9 ms·

The Argument of Twelves and the Metric System

20 points by rienbdj 7y ago

martyalain 7y ago
I just discover your submission and - if you can read french - I wonder what you could think of this paper : http://marty.alain.free.fr/confs_2019/?view=grain http://marty.alain.free.fr/confs_2019/?view=grain where I try to use the imperial system [foot,inch]] inside the metric system.
- kasperni 7y ago
  The site ahead contains malware Attackers currently on marty.alain.free.fr might attempt to install dangerous programs.... on Chrome
  - realusername 7y ago
    Same on Firefox, it's probably blacklisted in the safe browsing list.
shmerl 7y ago
People like what they are used to, so they can be simply defending the habit. US should be pushing more strongly to switch to metric system instead of dragging this for ages. Speed signs should use kilometers per hour, and weather reports should use Celsius.
- archgoon 7y ago
  Why? What's the cost of doing this? What's the benefit?
  - shmerl 7y ago
    See the summary here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_Stat... You should be long past asking about why, and should be asking why it didn't happen years ago.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - wastholm 7y ago
    For one thing, as mentioned in the article, not exposing hospital patients to a completely unnecessary risk of death due to incorrect dosage of medication? When you're living inside a system, it seems perfectly normal to you, I get that. To me, when someone explains the American measurements system to me, here's what I hear: > Mr. Zabladowski: If you must know, the currency here is a little strange. First of all, in the small money comes the drakmids. At the regular, normal rate of exchange, there are 59 drakmids to one silver zlobeck. > Bart Collins: "Zlobeck"? > Mr. Zabladowski: Three silver zlobecks make one golden kratchmuk. A pastoola normally is, uh, 44,000 kratchmuks. But these, they tell me, are not normal times... (From the movie "The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T".)
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  It's 50 years, maybe a little more, since Britain required all education to be in SI units. That's two generations taught entirely metric. Weather has been in Celsius only for almost as long. People still mostly refer to their height in feet & inches, buy a pint of beer, but petrol's in litres, they drive at 40 mph, and calculate mpg. When it's cold most people use Celsius, but when it's hot, people always remember Fahrenheit and it's 80s, 90s, etc. Never quite worked that one out. :) It's going to take a bloody long while, whenever the switch starts, whether it includes road signage or not.
  - shmerl 7y ago
    Interesting. At least Britain pushed for it for real and as you say, even with that it takes a long time. In US it's very lax. Government basically gave up finishing the job, so it's stalled.
    - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
      There's other silly ones. Wood has been metric almost as long as I can remember, but 50x25mm is still commonly referred to as 2x1 etc. If it's PAR it'll be smaller than either. :) plumbing pipes and fittings are still mostly really BSP - British Standard Pipe uses inside diameter, metric outside. 15mm pipe and fitting is really a 1/2" BSP with imperial thread. UK was probably too lax about it to be honest. They didn't require all packaging to use metric only until the last 20 years, so plenty of shops kept on putting up signs in pounds even if the till worked the price in kilos. Since metric packaging was required there's been one clear downside - you're far, far more likely to have manufacturers hide price rises by dropping 5 or 10 ml or grams from a product, in an apparently identical pack. Repeat a few times and much is now randomly sized, where once all brands had comparable sizes. Choc bars, jam, used to be 1lb, 1/2, 1/4. Now some random number of g.
  - shawabawa3 7y ago
    I've personally never heard anyone talk about temperature in farenheit
  - realusername 7y ago
Animats 7y ago
The real problem is that it's bad for US exports. Outside the US, almost nobody has inch tools. US defense, aviation, and automotive have been metric for decades now. Electronics still has some inch stuff in through-hole parts. US construction, though, is still inch-oriented. Home Depot stocks few metric fasteners. I had a conversation there with someone from a restaurant who was desperately trying to get the fasteners needed to fix some piece of metric equipment on a weekend. Home Depot didn't even have basic metric screws.
- aviation_ 7y ago
  US Aviation in the sense of the "aero" part of aerospace is still very much US Customary Units. I don't have enough experience with the "space" part of aerospace to comment on that. We still use pounds of thrust, slug and pound masses, psi for pressures and so on for things related to turbines and engines and so on. Strangely, we use kelvins instead of Rankines but that's the only exception I can think of. Edit: Note that this isn't to say that aerospace engineers prefer the US units or that we don't know how to use the metric system or anything, it's just how it is. In this particular field, it's just the accepted standard.
