaking a 'kg' parameter as 'g' as it would have been by mistaking a 'kg' parameter as 'lbs'.
What's worse, in engineering there are multiple metric standards of measure (c-g-s, m-k-s, subatomic measures, etc.) There's no way around it, you have to know your units.
Excuses don't matter. The fact is that these mixups happen. And the probe would not have been brought down just as easily by mistaking 'kg' for 'g', because that would result in a number that was off by a factor of a thousand, and the result would be unlikely to make any sense. The meters/feet mixup that actually did happen could only happen because being off by a factor of 3.3 resulted in a number that still made basic sense, even though it was incorrect.
There are documented instances of metric/imperial mixups crashing space probes and forcing airliners to land after running out of fuel in midair and such things. Are there any documented instances of similar metric/metric mixups?
> There are documented instances of metric/imperial mixups crashing space probes and forcing airliners to land after running out of fuel in midair and such things.
As I recall, the Gimli glider came about because they were trying to switch to include metric units and had to change their procedure to do it, but didn't make the change in all places where it was necessary. This resulted in pilots using an Imperial conversion factor to try to calculate a metric fuel loadout, with disastrous results. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider#Refueling
... this isn't exactly selling me on the idea that switching up all the units used in the U.S. is actually a good idea.
This sort of error can happen any time you have mixed units, though, and as long as some countries insist on not using metric, the potential is there. The potential goes away once you switch, so as long as the costs for switching and for staying mixed are both finite and non-zero, it makes sense to switch now and get it over with.
I wonder if the Gimli glider incident had anything to do with imperial units being the preferred unit in the US. In any case I think the aviation industry would be well across this issue by now, given they would have to deal with conversion all the time on international flights between the US and metric countries. There is the benefit of hindsight with the Gimli incident, so the same mistakes need not be repeated.
Automobile tires are an interesting case of measurement system compromise - the mounting diameter is measured in inches, but the section width is measured in millimeters. Sidewall height is even stranger - it's represented as a percentage of the section width.
Example:
195/60R15 - 15" diameter, 195 mm wide, and 117 mm sidewalls (60% of 195)
Note that this is only because of US influence. USSR and its satellites used meters-graduated altimeters, and so did most of the rest of the world until the end of WWII at least.
My experience has been that the US and Canada are still "mixed" enough that it's highly noticeable. And I hear it's similar in the UK. The main differences are absence of an official government position (UK and Canada both have that, but with exceptions and/or significant numbers of people just ignoring it), and we still use Fahrenheit for temperature (amusing since the degree Celsius is arguably less "metric" and more just SI).
Otherwise, it seems a largely arbitrary toss-up as to what will be metric in any of the three countries and what won't.
At my last job, we measured product thickness in mm; area in square feet; throughput in meters per minute; coating thickness in nm, angstroms, or fraction multiples of 550nm; weight in tons (imperial) but some input materials in grams and kilograms; and pressure in hPa, atmospheres, psi, and torr (occasionally in the same sentence and graphed logarithmically in some cases).
Basically, we use units like any tool. Use whatever tick marks line up to the problem conveniently. You can always covert later if you need to.
It's nice to be reminded that there will always be fresh waves of not-yet-cynical people to take up issues like this. But boy, am I cynical about the chances on this one.
The wikipedia article on Metrication in the US [1] isn't the best article ever but is worth reading for mentions of previous efforts.
A few things:
- the US Congress has in various ways 'blessed' the metric system, more than any other. However...
> Proponents of the metric system in the U.S. often claim that "the United States, Liberia, and Burma (or Myanmar) are the only countries that have not adopted the metric system." This statement is not correct with respect to the U.S., and probably it isn't correct with respect to Liberia and Burma, either. The U.S. adopted the metric system in 1866. What the U.S. has failed to do is to restrict or prohibit the use of traditional units in areas touching the ordinary citizen [2]
Did you know that Jefferson proposed a decimal system for the US before the SI system had come about? (See e.g. [2].) There were also proposals to measure land in decimal units rather than in 640-acre sections.
I think most engineers would naturally support this idea. The reality is that doing something like this is pretty tough because the current system has so much weight. It's akin to asking a company to abandon a perfectly functioning legacy software system just so that someone can rewrite it.
My dad was an engineer with Caltrans and he told me about how California was ready to make the switch. It was going to be a gradual transition where signage would start listing both metric and imperial speed limits. They had actually gotten pretty far along into designing signs, etc.
He told me that the state eventually killed it because no politicians supported it and there was no strong desire from the public. While I think this is a great idea, I don't have my hopes up.
Apparently the state did a lot of work actually switching over to the metric system (all manuals, standards, etc. were updated to metric) but the plan was eventually aborted in favor of English units and much effort was then spent on switching back. :-/
Metric system is way more understandable and easy to mentally manipulate. The only good argument against standardizing it, is people are used to it for many years. But so were my grandparents with our country's currency before we switched to Euro. There's an awkward "bootcamp" period where you just convert every unit to the old one just to get the feeling of the "quantity" but after a couple of months the new units feel normal.
Every objection that is being raised on this thread was raised when other countries enacted metrication. You are free to read the history of these processes. Nations did not collapse and people learned how to use new units.
Only vaguely relevant, but I grew up in a rural area in Canada which caused me to learn a strange set of units. For me, highway distances are measured in kilometres, but country roads are measured in miles. Groceries are priced per kilogram, but my weight is in pounds. I readily swap inches and centimetres for measuring small sizes and distances (sometimes on the same project). I am more comfortable with Celsius, but the thermostat in my parents' house was in Fahrenheit.
Just to throw an additional wrench into things, prior to official metrification (which technically predates my birth), Canada used "imperial" (i.e. British) units, not "standard" (i.e. U.S.) units. Because of this and the close proximity to the U.S., one had to be careful about just which gallon or pint you were talking about.
People younger and/or more urban than me seem to be 100% metric. I am starting to learn my weight in kilograms, but I still have no idea what my height is in cm without converting.
Indeed in country fully converted to metric, the old unit are converted to their closest sane metric equivalent.
For example, my grand-mother still talks about buying a pound of stuff. However a pound is now understood as meaning 0.5 kg, we even learn it that way in school.
