5 ms·

I find impossible to read those kind of things when you use the United States customary units

by grabball 7y ago

dkersten 7y ago
At least they’re not using “football fields” as a measurement unit...
- glandium 7y ago
  Around here, it's in "Tokyo Dome"s. Just as useless.
choeger 7y ago
I don't know it is easy to translate feet from US to German. I just need to know which city the unit refers to: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsolete_German_units_of_measurement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsolete_German_units_of_mea... /S (honestly, once the US empire is gone for good, historians will have a good laugh about their stubborn refusal to adopt the metric system. Must be the worst case of NIH in history)
- jrockway 7y ago
  Complaints about systems of measurement is the topic every Internet forum should prohibit in their rules, but none does. It's strange. Politics is tame in comparison! A foot is the distance light in a vacuum travels in 1.01 nanoseconds. A meter is the distance light travels in 3.33 nanoseconds. It is not really a big deal what you name that, they are both totally arbitrary. They have no relationship to any core feature of the Universe except by some reverse-engineered arbitrary constant. (You start by defining that there are 9192631770 transitions between the two hyperfine ground states of caesium-133 atoms in a second. You then build the meter by saying that light in a vacuum travels 299792458 meters in 1 second. There is no special meaning to 9192631770 or 299792458; they are totally made-up bullshit constants that mean nothing. Kilograms are even worse; before 2019 it was just a big arbitrary ball of metal in a museum. I won't even mention how the base unit has the prefix "kilo". How crazy someone is for not using the elegant kilogram/meter/second unit system. It's just so pure and natural!) It seems pointless to me to argue over (or worse, get high-and-mighty over) what these constants are called. SI has a bunch of bullshit constants. The imperial system has a bunch of bullshit constants. It's bullshit all the way down, my friend. As long as you know what constants to use, which is why we name units, then it doesn't really matter which you use. None is better than the other. Arguments about units usually devolve into how crazy it is that people use fractions with imperial units. But nobody using the units for real things uses fractions; for low precision applications, sure, people will say "a half inch", but when precision matters, it's "500 thou". And people use fractions with meters/kilograms/seconds, they say "half a second" when they really mean "500ms" or "500.000000000ms" or whatever. (This is all weird to me because fractions exist in real life -- you can fold a sheet of paper into thirds. But there is no way to express it in a decimal dimension. You can make three sections that are 33mm, 33mm, and 34mm, but that's not quite right. So I guess you make them 33.33333333333mm, 33.33333333333mm, and 33.33333333334mm?) It gets weirder when you start using the SI prefixes. There are names for every power of ten, but people only use certain prefixes with certain base units. Nobody ever talks about centiamps, but they'll happily use centimeters. Nobody ever uses deci-anythings, but there it is on the trivia test for SI prefixes. And of course, computer people thought that prefixes would be pretty useful, but we make bytes from 8 bits and not 10, so a kilobyte is 1024 bytes... for some reason. (It's 8192 bits, of course!) Decades later someone decided this was stupid and invented new words for every SI prefix just for computer people. The best case is that you sneak in an extra letter for every quantity ("1KiB") and people will think you made a typo and interpret it as 1024 bytes... exactly as they would if you wrote "1KB". If you want to refer to 1000 bytes you ... just say 1000 bytes because there is no byte prefix that means 1000 unambiguously. (The only people smart enough to benefit from this were marketers. They could write 1K and say "well we thought you were using SI prefixes" and convince customers that they were getting 1KiB of storage for the price of 1000 bytes. If it sounds too good to be true it probably is.) So this all continues to be arbitrary. What about fastener sizes? The metric system gave us the intuitive ISO metric screw thread. How big is an M4 screw? The minor diameter is 3.242mm, which is obvious from the name. An M4 socket head cap screw accepts a 3mm wrench. An M10 screw accepts an... 9... erm... 8mm wrench. (The SAE/UTS system makes even less sense, if that's possible. It's wire gauges and threads per inch, I think.) Anyway, my point is that it's all super arbitrary and to do anything you need a lookup table. You can go look at a cesium atom and you'll have no idea how that defines the meter, kilogram, second, or inch without a lookup table. You'll never be able to make a screw with just one number ("M4"). So it's not really worth making snide comments about. To answer your actual question, why does the US use the metric system? Because we started doing science and engineering before the metric system was invented. There was no reason to switch because there are no benefits in switching. It's all arbitrary.
  - bmn__ 7y ago
    > my point is that it's all super arbitrary Granted. Yet it is wrong of you to imply that makes all measurement systems equally bad. > There was no reason to switch because there are no benefits in switching. SI has two advantages designed into it, namely easy conversion between unit orders of magnitude (e.g. 1 ℓ = 10 dℓ = 100 cℓ = 1000 mℓ), and easy conversion between units (e.g. 1 t water = 1 ㎥ water, 1 ℓ water = 1 ㍹ water).
