7 ms·

Why the US and UK can’t stop fighting the metric system

30 points by nickt 4y ago

hyperman1 4y ago
I can't help noticing this article gathers enough interest to raise in the HN ranks, but attracts no discussion (0 posts when I write this). After decades of the same old arguments, is there anything new to be said other than things that boil down to 'I prefer metric/imperial because that's what I grew up with so its more natural' ?
- mdaniel 4y ago
  > I prefer I'm guessing that is only some portion of the audience, whereas I would suspect the network effect is the dominant term. Trying to push uphill against the cookbooks, road signs, local weather reports, etc is like trying to maintain one language in your head while the rest of the _local_ world is another language. Certainly possible, but is questionable use of that glucose I had never heard of "anti-metric vigilantes" like TFA discussed, but hopefully those are just some fringe jokers designed to get article clicks, and not a serious movement
mrlonglong 4y ago
As a Brit, I love metric. Imperial are a relic of the past, rightfully consigned to history. I'll be happy the day we go from miles to kilometres.
- pornel 4y ago
  On a related note, I wish car navigation apps had a more fine-grained configuration than all-imperial or all-metric. I need the car to show speed in miles, but I don't want the navigation to use yards.
curiousgibbon 4y ago
I've dealt with the British and American version of imperial measurements, and know metric. It's not exactly difficult to quantify and convert as necessary so all the culture wars confuse me. What enrages me about the American system is more the lack of consistency. Take something like mayonnaise. One brand will be sold with a price quoted in dollars per ounce, another in pounds, and yet another in x$/yoz for some y other than 1. And one will have calories per 2oz portion, one calories per 7oz portion, and the other calories per tablespoon (0.76oz) on the label. Obviously I made the numbers up, but this phenomenon is pure insanity. And it's blatant that the obfuscation is to enable exploitation of the consumer who has to perform arduous arithmetic to compare products. At least in the (pre-Brexit) UK the yoghurt had to have calories and price per 100g on the label, whether it was a 454g (vestiges of 1lb) pot, 500g, or some other size. I prefer consistency in some unit that I can learn to chaos. As for recipes: why insist on measuring things of totally unknown density in cups? Mass is the appropriate way to measure strawberries or lettuce leaves, not volume.
- ithkuil 4y ago
  > I prefer consistency in some unit that I can learn to chaos. Basically you made the case for the metric system! Yes, sure, technically it's not that hard to convert between units, when all you're doing is focusing kn converting units. But in real life you're supposed to use your brain to do other stuff and if you have to stop and suddenly perform a contortion to compare the price per weigh unit of one item with another item that uses another base weigh unit, well, that's now an extra step that you didn't ask for. With the metric system it can happen that some products use grams, and some kilograms (some countries use hectograms while others prefer decagrams, for some uses like food) and you have the same potential for inconsistency, however since there are only factors of ten at play, it doesn't take many brain cycles to quickly compare the numbers in your head.
  - georgeplusplus 4y ago
    However, the mass of people are not using their brain for other stuff between social media addiction and bing watching streaming platforms. I would say doing some forced arithmetic might do a little good. My post is slight sarcasm but it's quite egregious to compare working out simple arithmetic to a contortion of the mind. Have more faith in humanity.
  - curiousgibbon 4y ago
    I agree, of course metric is better. My point is that perhaps things can improve in a direction that is orthogonal to the metric vs imperial/US choice and doesn't require making anyone angry. The inherent superiority of metric is small enough that people are going to be angry about this stuff, and yet it's dwarfed by inherent idiocy of inconsistent labelling which is solvable without a prolonged culture siege.
- mytailorisrich 4y ago
  For recipes, cups, teaspoons, table spoons, are used (not only in the US but in most countries) because they are practical and precision is not required. Many ingredients naturally vary in size anywy and it is expected that the 'cook' will adjust as they go to get the desired result.
iamkoch 4y ago
I love in the UK and haven't met anyone who thinks a return to imperial units is a good idea. That being said, I met only a handful of people who classed themselves as pro-brexit and look how that turned out. I look forward to adding fractions of 16ths while shopping for plums
