7 ms·

Ah standards. Taking all the fun out of international travel confusion. Now if we could only get the US onto the metric system and abolish daylight saving time

Ah standards. Taking all the fun out of international travel confusion. Now if we could only get the US onto the metric system and abolish daylight saving time.

kmeisthax 3y ago
And, for that matter, stop counting years and centuries from one. The 19th century was from 1900 to 1999. The 20th started at the year 2000.
- simple10 3y ago
  Let's go a step farther and reset the year counting from Jesus to L Ron Hubbard's death. Either that or reset on the singularity, but I'm impatient. [EDIT] I've just been informed LRH didn't completely die. I'll petition for the singularity reset.
  - kibwen 3y ago
    There already exists a notion of "the human era" that adds exactly 10,000 to the current year: > The Holocene calendar, also known as the Holocene Era or Human Era (HE), is a year numbering system that adds exactly 10,000 years to the currently dominant (AD/BC or CE/BCE) numbering scheme, placing its first year near the beginning of the Holocene geological epoch and the Neolithic Revolution, when humans shifted from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to agriculture and fixed settlements. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar (Of course, the choice to add exactly 10,000 is a compromise to make it trivial to interconvert between HE and AD.) You can even buy Human Era calendars: https://shop-us.kurzgesagt.org/collections/calendar https://shop-us.kurzgesagt.org/collections/calendar
- gsich 3y ago
  decades too
- chungy 3y ago
  The current century being the 21st will make that very confusing. The 2000/2001 start of the 21st century is reasonable debate. Mathematically, 2001 makes sense. In terms of being excited during the 1999→2000 transition with all the digits incrementing, it makes more sense socially to have celebrated the new millennium and century then.
- namro 3y ago
  So, the first century in the Current Era would be 99 years? There's no year 0. A century is any quantity of 100, go crazier: 1946 to 2045!!!
  - maxerickson 3y ago
    We can include a year called 0 in the first century, no problem. All we have to do to get a year 0 is decide that there was one.
    - tourmalinetaco 3y ago
      > All we have to do to get a year 0 is decide that there was one. But it’s not one, it’s 0
    - zarzavat 3y ago
      For that matter let’s get rid of the asinine BC system and just use negative years AD. The thing that gets me is that when they invented the CE notation, they went to the trouble of inventing a “BCE” notation for BC. Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory! Also while we are fixing broken modular arithmetic, let’s add a proper modulo division operator to all the languages that got % wrong :)
      - madcaptenor 3y ago
        What you want is called "astronomical year numbering" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_year_numbering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_year_numbering), so you have 1 BC = 0, 2 BC = -1, and so on. Astronomers are about the only people who would need to do math on negative years.
  - KptMarchewa 3y ago
    How long did hundred years war last? Let's redefine hundred to that.
- nulbyte 3y ago
  That numbering would be confusing. No one says "zeroth." The first of a set is always "first." The first century is the first 100 years counting from the first day of the first year of the common era.
- samtho 3y ago
  The 20th century started on Jan 1, 2001. Because there was no year 0 (1 AD/CE started immediately after BC/E), 1/1/0001 was the beginning of the first century which ended on the last day of 100 CE, exactly one hundred years later.
  - valleyer 3y ago
    So, which century are you skipping to make this work? I think we all have our preferences.
- zarzavat 3y ago
  Considering the magnitudes of the celebrations of the new millennium and 21st century on Jan 1 2000 vs 2001, I’d say that argument has been comprehensively won by the zero indexers already.
mensetmanusman 3y ago
If base 12 is good enough for the Babylonians and for the fundamental subatomic particles, it's good enough for me :) I'll change when we have a metric clock used regularly.
Kamq 3y ago
I'm willing to adopt the metric system, but I want to use alternative base-units to screw with people. By which I mean, something like using rods, but with SI-prefixes.
- tialaramex 3y ago
  Why rods? Use one of the Natural unit systems, for example, how about one of the systems where c = 1 which makes matter/energy conversions much easier, as now Einstein's equation simplifies to E=m justifying insistence on the same units for measuring how much electricity you used last month and your target "weight" at a doctor's appointment :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units