  - nraynaud 7y ago
    Iso fasteners and metrics blueprints are favored for all NATO activities, but it's not all military stuff. Moreover, a lot of iso hydraulics stuff is imperial.
  - naval-gazer 7y ago
    In Aviation there are nautical miles for ground distance, knots for speed and feet for altitude. But in US aviation there are also statute miles for airport visibility and feet for runway visibility. Customary units are bigger mess than imperial vs. metric.
    - bnegreve 7y ago
      Nautical miles make some sense because they are consistent with the lat./long. coordinate system (60 miles = 1° lat). For the rest, I'm not sure.
DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
One place where the metric/American mixup is a regular pain is paper sizes. American scientific journals are generally published on Letter paper, while all other scientific journals are generally published on A4 paper. The difference in aspect ratio is just enough to cause the bottoms or sides of pages to be cut off if you don't pay attention. One nice thing about the international paper standard is its subdivision property: if you fold a piece of paper in half (along the correct axis), it retains its aspect ratio. That's pretty useful for printing pages 2-up, and for reducing paper waste. It's a similar argument to the "argument of twelves," but it goes in the opposite direction: the metric standard is favored.
- masklinn 7y ago
  TBF you've got to be slightly obsessed to see the metrication in A-series: most people will interact with A3 and A4 papers which are respectively 420x297mm and 297x210mm, if you go up you end up with A0's 1189x841mm which doesn't look very metric either. You've got to realise that it's 1 sqm in a sqrt(2) ratio to see the metrication (the aspect ratio being chosen so it stays constant when you halve the page through its larger edge). The B series actually looks "more metric" at first glance: B0 is 1414x1000mm.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
variable11 7y ago
In a pre-technical society, there's an argument for using a system of 12s and 60s, this is how the Sumerians and Babylonians did things after all. Obviously now, with global standards and decimals, not using metric is foolish.
Aardwolf 7y ago
Optimally humanity should have chosen base 12 instead of base 10, then the metric system would have used it :) But anyway, to me it doesn't actually matter. Admittedly I don't do workshop stuff that much, but when I do, I measure with a ruler, and never needed fractions for that, numbers like 3.333 work fine. Where do you need fractions if you've got floating point notation, plus if you'd like to use fractions nothing stops you from saying "1 third of a meter". And the imperial system doesn't really use base 12 much anyway? The only ratio of 12 I see in there is inch and foot. All the rest is various random different ratios (e.g. a mile is 5280 foot? really? and gallon vs ounce is a ratio of 160?), and Fahrenheit is its own separate mess.
- masklinn 7y ago
  > All the rest is various random different ratios (e.g. a mile is 5280 foot? really? and gallon vs ounce is a ratio of 160?) TBF you're skipping intermediate units. After all 12^3 would be 1728 so non-decimal units quick get to weird ratios. Of course you're also right that imperial and customary measurements use seemingly random ratios even within the same unit of measure: the mile is 5280 feet because a statute mile is 8 furlong, a furlong is 10 chains, a chain is 22 yards (though technically there's the intermediate "rod" unit which is 1/4th of a chain, and thus 5 ½ yards) and a yard is 3ft.
  - goalieca 7y ago
    There’s no scale below the inch. I see people use decimal parts of inches and others use fractions.
  - mkl 7y ago
    In base 12, 12^3 = 1000. Easy! Base 12 numbers and base 12 "metric" would be great, but unfortunately we will never have them.
  - Aardwolf 7y ago
    Those 8/10/22 ratios are still quite random, and I've never heard anyone use furlong or chain as units (at least in movies). To be fair, I should have said 1760 yards, which is equally weird (its prime factorization is 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 * 5 * 11, especially the 11 in there is weird, plus the 5 in there makes it more lean towards base 10 than base 12)
ginko 7y ago
I think one thing that's often glossed over in the imperial vs metric discussion is that users of metric almost universally stick to decimal numbers, while fractions are a lot more commonly used with imperial. For many Europeans, dealing with values like 3/8 or 5/16 seems completely unintuitive and even deciding which of them is larger will take us some thinking. So being able to elegantly converting fractions seems like a non-issue since you would never use them in the first place.
w1nst0nsm1th 7y ago
The only things Americans get right is dollars and interest rates. I would not go as far as to say it probably means something but here we are... :)