- scraft 7y ago
  To be fair, over here in the UK, we have MPH for roads, stones and pounds for peoples weight (kilograms are becoming more popular, in particular for the under 25s), feet and inches for peoples height (meters becoming more popular for under 25s). So we have a bit of a hybrid really, I am 36 so get a bit of both, but my parents need everything converted to "old money" as they call it, they can't imagine what 25cm length is, they would need it in feet and inches. It is less stubborn for them, more, "why bother"? They can get by as is and have other things to occupy their time than trying to work out what familiar distances and weights are using a different scaler. Given that roads are still imperial as are lots of other things (mattress sizes, timber sizes, etc) it isn't like if they switched to metric it would even fix anything useful.
  - RugnirViking 7y ago
    I think the important distinction here is that the UK is definately on the path to transitioning away sensibly in that imperial units haven't been taught at any school at any level for many years. All product units (litres, kgs etc) in shops are given in both metric and imperial, with the metric part required by law and the imperial part there for old people's convenience.
    - kd5bjo 7y ago
      In an odd way, the US is fully metricized: they’re one of the original signatories of the Treaty of the Metre, and redefined all of their legacy units in terms of SI ones [1]. SI units are used directly in the sciences and most products have the SI equivalent listed alongside the traditional measure. I understand that industries with international supply chains, like the auto industry, are also mostly metric these days. There just hasn’t been much of a reason for the purely-domestic parts of the market to switch: house builders are looking for 2x4 lumber, and won’t buy from a lumberyard that calls it 50x100mm. Knowing that, the sawmills continue producing the 1.5x3.5 inch profile that’s called “2x4” and anything else is a specialty item. Who has an incentive to push through the change? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendenhall_Order https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendenhall_Order
    - beojan 7y ago
Symbiote 7y ago
I'm surprised an Indian person has used US units How long does it take immigrants in the US to "go native"?
- oefrha 7y ago
  A decade is not enough in my experience. I think the answer is never.
- beojan 7y ago
  India is a Commonwealth country, and I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people still think in imperial (not US customary) units. Also, here in the UK, for the purposes of identifying COVID-19 symptoms, a fever is being defined as 38.6 °C = 100.0 °F, so US recommendations are clearly having an influence in other countries.
  - garmaine 7y ago
    The US doesn't recognize 100.0 °F as a fever. That's within normal range.
    - RandomBacon 7y ago
      There are different definitions of "fever" in medical websites. Some say anything above a person's normal average temperature is a fever, with it being considered a serious fever if the temperature is above 100.4°F.
  - BerislavLopac 7y ago
    100 F is 37.8 (more precisely 37.77777...) C.
    - beojan 7y ago
      Indeed. It's the Celsius figure that I misquoted. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-guidance-on-isolation-for-residential-educational-settings https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid...
yodsanklai 7y ago
Indeed, it seems odd in a "maths" context with nice formatted formulas. Do US kids in science class use the metric system?
- kd5bjo 7y ago
  > Do US kids in science class use the metric system? In general, yes. Though like everything else in the US education system, it’s really up to the local school boards. When I went through a couple of decades ago, we did almost everything in SI units with the occasional oddball problem in traditional units to make sure we knew how to do the conversions.
  - tonyarkles 7y ago
    Your neighbours to the north do it the same way. In school (elementary, high school), all of the science classes are going to be in SI units, minus maybe a lesson or two in unit conversion. It wasn’t really until engineering school where they started really forcing us to be comfortable with problems that had a bunch of unit conversions; the engineers were really happy to give us problems with grams, pounds, miles, and litres, and expect us to get the right answers.
    - kd5bjo 7y ago
      That sounds about right. I (vaguely) remember having to do some thermodynamics problems in BTUs and Rankine temperatures without converting to SI, but that was certainly the exception. Once I got into the engineering curriculum, we were also expected to be able to do simple torque and force problems in pounds (force or mass, depending on context), feet (distance), foot-pounds (energy), and pound-feet (torque). Mostly it was to show that all the concepts work in both systems, I think. In case you found yourself working in an industry that hadn’t switched to metric.
milkbikis 7y ago
Author here. I also prefer metric in general, but the "6 feet" guideline has been so recognizable that I decided to convert to imperial to preserve it. It also helps compare with San Francisco where I live, which is famously 7x7 miles.

