I wish that the French had gone all of the way to a duodecimal system, and a base 12 measurement system. Most of the arguments for the Imperial system surround the fact that in convenient places you can divide things in half or thirds. And a base 12 time system could have been compelling enough to replace the Babylonian base 60 system that we are stuck with. The one that, even in the metric system makes it hard to convert from meters/second to km/hour.
If we switch to a base 12 system, I’d recommend instead a 360 day + 5 or 6 extra day year, using either 6 or 12 day weeks, grouped into 10 36-day or 15 24-day months.
Or maybe Kodak’s 4 x 7 x 13 + {1 or 2} system would be fine, since we don’t too often need to do complicated artithmetic computations in terms of numbers of days.
A base 60 system is very practical: 3 * 4 * 5 = 60 so you can divide into halves, thirds, quarters, fifths, sixths, tenths, etc all very simply. And of course, 3 * 4 * 5 * 6 gives you 360, and even more useful even divisions.
If we routinely used a base-12 number system, and converted all our units to be base-12, it would have an individually small but collectively massive positive impact on our mathematical fluency. Calculating with fractions vs. “duodecimals” would be a much less dramatic trade-off, and for many everyday calculations converting back and forth between duodecimal and fractional forms would be trivial. We could easily change our systems for time, angular measurement, etc. to the new system in a much more closely backwards-compatible way, and without sacrificing the advantages of the base-60 system. For everyday calculations using physical quantities and measurements, the new system would beat the metric system hands down.
While we’re at it, we should probably replace the written numeral graphs with ones that are easy to write a bit more quickly and as difficult to confuse (either for one another, or for alphabet graphs) as we can manage, and change the pronunciation such that all of the basic numerals are one syllable, and regularize and simplify pronunciations of multi-digit numerals. The Chinese have a big leg up on English/Spanish/French/... speakers when it comes to basic arithmetic simply by virtue of their number pronunciation which is regular and fast.
Mountains out of molehills. The truth of it is, it doesn't matter what the default unit of measurement is as long as you know to clearly specify the unit! :) Like language translation, let others convert your "native" units into their local version. This is no different than how foods or tastes change, or sometimes even color preferences, can change regionally. At least we've moved beyond "m" means both "metre" and "mile". Generally people now say "mi" when they mean "mile", so I'll take that as a win. I tried to convert the word "mile" to other languages, but ended up finding that in many translations, they converted US miles into native miles or kilometres, and so did not have a clearly defined word for such things. Which is why I emphasize being specific about the unit of measure. The rest doesn't really matter. 70°F? 21°C? Feels about the same to me! That said, I wish everyone would hurry up on the YYYY-MM-DD adoption. Always confuses me to see 2-digit days and months and not know which is which.
I live in Phoenix, a city built entirely on a mile-demarked grid. It's useful to be able to approximate how far everything is in whole units based on the grid, and I reckon it would take a very long time before people just referred to them as "blocks" or something similar.
Due to my background as both an American and (chemical) engineer, I am fluent in metric, American, and domain specific unit systems used in chemical engineering that are neither American nor metric. I can switch between these as necessary quite fluidly; it is an elementary skill as a chemical engineer.
I would argue that being limited to a single unit system is like being limited to a single language. In principle, no one needs more than one but in practice the differences in expressiveness for different purposes are interesting and useful. These differences in expressiveness are connected to the continued existence of different systems.
America is big enough and is sufficiently independent of trade in its economy (most of its stupendous production is also internally consumed) that the cost of not transitioning to metric is marginal. I understand why metric is a good system but simultaneously understand why the benefit of metric is dubious for the average American. Remember, American units are defined in terms of metric units; it is a preference, an American can precisely convert to metric at any time if they deem it useful. But they don't because it serves little purpose.
Basically, like their language, Americans occupy a big enough economic sphere that they get to define their standards. An enormous number of global standards are American in origin as it is. I don't sweat the lack of metric even though I use it routinely. Once you become familiar with enough unit and arithmetic systems, you quickly learn that they all suck in some context.
It is pointless to turn these things into religions.
>I would argue that being limited to a single unit system is like being limited to a single language. In principle, no one needs more than one but in practice the differences in expressiveness for different purposes are interesting and useful.
After considerable reflection, I have come to the view that in fact the differences are not interesing and not useful. What is useful though is consistency and ease of application (which the metric system has) and familiarity (which just depends on the circumstances).
I work in the oil and gas industry, and I had to learn to think in terms of bizarre units like stcf/bbl, or pounds per gallon. In the end, the only driver was that once you digest enough information, you can compare things on a like-for-like basis... if you know the horsepower ratings of 10 car models, it is more immediately useful to be given the horsepower of the car you consider buying rather than its power output in kW.
But in the end I see no downsides, only upsides, if the entire industry switched to the metric system.
stcf/bbl (standard cubic feet per barrel) by the way is a customary measure of the amount of gas dissolved in the oil. After 25 years in the industry, I know for example that 1000 stcf/bbl represents a gassy oil that will take some effort to stabilise, and 100 stcf/bbl is a relatively dead crude... so inormation about new crudes is useful to me in this form. But - what a weird unit it is! The information could much better be provided as a dimensionless ratio, eg gas-to-oil ratio of 200 for gassy oil would be intuitive and better suited to use in further calculations, and once you've seen enough data expressed in this way, the familiarity issue is taken care of.
I invite you to provide counterexamples, where the customary unit has an inherent advantage (familiarity does not count). I can't think of any.
Cooking units are much better suited for the task than metric units.
Typographic units are non-metric and metric units are inconvenient in typography, because millimeters are too big for character sizes and too small for page units and centimeters are both too big and too small at the same time.
French (?) shoe sizes are numbered like 38, 39, 40, 41, etc. and the difference between these sizes are 2/3 cm, because it's a practical difference to mass-produce different shoe sizes. It's not metric, obviously.
Parsecs are not metric. Heck, light years are not metric; and look at how rich the unit is, it tells you a lot about the distance. Try to express the distance to Alpha Centauri in metric units and comprehend it.