  - Kamq 3y ago
    > Why rods? Because mega-rod and giga-rod sound hilarious to me. Also those units end up with a lot of pretty alien things as their bases, 10e-35 meters isn't super useful for human things. Whereas a rod maps pretty well to "down the hallway a bit", and a half a rod works pretty well for "the other side of the room". meter and foot work well for this as well, but they don't sound nearly as cool, though I would be willing to measure distances in "kilo-feet" just to screw with people. Alternatively a system of esoteric units starting with the meter would also work for what I'm thinking about (say, 12 meters to the dimber, with 60 dimbers to a schlimmel).
skissane 3y ago
> Now if we could only get the US onto the metric system Seriously though, I wonder if immigration is going to help with that? Almost everyone else in the world uses metric in everyday life. Immigrants to the US have to go through the unpleasant process of adjusting to not doing so. I'm sure many (most?) of them wish they didn't have to do that. As the immigration process continues, might this lead to growing popular support for finally phasing out non-metric units?
- gerdesj 3y ago
  "Almost everyone else in the world uses metric in everyday life." RLY? Hello from the UK! Here we are metricated in general and then it goes a bit mad. As you know we generally have at least five ways of saying the same thing. Well actually we don't any more. Mostly metricated but we still have inches and feet etc hanging on in there. I suspect that most other countries are the same. I recall (my Mum) buying stuff in West German markets by der pfund (slightly larger than the Imperial pound, I think). We used to measure spirits by the gill and when we joined the EU after a while we metricated most of our measures to this: https://www.gov.uk/weights-measures-and-packaging-the-law/specified-quantities https://www.gov.uk/weights-measures-and-packaging-the-law/sp... We still drink pints (obvs!)
  - skissane 3y ago
    > RLY? Hello from the UK! I did say almost everyone. The UK is unusual in still retaining significantly more pre-metric units than the average country does, although still much less than the US. Road distances in miles and speed limits in miles per hour being the most obvious one. Almost everywhere on earth, other than the US and UK (and maybe a tiny handful more, such as Burma/Myanmar, Liberia, Antigua), road distances are in kilometres. > I suspect that most other countries are the same. Many countries have some occasional lingering use of pre-metric measurements, but 90%+ of day-to-day units are metric. In the US, it is the other way around, 90%+ of day-to-day units are non-metric. The UK is unusual in lying somewhere in-between. > I recall (my Mum) buying stuff in West German markets by der pfund (slightly larger than the Imperial pound, I think). Since 1854, Germany has used the "metric pound" (pfund) of 500 grams exactly, as opposed to the US/UK pound of exactly 453.59237 grams (since 1959; before then, the US and UK had slightly different definitions of the pound). Prior to the metric system, almost every country in Europe had its own unique "pound", all of which were around about (but not exactly) 500 grams. Some countries (e.g Australia) metricated by dropping the pound entirely, but several West European countries (such as France and Germany) instead metricated it to be exactly 500 grams. Arguably, the metric pound actually is a metric unit (0.5kg is a sufficiently round multiple of the base unit, even if a power of 2 instead of 10), whereas the US/UK pound is not (nobody would consider 0.45359237 to be round) > We still drink pints (obvs!) In Australia, we still measure beer by pints too. But our pint is different from the UK pint. The UK pint is exactly 568.26125 mL. The US liquid pint is exactly 473.176473 mL. In Australia, a pint of beer is exactly 570 mL (metricated by rounding up from the UK pint), except (for obscure historical reasons no one seems to be able to explain) in South Australia were a pint is instead defined as 425 mL (a volume of beer which in other Australian states is called a "schooner"). However, stuff like beer sizes falls into that "10% of surviving non-metric" which many countries have, so I don't think it really counts.
adventured 3y ago