20 points by rienbdj 7y ago

I just discover your submission and - if you can read french - I wonder what you could think of this paper : http://marty.alain.free.fr/confs_2019/?view=grain http://marty.alain.free.fr/confs_2019/?view=grain where I try to use the imperial system [foot,inch]] inside the metric system.

kasperni 7y ago
The site ahead contains malware Attackers currently on marty.alain.free.fr might attempt to install dangerous programs.... on Chrome
- realusername 7y ago
  Same on Firefox, it's probably blacklisted in the safe browsing list.

shmerl 7y ago

People like what they are used to, so they can be simply defending the habit. US should be pushing more strongly to switch to metric system instead of dragging this for ages. Speed signs should use kilometers per hour, and weather reports should use Celsius.

archgoon 7y ago
Why? What's the cost of doing this? What's the benefit?
- shmerl 7y ago
  See the summary here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_Stat... You should be long past asking about why, and should be asking why it didn't happen years ago.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- wastholm 7y ago
  For one thing, as mentioned in the article, not exposing hospital patients to a completely unnecessary risk of death due to incorrect dosage of medication? When you're living inside a system, it seems perfectly normal to you, I get that. To me, when someone explains the American measurements system to me, here's what I hear: > Mr. Zabladowski: If you must know, the currency here is a little strange. First of all, in the small money comes the drakmids. At the regular, normal rate of exchange, there are 59 drakmids to one silver zlobeck. > Bart Collins: "Zlobeck"? > Mr. Zabladowski: Three silver zlobecks make one golden kratchmuk. A pastoola normally is, uh, 44,000 kratchmuks. But these, they tell me, are not normal times... (From the movie "The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T".)
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
It's 50 years, maybe a little more, since Britain required all education to be in SI units. That's two generations taught entirely metric. Weather has been in Celsius only for almost as long. People still mostly refer to their height in feet & inches, buy a pint of beer, but petrol's in litres, they drive at 40 mph, and calculate mpg. When it's cold most people use Celsius, but when it's hot, people always remember Fahrenheit and it's 80s, 90s, etc. Never quite worked that one out. :) It's going to take a bloody long while, whenever the switch starts, whether it includes road signage or not.
- shmerl 7y ago
  Interesting. At least Britain pushed for it for real and as you say, even with that it takes a long time. In US it's very lax. Government basically gave up finishing the job, so it's stalled.
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    There's other silly ones. Wood has been metric almost as long as I can remember, but 50x25mm is still commonly referred to as 2x1 etc. If it's PAR it'll be smaller than either. :) plumbing pipes and fittings are still mostly really BSP - British Standard Pipe uses inside diameter, metric outside. 15mm pipe and fitting is really a 1/2" BSP with imperial thread. UK was probably too lax about it to be honest. They didn't require all packaging to use metric only until the last 20 years, so plenty of shops kept on putting up signs in pounds even if the till worked the price in kilos. Since metric packaging was required there's been one clear downside - you're far, far more likely to have manufacturers hide price rises by dropping 5 or 10 ml or grams from a product, in an apparently identical pack. Repeat a few times and much is now randomly sized, where once all brands had comparable sizes. Choc bars, jam, used to be 1lb, 1/2, 1/4. Now some random number of g.
- shawabawa3 7y ago
  I've personally never heard anyone talk about temperature in farenheit
- realusername 7y ago

Animats 7y ago

The real problem is that it's bad for US exports. Outside the US, almost nobody has inch tools. US defense, aviation, and automotive have been metric for decades now. Electronics still has some inch stuff in through-hole parts. US construction, though, is still inch-oriented. Home Depot stocks few metric fasteners. I had a conversation there with someone from a restaurant who was desperately trying to get the fasteners needed to fix some piece of metric equipment on a weekend. Home Depot didn't even have basic metric screws.

aviation_ 7y ago
US Aviation in the sense of the "aero" part of aerospace is still very much US Customary Units. I don't have enough experience with the "space" part of aerospace to comment on that. We still use pounds of thrust, slug and pound masses, psi for pressures and so on for things related to turbines and engines and so on. Strangely, we use kelvins instead of Rankines but that's the only exception I can think of. Edit: Note that this isn't to say that aerospace engineers prefer the US units or that we don't know how to use the metric system or anything, it's just how it is. In this particular field, it's just the accepted standard.
- nraynaud 7y ago
  Iso fasteners and metrics blueprints are favored for all NATO activities, but it's not all military stuff. Moreover, a lot of iso hydraulics stuff is imperial.
- naval-gazer 7y ago
  In Aviation there are nautical miles for ground distance, knots for speed and feet for altitude. But in US aviation there are also statute miles for airport visibility and feet for runway visibility. Customary units are bigger mess than imperial vs. metric.
  - bnegreve 7y ago
    Nautical miles make some sense because they are consistent with the lat./long. coordinate system (60 miles = 1° lat). For the rest, I'm not sure.