I would hazard a guess that we're roughly the same age because I grew up with the same mixture of units but I think it's less to do with growing up in a rural area than the fact that your parents and grandparents were educated on imperial units and even though metric was standard by the time you were born, the imperial system was still ingrained in your elders and some of that nomenclature was passed on to you. When I talk to anyone over 50 I have to be careful to remember when they say it got to -70 a few years ago they are most likely saying it was -70F and not -70*C.
I grew up in Australia with metric, with parents and grandparents who grew up with imperial units. Though it seems things happened differently in Australia as my parents (and possibly grandparents too) converted to thinking in metric at least most of the time. That said, it's still reasonably common to hear people quoting their personal height in feet and inches. Even then, most people born post-metrification don't really have a grasp of imperial units (the exception tends to be people who have spent time in the US).
In my neck of the Canadian woods, the default unit of measurement for road distances was the time it took to travel that distance.
"How far is it into town? Oh, about twenty minutes."
People could deal with kilometers just fine, but you'd have to ask for them explicitly. Often they'd give you a rough guess by converting from minutes, and that's how you could back your way into the unofficial local speed limit (as opposed to what the signs said).
At first I assumed this was universal, or at least universal to rural areas, but they don't seem to do it much down here in Texas.
There's a couple of things you'd want to consider converting to metric: long distances, short distances/dimensions, volumes, weights, and temperature come to mind.
Long distances: swap out a bunch of highway signs, consider that 60mph (a mile a minute) ~= 100km/h, not too hard on people but a lot of signage needs to change. Feasible.
Volumes: people are used enough to 2-liter bottles of soda, expect the 3.78 liter milk to stay around for a while because of supply chains. Gas prices will be modestly interesting for people, but really easy on the industry.
Short distances/dimensions: now things get tricky and potentially expensive. There are a lot of fractional-dimensioned parts out there in industry in different supply chains.
Temperature:
Here's the thing about temperature: converting would be relatively useless because Real People don't do math with the temperature outside. Even scientists don't do math with the temperature outside all that much. For most people, a scale that starts at 0="civilization shuts down because you can't ice the roads" and goes up to 100="heatstroke territory" is a fine representation of humanity's day to day temperature. Why would we bother changing it?
> For most people, a scale that starts at 0="civilization shuts down because you can't ice the roads" and goes up to 100="heatstroke territory" is a fine representation of humanity's day to day temperature. Why would we bother changing it?
I thought you were talking about Celsius at first...
Mecanical parts are the most difficult thing to switch because there are many things defined in relation to one another. For example the american UNC threads have different angles than the metric ones do and therefore it is impossible to replace one with another. For this reason alone it will take very long time to do a full switch from one unit system to another. However, many "metric" units are actually slightly adapted imperial ones. For instance you can get a lot of 25 mm stuff in Europe that is almost equivalent to the 1 inch stuff you get in the US (1 inch = 25.4 mm) and similarly there is a lot of 30 cm and 60 cm stuff in stead of 1 foot and 2 feet stuff.
>not too hard on people but a lot of signage needs to change. Feasible.
Very expensive though. Signs normally have a 20 years expected lifetime. Now you need to replace them all at once. Plus a lot of the sign locations need to be changed, unless you want all those "Exit 29 1 mile" signs to now say "Exit 29 1.6 km".
You do not need to replace them all at once. For example the new signs could be European style, red ringed white circles with the number inside. Virtually every car has both readings already. This would make new speed limit signs immediately recognizable to more visitors in the future while avoiding ambiguity of units during the transition. They could even say km/h during the first generation.
Road signs need to be very clear and instantly understandable. Adding a tiny delay to comprehension; a tiny bit of lack of attention to the road; could, when multiplied over the number of kilometres driven and number of drivers and time mean many deaths.
Whether that's acceptable or not is another matter, but it'd suck if "km/h KILLED MY FATHER" became a meme.
It is odd how some countries make massive national changes overnight. eg, Sweden:
> In 1955, the Swedish government held a referendum on the introduction of right-hand driving. Although no less than 82.9% voted “no” to the plebiscite, the Swedish parliament passed a law on the conversion to right-hand driving in 1963. Finally, the change took place on Sunday, the 3rd of September 1967, at 5 o’clock in the morning.
Leaving it until now has meant the UK would find it very hard to change.
In the US, all speed limits are in 5 mph increments.
So, let's say you convert your 60mph limit to 100kph (Really 96.5). 70mph is 112.65kph. Do you round down to 110, or up to 115 or 120?
If you round down, congratulations, you just cut the speed difference between a rural highway and interstate essentially in half, as a "true" 17kph difference is only 10.
Anyone in a country that uses the celsius scale knows that the temperature argument is rubbish... It's totally and completely what you're used to. I doubt people really think of temperature in more than about eight or ten increments anyway (bloody freezing, cold, pleasant, etc.) so having a range of forty or fifty integers really gives you more than enough precision.
I suppose it doesn't really matter what people use to express the temperature in common use, but having a unified scale across ambient temperature, cooking, science (1K = 1°C), manufacturing, etc. that people in almost every other country uses really does make sense, especially when the conversion is so annoying.
My point is more "why should people have to change what they're used to for a small subset of the scientific class?" - of all the things that people do math with, and would benefit from decimalization and metrifying, temperature is pretty much the last.
Regionalized units have the same damaging effect to manufacturing as closed software ecosystems has to software development. The only reason most US citizens do not feel the pain of this fragmentation is that they do not have to buy anything that is not adapted to the US market. Again, this is because the US is the biggest market on the planet and thus it is profitable for big companies to adapt their products to US standards.
However, supporting several unit systems is a huge tax on startup companies that work in manufacturing and therefore they reduce innovation and competition, causing harm to everybody along the way.
This is actually an argument, for some people in the U.S., to keep using imperial units. The use of imperial units acts as sort of an "artificial trade barrier" to foreign competition - it's like a tariff that international trade agreements can't touch.
That is a ridiculous argument for a country that is already so heavily reliant on foreign manufacturing. If anything, at this point, the imperial standard is a barrier to having the US become a manufacturing nation once again - because so much industrial technology has been developed without a thought to the archaic measurements.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 340 ms ] threadWe hear imperial units every day in this country. We hear it when we discuss body weight, driving distance, cooking, size of most things, etc.