The US heavily uses metric, just like other nations also use English while having a different primary language. The US leads the world in technological and scientific output and has for over a century, it very obviously and very commonly uses the metric system. Communication is more important than measurement. Nearly everybody else needs to abandon their languages and adopt English, Spanish or Mandarin - because standards. Half the people of Europe share no common language and can't communicate properly with one another, if only we could talk some sense into them and get them onto a standard.
- tommiegannert 3y ago
  I liked that Estonia said "f*ck it, English is now the official second language." Meanwhile, in Switzerland, Zürich is contemplating making school children study English before French/Italian. That's great, except Switzerland is already quad-lingual, depending on canton. Making it more difficult for a german-speaking person in Zürich to go to Geneva probably won't be great for unity. Instead of all cantons adopting one of the existing four as the universal language, they are now trying for English, it seems. (As an immigrant observer.)
  - jhugo 3y ago
    > Instead of all cantons adopting one of the existing four as the universal language, they are now trying for English, it seems. That’s likely deliberate and quite sensible, as elevating one of the existing four would probably cause disunity. Something similar happened at the creation of the modern Indonesian state. Rather than elevating e.g. Javanese, they imported Malay as the neutral foundation of the Indonesian language.
chungy 3y ago
Alternative take: the US customary units have stuck around because SI has failed to present itself as better enough to switch. Grant that all base units are arbitrary[1], many of the customary units make easier logical sense in day-to-day life, or are designed to be divisible in easier units than SI units are designed to be. Do you want ⅓ of a foot? Well, that's 4 inches (12 inches in a foot, divide by 3, you get 4). Feet are made up of 12 inches, a number that can be divided by 2, 3, 4, and 6. Very convenient. One yard is three feet, gaining all the divisibility benefits that feet already have, and then some. How about volume? Especially when dealing with recipes, the customary units are extremely convenient, with perhaps one exception. One gallon is four quarts (alternatively, two pottles, but that unit is not encountered much, shame), one quart is two pints, one pint is two cups, one cup is eight fluid ounces, one fluid ounce is two tablespoons, one tablespoon is three teaspoons. Excepting the last one (three instead of two), these measures make it very easy to double and halve quantities at will. Just a little bit of math, and third and quarter measurements are not difficult either. Effectively the customary volume measurements are counting in binary. How about temperature? What's a more convenient scale for human living conditions? 0–100 °F or -20–40 °C? I know what one I'd pick. I am aware people live in even colder and hotter environments, but the majority of people in the world don't need to worry about values outside of this range. I also think "0 is very cold" and "100 is very hot" just makes more sense than "-20 is very cold" and "40 is very hot". Metric/SI systems have been pushed in the United States since the 1860s. The continued use of the customary units is not for lack of trying. The customary units are plenty good already, have a few advantages of their own, and SI has failed to present itself as an overall better system. We'd probably adapt just fine, but we don't want to. We already have a convenient system for everyday use. (SI is probably better in scientific fields, and it's already used in such industry, so there you go.) [1] Yes, even the SI base units. Look up their definitions and they're all defined with very difficult to remember numbers that you can measure against physical constants. This is because old meters, grams, liters, et al were arbitrary things and physical constant definitions have been retrofitted onto them. United States customary units are likewise defined as multiplications against the SI base units. Customary units already benefit from the physical constant definitions.
- reaperducer 3y ago
  Yes, even the SI base units. Shhh! Don't let them know that SI's base ten counting isn't some kind of scientific absolute and is just as arbitrary as inches and feet, and if humans had 11 fingers, SI would be different.
givemeethekeys 3y ago
> abolish daylight saving time I wish we'd standardize the world over on DST. I prefer having an extra hour of sunshine in the evening than the morning. Permanent DST year round!
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Just get rid of it and mandate work/school starts hour earlier...
  - givemeethekeys 3y ago
    In which country do you think you'd be able to mandate that?