I find impossible to read those kind of things when you use the United States customary units

dkersten 7y ago

At least they’re not using “football fields” as a measurement unit...

glandium 7y ago
Around here, it's in "Tokyo Dome"s. Just as useless.

choeger 7y ago

I don't know it is easy to translate feet from US to German. I just need to know which city the unit refers to: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsolete_German_units_of_measurement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsolete_German_units_of_mea... /S (honestly, once the US empire is gone for good, historians will have a good laugh about their stubborn refusal to adopt the metric system. Must be the worst case of NIH in history)

jrockway 7y ago
Complaints about systems of measurement is the topic every Internet forum should prohibit in their rules, but none does. It's strange. Politics is tame in comparison! A foot is the distance light in a vacuum travels in 1.01 nanoseconds. A meter is the distance light travels in 3.33 nanoseconds. It is not really a big deal what you name that, they are both totally arbitrary. They have no relationship to any core feature of the Universe except by some reverse-engineered arbitrary constant. (You start by defining that there are 9192631770 transitions between the two hyperfine ground states of caesium-133 atoms in a second. You then build the meter by saying that light in a vacuum travels 299792458 meters in 1 second. There is no special meaning to 9192631770 or 299792458; they are totally made-up bullshit constants that mean nothing. Kilograms are even worse; before 2019 it was just a big arbitrary ball of metal in a museum. I won't even mention how the base unit has the prefix "kilo". How crazy someone is for not using the elegant kilogram/meter/second unit system. It's just so pure and natural!) It seems pointless to me to argue over (or worse, get high-and-mighty over) what these constants are called. SI has a bunch of bullshit constants. The imperial system has a bunch of bullshit constants. It's bullshit all the way down, my friend. As long as you know what constants to use, which is why we name units, then it doesn't really matter which you use. None is better than the other. Arguments about units usually devolve into how crazy it is that people use fractions with imperial units. But nobody using the units for real things uses fractions; for low precision applications, sure, people will say "a half inch", but when precision matters, it's "500 thou". And people use fractions with meters/kilograms/seconds, they say "half a second" when they really mean "500ms" or "500.000000000ms" or whatever. (This is all weird to me because fractions exist in real life -- you can fold a sheet of paper into thirds. But there is no way to express it in a decimal dimension. You can make three sections that are 33mm, 33mm, and 34mm, but that's not quite right. So I guess you make them 33.33333333333mm, 33.33333333333mm, and 33.33333333334mm?) It gets weirder when you start using the SI prefixes. There are names for every power of ten, but people only use certain prefixes with certain base units. Nobody ever talks about centiamps, but they'll happily use centimeters. Nobody ever uses deci-anythings, but there it is on the trivia test for SI prefixes. And of course, computer people thought that prefixes would be pretty useful, but we make bytes from 8 bits and not 10, so a kilobyte is 1024 bytes... for some reason. (It's 8192 bits, of course!) Decades later someone decided this was stupid and invented new words for every SI prefix just for computer people. The best case is that you sneak in an extra letter for every quantity ("1KiB") and people will think you made a typo and interpret it as 1024 bytes... exactly as they would if you wrote "1KB". If you want to refer to 1000 bytes you ... just say 1000 bytes because there is no byte prefix that means 1000 unambiguously. (The only people smart enough to benefit from this were marketers. They could write 1K and say "well we thought you were using SI prefixes" and convince customers that they were getting 1KiB of storage for the price of 1000 bytes. If it sounds too good to be true it probably is.) So this all continues to be arbitrary. What about fastener sizes? The metric system gave us the intuitive ISO metric screw thread. How big is an M4 screw? The minor diameter is 3.242mm, which is obvious from the name. An M4 socket head cap screw accepts a 3mm wrench. An M10 screw accepts an... 9... erm... 8mm wrench. (The SAE/UTS system makes even less sense, if that's possible. It's wire gauges and threads per inch, I think.) Anyway, my point is that it's all super arbitrary and to do anything you need a lookup table. You can go look at a cesium atom and you'll have no idea how that defines the meter, kilogram, second, or inch without a lookup table. You'll never be able to make a screw with just one number ("M4"). So it's not really worth making snide comments about. To answer your actual question, why does the US use the metric system? Because we started doing science and engineering before the metric system was invented. There was no reason to switch because there are no benefits in switching. It's all arbitrary.
- bmn__ 7y ago
  > my point is that it's all super arbitrary Granted. Yet it is wrong of you to imply that makes all measurement systems equally bad. > There was no reason to switch because there are no benefits in switching. SI has two advantages designed into it, namely easy conversion between unit orders of magnitude (e.g. 1 ℓ = 10 dℓ = 100 cℓ = 1000 mℓ), and easy conversion between units (e.g. 1 t water = 1 ㎥ water, 1 ℓ water = 1 ㍹ water).
scraft 7y ago
To be fair, over here in the UK, we have MPH for roads, stones and pounds for peoples weight (kilograms are becoming more popular, in particular for the under 25s), feet and inches for peoples height (meters becoming more popular for under 25s). So we have a bit of a hybrid really, I am 36 so get a bit of both, but my parents need everything converted to "old money" as they call it, they can't imagine what 25cm length is, they would need it in feet and inches. It is less stubborn for them, more, "why bother"? They can get by as is and have other things to occupy their time than trying to work out what familiar distances and weights are using a different scaler. Given that roads are still imperial as are lots of other things (mattress sizes, timber sizes, etc) it isn't like if they switched to metric it would even fix anything useful.
- RugnirViking 7y ago
  I think the important distinction here is that the UK is definately on the path to transitioning away sensibly in that imperial units haven't been taught at any school at any level for many years. All product units (litres, kgs etc) in shops are given in both metric and imperial, with the metric part required by law and the imperial part there for old people's convenience.
  - kd5bjo 7y ago
    In an odd way, the US is fully metricized: they’re one of the original signatories of the Treaty of the Metre, and redefined all of their legacy units in terms of SI ones [1]. SI units are used directly in the sciences and most products have the SI equivalent listed alongside the traditional measure. I understand that industries with international supply chains, like the auto industry, are also mostly metric these days. There just hasn’t been much of a reason for the purely-domestic parts of the market to switch: house builders are looking for 2x4 lumber, and won’t buy from a lumberyard that calls it 50x100mm. Knowing that, the sawmills continue producing the 1.5x3.5 inch profile that’s called “2x4” and anything else is a specialty item. Who has an incentive to push through the change? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendenhall_Order https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendenhall_Order
  - beojan 7y ago

