14 ms·

I'm actually rather impressed with humanity's ability to standardize. It's perfectly natural (and in many cases desirable) for multiple parties to go through th

by hugi 9y ago

I'm actually rather impressed with humanity's ability to standardize. It's perfectly natural (and in many cases desirable) for multiple parties to go through that "painful period" with different solutions that will compete to become "standard". It just takes a little time for everything to align and settle, that's perfectly natural. As for the U.S. refusing to adopt the planet-wide metric system? You've got me there. That's just… Weird.

snarfy 9y ago
The US government adopted it in 1975, and Reagan abolished it 1982. It's frustrating not being able to repair the tools I buy from home depot using tools bought from home depot. I couldn't even go metric if I wanted to. They don't sell raw materials in metric. You get 4x8' sheets of plywood and something called a 2x4 which seems to have nothing to do with either measuring system. It's not even Cartesian.
- dekhn 9y ago
  2x4s are measured using nominal sizes- "nominally" they are 2" by 4" but in reality a bit less. There is a lawsuit over this right now.
zanny 9y ago
It should be obvious why the US stays on the imperial system. There is an opportunity cost to switch that is greater than the current ongoing cost of translation. Thus, someone has to bite the bullet and assume losses to push metric. Throughout the world, the organization that put the foot down and ate the bill has almost always been the government - but the US government operates on short term results. The politician that inconveniences the public today with a metric conversion doesn't have his seat tomorrow, and his replacement immediately halts proceedings. Language isn't close to a solved problem. Hopefully the next hundred years can finally see the reconstruction of the Tower of Babel for a generation of the world soon to come. But there also needs to be a legitimate reason for us to want to unify language. If we operate independently of one another and let businesses control any interactions by proxy of money, we will stay separate.
- esolyt 9y ago
  The problem is public opinion. Americans either don't care or think imperial is superior. It doesn't have to be a federal law. Change can start gradually with private companies. Pokemon Go, for instance, shows only kilometers and doesn't offer imperial units as an option. All water bottles in the US have both mililiters and fluid ounces on their label.
  - cr0sh 9y ago
    From what I understand, most construction and other raw materials are all measured in metric units, then converted to imperial at final sale if needed. For instance, a 4 x 8 foot sheet of plywood down at Home Depot isn't really 4 x 8 feet; it actually has an imperial measurement of 47.938 x 95.938 inches, which is approximately 1217 x 2437 mm - the standard metric size is 1220 x 2440 mm: http://cwc.ca/wood-products/panel-products/plywood/sizes/ http://cwc.ca/wood-products/panel-products/plywood/sizes/ Thicknesses (as noted in the table too) have similar "whole" metric numbers. You see this also on some (not all) general materials sold to the American consumer public - the actual material is metric sized, but marketed with imperial measurements. I think this is done both for cultural reasons, as well as just "momentum" and that the public is used to it. But the reality is (almost) everything is now metric, the public just isn't fully aware of it yet.
    - Terretta 9y ago
      This doesn’t pass commen sense for me. Plywood measured in metric, converted to imperial if needed? I can imagine someone coming up with 4 feet by 8 feet as a standard size for building material. I don’t see them coming up with 1220mm x 2440mm and thinking “nailed it, perfect size for calculating how many of these to make a wall!” Also, since the gap between plywood takes space, plywood (and drywall) is a bit less than stated size to give you breathing room to put 4x8s repeating every 4 and 8 feet. That said I don’t know why a nominal 2×4 is actually 1½ × 3½. Used to be finishing work shaved it down, now they just make ‘em that way to be ornery.
      - 9y ago
fl0wenol 9y ago
Is this a troll? The U.S. is on metric; NIST defines and curates standards on the ISU and is a critical, founding participant in the GCWM. Manufacturing and engineering specifications (especially for the military) are usually ISU. It's just that commercially imperial units are still popular. Most people aren't engineers or scientists and so they don't think about this a lot, but marketing loves inertia.
- refurb 9y ago
  Thank you!! I worked as a scientist in the US. Everything is metric. Cars are assembled with metric bolts. The only thing left that's imperial is generally the consumer facing untold of pounds and gallons.
  - cr0sh 9y ago