bluenose69 4y ago
The US resistance to change is also exemplified by those whacky dollar bills. Weird pyramid much? God much?
- wkat4242 4y ago
  And all the same colour and size. I've never handled dollars but I'd imagine that would be annoying. I like that I can tell a 20 and 50 euro bill apart even when I'm totally drunk.
  - bluenose69 4y ago
    I come from a funny-coloured-currency country but lived in the USA for a while. And, yes, it's very confusing dealing with the money there. You'd think you had loads of money in you wallet because it was straining your pocket, but it was just 25 one-dollar bills. With coloured bills, a person naturally tends to organize them a bit so you can tell at a glance whether you have enough money for lunch or not. The other thing is that bills feel sort of greasy or dirty. I'm not sure I can quite describe that, though. We used to have paper bills where I live but now it's plastic ones. They took a while to get used to because they are stiff and hard to organize. Then again, I almost never use actual currency anymore. It's all payment by phone or card. (Edit: spelling)
quitit 4y ago
If the UK are so inclined, they should return to the old currency measures of pounds, shillings, pennies, half pennies, farthings, thruppence, sixpence, florin, half crowns and crowns. 1 pound = 20 shillings 1 shilling = 12 pennies 1 penny = 4 farthings 3 pence* = 1 thruppence 6 pence = 1 sixpence 2 shillings = 1 florin 5 shillings = 1 crown (so 2 shillings + 2 thruppence = 1 half crown) Bless. *pence = plural of penny.
- musicale 4y ago
  1 pound = 240d divides evenly by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, etc.. And it's good for practicing arithmetic. ;-) [The Wizarding Currency of the Harry Potter series was presumably a parody of this but based on 1g = 17s*29k = 493k; 17 and 29 being somewhat less useful divisors, though in practice one could presumably divide physical quantities by 18 or 30 and price on the 17 or 29 scale. 29 does have the occasionally useful property of being the number of days in February in a leap year.]
- inkyoto 4y ago
  Thruppence is a somewhat inconvenient coin to pay with at a toll booth from a vehicle travelling at the 133619.661 furlongs per fortnight speed. It helps to travel prepared and dispense the required number of thruppence into little cloth bags beforehand – to throw them at the cashier without having to slow down.
llimos 4y ago
> “When I came to look closely at it,” he told me later, “the more it appeared to me that the European project was a deliberate attempt to reverse what happened at Babel. Curiously, the European Parliament building is based on Peter Bruegel's Tower of Babel [1]. [1] https://mattbell.org/why-is-the-strasbourg-parliament-based-on-tower-of-babel https://mattbell.org/why-is-the-strasbourg-parliament-based-...
Havoc 4y ago
I think it's telling that 5 out of 5 people pictured in the article look like they're >50 years old
bsder 4y ago
I suspect the issue is simply that there really isn't a driving force behind making "everything" metric anymore. The original impetus in the 1970s was that it was costing a lot of money to maintain multiple systems in manufacturing. CAD systems and automation make a lot of the issues moot. Everybody mostly converged to metric and let the CAD system put things in English for where you touch the legacy systems. CNC machines don't care whether you feed them metric or imperial units. So, we're left with "imperial" in the US in things like highway signage, consumer recipes (businesses needing recipes already run by weight for consistency so the switchover isn't that relevant--scales easily do both), and housing construction. Note that there is expense in updating these to metric with no particular advantage accruing from doing so. I note that one of the areas I never thought would become metric, consumer groceries, seems to be starting to change. Once this occurs, I suspect cookbooks will also start to change.
- Psychlist 4y ago
