9 ms·

It's too bad that the US didn't switch to the metric system and A4 paper. It isn't so much about imperial vs. metric (though the metric system's design feels mo

by mcav 18y ago

It's too bad that the US didn't switch to the metric system and A4 paper. It isn't so much about imperial vs. metric (though the metric system's design feels more natural); but it would be nice to have a worldwide standard format.

vaksel 18y ago
precisely, its pretty asinine, everyone else in the world uses the metric system, and USA is stuck using obsolete weights and measures
- bbgm 18y ago
  Especially when it comes to science. Drove me nuts when I first moved here
  - mechanical_fish 18y ago
    I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say. As a US-trained scientist, I never used anything but the metric system except when standing inside a machine shop. Scientists are among the US citizens most likely to relate to the metric system. Although I have to confess that my personal temperature meter is still calibrated in degrees Fahrenheit. ("Uh, it's 25 degrees in Rome today. Is that really hot? I can't remember.") For some reason temperature is my brain's last holdout: I'm pretty well used to meters and liters and even kilos. Perhaps that's because a liter is like a quart, a meter is like a yard (and a kilometer is close to a half mile) and a kilo is about two pounds, but Fahrenheit is completely nuts because there's an offset as well as a ratio in the conversion.
    - psadauskas 18y ago
      I googled without luck, but I remember reading a study awhile ago that demonstrated that Imperial is easier for a human to estimate. Of the the experiments was asking for people familiar in each to guess the length of some objects. The people who gave an answer in feet and inches were more accurate than people using centimeters. They postulated that it was because the values in the Imperial system "evolved", and are they way they are because of their convenience for measuring objects in a human scale. Eg, when eyeballing something hand-sized, its easier to pick out a few inches than it is dozens of centimeters. I'll post a link to that article if I can find it.
      - wheels 18y ago
        Imperial units also tend towards being more division oriented, for instance a foot divides cleanly into halves, thirds or quarters. A gallon divides into 4 quarts which divide into two pints, which divide into two cups. That same series would be (starting from 4 liters), 4l, 1l, 0.5l, 125 ml, 62.5 ml.
        seano 18y ago
        In your volume example, imperial units only divide cleanly for certain factors (e.g. 2 in your example), from certain starting points (e.g. two pints) and within certain ranges (keep dividing a cup by 2 and it stops dividing cleanly).
        wheels 18y ago
        Yep. But it stops at ... one ounce. So a gallon can be divided cleanly by two seven times. It's naturally no coincidence that a gallon is 2^7 ounces. :-) I'm in favor of the US switching to metric (I'm American, but have lived in Europe for the last 7 years), but just trying to give some context on what I believe are some of the niceties of the Imperial system. A "cup" is a much easier notion to get your head around than "about 50-70 ml".
        trezor 18y ago
        A "cup" is a much easier notion to get your head around than "about 50-70 ml". This opinion can only come from exposure. Whenever I see "one cup" in a recipe I'm 100% baffled. A big cup? A tea cup? One of those larger coffee mugs? Trying to judge what is actually meant here can leads to volumes differing about two to three times in scale. Give me centiliters, desiliters and liters any day. I still have no idea what a cup is. And 50-70 ml seems way too little to make sense, so I will just assume you pulled those numbers out of thin air.
        juanpablo 18y ago
        1 cup = ~250 mL = ~1/4 Liter = 237 mL
    - wheels 18y ago
      Fast ballpark conversion that's easy to do in your head that works for most outdoor temperatures -- F -> C: subtract 30, divide by 2
      - ahoyhere 18y ago
        Oh, that's really useful. I had my own mental approximation, but it was much mushier than this, and this is pretty darn accurate. Much easier than multiplying by 5/9ths. Or 9/5ths. Whatver.
    - easyfrag 18y ago
      Seems like imperial is used http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric.02/ http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric.02/
- ewanmcteagle 18y ago
  Not at all. There's nothing obsolete about it. There's a social aspect to switching because others have done so but that's all. Except for that it's change for change's sake. An inch, a foot, a yard are all very intuitive measures that have good rough ways of being measured without any tools. I'm not sure what I get from metric that beats this. It's just convention. If anything metric is more arbitrary. Metric is design by committee, as hacker's we should consider that a mark against it.
  - litewulf 18y ago