I never hear Fahrenheit, which I'm glad about.
Cooking is definitely not 100% metric. The cooking shows on TV still mention cup sizes, pints etc. There's so many recipe books still in imperial and colloquially we never say a 30cm baguette or a 113g burger. It's a foot-long and a quarter pounder.
I do a person's height in casual conversation (on forms I write it in metres) and driving distance in Imperial measurements (often; I use kilometres when I'm talking to someone I trust to know what a kilometre is, which is generally anyone under about 40). I do depth and altitude in metres, but sometimes I'll use an old chart that has feet (or sometimes fathoms, but that's the really, really old charts). Volume, mass, everything else is metric. I know my mass in kg. I've only the vaguest idea what a "stone" is. A pound? An ounce? Those are twee measurements I sometimes see in old books. I know how much a litre is. I don't even know what the metric unit of volume is. Cubic inches? That seems clumsy even for Imperial units. At the supermarket, the unit used on the fruit, veg and meat is kilogrammes. Last weekend I was comparing pork by cost per kilogramme. Which supermarket do you shop at that uses... I don't even know what you'd use. Not stones, I guess? Pounds and ounces? I remember at about age ten someone telling me the temperature in Fahrenheit, and having no idea whether that was hot or cold. I have less idea today of what it means.
Where this is going is that I thoroughly disagree.
Additional edits, for the fun of it:
"Though I bet you don't go to Asda and ask where you can find 2.272 litres of milk." Fair enough. I do buy milk in pints. If they switched to 2 litre bottles, I'd still buy it, and frankly I'd prefer it if they did. At the moment, I have to look at the scale on the side of the milk marked in litres to see how much I'm pouring into something (because the recipe I'm using specifies litres or millilitres; maybe there's a whole dual-industry for recipes in which you get Imperial units and I get metric; I note that the recipes on the BBC list both units; Jamie Oliver's web page is metric, Delia Smith is both, Hairy Bikers are metric, I've given up looking after those high-ranking four, but I note that not one of them is this Imperial only thing you talked about).
"Do you ever do mile-per-gallon approximations for your fuel economy?" Fair enough. I don't drive so this is a closed book to me.
"Do you ever buy a steak at a nice restaurant?" Yes, often. I have never once specified a mass the steak is to have. That it is marked on the menu in crazy measurements has always seemed a twee restaurant kind of thing; cosmetic rather than meaningful. The meat at the supermarket is, of course, in kg.
"Have you ever played golf or football?" Never golf, and football not since I was about ten. Perhaps we simply move in different circles. You're with the Imperials, I'm with the metrics.
"Where are you?" Deep south. Hampshire. As a drifting aside, I note that London is now approximately 40% non-British born, so that presumably means that about 40% of people living in London have even less grasp of Imperial measurements than I do. Perhaps metric is more common in the south.
Steak update: I am sure I have specified the steak by name, and its name is "Ten ounce" or "Eight ounce" or whatever. It is as meaningful to me as "Medium bowl of custard" or "large bowl of custard", for example. If you gave me a big bucket of sand and asked me to put about ten ounces of sand in a cup, I'd have no idea at all. I seem to recall that I once saw an ounce of butter and it was kind of about "this" big". I'd probably use that as a base.
Ramsay: A ha. Ramsay, of course, is Scottish. Maybe Scotland isn't metric.
Do you ever do mile-per-gallon approximations for your fuel economy? Cars are still advertised with mpg values.
Do you ever buy a steak at a nice restaurant?
Have you ever played golf or football?
Regarding the steak point, do you never ask for the 8oz or 10oz steak?
For curiosity, I'm just outside Glasgow, where are you?
Edit: Gordon Ramsay recipes: http://gordonramsaysrecipes.com/
Butter update: Butter is measured in knobs.
Road distances & speeds : kilometres Food measurements are always grams/kilograms & mls and litres ... except for steak & there are some hold hovers like soft drinks which are often in 330ml/600/680ml, 1.25litre, 2 litre. Milk is always litres and not just a straight conversion from ounces to litres, so always 1/2/4 litres. In addition, I think supermarkets are required to list food prices with a price/unit, e.g. $2/kg so that you can easily compare prices between brands/varieties.
Hardware supplies are in metres or dual listed.
Weight is always done in kilograms although older people occasionally will use stones / pounds (which usually requires clarification). Haven't heard them in quite a while.
Engine power is measured in terms of kilowatts. For some odd reason we have an odd unit for fuel efficiency of litres/100km. Not sure who picked this. E.g. 8.5 L /100km.
TVs are sometimes dual although mostly I'll see them in terms of centimetres although computer monitors are still in inches, probably due to the US.
I think when purchasing land it's a bit of mix as you can buy land in hectares as well as acres. There's also squares which I gather is 10ft by 10ft (which is odd and everyone I know silently guesses is around 9.something metres^2).
Not much into sports but pretty sure they use metres there too for Australian Football.
US gallon = 3.79 Litres where as UK gallon = 4.5 Litres
US pint = 473 mL where as UK pint = 568 mL
I'm in the UK, 27 and still struggle at times to comprehend lbs, ounces, stone, feet, inches, yards, miles etc., when everything I was taught in school was in metres, litres, newtons and kilogrammes.
Apart from lengths (feet vs. metres) I don't really find myself needing to calculate between the different units. I couldn't tell you how many litres in a 4 pint bottle of milk (or a pint of beer :)) but all other milk (or beer) is sold with those units, so I can easily compare.
I mean, we are supposed to be metric - but there are plenty of imperial measures in use (height, is another obvious example).
Strangely enough, whilst I'm fine with lengths and distances in metres, the minute someone tries to tell me how tall they are in metres and centimetres, I'm completely thrown. It's the one conversion I pathetically still really struggle with (UK -> Poland in this case).
Just bear in mind that 6ft is approximately 180 cm, anything above is above, and anything lower is lower. This gives you a first approximation with only remembering one number. Also, 4in is about 10cm and is easy to add/subtract both ways. This might not be very exact, but it will give you a quick idea.
Our fat friends are 16 stone, 17 stone.