  > CAD systems and automation make a lot of the issues moot. Only sort of. Threads are probably the easiest counter-example, because single point cutting is much the same on CNC or manual lathe and while the CNC one can easily swap from 60 threads per inch to 5 per mm or whatever, cutting a 60° thread using a cutting tool that doesn't have a 60° point on it means another pass on every thread. Meanwhile the "imperial standard" is a loose collection of every thread ever and good luck to you. The big win is communication. With metric it's rare to be working in metre-newtons per farad-volt-second but with imperial often the conversion from energy to power involves going from pound-feet to horsepower (etc). Much easier to say or write "1234 joules over 18 seconds is 89.2 watts". It's one less conversion as well as less to say, and that matters when you're stacking many of them then trying to use units to verify that it makes sense. You also have the joy of "the hole for a 17/64ths Whitworth tap is 47.2 thou" or whatever other imperial nonsense machinists have to deal with. Meanwhile metric bunnies say "6mm tap therefore 5.1mm hole". Sure, you need a special drill bit in both cases, but honestly I'm just guessing at the imperial size and if I'm out by an order of magnitude I wouldn't know. But just guess... is 5.1 less than 6, yes or no?
  - rubberpoliceman 4y ago
andreareina 4y ago
US and UK pints are different. The ounces used to weigh metals aren’t the same ounces as used to weigh pretty much everything else. Aside from that, I can deal; teaspoons and tablespoons are perfectly cromulent measurements for use in the kitchen, as long as you’re measuring something that’s actually ok to measure by volume. Of course this is all in the kitchen, but IME most things that need to be measured precisely are already metric anyway. Except for fasteners and machining; the incongruity of my torque driver taking bits that are 3/8” square on the drive side and metric on the fastener side is amusing. What’s not amusing is finding the bits anywhere that’s not overpriced (and overseas)
precommunicator 4y ago
I feel people against global, or at the least, European unification of stuff, whatever they are, laws, units, currency, probably never went abroad for a prolonged period of time. Once you did, and you have to deal with everything from cultural shock to tax returns, you will change your mind pretty quickly (not even mentioning the language barrier).
kylehotchkiss 4y ago
Meters, grams, liters. Cool. Celsius? No way! Fahrenheit is a great scale for people. Under 0 is way too cold and over 100 is way too hot. -20c and 50c just don’t capture the range people can tolerate as well.
- feet 4y ago
  Decimals exist
  - iggldiggl 4y ago
    And having the freezing point of water at exactly 0 °C is also both neat and relevant in winter. Having the boiling point (at standard pressure) at exactly 100 °C might be a bit less relevant during day-to-day life, though occasionally it's still useful.
europeanguy 4y ago
Ok since everyone here is a fan of metric, can we also do away with imperial time? What is this nonsense, 1 minute has 60 seconds, but all of a sudden a day has 24 hours and a week 7 days? Why the arbitrary ratios? Compare to how 1 metric minutes is 10 metric seconds, 1 metric hour is 10 metric minutes, one metric day is 10 metric hours, one week is 10 metric days. How many metric seconds are there in one metric week? Well 10000 metric seconds, or 10 kiloseconds, of course. See how the conversions are so much easier in the metric system?
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  A few attenpts have been made on this in real life and Star Trek uses it too: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/32127/decimal-time-how-french-made-10-hour-day https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/32127/decimal-time-how-f...
- hyperman1 4y ago
  Afaik, that's sumerian time, not Imperial time. They used the thumb with the finger phalanges, giving 3 * 4=12 options. Together with 5 fingers on the other hand, they got 12 and 60 as bases. I don't know why they just didn't do 12 * 12. The 24 should be looked at as 12 am and 12 pm, the day starting at noon, so it's more like minus 12 to plus 12. But as we're engineers, lets do a back of the envelope trial: You're mostly stuck with days, months and years because of astronomical facts. Seconds are close to heartbeats which has some psychological nicities: People used to count short times in heartbeats. You might be able to redefine a second as 10 millidays. Weeks tend give decent divisions between work and free days. I remember reading about the USSR messing with the week rythm to get more work time, and it severely backfired in productivity. So you'd need to find a way to give about 8 days in each month as new weekend. Numbers 30 and 8 are hard to decimalize. Maybe define a week as 10 days, with day 1 of the week a holy day, and 1 or 2 more day in the week that workers can choose themselves. I don't see weeks getting much better like that. The french did give it a try in their revolution, but I don't know why only that part of metrification failed.
  - europeanguy 4y ago
    > Seconds are close to heartbeats which has some psychological nicities Ah yes, reminds me of the argument feet are better because it's a more human measure than meters (cf surely you're joking Mr Feynman)

