7 ms·

I think any sane individual recognizes the huge benefits of having a consistent 10-based measurement system. However, apart from that, the failing of the metri

• ardit33 8y ago
  wat, yes they are very human friendly. 0C for freezing water and 100C for boiling water makes a lot more sense than 32F and 212F or 273.15°K and 373.15°K. Also one meter is about the length of one very large step, or two smaller steps, and one gr the weight of about a teaspoon of water, or 1kg a large loaf of bread. They are human scale.
  • carlob 8y ago
    Nitpick: you write 0C and 32F, but 273.15°K. It's actually 0°C and 32°F, but 272.15 K.
• lwansbrough 8y ago
  Humans always have to adapt to measurement systems. There’s no such thing as a universally intrinsic measurement system because humans aren’t a unified standard size. Take the “foot” for example. It’s based on a foot, but not your foot.
• kleiba 8y ago
  I don't know what you're talking about. I've lived with the celcius scale all my life, and never found any practical problem with it.
  • kazen44 8y ago
    The scale itself doesn't really matter, considering they simply represent temperature. Heck, if we all grew up using kelvin we would have no pratical problems with it.
• dazc 8y ago
  Interesting how some measurements, in the UK at least, remain steadfastly in the imperial standard; height in feet and inches, body weight in stones & pounds and, of course, beer in pints.
  • orwin 8y ago
    Yeah, and an imperial pint is half a liter, whereas the us pint is somethin like 0.46 liter if i remember correctly. Somehow, in France, "Pinte" is still used for beer, "livre" (pound) was still used recently in cook books for butter, and we still use some weird non-metrics mesurment like "corde" for raw wood.
    • the_mitsuhiko 8y ago
      Not sure if French people use pinte colloquially how I remember it, but AFAIR a pinte in France is almost exactly one liter.
      • williamdclt 8y ago
        Do you mean "almost exactly half a liter"? Because "pinte" in France is definitly not a liter
        • the_mitsuhiko 8y ago
          Are you sure? Wikipedia [1] disagrees with you. > pinte 1 ~952.1 ml ~2.01 pint ~1.68 pint Although etymologically related to the English unit pint, the French pint is about twice as large. It was the main small unit in common use, and measured 1/36 of a cubic French foot. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Units_of_measurement_in_France_before_the_French_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Units_of_measurement_in_France...
          • williamdclt 8y ago
            Interesting! I suppose the pre-revolution "pinte" unit of measurement is different from the volume you order at the bar today. If you order a pinte at a bar, you'll always get a ~half-liter, without any sort of doubt. I'm French and I've heard of almost none of the units in those tables actually
• gumby 8y ago
  I agree with everything but your first sentence. 10 is a pretty useless divisor as it has few factors while twelve has 2,3,4,6 (and since 12 is often used with fractions, 8 is a convenient 2/3). There's a reason we've stuck with 24 hours (though we abandoned the variable-length 12 hours/day + 12 hours/night), 60 minutes in an hour, 360 degrees in a circle, etc. Honestly how often do you really divide any measurement by 10? Perhaps km.
  • nraynaud 8y ago
    it's because of the superior power units, like area and volume that it is practical.
  • toolslive 8y ago
    You constantly divide or multiply by powers of ten using the metric system. From liter to cubic meter? factor 1000, from meter to kilometer, factor 0.001 etc etc.
    • gumby 8y ago
      Do you really do those calculations though? I doubt ml to cu m is all that common. I find the non-metric approach of divide by 2 (1/8, 1/16th), the convenient way to adjust measurements (e.g. drill bits) and the comfortable use of fractions (rationals) constantly (e.g. recipes for four people easily adjusted for my three-person family; dress patterns etc). Note I spent my childhood in countries that used both systems (and my adult life too) and in my university training used US, cgs and mks systems. I'm not arguing for one because it's more familiar to me. We're talking about customary human usage. Various fields use their own units from nm to parsecs and whether they should be divisible by 10 is not part of my discussion (sure, for both of these cases it's as good as any other divisor). In fact for daily use, many metric countries retain traditional units not just for daily purposes but even for things like land. The UK is the most familiar case for Americans, but many countries are similar.
  • Someone 8y ago
    I only agree with the first sentence (except for the 10. The base chosen isn’t that important). The rest, IMO, are arguments that get repeated every time this issue comes up that have barely any value. For temperature, the main argument is that people won’t understand what ½ means. Counter-argument (also weak, but not weaker than the one about ½) is that digital body-for measuring body temperatures that use Fahrenheit all seem to use a digit beyond the decimal, too (https://www.google.nl/search?q=Digital+fahrenheit+thermometer&tbm=isch https://www.google.nl/search?q=Digital+fahrenheit+thermomete... shows 98.6 as the winning value). The argument that negative temperature are hard to understand, in turn, is offset by the fact that Fahrenheit also way to easily requires the use of 3 digit numbers for normal temperatures (both also very weak arguments) The ‘exact division is easier’ argument holds some water, but how often do you need to do exact divisions (no, you can’t use a saw to cut a two by four into two two by twos; the saw takes away material). One could also argue we should have chosen an odd prime to give almost all divisors even footing, and to prevent requiring the invention of ‘round to odd/even’ conventions.
• the_mitsuhiko 8y ago
  > Sure, its clever that 0C is water freezing and 100C is water boiling, but most humans live only in a fraction of that range. So it forces all sorts of inelegant practical situations (notice how nearly every euro thermostat has decimals so you can set it to 17.5). Not exactly sure what you mean. Celsius is pretty convenient in ranges I care about. * -20 to +40 are outside temperatures here * 100 is Sauna temperature * ~100 is boiling temperature * 180-300 are baking/grilling temperatures The thermostat allowing .5 seems pretty reasonable to me. But what's the point in being able to change from 61 to 62 degree Fahrenheit on an AC? That thing is not even accurate enough to measure that.