We live miles away from each other.
Penalties in football are taken in the 18 yard box.
We use cup measures for flour, sugar etc in cooking.
The average penis is ~6 inches when fully erect.
I've got two 4 pint cartons of milk in my fridge.
I could go on. Imperial units are absolute muck and I cannot wait for a entirely metric world.
We do? My cookbooks are in metric units. In fact I own no books that use "cups."
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gordon-Ramsays-Ultimate-Cookery-Cour...
Click "search inside." Everything is in grams.
edit: That web-site isn't even associated with the chief. It is just some fan site. Here is a legit web-site and it is all in grams: http://www.channel4.com/4food/recipes/chefs/gordon-ramsay/go...
There's loads of references in that book to knobs of butter and tablespoon/teaspoon measurements.
[1] sorry if I'm using the wrong term. Friendly corrections welcomed.
1 Tablespoon [UK] = 14.206 531 25 milliliter
Tablespoon and teaspoon measurements correlate to fluid ounce measurements - 1 Tablespoon [UK] = 0.5 ounce [UK, liquid]
They're definitely imperial.
So? There's nothing wrong with asking for something called a "footlong" and getting a 30cm meal. Nothing wrong with asking for a "pint" and getting 500ml of beverage.
It's not just a simple lingual thing. We actually buy products that are divided into round imperial measurements, i.e. 1 foot, 1/4 of a pound, 2 pints, etc.
Ah sorry, I misread your grandparent post, I thought you wanted to keep the Imperial names & sizes.
The problem is, I think the US has already declared itself to be metric to little effect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_Conversion_Act
It's not the do-nothing congress this time, it's the learn-nothing public.
In many cases, the metric system is less precise, as it demands that all measurements fit into base 10. Base 10 makes it easier for us to do calculations in our head and understand, but it does NOT improve precision. In many cases, it removes precision in exchange for the base 10 ease of use.
And anyone who thinks a metric conversion will do anything for science obviously knows nothing of American science -- which has used the metric system almost exclusively for a very long time.
More seriously, I can understand the power of habit, but the imperial system looks, well, pretty insane from a non-accustomed point of view.
Sadly, there are people who believe more of less exactly what I just wrote.
The US is a notable outlier, and the various comparative social and economic indicators are pretty damning evidence that the continued American insistence on an 18th century approach to governance actually is inferior to a number of other approaches that have been more inclined to take evidence-based best practices into account.
That's just utter nonsense. What measurement are you optimizing for?
What makes you think that moving the US to the left moves it closer to, say, Germany, instead of closer to, say, Brazil, India, and Mexico (which is what I think will happen)?
And even if it did move it closer to Germany, I wouldn't want that, which speaks to the fact that your "measurably works" claim probably refers to some non-objective sense of optimality.
> the continued American insistence on an 18th century approach to governance
That's a straw man. Predominating sentiments in the GOP are strongly contra the Founding Fathers. I mean, George W. Bush greatly expanded the welfare state.
1. The 1% would be less happy. 2. Lot of the 99% would feel guilty (which lowers happiness). 3. The 1% would probably be less productive than if they were free. So the only benefit for the 99% would be that they consume less.
By the way, this system to a certain extent exist in our society (cheap labour in China for example).
Take your pick. The US is at or very near the worst among OECD countries in: infant mortality, child poverty, child health and safety, life expectancy at birth, healthy life expectancy, rate of obesity, disability-adjusted life years, doctors per 1000 people, deaths from treatable conditions, rate of mental health disorders, rate of drug abuse, rate of prescription drug use, incarceration rate, rate of assaults, rate of homicides, income inequality, wealth inequality, and economic mobility.
For example, high child poverty is to be expected in a country that harbors many poor immigrants from Latin America.
For another example, high rate of incarceration is largely to be blamed on the "War on Drugs," which has the same effect as the prohibition on alcohol did.
For another example, low rate of doctors is largely to be blamed on the fact that medicine is a guild (as in, midieval guild) where med school is super tough to get into, doesn't select for competency as a medical practitioner, and creates a "class hierarchy" within medicine where a highly-trained nurse can perform as well or better than a doctor in many common situations, but is not legally allowed to practice in that capacity.
This could go on and on.
Overall, American liberals want a society where everybody gets whatever they demand, to the degree that there is enough to go around, except the actual producers. That society already exists, and it's called India.
You mean the rest of the industrialized world, not just Europe.
> high child poverty is to be expected in a country that harbors many poor immigrants from Latin America.
You mean unlike a country that harbours many poor immigrants from Northern Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe?
> high rate of incarceration is largely to be blamed on the "War on Drugs"
Yes, and it is the conservative right that most strongly favours continuing the War on Drugs. Those left of centre liberals you don't like generally favour ending the war on drugs and following a more - dare I say - European approach to legalization. (Sadly, Canada's Republican-lite Conservative government has taken a more American approach to the War on Drugs, establishing mandatory minimum sentences and other punitive measures that have already failed in the US.)
> low rate of doctors is largely to be blamed on the fact that medicine is a guild
That's true across all the industrialized countries, but the other countries are much better than the US at achieving a higher rate of doctors and much better overall health outcomes, despite spending only 40-70% of what the USA spends on health care - and running various incarnations of universal health coverage.
> American liberals want a society where everybody gets whatever they demand
That's a lazy straw man attack. American liberals, like liberals in other industrialized countries, want their country to value human rights, pay attention to evidence-based public policy and invest enough in public social and physical infrastructure to ensure everyone has an adequate standard of living and the opportunity to work hard and prosper.
Ironically, the USA has among the worst levels of socioeconomic mobility in the OECD. Poor Americans are more trapped in their poverty than poor people in countries that do more to level the playing field so everyone has a fair chance of escaping poverty.
Right. And if the USA tries to emulate Europe in healthcare more than we alreay do, we will end up wasting even more money. There is no solution to be had here through more regulation.
> value human rights
> ensure everyone has an adequate standard of living
Contradiction. But providing a moral basis for individual rights requires understanding a complete philosophical system, which is out of the scope of an HN comment.
> ensure everyone has an adequate standard of living and the opportunity to work hard and prosper
You're asking something that may be outside the scope of reality.