DiogenesKynikos 7y ago

One place where the metric/American mixup is a regular pain is paper sizes. American scientific journals are generally published on Letter paper, while all other scientific journals are generally published on A4 paper. The difference in aspect ratio is just enough to cause the bottoms or sides of pages to be cut off if you don't pay attention. One nice thing about the international paper standard is its subdivision property: if you fold a piece of paper in half (along the correct axis), it retains its aspect ratio. That's pretty useful for printing pages 2-up, and for reducing paper waste. It's a similar argument to the "argument of twelves," but it goes in the opposite direction: the metric standard is favored.

masklinn 7y ago
TBF you've got to be slightly obsessed to see the metrication in A-series: most people will interact with A3 and A4 papers which are respectively 420x297mm and 297x210mm, if you go up you end up with A0's 1189x841mm which doesn't look very metric either. You've got to realise that it's 1 sqm in a sqrt(2) ratio to see the metrication (the aspect ratio being chosen so it stays constant when you halve the page through its larger edge). The B series actually looks "more metric" at first glance: B0 is 1414x1000mm.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

variable11 7y ago

In a pre-technical society, there's an argument for using a system of 12s and 60s, this is how the Sumerians and Babylonians did things after all. Obviously now, with global standards and decimals, not using metric is foolish.

Aardwolf 7y ago

Optimally humanity should have chosen base 12 instead of base 10, then the metric system would have used it :) But anyway, to me it doesn't actually matter. Admittedly I don't do workshop stuff that much, but when I do, I measure with a ruler, and never needed fractions for that, numbers like 3.333 work fine. Where do you need fractions if you've got floating point notation, plus if you'd like to use fractions nothing stops you from saying "1 third of a meter". And the imperial system doesn't really use base 12 much anyway? The only ratio of 12 I see in there is inch and foot. All the rest is various random different ratios (e.g. a mile is 5280 foot? really? and gallon vs ounce is a ratio of 160?), and Fahrenheit is its own separate mess.

masklinn 7y ago
> All the rest is various random different ratios (e.g. a mile is 5280 foot? really? and gallon vs ounce is a ratio of 160?) TBF you're skipping intermediate units. After all 12^3 would be 1728 so non-decimal units quick get to weird ratios. Of course you're also right that imperial and customary measurements use seemingly random ratios even within the same unit of measure: the mile is 5280 feet because a statute mile is 8 furlong, a furlong is 10 chains, a chain is 22 yards (though technically there's the intermediate "rod" unit which is 1/4th of a chain, and thus 5 ½ yards) and a yard is 3ft.
- goalieca 7y ago
  There’s no scale below the inch. I see people use decimal parts of inches and others use fractions.
- mkl 7y ago
  In base 12, 12^3 = 1000. Easy! Base 12 numbers and base 12 "metric" would be great, but unfortunately we will never have them.
- Aardwolf 7y ago
  Those 8/10/22 ratios are still quite random, and I've never heard anyone use furlong or chain as units (at least in movies). To be fair, I should have said 1760 yards, which is equally weird (its prime factorization is 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 * 5 * 11, especially the 11 in there is weird, plus the 5 in there makes it more lean towards base 10 than base 12)

ginko 7y ago

I think one thing that's often glossed over in the imperial vs metric discussion is that users of metric almost universally stick to decimal numbers, while fractions are a lot more commonly used with imperial. For many Europeans, dealing with values like 3/8 or 5/16 seems completely unintuitive and even deciding which of them is larger will take us some thinking. So being able to elegantly converting fractions seems like a non-issue since you would never use them in the first place.

w1nst0nsm1th 7y ago

The only things Americans get right is dollars and interest rates. I would not go as far as to say it probably means something but here we are... :)