Can you actually name this number without looking in a dictionary? I cannot. Nine and a half zillions, I guess. So Alpha Centauri is like 44 zillion meters away; very enlightening.
You can always invent a name (and "light year" is nothing else, just not based on a "round" number of meters).
For example, since failure rates in safety engineering are usually pretty small and nobody wants to pronounce "something times ten to the minus eight" or similar, the term "fit" was invented to stand for 10^-9.
(Although I admit that "failure in time" is a stupid name for a dimensionless constant)
Similarly you could invent a "galactic length" or however you'd like to call it.
Light year is not just a name; year is a natural length of time and light speed is also a natural constant. The whole unit is natural and is based on things that make sense on such distances. This is same for all natural units; they grew up from usage. (This resulted in things that appears illogical, like having different with similar name for different applications, but this is only appearance. We measure water differently from oil or precious drugs and differently when we cook with water or build a dam, so it makes all the sense to have different units for different purposes.)
Meters, however, have a different story; the meter was invented by some French scientist about the time they were changing everything after the revolution, including month names; somehow month names reverted back to normal, but meters stayed. The meter was initially defined as 1/40,000,000 of the length of a meridian. Here only the length of the meridian is natural to some extent, although I fail to see how it is relevant to what is normally measured with meters, and the constant is completely artificial.
Sure: nine quadrillion, four hundred and sixty trillion, five hundred and twenty-eight billion, four hundred million.
Next would be quintillion, sextillion, septillion, nonillion, decilion, undecilion, duodecillion, tredecillion...um...quaterdecillion(sp?)
Granted, I had to write it out to convert (or I could have sat and derived the rule--divide by three and subtract two to get the prefix). And I may be an exception, having spent a brief bit of my childhood interested in names for very large number. :-)
But it's pretty easy to know that 10^15 is bigger than 10^10. 10^5 times bigger. Ideally, we'd get sufficiently familiar with scientific notation to immediately understand that the difference between 9 lightyears and 9 000 lightyears is the same as between 10^12 meters and 10^15 meters.
I don't hold any illusions that people do have that fully internalized, of course. I don't.
You probably know Archimedes names for big numbers too :)
What I'm trying to say is that every sufficiently different field of human interest has some kind of units natural to this field. The metric system claims to be universal, but it's like one size fits all, but nobody looks their best. I can measure a backyard in millimeters, but why would I need it? I don't need this kind of precision there. A yard is a more natural scale because it's about the size of a step and this is about the right unit for what I do in the backyard. And inside the house I usually need a finer resolution, so I use feet instead of yards. If I build something on a smaller scale, I switch to inches; and so on. Every field has its best unit and the relationship between them is organic and is not always the fixed 1:10 as with metric.
> Cooking units are much better suited for the task than metric units.
No they are not. Measuring everything on the scale to a gram yields much better and consistent results than wondering if your dish will fail because some inexpedient was more tightly packed or if your spoons are the same spoons that someone else had.
And while a person could argue that ounce vs gram is moot, it is total nightmare for volume given stuff on dry ingredients.
I agree that weighting is the key to stability for professional cooks and bakers, but up to a gram or not depends on what you're weighting, how much of it, and for what purpose (and yes, the gram itself as a unit is irrelevant). This is engineering tolerance and it's same in every field; even a fine metalworker can be imprecise provided he stays within the defined range.
Yet for part-time cooks as most of us are weighting is impractical: we don't have scales, and even if we do the amounts are usually too small. And stability is not necessary the goal :) For home cooks the usual task is to scale a recipe up or down and with cooking units the math is much simpler. Another thing about cooking units is that the number of different units helps to convey that engineering tolerance I've mentioned; the smaller the unit, the less the tolerance. When everything is expressed in one unit, you need to specify the tolerance explicitly.
This is a very American view. When I grew up in Germany EVERYONE had a scale for cooking because every recipe gives all larger quantities in grams. I think the only exception is the difference is the equivalent of "a pinch". When I moved to the US I didn't have a scale and most recipes I cooked were American and I ended up using cups etc. I got totally used ot it after a while and everything was fine. However, I love cooing and wanted to get more into modernist cuisine. That pretty much requires a scale. Having used a scale for cooking again I cannot overstate how incredibly convenient it is. It saves a lot of time and cleaning of measuring devices. You just put your container (pot, bowl or whatever you will use later for processing) onto the scale; zero the scale; and start puring in the first ingredients till you go tthe right amount. Then you just zero the scale again and do the next ingredients. No need to rinse measuring cups in between. The metric system also has the added benefit that 1 liter translates for water based liquids to 1kg which means you again just pour the liquid into your bowl that's on the scale. The scale has pretty much only upsides. The downside that most people in the US don't have a scale is only a downside because culturally US Americans don't use scales for cooking. On the flip side you can say that measuring cups are incovenient because Europeans don't have them.
I love to cook myself and I agree that using scales yields a more stable result (provided the ingredients are stable). But to be simpler than volume-based units the scales have to be pretty sophisticated, like the modern electronic scales. Would the process be simpler if the scales could not zero-out on a weight and you'd have to weight the ingredients separately or do the math mentally? Or if they were mechanical and thus harder to read? Or if they were balance scales with pans and separate iron masses? :) Well, this is too much, perhaps, but I remember using such scales to mix solutions for photographic process. But not for cooking; this would be completely unpractical.
Of course, nowadays the scales are very smart and a pleasure to use. But here's the thing: with smart equipment we don't need to bother about being metric. It's not a problem for smart scales to display the weight in any unit imaginable. I think there must be culinary apps that convert between weight- and volume-based units to suit everyone's tastes and they're either free or cost less than $5. The proponents of metric system claim it's simple. Maybe, but it's a simplicity of a typewriter compared with a modern typesetting program. Why would anyone with a smartphone care about this kind of simplicity?