    There was a time in the mid-1990s when certain models of vehicles had both metric and imperial fasteners on them; made wrenching on them a major pain. But today, though, everything is metric. You're right that consumer marketing is still toward imperial. I think it's just going to be a slow process of gradual weaning away as older people pass on. I'm personally of a "in-the-middle" generation (X) - I tend to be more comfortable with imperial units, but if metric is required, or I think it might be a better measurement to use (depending on the purpose), then I'll use it instead.
  - Noumenon72 9y ago
    I manufactured plastic sheeting and all product was measured in inches, leading to a huge amount of conversion (24-3/8 sheet with +3/64 tolerance) and to me learning what a mil is (1/1000 of an inch). 10 mil plastic runs and stacks totally differently from 15 mil, and 40 and 60 mil take different amounts of time to cool and shrink, so there truly would have been switching costs going to meters (plus all the people who ordered 48x96 sheets, and rolls on 6-inch diameter cores, and so forth).
    - fl0wenol 9y ago
      Hit the nail on the head. There's a lot of domain-specific units in use which aren't even imperial originally (fluid barrel, troy ounce/carat, ton of cooling, horsepower, AWG) that will stick around for a long time since they're used so frequently in finance, planning and B2B transactions, along with other imperial units that'll remain because they've taken on domain-specific uses (acre of land, fabric yard, bushel, mils) even when the engineers and logistics folks touching that same stuff are using SI equivalents.
tzs 9y ago
The metric system was based on one great (mostly) idea, and one stupid idea. The great idea was having larger and smaller units for a given thing related to the base unit by powers of 10. That's a lot easier to work with than 12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to a yard, 1760 yards to a mile. The stupid idea was basing the meter on the distance between the North Pole and the Equator. What they should have done is based it on existing systems of units. The meter should have been equal to 3 feet. The definition of the foot at the time, in both England and on the continent I believe, was a bit fuzzy, but they all had such a unit and it was reasonably consistent everywhere. Then they could have worked at making the definition of the foot/meter more precise and reproducible, keeping it within the range of existing practice. That would have given us the benefits of a metric system, but with the conversion between metric and prior units easier. Converting feet to meters would have then been a simple division by 3. An inch would be exactly 25 mm. (25 is easy to multiple by in your head: just divide by 4 and shift the decimal point two to the right. Similarly it is easy to divide by in you head if you do it as a multiply by 4 and then shift the decimal two to the left). Similarly for all other metric base units except for temperature. For temperature, as far as I can tell, there was NO good reason to switch to Celsius. Unlike with distance, we don't make bigger or smaller units out of multiples of the base unit. We just state the numeric value, in decimal, possibly with modifiers like kilo or micro, and the base unit. In other words, with temperature we were kind of already doing metric, in the sense of using powers of 10 and writing things in decimal. So the only thing switching from the older, widely in use Fahrenheit scale to Celsius actually made better was changing the anchor points for the scale. Fahrenheit based his scale on a 0 point of the coldest temperature he could make in his lab, and his 100 point at what he thought was human body temperature. Celsius based his on water freezing at 100 and boiling at 0, but the whole universe thought having lower numbers mean hotter was stupid, so it was quickly flipped to freezing at 0 and boiling at 100. Now those anchor points are better than the ones Fahrenheit picked, because they are easier to reproduce and more consistent. (They still suck...but they suck a lot less). Fahrenheit's degree size was better, though, especially for the range of temperatures that most people live in. Celsius' degree is too coarse. The right approach would have been to make Fahrenheit the scale for metric temperature, but anchor at it better points. Instead of 0 as coldest Fahrenheit could make in his lab and 100 human body temperature, use the same anchors Celsius did: freezing and boiling of water. Define freezing as 32 Fahrenheit and boiling as 212 Fahrenheit. This would have made as much sense as adopting Celsius, and no one would need a new thermometer.
pmarreck 9y ago
12 inches in a foot, 12 hours in a day... it is arguable that the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal system is superior to the "powers of 10" the metric system uses: http://io9.gizmodo.com/5977095/why-we-should-switch-to-a-base-12-counting-system http://io9.gizmodo.com/5977095/why-we-should-switch-to-a-bas...