Ah standards. Taking all the fun out of international travel confusion. Now if we could only get the US onto the metric system and abolish daylight saving time.

kmeisthax 3y ago

And, for that matter, stop counting years and centuries from one. The 19th century was from 1900 to 1999. The 20th started at the year 2000.

simple10 3y ago
Let's go a step farther and reset the year counting from Jesus to L Ron Hubbard's death. Either that or reset on the singularity, but I'm impatient. [EDIT] I've just been informed LRH didn't completely die. I'll petition for the singularity reset.
- kibwen 3y ago
  There already exists a notion of "the human era" that adds exactly 10,000 to the current year: > The Holocene calendar, also known as the Holocene Era or Human Era (HE), is a year numbering system that adds exactly 10,000 years to the currently dominant (AD/BC or CE/BCE) numbering scheme, placing its first year near the beginning of the Holocene geological epoch and the Neolithic Revolution, when humans shifted from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to agriculture and fixed settlements. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar (Of course, the choice to add exactly 10,000 is a compromise to make it trivial to interconvert between HE and AD.) You can even buy Human Era calendars: https://shop-us.kurzgesagt.org/collections/calendar https://shop-us.kurzgesagt.org/collections/calendar
gsich 3y ago
decades too
chungy 3y ago
The current century being the 21st will make that very confusing. The 2000/2001 start of the 21st century is reasonable debate. Mathematically, 2001 makes sense. In terms of being excited during the 1999→2000 transition with all the digits incrementing, it makes more sense socially to have celebrated the new millennium and century then.
namro 3y ago
So, the first century in the Current Era would be 99 years? There's no year 0. A century is any quantity of 100, go crazier: 1946 to 2045!!!
- maxerickson 3y ago
  We can include a year called 0 in the first century, no problem. All we have to do to get a year 0 is decide that there was one.
  - tourmalinetaco 3y ago
    > All we have to do to get a year 0 is decide that there was one. But it’s not one, it’s 0
  - zarzavat 3y ago
    For that matter let’s get rid of the asinine BC system and just use negative years AD. The thing that gets me is that when they invented the CE notation, they went to the trouble of inventing a “BCE” notation for BC. Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory! Also while we are fixing broken modular arithmetic, let’s add a proper modulo division operator to all the languages that got % wrong :)
    - madcaptenor 3y ago
      What you want is called "astronomical year numbering" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_year_numbering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_year_numbering), so you have 1 BC = 0, 2 BC = -1, and so on. Astronomers are about the only people who would need to do math on negative years.
- KptMarchewa 3y ago
  How long did hundred years war last? Let's redefine hundred to that.
nulbyte 3y ago
That numbering would be confusing. No one says "zeroth." The first of a set is always "first." The first century is the first 100 years counting from the first day of the first year of the common era.
samtho 3y ago
The 20th century started on Jan 1, 2001. Because there was no year 0 (1 AD/CE started immediately after BC/E), 1/1/0001 was the beginning of the first century which ended on the last day of 100 CE, exactly one hundred years later.
- valleyer 3y ago
  So, which century are you skipping to make this work? I think we all have our preferences.
zarzavat 3y ago
Considering the magnitudes of the celebrations of the new millennium and 21st century on Jan 1 2000 vs 2001, I’d say that argument has been comprehensively won by the zero indexers already.

mensetmanusman 3y ago

If base 12 is good enough for the Babylonians and for the fundamental subatomic particles, it's good enough for me :) I'll change when we have a metric clock used regularly.