For example, there's ISO 216 standard for paper sizes: A0, A1, A2, etc. The sizes form an interesting progression: each size is exactly 1/2 of the larger size. But how did they select the 1st size in the row, the A0? It's pretty interesting: the A0 size is exactly 1 square meter. I bet the designers of the standard though it would be be a feature, because the users (e.g. printers) will be able to use this fact to simplify their calculations; e.g. you need to print 1000 A4, you know it's 1/16 of A0 and the paper is 100g/sq.m., and you go from there. But I don't believe anyone does this kind of math nowadays; everyone has computers and printer jobs have much more variations in paper sizes and densities for this "simple" rule to be of practical use.
"Measuring everything on the scale to a gram yields much better and consistent results than wondering if your dish will fail..."
It really depends on the recipe. Some cookbooks, for example, recommend that measurements be as accurate as possible for baking. However, I doubt the majority of the worlds population use scales to measure ingredients when they cook. In fact, great cuisines from around the world have developed perfectly well without the use of scales for measuring ingredients. Can you honestly say 250g of chopped carrots is preferable to two medium-sized carrots, chopped?
> Parsecs are not metric. Heck, light years are not metric; and look at how rich the unit is, it tells you a lot about the distance. Try to express the distance to Alpha Centauri in metric units and comprehend it.
The distance to Alpha Centauri is so mind-bogglingly huge that the human mind can not comprehend it. This has to do with the scale of things, and has absolutely nothing to do with the unit.
I can define the distance to Alpha Centauri to be 1 Alce. 1 is a really nice number that you can grasp, but it still helps you no further in understanding that distance.
All the unit systems are functionally equivalent but each generally have their own advantages. Chemical engineering 101 was learning to be fluidly unit agnostic. It is such a trivial skill that I do not see why it matters other than training people to do it.
The nominal value of metric is that it is easy for back-of-the-envelope arithmetic. That is only true for abstract math because humans learn base-10 counting. There are many kinds of engineering systems, like chemical reaction kinetics or computer science, where base-10 counting systems have minimal relevance to back-of-the-envelope computation.
I actually have designed a lot of physics-based representation software. It does not operate on metric models of reality even though it is translatable to metric units and presented that way to the end user for both input and output. In fact, a lot of sophisticated implementations represent all values as infinite intervals over the domain of integers with a strong preference for binary treatment because it is efficient. The presentation unit is almost irrelevant. Same with chemistry, which has its own archaic unit systems.
Metric has a lot of practical advantages and disadvantages, depending on the use case. They are all trivial in real engineering scenarios.
Americans occupy a big enough economic sphere that they get to define their standards
[Disclosure: US citizen here] While this is true, I don't think it's helpful to attach American economic/cultural dominance to the metric debate (at least wrt advocacy), because US and Imperial measurements and standards are almost identical. But that "almost" is an important qualifier. The root system they both share derives from the Middle Ages. Here's a helpful explanation of the differences:
I would argue it is extremely simplistic to compare languages to unit systems side by side.
In languages, it is both a way of communication and also a way of thinking, to say the least. Mandarin Chinese is my native language. My English is just ok, but it already gives me a new way of thinking, much more than a different perspective.
Also, there are many words and phrases in one language that you can't find a matched translation in another language, even between languages that are closely related, like English and German.
Different unit systems, on the other hand, can be converted to and from each other without losing anything. There could be some affinity attached to a system one grew up with. It is incomparable to languages, though.
Going metric isn't economical in the US as it has been elsewhere. You can't expect all the individual businesses to do something that isn't in their interest, and in general, when you've got this big a country with a single measuring system, it's not going to be in an individual business's interest to retool. This was not the case in most other places, where there was a lot more pressure to standardize because you might have a few different measuring systems within a few hundred mile radius.
I rarely see anyone consider that the American system has at least one fundamental advantage: it's closer to a binary system, rather than decimal.
Why do we want a decimal system? The only reason for a base of 10 that I can see is that we have ten fingers. But binary systems map better to a lot of real-world problems.
If baking, are you more likely to take a recipe and halve it or cut it by a factor of ten? In construction, are you more likely to subdivide an area into two, or ten? If you split a stock, are you more likely to split two-to-one or ten-to-one?
The answer, in all those cases, is the former, which is favored by a binary system. Forcing decimal upon us is what leaves us with numbers like 0.125 rather than 1/8.
So rather than move to metric, let's come up with a more consistent base-two system, and then we can all use that. (Just saying that to make a point; not a serious proposal.)
It's close, but not quite. 2 cups to 1 pint. 2 pints to one quart. 2 quarts to 1 gallon. But then there are the odd ones, like 3 feet to 1 yard, 3 teaspoons to 1 tablespoon (2 tablespoons is 1 dessertspoon though). But there is quite a bit of doubling in the Imperial system.
I don't understand. It's just as easy to divide by half in a decimal system as in a binary system; both share 2 as a factor.
My mathematician friends tell me that for a lot of reasons base twelve (like our clock) would be preferable, but changing makes no sense because the benefits don't come close to the costs...
In any event, like and system of measurement, decimal is ultimately founded on some arbitrary decisions. The argument in favor of decimal is that a common system of measurement has incredible advantages; nothing you mentioned in favor of the imperial system stands up to the benefits to being in lockstep with the rest of civilization.
>If baking, are you more likely to take a recipe and halve it or cut it by a factor of ten?
You are more likely to halve it. How does the "American" system help, if you have to halve say 1 lb of butter and 1 quart of milk? It just means you need to retain in your head a bunch of definitions and inconsistent conversion factors.
Well, half a pound of butter is two sticks (butter here is typically sold in four-stick packages weighing a pound; each stick being 4 oz) and half a quart of milk is a pint (also sold in grocery stores; it's also two cups).
Not that inconsistent; if you look up the scale, you'll see that most ratios are powers of two; sometimes there's an occasional 1/3, like the teaspoon to tablespoon ratio. What is convenient is that the ratios are small; as soon as you need a bigger amount, you just use bigger units. This not only keeps the math simpler, but also indicates the precision of the numbers; "1 cup" means you can err by a tablespoon, perhaps, but "16 tablespoons" (although formally equal to 1 cup) indicates much higher degree of precision.