Symbiote 7y ago

I'm surprised an Indian person has used US units How long does it take immigrants in the US to "go native"?

oefrha 7y ago
A decade is not enough in my experience. I think the answer is never.
beojan 7y ago
India is a Commonwealth country, and I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people still think in imperial (not US customary) units. Also, here in the UK, for the purposes of identifying COVID-19 symptoms, a fever is being defined as 38.6 °C = 100.0 °F, so US recommendations are clearly having an influence in other countries.
- garmaine 7y ago
  The US doesn't recognize 100.0 °F as a fever. That's within normal range.
  - RandomBacon 7y ago
    There are different definitions of "fever" in medical websites. Some say anything above a person's normal average temperature is a fever, with it being considered a serious fever if the temperature is above 100.4°F.
- BerislavLopac 7y ago
  100 F is 37.8 (more precisely 37.77777...) C.
  - beojan 7y ago
    Indeed. It's the Celsius figure that I misquoted. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-guidance-on-isolation-for-residential-educational-settings https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid...

yodsanklai 7y ago

Indeed, it seems odd in a "maths" context with nice formatted formulas. Do US kids in science class use the metric system?

kd5bjo 7y ago
> Do US kids in science class use the metric system? In general, yes. Though like everything else in the US education system, it’s really up to the local school boards. When I went through a couple of decades ago, we did almost everything in SI units with the occasional oddball problem in traditional units to make sure we knew how to do the conversions.
- tonyarkles 7y ago
  Your neighbours to the north do it the same way. In school (elementary, high school), all of the science classes are going to be in SI units, minus maybe a lesson or two in unit conversion. It wasn’t really until engineering school where they started really forcing us to be comfortable with problems that had a bunch of unit conversions; the engineers were really happy to give us problems with grams, pounds, miles, and litres, and expect us to get the right answers.
  - kd5bjo 7y ago
    That sounds about right. I (vaguely) remember having to do some thermodynamics problems in BTUs and Rankine temperatures without converting to SI, but that was certainly the exception. Once I got into the engineering curriculum, we were also expected to be able to do simple torque and force problems in pounds (force or mass, depending on context), feet (distance), foot-pounds (energy), and pound-feet (torque). Mostly it was to show that all the concepts work in both systems, I think. In case you found yourself working in an industry that hadn’t switched to metric.

milkbikis 7y ago

Author here. I also prefer metric in general, but the "6 feet" guideline has been so recognizable that I decided to convert to imperial to preserve it. It also helps compare with San Francisco where I live, which is famously 7x7 miles.