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I like how the article start with making fun of ancient body measures, but then uses feet to compare.
by fijal 11y ago
I like how the article start with making fun of ancient body measures, but then uses feet to compare.
- lostlogin 11y agoI'm currently working on a (very very basic) knitting app. Proof reading text is awful. Patterns use skeins, yards, metres, mm, cm, inches, gauge (arbitrary units) etc all interchangeably. It is kind of impressive how the units coexists. It pains me.
- mc32 11y agoOrwell would love the more rustic and humanistic imperial measures over the sterile metric system. http://orwelltoday.com/metricorwell.shtml http://orwelltoday.com/metricorwell.shtml
- Phemist 11y agoI can see where the writer of that article is coming from, having been born in 1950, Canada would've started its "metrification" in his/her 20s. Arguably a very late time to switch your mode of thought from imperial to metric. However, the key point Orwell makes: "But I have never heard a Frenchman say, ‘He is a hundred and forty-two centimetres high’" is, quite simply, false. To my Dutch ears, hearing about a 1.42m high man does bring up a vivid image of a very short person who'd have problems grabbing anything from a kitchen counter. Thus, it seems more like a legacy problem, rather than the imperial system being intrinsically more relatable than the metric system. A better test would be to see how long it would take someone who is unfamiliar with either systems, to pick up either. Does it take kids longer to learn metric than imperial? I doubt that..
- jmnicolas 11y agoI'm French but I can make the conversions of feet, pounds etc in my head quite easily (divide by 3 and 2 respectively to get a good enough approximation). But I'm at loss with Fahrenheit though.
- Phemist 11y agoThe point is not really about the difficulty of conversion, but about having to do it at all. Whether hearing about a 1.42m high man brings up a vivid image immediately, or only after conversion to imperial measures. Not unlike how becoming fluent in a given second language means there are no longer any intermediates. Rather than having to think consciously of a certain sentence in your own native language and then converting that consciously to a sentence in the given second language, you can just immediately think of the sentence in the given second language. This happens gradually of course, there are a few length measurements in feet & inches that immediately give me a clear/rich image of the intended length: 6 feet, my own height in feet/inches, etc. However, the set of imperial length measures for which this happens is much, much smaller than that for metric length measures. For instance, I have absolutely no clue how long a yard is, let alone a hundred yards, and how that relates to a mile. Only after conversion, and doing the conversion enough times, will it become clear(er) to me.
- abandonliberty 11y agoOwell's complaint that it's hard to estimate sizes in cm is debatable. As a tourist in Europe, I had plenty of people quote cm for various things that I would measure in feet and inches. It didn't seem hard for them. His argument around literary value is interesting. There are many languages which may be superior in those respects. English excels at being precise and scientific.
- mc32 11y agoOf course. We can all get used to whatever measures one has to use in daily life. Still, I think because many of the imperial units did actually come from human physical bases, they are intrinsically humanistic, whereas the metric system simply took arbitrary measures and divided and multiplied in powers of ten --leaving very large gaps. Kind of the same thing in architecture, when they talk about human scale vs more modernist epic architecture which lacks human scale (Brasilia, for example)
- NetStrikeForce 11y agoThere are no gaps between metric measures, especially not "very large" ones. It happens that people used to the metric system take full advantage of it by using decimals, whereas people raised using the imperial system don't. In the metric system you have much bigger units than with imperial, much smaller too and all the needed ones in between. A good example is height. It is much more precise and easy to use the metric system to say I'm 1'87 meters than saying 5 feet 11 inches, which mixes units. If you want to be more precise you could say 1'871 in metric and 5 feet 11 inches and something like "a sixteenth of an inch" (sorry I'm not being accurate, I didn't even look up). Or human weight? Don't get me started with stone and pounds. A stone is something more than 6kg and a pound is about 400g or 0'4kg. Good luck with that. The imperial system might have an aura of romanticism for those of you raised on countries that still use it, but the metric system is one of the most elegant solutions civilisation has invented. It works in every case better than any other system and it is easy to teach to kids. 10/10 would measure again ;) I guess, after all there's a reason the international science community adopted the metric system.
- cubix 11y agoHe might have a point with other units, but when it comes to temperature, Celsius strikes me as more humanistic and intuitive. Zero as the freezing point of water, and 100 as the boiling point is easy for any human to relate to since we interact with water every day.
- nitrogen 11y agoFahrenheit is fairly humanistic as well: 0 is very roughly as cold as you'll ever see, and 100 is about as hot as you'll ever see.
- tdsamardzhiev 11y agoThat may be true where you live. Try explaining it to somebody from Kuwait or Yakutsk, though.
- spdionis 11y ago0 is about as cold as you'll ever see? Except in half of the world?
- lostlogin 11y agoI'm not generally interested in the temperature when it is 'normal'. However when it is unusually hot or cold I might check.
- mc32 11y agoOne the one hand, yes, (freezing and boiling) but on the other hand, 1 degree C is not always fine enough to describe a temperature. I know, one could use fractions. Basically, the jump from 37C to 38C is noticeable, whereas something similar like a jump from 98F to 99F, feels more graduated.
- Turing_Machine 11y agoFahrenheit originally had the freezing point of water at 30 degrees, and body temperature at 90 degrees (can't get much more humanistic than that :-)). Then he fudged the scale to 32 and 96, so there would be 64 intervals between the two. Probably no one here needs to have it explained why 64 equal intervals was a convenient number for the task of marking the thermometer (compass and straight edge would be enough). Unfortunately it turned out that his number for the average body temperature was a little bit off. So it goes...
- fsloth 11y agoConsidering I respect Orwell's insights about lot of things this passage is especially dim: "There is, for instance, effectively no unit between the metre, which is more than a yard, and the centimetre, which is less than half an inch" Between the metre (100 centimetres) and the centimetre there is the "ten centimetres" - which we use extensively. Human hand is pretty good even in metric system. My thumb is 2 cm wide, and if I extend my hand the distance between the tops of my thumb and pinky is roughly 20 cm.
- mc32 11y agoThe imperial system is better positioned for those who are not exposed to maths. These systems developed before literacy and don't require literacy for its fundamentals. Of course it's a moot point these days, but this is why it's a more humanist system of weights and measures. The imperial system gives you more humanist whole units. Inches, yards, furlongs, miles, leagues, not to mention the less usual (today) digit, finger, palm, barleycorn, etc. Pounds, stone, hundredweight, woolsack, tonne, etc.
- tdsamardzhiev 11y agoThe 10cm unit actually even has a name - a decimetre :)
- fsloth 11y agoYes, but that's not what we use in vernacular (in finnish, that is) :)