In metric countries, however, you routinely see recipes like "140 g cornmeal" or hear people asking for "500 g meat" in a grocery store. Nobody really deals with these things in grams, but still somehow everybody uses grams here. The inventors of the metric system might think there would be decagrams or gectograms, but I've never heard of such units and even my spell checker just underlined them; somehow people using metric system ended up with kilograms and grams, units of 1:1000 ratio.
I learned both systems in school--our rulers always had inches and centimeters--but we never really learned the metric system until much later in science classes. I think there's a strong argument to be made that the metric system is easier to learn and could be taught at the same time as counting and basic arithmetic. It would make learning science and math easier in higher grades and waste less class time. I'm honestly surprised there are so many comments here defending the Imperial system.
I like the american system. It's based on 12 which is easily divisible by 2,4,3,(and 6 obviously) making it practical and easy to use for handy jobs. Having fractions of an inch divisible by factors of 2 is also far more convenient than using a decimal system imho. Why not just use a system that lists both units?
> It's based on 12 which is easily divisible by 2,4,3,(and 6 obviously) making it practical and easy to use for handy jobs.
Interestingly I never thought about it that way. I grew up and lived in Europe, and even after many years of living here, when I need more precision I always revert to millimeters instead of fractions of an inch.
There definitely is some major messiness with the system, but:
4 fluid drams in a Tablespoon (No 0.5Tbps unit?)
2 Tablespoons in a fluid ounce
4 fluid ounces in a gill (No 0.5 gill unit?)
2 gills in a cup
2 cups in a pint
2 pints in a quart
2 quarts in a half gallon
2 half gallons in a gallon
63 gallons in a hogshead
Okay, yeah, there's a lot of messy units outside of this series, and some holes. We have the apothecaries' system, the avoirdupois system, the customary system. A hundredweight is 112 LBs because a Stone is 14 rather than 10. A mile is some number of feet I always have to look up.
Metric is overrated. It's both too recent an invention and a part of the long gone movement that thought everything is to be rebuilt, you know, "rationally." It didn't turn out more rational as a result, at least not the kind of rationality that we really need.
[Edit] Disclaimer: I am from a country that went metric a century ago.
- Is the metric system superior to the American (bastard) imperial system ?
- Is it worth the switch ?
There are a lot of other accidental situations out there that are (perceived to be) too costly to eradicate. For example, in Europe (not the UK) we drive on the right hand side while yielding the right of way to the right as well. For safety reasons, it would have been better to switch on of the two to the left. Will it happen? probably not.
Actually, cost might even be irrelevant:
The Chinese still use chop-sticks while a fork is clearly more practical.
Sweden switched from left side driving to right side driving as late as in 1967. So it is possible, but, like you said, not likely. Sweden isn't an island, so I can imagine the safety hazards when crossing a border. The UK/Ireland are islands of course, so there's more of a physical barrier. I guess this applies to the metric/imperial system, too. I think we can all agree that the metric system is more logical. But there just isn't enough incentive to make the switch.
Countries are always funny about making such huge switches though. For example Sweden still has Swedish as its official language, which makes absolutely no rational sense. They should obviously standardize on English. There's no good reason for a country of ten million people to have their own language, it's extraordinarily inefficient.
The counter argument to this is always: but 90% of Swedish people also speak English. Ok, so what's the point of maintaining Swedish then? It's like arguing it'd be ok for the US to keep / use / teach both metric and imperial - in reality there is no good reason for that, it would be backwards.
In my experience, chopsticks are better when you have food that has already been cut up into pieces, especially when you’re trying to pluck pieces of food out of soups (I can’t imagine eating hot pot with a fork). By contrast, forks are better when you want to hold down a big piece of meat to cut it with a knife, or when you need to use the side of the fork itself to cut something, or when you’re trying to pick up awkward slippery things that you can just stab instead (e.g. raw cherry tomatoes).
For some types of food and dining arrangements, ditching the silverware/individual plates and using a piece of flat bread or a handful of rice to pick up the food (as people do in South Asia, many parts of Africa, and parts of Latin America) is more effective.
Still other types of food is best eaten with hands alone (e.g. sushi, sandwiches, pizza [whatever Europeans might tell you]).
To call the fork “clearly more practical” betrays ignorance and lack of imagination about the broader world.
I think that the article is sorely missing the point of the metric system. It's not about communication. For communication, the frathe of reference doesn't matter, as long as both parties agree on the same reference. In fact, I find imperial units to be somewhat more intuitive than metric units.
Instead, it's all about unit conversion. One liter of water weighs one kilogram and is a one decimeter cubmore room degrees is where water freezes, and 100 degrees is where it boils. This makes water the universal conversion constant, which makes it easy to compare different units (eg weights and volumes).
Also, it's trivial to convert meters to millimeters and kilometers. But this happens surprisingly seldom in practice compared to converting volumes to weights or lenghts.
I've seen that several times in the thread, but it's like asking what is the most intuitive size of "a piece" of string: Depends where you're born and which unit system you've used.
> and 100 degrees where it boils
I once thought that 0 and 100 degrees C were defined as the temperature of water freezing and boiling, and 1Pa would be defined accordingly, but nope. Boiling can happen at 98.5 degrees under ncpt.
Metrologically, even the pound is defined in terms of metric kilograms. Yes, I speak of the least worthy metric unit that is still defined in terms of an ingot sitting somewhere in France instead of a phenomena of nature. As such, the U.S. has gone entirely metric, and has been metric for over a century. It's just that some people insist on using second-rate translations of metric that are based on units inherited from the good ol' colonial days when the British ruled all.
As a Canadian, I am forced to use some imperial units to this day because of my close proximity to the U.S.. This is in spite of the fact that the empire that created imperial units has now gone totally metric. Way to go U.S.A.. You crazy living anachronistic monarchists. I bet you even think sticking to Imperial units is patriotic somehow too! Freakin' hilarious.