30 points by nickt 4y ago

I can't help noticing this article gathers enough interest to raise in the HN ranks, but attracts no discussion (0 posts when I write this). After decades of the same old arguments, is there anything new to be said other than things that boil down to 'I prefer metric/imperial because that's what I grew up with so its more natural' ?

mdaniel 4y ago
> I prefer I'm guessing that is only some portion of the audience, whereas I would suspect the network effect is the dominant term. Trying to push uphill against the cookbooks, road signs, local weather reports, etc is like trying to maintain one language in your head while the rest of the _local_ world is another language. Certainly possible, but is questionable use of that glucose I had never heard of "anti-metric vigilantes" like TFA discussed, but hopefully those are just some fringe jokers designed to get article clicks, and not a serious movement

mrlonglong 4y ago

As a Brit, I love metric. Imperial are a relic of the past, rightfully consigned to history. I'll be happy the day we go from miles to kilometres.

pornel 4y ago
On a related note, I wish car navigation apps had a more fine-grained configuration than all-imperial or all-metric. I need the car to show speed in miles, but I don't want the navigation to use yards.

curiousgibbon 4y ago

I've dealt with the British and American version of imperial measurements, and know metric. It's not exactly difficult to quantify and convert as necessary so all the culture wars confuse me. What enrages me about the American system is more the lack of consistency. Take something like mayonnaise. One brand will be sold with a price quoted in dollars per ounce, another in pounds, and yet another in x$/yoz for some y other than 1. And one will have calories per 2oz portion, one calories per 7oz portion, and the other calories per tablespoon (0.76oz) on the label. Obviously I made the numbers up, but this phenomenon is pure insanity. And it's blatant that the obfuscation is to enable exploitation of the consumer who has to perform arduous arithmetic to compare products. At least in the (pre-Brexit) UK the yoghurt had to have calories and price per 100g on the label, whether it was a 454g (vestiges of 1lb) pot, 500g, or some other size. I prefer consistency in some unit that I can learn to chaos. As for recipes: why insist on measuring things of totally unknown density in cups? Mass is the appropriate way to measure strawberries or lettuce leaves, not volume.

ithkuil 4y ago
> I prefer consistency in some unit that I can learn to chaos. Basically you made the case for the metric system! Yes, sure, technically it's not that hard to convert between units, when all you're doing is focusing kn converting units. But in real life you're supposed to use your brain to do other stuff and if you have to stop and suddenly perform a contortion to compare the price per weigh unit of one item with another item that uses another base weigh unit, well, that's now an extra step that you didn't ask for. With the metric system it can happen that some products use grams, and some kilograms (some countries use hectograms while others prefer decagrams, for some uses like food) and you have the same potential for inconsistency, however since there are only factors of ten at play, it doesn't take many brain cycles to quickly compare the numbers in your head.
- georgeplusplus 4y ago
  However, the mass of people are not using their brain for other stuff between social media addiction and bing watching streaming platforms. I would say doing some forced arithmetic might do a little good. My post is slight sarcasm but it's quite egregious to compare working out simple arithmetic to a contortion of the mind. Have more faith in humanity.
- curiousgibbon 4y ago
  I agree, of course metric is better. My point is that perhaps things can improve in a direction that is orthogonal to the metric vs imperial/US choice and doesn't require making anyone angry. The inherent superiority of metric is small enough that people are going to be angry about this stuff, and yet it's dwarfed by inherent idiocy of inconsistent labelling which is solvable without a prolonged culture siege.
mytailorisrich 4y ago
For recipes, cups, teaspoons, table spoons, are used (not only in the US but in most countries) because they are practical and precision is not required. Many ingredients naturally vary in size anywy and it is expected that the 'cook' will adjust as they go to get the desired result.

iamkoch 4y ago

I love in the UK and haven't met anyone who thinks a return to imperial units is a good idea. That being said, I met only a handful of people who classed themselves as pro-brexit and look how that turned out. I look forward to adding fractions of 16ths while shopping for plums

bluenose69 4y ago

The US resistance to change is also exemplified by those whacky dollar bills. Weird pyramid much? God much?