> Poor Americans are more trapped in their poverty
As someone from a poor part of rural eastern North Carolina, all I can do is LOL at this, because it's utterly, utterly false. That is a complete myth. I mean, we already have free universal education, de jure through high school and de facto through college.
The evidence is that American health care costs would go down significantly, given the clear correlation across industrialized countries between the extent to which health care spending is private and the overall cost (either per capita or as a share of GDP).
> Contradiction.
It's not a contradition, the latter follows necessarily from the former. It's why nearly every industrialized country has converged on public health, public education, public health care, affordable housing, and so on.
> But providing a moral basis for individual rights requires understanding a complete philosophical system, which is out of the scope of an HN comment.
Or we can dispense with the 18th century a priori legerdemain and just recognize human rights as a self-evident basis for a fair, just and humane society.
> You're asking something that may be outside the scope of reality.
And yet the rest of the industrialized world does a much better job of it than the United States.
> As someone from a poor part of rural eastern North Carolina, all I can do is LOL at this
The plural of anecdote is not data.
There are many examples of "liberal" and even "democratic" or "republican" governments / societies that lasted for centuries before failing into tyranny and / or to foreign domination. The US Constitution attempts to correct the failings of each of those examples. Saying it has worked so far is declaring the weather today, all day long, was great -- at 9:30am.
Saying the French or Germans have demonstrated their solutions, at that time scale, is just nuts.
The only advantage that imperial measures have (for some) is that they are familiar. That's the sum total of it. People where were raised metric find these apologies for imperial measures to be pure gibberish.
e.g. If somebody asks me "How tall is that person?" it's easier to say "About five foot" rather than "I dunno, about 155cm?"
(I'm British, btw)
The 30cm unit would improve absolutely nothing, it would only complicate things. If you want to use approximate measurement, just round it to tens of centimeters. Or you can use meters with one decimal place, whatever comes more natural.
I totally agree. Rounding to powers of ten works comes for free in metric measurements using base ten numbers. This is by design.
It isn't, really. If asked about my approximate height, I'd say 'eins-achtzig' ie 1.8m (notice me omitting the unit), which in practice also has only a single significant digit (or 2 if you account for tall people) and to me isn't any more unwieldy than '6 foot'.
I'm totally unable to represent in my head how really tall "about five foot" is whereas 1,50m is totally understandable for me, easy to visualize.
It's confusing, but makes sense in the long run.
You're perceiving things like this because it's what you were brought up with. None of the examples in which you claim it's "natural" to use imperial units make any sense to me at all. I don't think in miles, don't know how much a "stone" is, and pints are just pure confusion - which pint? there's about 4 types isn't there?
It's what you grew up with, nothing more.
This all apart from miles of course, but when all your road signs are in miles and the speed limits in mph there’s not much you can do about that. Who knows what plans there are for that switchover…
And what if your feet are not 30cm, but longer or shorter?
If you say "about x" you might as well estimate to 10cm precision and say "about 180cm" or "about 190cm".
More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushel
I suppose I like it in the same way I prefer natural languages to some artificial languages like Esperanto, etc. - or our base-60 time units as opposed to some other decimal-based system. :)
Like a previous commenter said, all my science labs in high school and college used metric. I imagine legitimate research and engineering labs in America are also using metric.
The metric system is relatively ancient, dating from the late 1700s.
We 've already settled on using English for everything on the net, why not settle on common language about measures too.
You understand that you're just saying this in an english-speaking world and if there is anything against your argument it just won't come up here at your feet?
Besides which, what problem would be solved in the process? People will use whatever units they prefer anyways at the end of the day. As a negative, forcing top-down change would irritate people.
The world is already nine-tens of the way through the switch. This is a compelling reason to finish the job.
The system is embedded in standards, such as SAE. It is embedded in industries such as construction. It is embedded into statutes, regulations, and deeds for real property.
Yes, the system is familiar, but wiping the slate clean and starting anew is not a feature of stable democracies.
So is the metric system now in most of the world.
And where the non-metric world has to interact with the rest of us, metric is embedded in their processes too. E.g. science done in the U.S. and engineering goods made for export in the US. This comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4996646 discusses some of the same issues.
I knew a civil engineer who first worked in the private industry and later got a job at the DOT.
At the construction company, they did everything in metric internally. Once a design was finalized, they would convert everything to imperial and submit to the DOT. DOT is behind the times, she thought.
When she got to the DOT, she learned their procedure. Before engineers got started reading the plans, a secretary would translate units from imperial to metric for internal use.
The fact that an old contract specifies units of rods and farthings is not an argument for anything other than defining official conversion factors between the old way and the new way.
What about those that already went through the metric conversion?
If you have precise measuring tools at your disposal, then I'm inclined to agree though.
But it doesn't matter anyway. You could sit and invent an infinite number of cases when using the imperial system "feels" easier. None of these invalidate the conveniences of the metric system, nor do they remove the compelling motivation to setup our system in line with that of the rest of the world to stop the waste of money, material, and time the is now spent on conversion, dual labeling, and confusion.
Unless all of the people you deal with have nearly the same foot size, it's easier to deal with a single reference measure. But hey, if you and your mates want to say that the tractor is 30 feet, 20 cubits, 10 yards, 5 fathoms, or 1.8 rods away, then more power to you.
If instead of putting your feet in front of each othr you actually take a step you should get closer to 1m.
(most people I met measure distances with 1m = 1step when playing european football, for example and you have to be at X meters from the ball por something)
It seems more practical (and certainly faster) than to measure the distance to "approximately 30 feet" by putting one foot just in front of the other 30 times.
Of course, once you enter any sort of engineering work, well, simple fractions often won't cut it and it's far, far easier to simply use a decimal number. And then there's no reason not to use metric measurements.
What does that mean? Isn't "use of multiples of fractions" a property of numbers in general?
> For some people, a simple fraction of a relatable unit really is easier to deal with than a base ten decimal
What's easier is what you're used to. That's the whole point.
Also, I don't get the thing about fractions. Decimal numbers are fractions as well.
Of course, that doesn't apply much when the difference is only a factor of 2, like the pound/kilogram difference, but even there people cheat a bit by just saying "kilo."