Amongst all the rationalizations I miss the one thing that is typical for the US as a young immigrant nation with little history: a desperate need to cling to any kind of custom or tradition to create a sense of identity. Especially if those customs set them apart from the rest of the world.
This goes well beyond the metric system. In many ways the US is extremely old-fashioned in the eyes of other Westerners, clinging to customs most of us have abandoned many decades ago. Unless there is a clear economic advantage in it, the US is strongly resistant to change for fear of diluting its still relatively young and shallow identity.
On typical form of American deflection is coming up with elaborate explanations why what works for other countries won't work for America. Sometimes these exceptionalist arguments are not entirely untrue (the US is an exceptional nation in many ways), but they become really transparent when they try to argue why other countries are different. (Most of those arguments just show a willful cultural ignorance, especially remarkable when coming from well-educated and well-traveled Americans.)
No, for the US there is no compelling economic reason to go metric. But that's not the reason why it doesn't, that's just the rationalization du jour. Any other country would not be afraid to adopt the simple convenience of joining the rest of world in a single standard.
Clinging to customs is definitely a common human trait. I don't see anything special about the US doing it.
For example Europe clings to one of the most absurd customs of all: large numbers of unnecessary languages. Instead of standardizing, countries in Europe go out of their way to preserve extreme inefficiency in communication. So there's Europe, not a young world, desperately clinging to languages to hold on to tradition and supposedly culture.
If it's important to standardize measurement, it must be dramatically more important to standardize on language.
Why does Europe have three dozen major languages in use? Half of Europe shares no common language, with only 50% of people there speaking English. The only thing that would make sense, is to standardize on English, Spanish or perhaps Mandarin (it doesn't make as much sense as the other two for Europe).
I see non-stop talk about how the US should adopt the metric system, and I completely agree because it makes logical sense. And Europe should abandon all of their languages and adopt English - let's see which happens first.
They are standardizing on English. I recently moved to the Netherlands and only speak English and 99% of people I've met speak English. Nearly all meetups and tech conferences in western Europe are also done in English.
Also almost the entire world uses metric, it would really suck if everyone in the entire world spoke English except for the country you grew up in.
The countries in Europe with a high % of English language use, are simultaneously maintaining their old languages. For example the Netherlands are keeping Dutch, and Sweden is keeping Swedish.
It'd be like arguing the US is standardizing on metric, while still commonly using imperial, keeping both would be extremely inefficient and pointless. I believe language standardization is more important than measurement standardization, and yet, again, half of Europe has no common language. Somehow language gets treated with special kid gloves, because it's supposedly an important tie to culture. I completely reject that claim as being any more valid than trying to claim imperial is an important tie to culture and thus should be preserved.
Only about 35% of people in France speak English; for Italy it's sub 30%; Spain is only 22% or so. And this isn't fluency, it's the % of people with any meaningful knowledge of English. The rate of moderate fluency would be far lower.
I stumbled upon a very interesting short documentary about the metric system and the world's roundest object. Well worth 10 minutes of your break today. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMByI4s-D-Y
This article claims Americans initially rejected the metric system because it was "too French", which is an inaccurate exaggeration.
Before the metric system was created, the US, which had recently won independence, was put in the position of selecting a standard system of weights and measures. Jefferson suggested a decimal system based off the seconds pendulum at 45° latitude. He did this in coordination with scientists in France with the direct goal of achieving a universal standard. Before congress could adopt this system, the French modified their standard:
Although French scientists working on a decimal system had originally supported using the seconds pendulum as a scientific basis, and Jefferson had deliberately matched his seconds pendulum proposal to the French one, based on a measurement at the latitude of Paris, the French decided to use the length of a meridian of the Earth instead of a seconds pendulum. This and other developments changed what had promised to be an internationally developed system into a strictly French project. Jefferson wrote, "The element of measure adopted by the National Assembly excludes, ipso facto, every nation on earth from a communion of measurement with them."
As a result the US wound up passing on Jefferson's system and eventually settling on US "customary" units.
The real benefit of adopting the metric system is to have a consistent, widespread system of units. The United States has had this for over 200 years and most sectors of the economy have been isolated enough from Europe and the rest of the world where adopting metric has not been worth it. Industries that are increasingly global (automotive, electronics, etc) have already effectively adopted metric.
For me, it's not about the length or the scale of the temperature, it's having grown up with the "feel" or the "time" of a measurement.
If I see a road sign that says it's 130 miles to Chicago, then I know how much time it's going to take me to get there. I don't have that "feel" for seeing 209km.
If I see it's 60° (F) out, I know how that feels, I know how to dress for it. I have a very different expectation if I see it's 15° (C).
I personally think that's the biggest barrier to conversion, the learned, in-grained expectation of time or sensation when seeing a measurement expressed.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadWhen you're such a large country, you can afford to do things your own way - others will accommodate you.
I wish that the French had gone all of the way to a duodecimal system, and a base 12 measurement system. Most of the arguments for the Imperial system surround the fact that in convenient places you can divide things in half or thirds. And a base 12 time system could have been compelling enough to replace the Babylonian base 60 system that we are stuck with. The one that, even in the metric system makes it hard to convert from meters/second to km/hour.
Or maybe Kodak’s 4 x 7 x 13 + {1 or 2} system would be fine, since we don’t too often need to do complicated artithmetic computations in terms of numbers of days.
Our ancestors were not idiots.
The duodecimal times table is actually easier to memorize than the decimal one because while it is 44% bigger, there are many easy patterns.
While we’re at it, we should probably replace the written numeral graphs with ones that are easy to write a bit more quickly and as difficult to confuse (either for one another, or for alphabet graphs) as we can manage, and change the pronunciation such that all of the basic numerals are one syllable, and regularize and simplify pronunciations of multi-digit numerals. The Chinese have a big leg up on English/Spanish/French/... speakers when it comes to basic arithmetic simply by virtue of their number pronunciation which is regular and fast.