Kamq 3y ago

I'm willing to adopt the metric system, but I want to use alternative base-units to screw with people. By which I mean, something like using rods, but with SI-prefixes.

tialaramex 3y ago
Why rods? Use one of the Natural unit systems, for example, how about one of the systems where c = 1 which makes matter/energy conversions much easier, as now Einstein's equation simplifies to E=m justifying insistence on the same units for measuring how much electricity you used last month and your target "weight" at a doctor's appointment :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units
- Kamq 3y ago
  > Why rods? Because mega-rod and giga-rod sound hilarious to me. Also those units end up with a lot of pretty alien things as their bases, 10e-35 meters isn't super useful for human things. Whereas a rod maps pretty well to "down the hallway a bit", and a half a rod works pretty well for "the other side of the room". meter and foot work well for this as well, but they don't sound nearly as cool, though I would be willing to measure distances in "kilo-feet" just to screw with people. Alternatively a system of esoteric units starting with the meter would also work for what I'm thinking about (say, 12 meters to the dimber, with 60 dimbers to a schlimmel).

skissane 3y ago

> Now if we could only get the US onto the metric system Seriously though, I wonder if immigration is going to help with that? Almost everyone else in the world uses metric in everyday life. Immigrants to the US have to go through the unpleasant process of adjusting to not doing so. I'm sure many (most?) of them wish they didn't have to do that. As the immigration process continues, might this lead to growing popular support for finally phasing out non-metric units?

gerdesj 3y ago
"Almost everyone else in the world uses metric in everyday life." RLY? Hello from the UK! Here we are metricated in general and then it goes a bit mad. As you know we generally have at least five ways of saying the same thing. Well actually we don't any more. Mostly metricated but we still have inches and feet etc hanging on in there. I suspect that most other countries are the same. I recall (my Mum) buying stuff in West German markets by der pfund (slightly larger than the Imperial pound, I think). We used to measure spirits by the gill and when we joined the EU after a while we metricated most of our measures to this: https://www.gov.uk/weights-measures-and-packaging-the-law/specified-quantities https://www.gov.uk/weights-measures-and-packaging-the-law/sp... We still drink pints (obvs!)
- skissane 3y ago
  > RLY? Hello from the UK! I did say almost everyone. The UK is unusual in still retaining significantly more pre-metric units than the average country does, although still much less than the US. Road distances in miles and speed limits in miles per hour being the most obvious one. Almost everywhere on earth, other than the US and UK (and maybe a tiny handful more, such as Burma/Myanmar, Liberia, Antigua), road distances are in kilometres. > I suspect that most other countries are the same. Many countries have some occasional lingering use of pre-metric measurements, but 90%+ of day-to-day units are metric. In the US, it is the other way around, 90%+ of day-to-day units are non-metric. The UK is unusual in lying somewhere in-between. > I recall (my Mum) buying stuff in West German markets by der pfund (slightly larger than the Imperial pound, I think). Since 1854, Germany has used the "metric pound" (pfund) of 500 grams exactly, as opposed to the US/UK pound of exactly 453.59237 grams (since 1959; before then, the US and UK had slightly different definitions of the pound). Prior to the metric system, almost every country in Europe had its own unique "pound", all of which were around about (but not exactly) 500 grams. Some countries (e.g Australia) metricated by dropping the pound entirely, but several West European countries (such as France and Germany) instead metricated it to be exactly 500 grams. Arguably, the metric pound actually is a metric unit (0.5kg is a sufficiently round multiple of the base unit, even if a power of 2 instead of 10), whereas the US/UK pound is not (nobody would consider 0.45359237 to be round) > We still drink pints (obvs!) In Australia, we still measure beer by pints too. But our pint is different from the UK pint. The UK pint is exactly 568.26125 mL. The US liquid pint is exactly 473.176473 mL. In Australia, a pint of beer is exactly 570 mL (metricated by rounding up from the UK pint), except (for obscure historical reasons no one seems to be able to explain) in South Australia were a pint is instead defined as 425 mL (a volume of beer which in other Australian states is called a "schooner"). However, stuff like beer sizes falls into that "10% of surviving non-metric" which many countries have, so I don't think it really counts.