wkat4242 4y ago
And all the same colour and size. I've never handled dollars but I'd imagine that would be annoying. I like that I can tell a 20 and 50 euro bill apart even when I'm totally drunk.
- bluenose69 4y ago
  I come from a funny-coloured-currency country but lived in the USA for a while. And, yes, it's very confusing dealing with the money there. You'd think you had loads of money in you wallet because it was straining your pocket, but it was just 25 one-dollar bills. With coloured bills, a person naturally tends to organize them a bit so you can tell at a glance whether you have enough money for lunch or not. The other thing is that bills feel sort of greasy or dirty. I'm not sure I can quite describe that, though. We used to have paper bills where I live but now it's plastic ones. They took a while to get used to because they are stiff and hard to organize. Then again, I almost never use actual currency anymore. It's all payment by phone or card. (Edit: spelling)

quitit 4y ago

If the UK are so inclined, they should return to the old currency measures of pounds, shillings, pennies, half pennies, farthings, thruppence, sixpence, florin, half crowns and crowns. 1 pound = 20 shillings 1 shilling = 12 pennies 1 penny = 4 farthings 3 pence* = 1 thruppence 6 pence = 1 sixpence 2 shillings = 1 florin 5 shillings = 1 crown (so 2 shillings + 2 thruppence = 1 half crown) Bless. *pence = plural of penny.

musicale 4y ago
1 pound = 240d divides evenly by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, etc.. And it's good for practicing arithmetic. ;-) [The Wizarding Currency of the Harry Potter series was presumably a parody of this but based on 1g = 17s*29k = 493k; 17 and 29 being somewhat less useful divisors, though in practice one could presumably divide physical quantities by 18 or 30 and price on the 17 or 29 scale. 29 does have the occasionally useful property of being the number of days in February in a leap year.]
inkyoto 4y ago
Thruppence is a somewhat inconvenient coin to pay with at a toll booth from a vehicle travelling at the 133619.661 furlongs per fortnight speed. It helps to travel prepared and dispense the required number of thruppence into little cloth bags beforehand – to throw them at the cashier without having to slow down.

llimos 4y ago

> “When I came to look closely at it,” he told me later, “the more it appeared to me that the European project was a deliberate attempt to reverse what happened at Babel. Curiously, the European Parliament building is based on Peter Bruegel's Tower of Babel [1]. [1] https://mattbell.org/why-is-the-strasbourg-parliament-based-on-tower-of-babel https://mattbell.org/why-is-the-strasbourg-parliament-based-...

Havoc 4y ago

I think it's telling that 5 out of 5 people pictured in the article look like they're >50 years old

bsder 4y ago

I suspect the issue is simply that there really isn't a driving force behind making "everything" metric anymore. The original impetus in the 1970s was that it was costing a lot of money to maintain multiple systems in manufacturing. CAD systems and automation make a lot of the issues moot. Everybody mostly converged to metric and let the CAD system put things in English for where you touch the legacy systems. CNC machines don't care whether you feed them metric or imperial units. So, we're left with "imperial" in the US in things like highway signage, consumer recipes (businesses needing recipes already run by weight for consistency so the switchover isn't that relevant--scales easily do both), and housing construction. Note that there is expense in updating these to metric with no particular advantage accruing from doing so. I note that one of the areas I never thought would become metric, consumer groceries, seems to be starting to change. Once this occurs, I suspect cookbooks will also start to change.

