4 ms·
think renaming a software library is hard? try changing units of measure!!!!!
by kbar13 7y ago
think renaming a software library is hard? try changing units of measure!!!!!
- oneplane 7y agoI think that's what they did in Canada and it worked out great as far as I can tell (except that they had a silly clock based on 10 hours instead of 12 IIRC which had little to do with metric units and nobody wanted it nor was it compatible with the rest of the world).
- kibwen 7y agoI suppose it depends on what your goals are; despite being officially metric, my Canadian and British friends still seem to exhibit a melange of imperial and metric in everyday life.
- saghm 7y agoI notice sometimes when watching British television that stones are commonly used as a unit of weight, which is interesting because it's imperial, not metric, but I've seen never it used in American contexts.
- moron4hire 7y agoThat's because we don't use the Imperial system. The system we use is called "US Customary".
- Someone 7y ago“1 stone equals 14 pounds” is (also) British. It dates back to Edward III (1350). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_(unit)#England https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_(unit)#England. The idea to use physical stones as reference weights is way older.
- thrower123 7y agoSome metric units work well, and are scaled to human everyday measurements, and some are not.
- beerandt 7y agoBut the time thing goes to show the absurdity of people's frame of reference. The same people that judgingly ask why the US hasn't gone full metric will say how absurd the idea of base 10 time is.
- sudasana 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider
- mark-r 7y agoI once tried to imagine a metric time system, with a deciday of 14.4 minutes. I realized that it would never catch on, because a half-hour TV show would have to be cut to 28.8 minutes losing at least 2 commercials.
- jonas21 7y agoThey actually tried this, during the French Revolution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar It didn't catch on then either.
- zokier 7y agoAnd again in the 90s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
- zokier 7y ago14.4 minutes is a centiday btw. For decimal time I think milliday is the most reasonable unit, being very close to conventional minute. In practice Mars might be the best opportunity for enacting decimal time, because Earth based units would be bit awkward on Mars.
- mark-r 7y agoThanks for the correction.
- salgernon 7y agoSaw this here somewhere previously: Sweden did something more insane: Högertrafikomläggningen. Do it once, get it over with? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H
- irrational 7y agoWhat would the cost be to change everything for a country the size of the USA? I imagine it would be in the trillions.