(and that there still is no such thing as a "one size fits all" system of units)
That is exactly the problem with the imperial system. You have multiple units for the same thing, and when they are multiples of each other, it is in base 12.
You could settle on feet and have kilofeet and millifeet, and you'd have a sensible system (apart from being incompatible with the rest of the world).
Why? Why is it more practical? How is it better other than being more familiar? It blows me away that people can make the argument as it being "better".
Yes. However, the earth is not a perfect sphere. The nautical mile is an average arc-minute.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grad_(angle)
(http://metricviews.org.uk/2010/01/why-do-nautical-miles-ling...)
That's when you're lucky, can also be 3 (yard to feet), 22 (chain to yard), 10 (furlong to chain), 8 (miles to furlong, and that's why a mile is 5280 feet), 5 (gill to fluid ounce), 4 (acres to rod, gallons to quarts), 14 (stones to pounds) and probably everything in-between.
Even so, varying units does restrict how we can express time. Even if someone tells you something as simple as "half a week", you have to ask for clarification. And while "a week from now" translates to a date, forget about "a month from now." That could mean half a dozen different things.
Suppose I am recounting a dish I made to someone over the phone in two realities, one with Imperial and the other with metric.
Imperial universe: "Okay, now add... say... a third of a gallon of milk" "...third of a gallon.. eehh.. half a pint of milk.
Metric universe: "Okay, now add... say... 2/3rds of a liter." "Two thirds of a liter... 666 ml it is then."
In the imperial universe poor conversations force two inaccurate estimations. In the metric universe only one of the parties is being dreadfully inaccurate.
Imperial is defined in terms of metric units, so it is possible to be as accurate in imperial. The difference between imperial and metric is that imperial adds mental overhead that in practice reduces accuracy.
I've never heard anyone say a third gallon, but just convert to ounces. 128 / 3 = 48. That's 3 pints, btw.
Of all the "math is hard" arguments, I think the kitchen measures are the least convincing. Everything is a power of two. You can halve or double a recipe without even thinking.
You can think the arguments for metric are weak (most of the world disagrees...), but the arguments against it are nonexistent.
(Dividing by two is just easy in a decimal numbering system as it is in a hybridized decimal system, so give me a break)
Come again? This doesn't quite look like sarcasm, or did you want to prove the OP's point?
Or maybe this is just an explanation for the taste of British food...
It never gained much hold, probably for two reasons
- its units were too far off the customary units, hard to convert, and didn't fit into the neat 10^3 system. The other units (metres, kilograms) were close or easily convertible into what they replaced (ell and pound, both at approximately 0.5 metres/kilograms).
- the number of days in a year is set, so you never end up at a neatly decimal system with e.g. 10^3 days in a year (and even worse, it's a weird fraction leading to leap years and seconds)
> a neatly decimal system with e.g. 10^3
Why is ^3 neat? 10 for the radix is standard all over the world now, except perhaps in IT where there's some competition from 16.
But 3 for digit groups isn't very standard. East Asia uses groups of 4, so 10,000 and 100 million are standard. India uses lakh and crore, i.e. the oddball groupings 3, 5, 7, etc.
We need to be able to easily count days, since we sleep at night. (It would be very difficult to change to, say, a 20 hour cycle.)
We could skip the month, week, hour, minute and second, but the year and day are essential.
16 is divisible by 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16.
24 is divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 24
10 just has 1, 2, 5, 10
If you wanted, you could always count in 2 times, 12 times or 16 times the basic SI units.
People who have no trouble with the concept of "half of a third for four people taken out of this bag of potatoes" get stuck on "0.25".
For all the people who answered my post - I agree that metric and SI are the sensible way forward. I'm kind of relieved that some sections of US[1] industry are choosing to ignore the international market or to lumber themselves with extra costs for both systems.
[1] Because I'm not in the US; I'm European and I want our industry to do well.
Thumb is out of the question because it's what sets us apart, lets us use tools and so forth. Next finger up is usefull for pointing, not getting interrupted while on the phone and most importantly pulling triggers...seems valuable enough. Finger #3 has too much social importance due to it's use as a universal sign of diagreement. Finger #4 seems to be of mostly sentimental value if you're married I could see this one as a viable candidate. Finger #5 is freakishly small compared to the rest but it is also very valuable for swearing.
So I think I'd propose removing both fingers #4 on birth from here on out or I suppose we could keep it as is. Occam's razor would suggest keeping it as is but could also be used to cut off the fingers.
Too many choices...which makes me wonder if binary isn't the way to go after all.
I recommend base 11, since it's the closest prime base to the customary base 10.
Maybe it's just that I'm so used to decimal measurements, but whenever I see plans that use fractions of inches, it looks confusing and imprecise... Coming from a decimal background, I don't really feel like using a fraction is ever better than using a smaller unit unless you're making an estimate (ie, "about half a kilometre").
That is what kills me about the metric system. It seems to intentionally ignore the human scale. Why is 10 centimeters not a standard unit of measurement, and this is the important part, that is marked on every ruler and tape measure? The same for 10 Milliliters, 10 grams and 100 grams. Over the entire metric system the base 10 increments that are human scale are always ignored. The liter is the only one that comes close. Why is this?
Until the human scale is taken in to account I'm perfectly happy using more than one measurement system...
As someone raised metric, Imperial measures are just weird, pointless and baroque. It is nothing more than a question of what you are used to.
High school science was all in SI, of course.
The 'A' system for paper has many advantages, and actually would be something that could be accessibly changed (all printers and scanners handle it just fine).
The ISO system in general, ISO 216 and 269 provide 3 series (A, B and C, A is the base series, B is the geometric mean between two sizes of the A series, C is the geometric mean between the A and B series at a given index, and is thus mostly used for envelopes for the A series: an envelope Cn will hold an An sheet without folding, and of course a Cn envelope will fit an A(n-1) folded in two)
Do you remember the transition to the Euro? How you had to mentally convert prices at first? And how old people had more difficulties with it in some cases? Now, imagine that, not just for one unit, but weights, lengths, temperatures and volumes, all at the same time.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4996402
I'm telling it like I see it, please do not ascribe malice to what I'm writing. I wish we had the metric system in the US, but the units just aren't as meaningful as familiar degrees F, pounds, inches, feet, miles, and so on. That's true for me even after having spent a lot of time living here in Italy, to varying degrees, depending on how much I use a given unit.