Psychlist 4y ago
> CAD systems and automation make a lot of the issues moot. Only sort of. Threads are probably the easiest counter-example, because single point cutting is much the same on CNC or manual lathe and while the CNC one can easily swap from 60 threads per inch to 5 per mm or whatever, cutting a 60° thread using a cutting tool that doesn't have a 60° point on it means another pass on every thread. Meanwhile the "imperial standard" is a loose collection of every thread ever and good luck to you. The big win is communication. With metric it's rare to be working in metre-newtons per farad-volt-second but with imperial often the conversion from energy to power involves going from pound-feet to horsepower (etc). Much easier to say or write "1234 joules over 18 seconds is 89.2 watts". It's one less conversion as well as less to say, and that matters when you're stacking many of them then trying to use units to verify that it makes sense. You also have the joy of "the hole for a 17/64ths Whitworth tap is 47.2 thou" or whatever other imperial nonsense machinists have to deal with. Meanwhile metric bunnies say "6mm tap therefore 5.1mm hole". Sure, you need a special drill bit in both cases, but honestly I'm just guessing at the imperial size and if I'm out by an order of magnitude I wouldn't know. But just guess... is 5.1 less than 6, yes or no?
- rubberpoliceman 4y ago

andreareina 4y ago

US and UK pints are different. The ounces used to weigh metals aren’t the same ounces as used to weigh pretty much everything else. Aside from that, I can deal; teaspoons and tablespoons are perfectly cromulent measurements for use in the kitchen, as long as you’re measuring something that’s actually ok to measure by volume. Of course this is all in the kitchen, but IME most things that need to be measured precisely are already metric anyway. Except for fasteners and machining; the incongruity of my torque driver taking bits that are 3/8” square on the drive side and metric on the fastener side is amusing. What’s not amusing is finding the bits anywhere that’s not overpriced (and overseas)

precommunicator 4y ago

I feel people against global, or at the least, European unification of stuff, whatever they are, laws, units, currency, probably never went abroad for a prolonged period of time. Once you did, and you have to deal with everything from cultural shock to tax returns, you will change your mind pretty quickly (not even mentioning the language barrier).

kylehotchkiss 4y ago

Meters, grams, liters. Cool. Celsius? No way! Fahrenheit is a great scale for people. Under 0 is way too cold and over 100 is way too hot. -20c and 50c just don’t capture the range people can tolerate as well.

feet 4y ago
Decimals exist
- iggldiggl 4y ago
  And having the freezing point of water at exactly 0 °C is also both neat and relevant in winter. Having the boiling point (at standard pressure) at exactly 100 °C might be a bit less relevant during day-to-day life, though occasionally it's still useful.

europeanguy 4y ago

Ok since everyone here is a fan of metric, can we also do away with imperial time? What is this nonsense, 1 minute has 60 seconds, but all of a sudden a day has 24 hours and a week 7 days? Why the arbitrary ratios? Compare to how 1 metric minutes is 10 metric seconds, 1 metric hour is 10 metric minutes, one metric day is 10 metric hours, one week is 10 metric days. How many metric seconds are there in one metric week? Well 10000 metric seconds, or 10 kiloseconds, of course. See how the conversions are so much easier in the metric system?

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
A few attenpts have been made on this in real life and Star Trek uses it too: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/32127/decimal-time-how-french-made-10-hour-day https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/32127/decimal-time-how-f...
hyperman1 4y ago
Afaik, that's sumerian time, not Imperial time. They used the thumb with the finger phalanges, giving 3 * 4=12 options. Together with 5 fingers on the other hand, they got 12 and 60 as bases. I don't know why they just didn't do 12 * 12. The 24 should be looked at as 12 am and 12 pm, the day starting at noon, so it's more like minus 12 to plus 12. But as we're engineers, lets do a back of the envelope trial: You're mostly stuck with days, months and years because of astronomical facts. Seconds are close to heartbeats which has some psychological nicities: People used to count short times in heartbeats. You might be able to redefine a second as 10 millidays. Weeks tend give decent divisions between work and free days. I remember reading about the USSR messing with the week rythm to get more work time, and it severely backfired in productivity. So you'd need to find a way to give about 8 days in each month as new weekend. Numbers 30 and 8 are hard to decimalize. Maybe define a week as 10 days, with day 1 of the week a holy day, and 1 or 2 more day in the week that workers can choose themselves. I don't see weeks getting much better like that. The french did give it a try in their revolution, but I don't know why only that part of metrification failed.
- europeanguy 4y ago
  > Seconds are close to heartbeats which has some psychological nicities Ah yes, reminds me of the argument feet are better because it's a more human measure than meters (cf surely you're joking Mr Feynman)