by hugi 9y ago

snarfy 9y ago

The US government adopted it in 1975, and Reagan abolished it 1982. It's frustrating not being able to repair the tools I buy from home depot using tools bought from home depot. I couldn't even go metric if I wanted to. They don't sell raw materials in metric. You get 4x8' sheets of plywood and something called a 2x4 which seems to have nothing to do with either measuring system. It's not even Cartesian.

dekhn 9y ago
2x4s are measured using nominal sizes- "nominally" they are 2" by 4" but in reality a bit less. There is a lawsuit over this right now.

zanny 9y ago

It should be obvious why the US stays on the imperial system. There is an opportunity cost to switch that is greater than the current ongoing cost of translation. Thus, someone has to bite the bullet and assume losses to push metric. Throughout the world, the organization that put the foot down and ate the bill has almost always been the government - but the US government operates on short term results. The politician that inconveniences the public today with a metric conversion doesn't have his seat tomorrow, and his replacement immediately halts proceedings. Language isn't close to a solved problem. Hopefully the next hundred years can finally see the reconstruction of the Tower of Babel for a generation of the world soon to come. But there also needs to be a legitimate reason for us to want to unify language. If we operate independently of one another and let businesses control any interactions by proxy of money, we will stay separate.

esolyt 9y ago
The problem is public opinion. Americans either don't care or think imperial is superior. It doesn't have to be a federal law. Change can start gradually with private companies. Pokemon Go, for instance, shows only kilometers and doesn't offer imperial units as an option. All water bottles in the US have both mililiters and fluid ounces on their label.
- cr0sh 9y ago
  From what I understand, most construction and other raw materials are all measured in metric units, then converted to imperial at final sale if needed. For instance, a 4 x 8 foot sheet of plywood down at Home Depot isn't really 4 x 8 feet; it actually has an imperial measurement of 47.938 x 95.938 inches, which is approximately 1217 x 2437 mm - the standard metric size is 1220 x 2440 mm: http://cwc.ca/wood-products/panel-products/plywood/sizes/ http://cwc.ca/wood-products/panel-products/plywood/sizes/ Thicknesses (as noted in the table too) have similar "whole" metric numbers. You see this also on some (not all) general materials sold to the American consumer public - the actual material is metric sized, but marketed with imperial measurements. I think this is done both for cultural reasons, as well as just "momentum" and that the public is used to it. But the reality is (almost) everything is now metric, the public just isn't fully aware of it yet.
  - Terretta 9y ago
    This doesn’t pass commen sense for me. Plywood measured in metric, converted to imperial if needed? I can imagine someone coming up with 4 feet by 8 feet as a standard size for building material. I don’t see them coming up with 1220mm x 2440mm and thinking “nailed it, perfect size for calculating how many of these to make a wall!” Also, since the gap between plywood takes space, plywood (and drywall) is a bit less than stated size to give you breathing room to put 4x8s repeating every 4 and 8 feet. That said I don’t know why a nominal 2×4 is actually 1½ × 3½. Used to be finishing work shaved it down, now they just make ‘em that way to be ornery.
    - 9y ago

fl0wenol 9y ago

Is this a troll? The U.S. is on metric; NIST defines and curates standards on the ISU and is a critical, founding participant in the GCWM. Manufacturing and engineering specifications (especially for the military) are usually ISU. It's just that commercially imperial units are still popular. Most people aren't engineers or scientists and so they don't think about this a lot, but marketing loves inertia.