Does that make sense?
But, if the rest of the world is to ask of the US to switch to the metric system, there will be a time when the authorities have to enforce the system onto the citizen.
Sometimes, the greater good of the community does not align with that of the citizen. We Europeans have switched from our country's respective currency to the Euro not to please us personally but for the economic good of the whole European Union. (Whether it has succeeded or not is another debate altogether.) It sure wasn't easy for the ol' timers, but now it's all behind and even my parents don't think back in Francs when they have to pay their baguette and wine.
The behind-the-scenes motivation wasn't about the common good, it was about the French trying to gain formal influence on monetary policy. The Germans had to agree in exchange for the French consent to German reunification. (Before the Euro, the rest of Europe was more or less reduced to copying German monetary policy, or face devaluations.)
The behind-the-scenes motivation wasn't about the common good, it was about the French trying to gain formal influence on monetary policy. The Germans had to agree in exchange for the French consent to German reunification. (Before the Euro, the rest of Europe was more or less reduced to copying German monetary policy, or face devaluations.)
No really, the worst thing that ever happened to metric system conversion was getting endorsed by the UN. That was the kiss of death. We created the UN, we host the UN, we fund the UN, and we hate the UN. Anything backed by the UN gets turned into the UN trying to take over the US and creating a new world order.
And after the debacle with the, UN-based, ITU trying to take over internet governance metric will never get a serious political foothold in the US.
It's the last artifact of a physical object used to measure all others. And that fucker changes weight too, so the kilogram ISNT stable. Its just like all those nasty imperial measurements used to be.
Would indicate that the process has being going on for some 40 years and is still not at all complete. That to me indicates that it's not "easy" either.
But at least food labels are all metric.
Just with the Euro the change should be at once. Then everybody will be fine in 2 years or so.
I've used both metric and imperial, for construction imperial is lots easier, for physics and other things that involve frequent conversions metric is far easier.
The Canadians officially have metric, try buying a 250x125 sheet of plywood. Everybody will look at you as if water is burning.
That's young by European standards. Somehow we managed the conversion.
The US surveyed and then subdivided much of a continent into townships. Land was sold and granted by the section, halfs and quarters thereof. Flying over the Midwest, the manifold rectangles on the ground show how problematic even the slightest of conversion errors would be.
Maybe it's technical debt. But it exists because the legal system is stable.
I guess there is some room to argue about the representational accuracy of a chosen coordinate system, but it would take quite a bit of a crazy to keep on pursuing it (especially in areas where public roads already impinge on things far more than an inch or two).
Of course it would still be pretty pointless to engage in a wholesale conversion of all that information (and I guess the lat/long stuff isn't really metric...).
Really? I picked up a 1.5m^2 sheet of aluminium for a project fairly recently (Australia). I have literally 0 idea what that is in feet/inches/furlongs.
Seriously?
1) If you haven't seen enough of these White House Polls go by yet (and there is a never ending list of inanity, for example: http://www.modernman.com/12-dumbest-whitehouse-petitions/) let me clue you in. They do nothing. Nothing. No one reads them. Just go back to wishing on a star.
2) The belief that something like this would ever be on the White House's radar/todo list is honestly just retarded.
3) Why is this even here? This isn't Reddit. The focus of HN is pretty nebulous these days but this is well outside the realm of entrepreneurship and programming which I believe has always sort of been at the heart of HN.
4) Rabble rabble HN is in decline.
But hey, the metric system seems more sensible to me too.
Edit I don't mean to come off as a jerk. I haven't slept yet and just got a BS call from m boss so I'll probably read this later and wish I were more diplomatic.
Just reading news about weather or some climatic phenomenon, all in Fahrenheit. Wth, Fahrenheit.
It is in the spirit of Andrew Jackson that I, from time to time, ask senior staff to have face-to-face meetings with those people representing organizations who have a difficult time getting our attention. I know the more jaded among you see this as something rather beneath you. But I assure you that listening to the voices of passionate Americans is beneath no one, and surely not the people's servants."
englilsh units aren't any less precise than SI/metric ones. They're just more awkward and less used worldwide. The cases which I find particularly irritating in US units are lb mass vs. lb force, and HP/BTU/foot-pounds/calories/Calories (and kWh) when all you need is a J.
2L bottles of coke and 9mm bullets, miles except when people suddenly switch to kilometers, 50 meter pools and 5K jogging runs but a 120 yard football field, 2 oz shaving cream but eye drops come in a 20ml bottle and so on.
Guess that's what globalization does for ya.
Speaking of globalization, TVs are still sold and classified in inches :-)
Do your cups come only in one size? (And aren't the bigger coffee mugs standardized to 200ml?)
Nope...
Notice a pattern, yet?
Quick quiz: what's the diagonal size of your laptop screen in centimeters? Your mobile phone?
So it doesn't matter if you use completely unrelated metrics for different things. When you want to buy a laptop you know how many inches you want. When you swim, you know what a 50 meters pool means. But do you care how many laptop diagonals you're swimming? Probably not.
Now back to US switching to metrics: I think the real argument in favor of sticking to imperial is the cost and risk of the switch. Risk because confusion between metrics could lead to a catastrophe (example: filling the tank of a plane with liters when it should be the same number of gallons).
I previously had a flight computer with two displays, each of which showed the distance to the next waypoint. One showed the distance in nautical miles, the other in statute. I could never remember which was which, and always had to look at both and see which number was bigger.
Silly measuring systems. We should measure everything in planck units.
Personally, I think the cost argument goes in the other direction. It's true that there would be costs to switching, even potentially lives lost. But there are constant, ongoing costs to having mixed units, potentially including lives lost (and certainly very expensive space probes lost). To me, that says that we should switch as quickly as possible to stop that ongoing cost. It may cost more up-front, but the cost of switching eventually ends, while the cost of staying as we are never stops.
In engineering there is never an excuse for not knowing the units of measure of a value in use. That probe would have been brought down just as easily by mistaking a 'kg' parameter as 'g' as it would have been by mistaking a 'kg' parameter as 'lbs'.