I would argue that being limited to a single unit system is like being limited to a single language. In principle, no one needs more than one but in practice the differences in expressiveness for different purposes are interesting and useful. These differences in expressiveness are connected to the continued existence of different systems.
America is big enough and is sufficiently independent of trade in its economy (most of its stupendous production is also internally consumed) that the cost of not transitioning to metric is marginal. I understand why metric is a good system but simultaneously understand why the benefit of metric is dubious for the average American. Remember, American units are defined in terms of metric units; it is a preference, an American can precisely convert to metric at any time if they deem it useful. But they don't because it serves little purpose.
Basically, like their language, Americans occupy a big enough economic sphere that they get to define their standards. An enormous number of global standards are American in origin as it is. I don't sweat the lack of metric even though I use it routinely. Once you become familiar with enough unit and arithmetic systems, you quickly learn that they all suck in some context.
It is pointless to turn these things into religions.
After considerable reflection, I have come to the view that in fact the differences are not interesing and not useful. What is useful though is consistency and ease of application (which the metric system has) and familiarity (which just depends on the circumstances).
I work in the oil and gas industry, and I had to learn to think in terms of bizarre units like stcf/bbl, or pounds per gallon. In the end, the only driver was that once you digest enough information, you can compare things on a like-for-like basis... if you know the horsepower ratings of 10 car models, it is more immediately useful to be given the horsepower of the car you consider buying rather than its power output in kW.
But in the end I see no downsides, only upsides, if the entire industry switched to the metric system.
stcf/bbl (standard cubic feet per barrel) by the way is a customary measure of the amount of gas dissolved in the oil. After 25 years in the industry, I know for example that 1000 stcf/bbl represents a gassy oil that will take some effort to stabilise, and 100 stcf/bbl is a relatively dead crude... so inormation about new crudes is useful to me in this form. But - what a weird unit it is! The information could much better be provided as a dimensionless ratio, eg gas-to-oil ratio of 200 for gassy oil would be intuitive and better suited to use in further calculations, and once you've seen enough data expressed in this way, the familiarity issue is taken care of.
I invite you to provide counterexamples, where the customary unit has an inherent advantage (familiarity does not count). I can't think of any.
Typographic units are non-metric and metric units are inconvenient in typography, because millimeters are too big for character sizes and too small for page units and centimeters are both too big and too small at the same time.
French (?) shoe sizes are numbered like 38, 39, 40, 41, etc. and the difference between these sizes are 2/3 cm, because it's a practical difference to mass-produce different shoe sizes. It's not metric, obviously.
Parsecs are not metric. Heck, light years are not metric; and look at how rich the unit is, it tells you a lot about the distance. Try to express the distance to Alpha Centauri in metric units and comprehend it.
For example, since failure rates in safety engineering are usually pretty small and nobody wants to pronounce "something times ten to the minus eight" or similar, the term "fit" was invented to stand for 10^-9.
(Although I admit that "failure in time" is a stupid name for a dimensionless constant)
Similarly you could invent a "galactic length" or however you'd like to call it.
Meters, however, have a different story; the meter was invented by some French scientist about the time they were changing everything after the revolution, including month names; somehow month names reverted back to normal, but meters stayed. The meter was initially defined as 1/40,000,000 of the length of a meridian. Here only the length of the meridian is natural to some extent, although I fail to see how it is relevant to what is normally measured with meters, and the constant is completely artificial.
Next would be quintillion, sextillion, septillion, nonillion, decilion, undecilion, duodecillion, tredecillion...um...quaterdecillion(sp?)
Granted, I had to write it out to convert (or I could have sat and derived the rule--divide by three and subtract two to get the prefix). And I may be an exception, having spent a brief bit of my childhood interested in names for very large number. :-)
But it's pretty easy to know that 10^15 is bigger than 10^10. 10^5 times bigger. Ideally, we'd get sufficiently familiar with scientific notation to immediately understand that the difference between 9 lightyears and 9 000 lightyears is the same as between 10^12 meters and 10^15 meters.
I don't hold any illusions that people do have that fully internalized, of course. I don't.
What I'm trying to say is that every sufficiently different field of human interest has some kind of units natural to this field. The metric system claims to be universal, but it's like one size fits all, but nobody looks their best. I can measure a backyard in millimeters, but why would I need it? I don't need this kind of precision there. A yard is a more natural scale because it's about the size of a step and this is about the right unit for what I do in the backyard. And inside the house I usually need a finer resolution, so I use feet instead of yards. If I build something on a smaller scale, I switch to inches; and so on. Every field has its best unit and the relationship between them is organic and is not always the fixed 1:10 as with metric.
No they are not. Measuring everything on the scale to a gram yields much better and consistent results than wondering if your dish will fail because some inexpedient was more tightly packed or if your spoons are the same spoons that someone else had.
And while a person could argue that ounce vs gram is moot, it is total nightmare for volume given stuff on dry ingredients.
Yet for part-time cooks as most of us are weighting is impractical: we don't have scales, and even if we do the amounts are usually too small. And stability is not necessary the goal :) For home cooks the usual task is to scale a recipe up or down and with cooking units the math is much simpler. Another thing about cooking units is that the number of different units helps to convey that engineering tolerance I've mentioned; the smaller the unit, the less the tolerance. When everything is expressed in one unit, you need to specify the tolerance explicitly.
Of course, nowadays the scales are very smart and a pleasure to use. But here's the thing: with smart equipment we don't need to bother about being metric. It's not a problem for smart scales to display the weight in any unit imaginable. I think there must be culinary apps that convert between weight- and volume-based units to suit everyone's tastes and they're either free or cost less than $5. The proponents of metric system claim it's simple. Maybe, but it's a simplicity of a typewriter compared with a modern typesetting program. Why would anyone with a smartphone care about this kind of simplicity?