refurb 9y ago
Thank you!! I worked as a scientist in the US. Everything is metric. Cars are assembled with metric bolts. The only thing left that's imperial is generally the consumer facing untold of pounds and gallons.
- cr0sh 9y ago
  There was a time in the mid-1990s when certain models of vehicles had both metric and imperial fasteners on them; made wrenching on them a major pain. But today, though, everything is metric. You're right that consumer marketing is still toward imperial. I think it's just going to be a slow process of gradual weaning away as older people pass on. I'm personally of a "in-the-middle" generation (X) - I tend to be more comfortable with imperial units, but if metric is required, or I think it might be a better measurement to use (depending on the purpose), then I'll use it instead.
- Noumenon72 9y ago
  I manufactured plastic sheeting and all product was measured in inches, leading to a huge amount of conversion (24-3/8 sheet with +3/64 tolerance) and to me learning what a mil is (1/1000 of an inch). 10 mil plastic runs and stacks totally differently from 15 mil, and 40 and 60 mil take different amounts of time to cool and shrink, so there truly would have been switching costs going to meters (plus all the people who ordered 48x96 sheets, and rolls on 6-inch diameter cores, and so forth).
  - fl0wenol 9y ago
    Hit the nail on the head. There's a lot of domain-specific units in use which aren't even imperial originally (fluid barrel, troy ounce/carat, ton of cooling, horsepower, AWG) that will stick around for a long time since they're used so frequently in finance, planning and B2B transactions, along with other imperial units that'll remain because they've taken on domain-specific uses (acre of land, fabric yard, bushel, mils) even when the engineers and logistics folks touching that same stuff are using SI equivalents.

tzs 9y ago

The metric system was based on one great (mostly) idea, and one stupid idea. The great idea was having larger and smaller units for a given thing related to the base unit by powers of 10. That's a lot easier to work with than 12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to a yard, 1760 yards to a mile. The stupid idea was basing the meter on the distance between the North Pole and the Equator. What they should have done is based it on existing systems of units. The meter should have been equal to 3 feet. The definition of the foot at the time, in both England and on the continent I believe, was a bit fuzzy, but they all had such a unit and it was reasonably consistent everywhere. Then they could have worked at making the definition of the foot/meter more precise and reproducible, keeping it within the range of existing practice. That would have given us the benefits of a metric system, but with the conversion between metric and prior units easier. Converting feet to meters would have then been a simple division by 3. An inch would be exactly 25 mm. (25 is easy to multiple by in your head: just divide by 4 and shift the decimal point two to the right. Similarly it is easy to divide by in you head if you do it as a multiply by 4 and then shift the decimal two to the left). Similarly for all other metric base units except for temperature. For temperature, as far as I can tell, there was NO good reason to switch to Celsius. Unlike with distance, we don't make bigger or smaller units out of multiples of the base unit. We just state the numeric value, in decimal, possibly with modifiers like kilo or micro, and the base unit. In other words, with temperature we were kind of already doing metric, in the sense of using powers of 10 and writing things in decimal. So the only thing switching from the older, widely in use Fahrenheit scale to Celsius actually made better was changing the anchor points for the scale. Fahrenheit based his scale on a 0 point of the coldest temperature he could make in his lab, and his 100 point at what he thought was human body temperature. Celsius based his on water freezing at 100 and boiling at 0, but the whole universe thought having lower numbers mean hotter was stupid, so it was quickly flipped to freezing at 0 and boiling at 100. Now those anchor points are better than the ones Fahrenheit picked, because they are easier to reproduce and more consistent. (They still suck...but they suck a lot less). Fahrenheit's degree size was better, though, especially for the range of temperatures that most people live in. Celsius' degree is too coarse. The right approach would have been to make Fahrenheit the scale for metric temperature, but anchor at it better points. Instead of 0 as coldest Fahrenheit could make in his lab and 100 human body temperature, use the same anchors Celsius did: freezing and boiling of water. Define freezing as 32 Fahrenheit and boiling as 212 Fahrenheit. This would have made as much sense as adopting Celsius, and no one would need a new thermometer.

pmarreck 9y ago

12 inches in a foot, 12 hours in a day... it is arguable that the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal system is superior to the "powers of 10" the metric system uses: http://io9.gizmodo.com/5977095/why-we-should-switch-to-a-base-12-counting-system http://io9.gizmodo.com/5977095/why-we-should-switch-to-a-bas...