What's worse, in engineering there are multiple metric standards of measure (c-g-s, m-k-s, subatomic measures, etc.) There's no way around it, you have to know your units.
There are documented instances of metric/imperial mixups crashing space probes and forcing airliners to land after running out of fuel in midair and such things. Are there any documented instances of similar metric/metric mixups?
As I recall, the Gimli glider came about because they were trying to switch to include metric units and had to change their procedure to do it, but didn't make the change in all places where it was necessary. This resulted in pilots using an Imperial conversion factor to try to calculate a metric fuel loadout, with disastrous results. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider#Refueling
... this isn't exactly selling me on the idea that switching up all the units used in the U.S. is actually a good idea.
Example: 195/60R15 - 15" diameter, 195 mm wide, and 117 mm sidewalls (60% of 195)
Note that this is only because of US influence. USSR and its satellites used meters-graduated altimeters, and so did most of the rest of the world until the end of WWII at least.
Otherwise, it seems a largely arbitrary toss-up as to what will be metric in any of the three countries and what won't.
Basically, we use units like any tool. Use whatever tick marks line up to the problem conveniently. You can always covert later if you need to.
The wikipedia article on Metrication in the US [1] isn't the best article ever but is worth reading for mentions of previous efforts.
A few things: - the US Congress has in various ways 'blessed' the metric system, more than any other. However...
> Proponents of the metric system in the U.S. often claim that "the United States, Liberia, and Burma (or Myanmar) are the only countries that have not adopted the metric system." This statement is not correct with respect to the U.S., and probably it isn't correct with respect to Liberia and Burma, either. The U.S. adopted the metric system in 1866. What the U.S. has failed to do is to restrict or prohibit the use of traditional units in areas touching the ordinary citizen [2]
Did you know that Jefferson proposed a decimal system for the US before the SI system had come about? (See e.g. [2].) There were also proposals to measure land in decimal units rather than in 640-acre sections.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_State...
[2] http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/usmetric.html
My dad was an engineer with Caltrans and he told me about how California was ready to make the switch. It was going to be a gradual transition where signage would start listing both metric and imperial speed limits. They had actually gotten pretty far along into designing signs, etc.
He told me that the state eventually killed it because no politicians supported it and there was no strong desire from the public. While I think this is a great idea, I don't have my hopes up.
Apparently the state did a lot of work actually switching over to the metric system (all manuals, standards, etc. were updated to metric) but the plan was eventually aborted in favor of English units and much effort was then spent on switching back. :-/
http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/oppd/metric1/DD-12-R1_Final.pdf
http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/oppd/metric1/metricpg.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication
I would more support a petition that was well and cogently written, however.
Just to throw an additional wrench into things, prior to official metrification (which technically predates my birth), Canada used "imperial" (i.e. British) units, not "standard" (i.e. U.S.) units. Because of this and the close proximity to the U.S., one had to be careful about just which gallon or pint you were talking about.
People younger and/or more urban than me seem to be 100% metric. I am starting to learn my weight in kilograms, but I still have no idea what my height is in cm without converting.
For example, my grand-mother still talks about buying a pound of stuff. However a pound is now understood as meaning 0.5 kg, we even learn it that way in school.
"How far is it into town? Oh, about twenty minutes."
People could deal with kilometers just fine, but you'd have to ask for them explicitly. Often they'd give you a rough guess by converting from minutes, and that's how you could back your way into the unofficial local speed limit (as opposed to what the signs said).
At first I assumed this was universal, or at least universal to rural areas, but they don't seem to do it much down here in Texas.
Long distances: swap out a bunch of highway signs, consider that 60mph (a mile a minute) ~= 100km/h, not too hard on people but a lot of signage needs to change. Feasible.
Volumes: people are used enough to 2-liter bottles of soda, expect the 3.78 liter milk to stay around for a while because of supply chains. Gas prices will be modestly interesting for people, but really easy on the industry.
Short distances/dimensions: now things get tricky and potentially expensive. There are a lot of fractional-dimensioned parts out there in industry in different supply chains.
Weights: 2.2lb = 1kg and you're pretty good. Nobody really uses ounces anyway!
Temperature: Here's the thing about temperature: converting would be relatively useless because Real People don't do math with the temperature outside. Even scientists don't do math with the temperature outside all that much. For most people, a scale that starts at 0="civilization shuts down because you can't ice the roads" and goes up to 100="heatstroke territory" is a fine representation of humanity's day to day temperature. Why would we bother changing it?
I thought you were talking about Celsius at first...
Very expensive though. Signs normally have a 20 years expected lifetime. Now you need to replace them all at once. Plus a lot of the sign locations need to be changed, unless you want all those "Exit 29 1 mile" signs to now say "Exit 29 1.6 km".
Whether that's acceptable or not is another matter, but it'd suck if "km/h KILLED MY FATHER" became a meme.
It is odd how some countries make massive national changes overnight. eg, Sweden:
(http://users.telenet.be/worldstandards/driving%20on%20the%20...)
> In 1955, the Swedish government held a referendum on the introduction of right-hand driving. Although no less than 82.9% voted “no” to the plebiscite, the Swedish parliament passed a law on the conversion to right-hand driving in 1963. Finally, the change took place on Sunday, the 3rd of September 1967, at 5 o’clock in the morning.
Leaving it until now has meant the UK would find it very hard to change.
Exit 14 - 1 Kilometer (.6Miles)
Then, as the old signs wear out, eventually all signs are replaced.
In the US, all speed limits are in 5 mph increments.
So, let's say you convert your 60mph limit to 100kph (Really 96.5). 70mph is 112.65kph. Do you round down to 110, or up to 115 or 120?
If you round down, congratulations, you just cut the speed difference between a rural highway and interstate essentially in half, as a "true" 17kph difference is only 10.
I suppose it doesn't really matter what people use to express the temperature in common use, but having a unified scale across ambient temperature, cooking, science (1K = 1°C), manufacturing, etc. that people in almost every other country uses really does make sense, especially when the conversion is so annoying.
However, supporting several unit systems is a huge tax on startup companies that work in manufacturing and therefore they reduce innovation and competition, causing harm to everybody along the way.