For example, there's ISO 216 standard for paper sizes: A0, A1, A2, etc. The sizes form an interesting progression: each size is exactly 1/2 of the larger size. But how did they select the 1st size in the row, the A0? It's pretty interesting: the A0 size is exactly 1 square meter. I bet the designers of the standard though it would be be a feature, because the users (e.g. printers) will be able to use this fact to simplify their calculations; e.g. you need to print 1000 A4, you know it's 1/16 of A0 and the paper is 100g/sq.m., and you go from there. But I don't believe anyone does this kind of math nowadays; everyone has computers and printer jobs have much more variations in paper sizes and densities for this "simple" rule to be of practical use.
It really depends on the recipe. Some cookbooks, for example, recommend that measurements be as accurate as possible for baking. However, I doubt the majority of the worlds population use scales to measure ingredients when they cook. In fact, great cuisines from around the world have developed perfectly well without the use of scales for measuring ingredients. Can you honestly say 250g of chopped carrots is preferable to two medium-sized carrots, chopped?
The distance to Alpha Centauri is so mind-bogglingly huge that the human mind can not comprehend it. This has to do with the scale of things, and has absolutely nothing to do with the unit.
I can define the distance to Alpha Centauri to be 1 Alce. 1 is a really nice number that you can grasp, but it still helps you no further in understanding that distance.
The only one I can think of is the nautical mile.
The nominal value of metric is that it is easy for back-of-the-envelope arithmetic. That is only true for abstract math because humans learn base-10 counting. There are many kinds of engineering systems, like chemical reaction kinetics or computer science, where base-10 counting systems have minimal relevance to back-of-the-envelope computation.
I actually have designed a lot of physics-based representation software. It does not operate on metric models of reality even though it is translatable to metric units and presented that way to the end user for both input and output. In fact, a lot of sophisticated implementations represent all values as infinite intervals over the domain of integers with a strong preference for binary treatment because it is efficient. The presentation unit is almost irrelevant. Same with chemistry, which has its own archaic unit systems.
Metric has a lot of practical advantages and disadvantages, depending on the use case. They are all trivial in real engineering scenarios.
[Disclosure: US citizen here] While this is true, I don't think it's helpful to attach American economic/cultural dominance to the metric debate (at least wrt advocacy), because US and Imperial measurements and standards are almost identical. But that "almost" is an important qualifier. The root system they both share derives from the Middle Ages. Here's a helpful explanation of the differences:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_imperial_and_...
In languages, it is both a way of communication and also a way of thinking, to say the least. Mandarin Chinese is my native language. My English is just ok, but it already gives me a new way of thinking, much more than a different perspective.
Also, there are many words and phrases in one language that you can't find a matched translation in another language, even between languages that are closely related, like English and German.
Different unit systems, on the other hand, can be converted to and from each other without losing anything. There could be some affinity attached to a system one grew up with. It is incomparable to languages, though.
This really depends what you’re trying to do. Learning electrodynamics is a lot easier if you use cgs–Gaussian units instead of SI units, cf. http://bohr.physics.berkeley.edu/classes/221/1112/notes/emun...
It only affects all its neighbors and trade partners.
It has a very real cost, but it's something you pass to others, just an externality with no lines in your own ledger.
Why do we want a decimal system? The only reason for a base of 10 that I can see is that we have ten fingers. But binary systems map better to a lot of real-world problems.
If baking, are you more likely to take a recipe and halve it or cut it by a factor of ten? In construction, are you more likely to subdivide an area into two, or ten? If you split a stock, are you more likely to split two-to-one or ten-to-one?
The answer, in all those cases, is the former, which is favored by a binary system. Forcing decimal upon us is what leaves us with numbers like 0.125 rather than 1/8.
So rather than move to metric, let's come up with a more consistent base-two system, and then we can all use that. (Just saying that to make a point; not a serious proposal.)
Not sure I follow. We got : 1 yard = 3 feet = 36 inches how is that closer to binary, than say: 1m = 10dm = 100cm = 1000mm
My mathematician friends tell me that for a lot of reasons base twelve (like our clock) would be preferable, but changing makes no sense because the benefits don't come close to the costs...
In any event, like and system of measurement, decimal is ultimately founded on some arbitrary decisions. The argument in favor of decimal is that a common system of measurement has incredible advantages; nothing you mentioned in favor of the imperial system stands up to the benefits to being in lockstep with the rest of civilization.
You are more likely to halve it. How does the "American" system help, if you have to halve say 1 lb of butter and 1 quart of milk? It just means you need to retain in your head a bunch of definitions and inconsistent conversion factors.
In metric countries, however, you routinely see recipes like "140 g cornmeal" or hear people asking for "500 g meat" in a grocery store. Nobody really deals with these things in grams, but still somehow everybody uses grams here. The inventors of the metric system might think there would be decagrams or gectograms, but I've never heard of such units and even my spell checker just underlined them; somehow people using metric system ended up with kilograms and grams, units of 1:1000 ratio.
Interestingly I never thought about it that way. I grew up and lived in Europe, and even after many years of living here, when I need more precision I always revert to millimeters instead of fractions of an inch.
Are you sure?? I thought it is based on 2 (pints in a quart), 3 (feet in a yard), 4, 12, 16 etc and there is no rhyme or reason for which is which...
Okay, yeah, there's a lot of messy units outside of this series, and some holes. We have the apothecaries' system, the avoirdupois system, the customary system. A hundredweight is 112 LBs because a Stone is 14 rather than 10. A mile is some number of feet I always have to look up.
[Edit] Disclaimer: I am from a country that went metric a century ago.
> Is global uniformity a good thing? Not when it comes to cultural issues, and customary measures are certainly a part of our national culture.
because you can define everything as a part of culture. I don't even want to go into examples (think "ugly things countries did and do").
So, yes, ideally there is no need for anyone to adopt anything, but it's not because it's part of culture.
- Is the metric system superior to the American (bastard) imperial system ?
- Is it worth the switch ?
There are a lot of other accidental situations out there that are (perceived to be) too costly to eradicate. For example, in Europe (not the UK) we drive on the right hand side while yielding the right of way to the right as well. For safety reasons, it would have been better to switch on of the two to the left. Will it happen? probably not.