adventured 3y ago

The US heavily uses metric, just like other nations also use English while having a different primary language. The US leads the world in technological and scientific output and has for over a century, it very obviously and very commonly uses the metric system. Communication is more important than measurement. Nearly everybody else needs to abandon their languages and adopt English, Spanish or Mandarin - because standards. Half the people of Europe share no common language and can't communicate properly with one another, if only we could talk some sense into them and get them onto a standard.

tommiegannert 3y ago
I liked that Estonia said "f*ck it, English is now the official second language." Meanwhile, in Switzerland, Zürich is contemplating making school children study English before French/Italian. That's great, except Switzerland is already quad-lingual, depending on canton. Making it more difficult for a german-speaking person in Zürich to go to Geneva probably won't be great for unity. Instead of all cantons adopting one of the existing four as the universal language, they are now trying for English, it seems. (As an immigrant observer.)
- jhugo 3y ago
  > Instead of all cantons adopting one of the existing four as the universal language, they are now trying for English, it seems. That’s likely deliberate and quite sensible, as elevating one of the existing four would probably cause disunity. Something similar happened at the creation of the modern Indonesian state. Rather than elevating e.g. Javanese, they imported Malay as the neutral foundation of the Indonesian language.

chungy 3y ago

Alternative take: the US customary units have stuck around because SI has failed to present itself as better enough to switch. Grant that all base units are arbitrary[1], many of the customary units make easier logical sense in day-to-day life, or are designed to be divisible in easier units than SI units are designed to be. Do you want ⅓ of a foot? Well, that's 4 inches (12 inches in a foot, divide by 3, you get 4). Feet are made up of 12 inches, a number that can be divided by 2, 3, 4, and 6. Very convenient. One yard is three feet, gaining all the divisibility benefits that feet already have, and then some. How about volume? Especially when dealing with recipes, the customary units are extremely convenient, with perhaps one exception. One gallon is four quarts (alternatively, two pottles, but that unit is not encountered much, shame), one quart is two pints, one pint is two cups, one cup is eight fluid ounces, one fluid ounce is two tablespoons, one tablespoon is three teaspoons. Excepting the last one (three instead of two), these measures make it very easy to double and halve quantities at will. Just a little bit of math, and third and quarter measurements are not difficult either. Effectively the customary volume measurements are counting in binary. How about temperature? What's a more convenient scale for human living conditions? 0–100 °F or -20–40 °C? I know what one I'd pick. I am aware people live in even colder and hotter environments, but the majority of people in the world don't need to worry about values outside of this range. I also think "0 is very cold" and "100 is very hot" just makes more sense than "-20 is very cold" and "40 is very hot". Metric/SI systems have been pushed in the United States since the 1860s. The continued use of the customary units is not for lack of trying. The customary units are plenty good already, have a few advantages of their own, and SI has failed to present itself as an overall better system. We'd probably adapt just fine, but we don't want to. We already have a convenient system for everyday use. (SI is probably better in scientific fields, and it's already used in such industry, so there you go.) [1] Yes, even the SI base units. Look up their definitions and they're all defined with very difficult to remember numbers that you can measure against physical constants. This is because old meters, grams, liters, et al were arbitrary things and physical constant definitions have been retrofitted onto them. United States customary units are likewise defined as multiplications against the SI base units. Customary units already benefit from the physical constant definitions.

reaperducer 3y ago
Yes, even the SI base units. Shhh! Don't let them know that SI's base ten counting isn't some kind of scientific absolute and is just as arbitrary as inches and feet, and if humans had 11 fingers, SI would be different.

givemeethekeys 3y ago

> abolish daylight saving time I wish we'd standardize the world over on DST. I prefer having an extra hour of sunshine in the evening than the morning. Permanent DST year round!

Ekaros 3y ago
Just get rid of it and mandate work/school starts hour earlier...
- givemeethekeys 3y ago
  In which country do you think you'd be able to mandate that?