  • tropo 8y ago
    Changing from 61 to 62 works well enough. The absolute error might be a few degrees, which will get you close enough to not be completely miserable. The relative error is about a degree. Going from 61 to 62 might actually be going from 63 to 64 (still a step of 1 degree), but it won't be going from 60 to 63. The good scale is Rankine. It is about the finest stepping that will give you both 0 being absolute and hot oven temperatures that fit in 3 digits. Degree size is the same as Fahrenheit.
• doombolt 8y ago
  I don't know, Celsius is actually very nice. I think there is another problem, where same dimension is used in fundamentally different contexts. Let's talk about mass. For small quantities you can use grams all right, though one gramm is still to small to be useful unless you're dealing. But you surely need kilogram (pronounced kilò in Russian), and for bulk shipping you need megagram (nobody ever uses this word, but you have ton fortunately). Again, meters are useful for heights and sizes, but useless for distance. Here you need kilometer. No shorter word for that, buddy. And for large distance you need thousands of kilometers. Nobody ever uses megameter, again. You can have single 10-based system but you still need different words for quantities differing by three or four orders.
  • carlob 8y ago
    FWIW in Italian we use etto for 100 g (useful for buying prosciutto) and quintale for 100 kg (mostly for shipping). AFAIK in Germany dag for 10 g is common.
    • adwn 8y ago
      > AFAIK in Germany dag for 10 g is common. I'm a native German, living in Germany, and I've never heard of "dag".
      • yorwba 8y ago
        It's the abbreviation for decagram, but I haven't seen it used either.
    • detaro 8y ago
      Not in Germany (except maybe regionally somewhere?), but I think it has some use in Austria.
      • the_mitsuhiko 8y ago
        Indeed it has. Austrians order ham and cheese in dag for instance.
• Poc 8y ago
  Honestly I don't think your argument really hold. When you are born in place were you use a specific system of mesure you get use to it. And I don't see how living beetwen -10°C and 30°C or 10F or 80F change anything.
• roberto 8y ago
  > the failing of the metric system How so? It was adopted by every country in the world except for 3.
  • chimeracoder 8y ago
    > How so? It was adopted by every country in the world except for 3. Adoption is hardly a measure of success, given that the adoption is only widespread because of imperial colonization by a couple of nations which happened to use it.
    • roberto 8y ago
      Ok, so how do you define "failure" when you say it's failing?
      • jsnell 8y ago
        You're not parsing it correctly. The OP was clearly using "failing" as a noun (synonymous to "weakness" or "flaw"), not as an adjective (something that's in the process of becoming a failure).
    • A2017U1 8y ago
      None of the science disciplines on Earth use imperial, and besides some manufacturing in the US or companies forced to use those products virtually no engineering disciplines use it either.
• avar 8y ago
  The discussion about whether metric, imperial or any other system inherently makes more sense has been beaten to death. You can usually say that any given measurement system has intrinsic properties to recommend it, but I think any such discussion usually devolves into the same sort of nonsense as whether any two very different natural languages are inherently better than one another. Is English a better natural language than Chinese, or the other way around? I bet if you polled their native speakers on that, even you selected ones who were close to bilingual in the two, they'd usually like their native language better. It's very hard for people to step outside of themselves and recognize their cognitive biases. But it does tell you something that people who grew up with the imperial system are more likely to argue for its advantages, and the same for people who grew up with metric. It's not like it's genetic. > [...]notice how nearly every euro thermostat has decimals so you can set it to 17.5[...] This is an interesting point I hadn't heard before, but for the sake of consistency, do you think the US dollar is also an inherently inelegant currency because it has fractional values, as opposed to some other currencies that don't? Does the very existence of cents on the dollar annoy you as you go about your business? If you hold that view and you grew up with the imperial system and think 17.5 Celsius makes no sense, I congratulate you on your consistency. But I'm willing to bet that this isn't even a thing you'd noticed or thought of, which is indicative of the cognitive bias of just trying to find reasons for disliking what you're unfamiliar with, even when those reasons can be perfectly transposed on other things with which you are familiar. Side note: By "unfamiliar" I'm not claiming that say a European who dislikes the imperial system doesn't understand it, or the other way around. But as with natural languages measurement systems are something where it's hard to truly become "bilingual" as an adult. You can argue (and I think you'd be right) that say metric is simpler, but is it better by some objective metric in the minds of its users than imperial? Who knows. I could also try to argue with a native Chinese speaker that their writing system is overly complex, and I'm sure I'd get millions of them that would think I was crazy.
  • oppositelock 8y ago
    I agree 100%. The systems are different, one isn't inherently better than the other. If you do any kind of carpentry, the fact that a foot is 12 inches, which can be divided into halves, thirds and quarters really nicely makes it a nicer system to work with when you're just doing stuff ad-hoc without plans. I wouldn't want to do physics math in the imperial system, though.
• otabdeveloper2 8y ago
  > the failing of the metric system Really? If that's an example of 'failing', I'd like to see what success looks like.
• beefield 8y ago
  > system is the actual measurements they used (length of a meter, celsius, etc), which are not really a great fit for humans. I think I saw this argument first time in one of Taleb's books, and I have to say I have difficulties understanding that. What makes yard a better fit for humans than a meter? Or what makes a pound better fit than a kilogram? (Agreeably, it is stupid that the base SI unit for mass has kilo in it. And instead of 10 base it might be nicer to have base 8. But imperial system does not address these) Anyway, my proposal for compromise is that imperial countries adopt SI and metric countries adopt decimal point and get rid of decimal comma.