Actually, cost might even be irrelevant: The Chinese still use chop-sticks while a fork is clearly more practical.
The counter argument to this is always: but 90% of Swedish people also speak English. Ok, so what's the point of maintaining Swedish then? It's like arguing it'd be ok for the US to keep / use / teach both metric and imperial - in reality there is no good reason for that, it would be backwards.
For some types of food and dining arrangements, ditching the silverware/individual plates and using a piece of flat bread or a handful of rice to pick up the food (as people do in South Asia, many parts of Africa, and parts of Latin America) is more effective.
Still other types of food is best eaten with hands alone (e.g. sushi, sandwiches, pizza [whatever Europeans might tell you]).
To call the fork “clearly more practical” betrays ignorance and lack of imagination about the broader world.
Instead, it's all about unit conversion. One liter of water weighs one kilogram and is a one decimeter cubmore room degrees is where water freezes, and 100 degrees is where it boils. This makes water the universal conversion constant, which makes it easy to compare different units (eg weights and volumes).
Also, it's trivial to convert meters to millimeters and kilometers. But this happens surprisingly seldom in practice compared to converting volumes to weights or lenghts.
I've seen that several times in the thread, but it's like asking what is the most intuitive size of "a piece" of string: Depends where you're born and which unit system you've used.
> and 100 degrees where it boils
I once thought that 0 and 100 degrees C were defined as the temperature of water freezing and boiling, and 1Pa would be defined accordingly, but nope. Boiling can happen at 98.5 degrees under ncpt.
As a Canadian, I am forced to use some imperial units to this day because of my close proximity to the U.S.. This is in spite of the fact that the empire that created imperial units has now gone totally metric. Way to go U.S.A.. You crazy living anachronistic monarchists. I bet you even think sticking to Imperial units is patriotic somehow too! Freakin' hilarious.
Kinda hard to take seriously from the people that have a reigning monarch as a legacy from that same empire.
Huh? Not according to either of these two links.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_speed_limits_in_the_United...
http://www.ukma.org.uk/speed-limits
Edit: BTW in the USA when I grew up we called them "imperial units", but nowadays the schools are calling them "customary units". Just to add to the confusion. :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units
This goes well beyond the metric system. In many ways the US is extremely old-fashioned in the eyes of other Westerners, clinging to customs most of us have abandoned many decades ago. Unless there is a clear economic advantage in it, the US is strongly resistant to change for fear of diluting its still relatively young and shallow identity.
On typical form of American deflection is coming up with elaborate explanations why what works for other countries won't work for America. Sometimes these exceptionalist arguments are not entirely untrue (the US is an exceptional nation in many ways), but they become really transparent when they try to argue why other countries are different. (Most of those arguments just show a willful cultural ignorance, especially remarkable when coming from well-educated and well-traveled Americans.)
No, for the US there is no compelling economic reason to go metric. But that's not the reason why it doesn't, that's just the rationalization du jour. Any other country would not be afraid to adopt the simple convenience of joining the rest of world in a single standard.
For example Europe clings to one of the most absurd customs of all: large numbers of unnecessary languages. Instead of standardizing, countries in Europe go out of their way to preserve extreme inefficiency in communication. So there's Europe, not a young world, desperately clinging to languages to hold on to tradition and supposedly culture.
If it's important to standardize measurement, it must be dramatically more important to standardize on language.
Why does Europe have three dozen major languages in use? Half of Europe shares no common language, with only 50% of people there speaking English. The only thing that would make sense, is to standardize on English, Spanish or perhaps Mandarin (it doesn't make as much sense as the other two for Europe).
I see non-stop talk about how the US should adopt the metric system, and I completely agree because it makes logical sense. And Europe should abandon all of their languages and adopt English - let's see which happens first.
Also almost the entire world uses metric, it would really suck if everyone in the entire world spoke English except for the country you grew up in.
It'd be like arguing the US is standardizing on metric, while still commonly using imperial, keeping both would be extremely inefficient and pointless. I believe language standardization is more important than measurement standardization, and yet, again, half of Europe has no common language. Somehow language gets treated with special kid gloves, because it's supposedly an important tie to culture. I completely reject that claim as being any more valid than trying to claim imperial is an important tie to culture and thus should be preserved.
Only about 35% of people in France speak English; for Italy it's sub 30%; Spain is only 22% or so. And this isn't fluency, it's the % of people with any meaningful knowledge of English. The rate of moderate fluency would be far lower.
Before the metric system was created, the US, which had recently won independence, was put in the position of selecting a standard system of weights and measures. Jefferson suggested a decimal system based off the seconds pendulum at 45° latitude. He did this in coordination with scientists in France with the direct goal of achieving a universal standard. Before congress could adopt this system, the French modified their standard:
Although French scientists working on a decimal system had originally supported using the seconds pendulum as a scientific basis, and Jefferson had deliberately matched his seconds pendulum proposal to the French one, based on a measurement at the latitude of Paris, the French decided to use the length of a meridian of the Earth instead of a seconds pendulum. This and other developments changed what had promised to be an internationally developed system into a strictly French project. Jefferson wrote, "The element of measure adopted by the National Assembly excludes, ipso facto, every nation on earth from a communion of measurement with them."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_for_Establishing_Uniformit...
As a result the US wound up passing on Jefferson's system and eventually settling on US "customary" units.
The real benefit of adopting the metric system is to have a consistent, widespread system of units. The United States has had this for over 200 years and most sectors of the economy have been isolated enough from Europe and the rest of the world where adopting metric has not been worth it. Industries that are increasingly global (automotive, electronics, etc) have already effectively adopted metric.
If I see a road sign that says it's 130 miles to Chicago, then I know how much time it's going to take me to get there. I don't have that "feel" for seeing 209km.
If I see it's 60° (F) out, I know how that feels, I know how to dress for it. I have a very different expectation if I see it's 15° (C).
I personally think that's the biggest barrier to conversion, the learned, in-grained expectation of time or sensation when seeing a measurement expressed.