    You know that if you started off with metric, metric would feel intuitive too right? (Aza Raskin has a video where he basically says that what most people call intuitive they really mean "familiar".)
    - laut 18y ago
      Right. I grew up with the metric system. (Just like anyone else outside Britain or their old colonies.) To me gallons and feet are not intuitive. But a meter and a liter and a kg is familiar, so I can roughly tell how much that is without a measuring instrument. The fact that a foot is supposed to be the length as a foot doesn't seem like any useful advantage to me. My foot is not precisely 30.48 cm anyway. Some imperial units are still in use outside of the British world. Inches for TVs and computer monitors and car wheels. Feet is used for boat lengths although meters is also used sometimes. Knots and nautical miles in sailing. Feet is also used in aviation.
  - trezor 18y ago
    Metric is design by committee, as hacker's we should consider that a mark against it. Just like http really. We should all be rolling our own protocols.
  - alain94040 18y ago
    >Metric is design by committee, as hacker's we should consider that a mark against it. Sorry but this is a sign of ignorance. Read the biography of Condorcet. Coming up with the metric system was extremely smart. In hacker terms, think of it as a beautiful, elegant fully rescursive and reentrant function that replaces mountains of ugly legacy code. It's amazing that at the time (1790), each profession used their own measurement system. An ounce for one trade was different from an ounce for another trade. You are somewhat aware of that of course because the difference between the US and British gallon carried to this day. Finding a way to universally cover all measurements (weight, distance, speed, etc.) so that everything is self-consistent is not committee design. It's extremely smart engineering. It removed the need for conversion constants and factors. In hacker terms, it was a major code cleanup effort.
- wvenable 18y ago
  What about Canada, we officially use the metric system. Kids are taught metric, roads signs are in kilometers, temperature in Celsius, but almost no Canadian can tell your their own weight in kilograms or their height in meters! If the US ever went all the way metric, I think they'd still end up using all their legacy measurements for decades. Certainly the US letter paper size isn't going anywhere -- everything is designed for it. The chicken and the egg are both well established.
  - tallanvor 18y ago
    Most definitely. Even in the UK, where they switched to metric some time ago, imperial measurements can still be seen all over, and many papers still provide both Celsius and Fahrenheit measurements. While it would be nice if we Americans were exposed more to SI (rather than just in science classes), I don't really think it's important that imperial measurements be abandoned. They still serve their purpose in everyday life, so there's no real reason to switch.
- axod 18y ago
  "and USA is stuck using obsolete weights and measures" Read that again, and tell me how it makes any sense whatsoever. Obsolete: 1. no longer in general use;
  - deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
  - StrawberryFrog 18y ago
    Simple, No one but the USA (and Malaysia or somewhere) uses them. So, the USA uses them, and they're not in general use.
    - axod 18y ago
      Pretty odd logic you have there. Why not just go the whole hog and say Metric is obsolete. After all, the chances of aliens in other universes using it is small, so we're likely the only ones using Metric. edit: The UK is also pretty non-metric.
      - fabjan 18y ago
        I guess that is how most Americans see the world, the rest of us are aliens.
ensignavenger 18y ago
Officially, the US kind of, sort of, has converted to metric- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_Conversion_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_Conversion_Act

by mcav 18y ago

vaksel 18y ago

precisely, its pretty asinine, everyone else in the world uses the metric system, and USA is stuck using obsolete weights and measures

bbgm 18y ago
Especially when it comes to science. Drove me nuts when I first moved here
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say. As a US-trained scientist, I never used anything but the metric system except when standing inside a machine shop. Scientists are among the US citizens most likely to relate to the metric system. Although I have to confess that my personal temperature meter is still calibrated in degrees Fahrenheit. ("Uh, it's 25 degrees in Rome today. Is that really hot? I can't remember.") For some reason temperature is my brain's last holdout: I'm pretty well used to meters and liters and even kilos. Perhaps that's because a liter is like a quart, a meter is like a yard (and a kilometer is close to a half mile) and a kilo is about two pounds, but Fahrenheit is completely nuts because there's an offset as well as a ratio in the conversion.
  - psadauskas 18y ago
    I googled without luck, but I remember reading a study awhile ago that demonstrated that Imperial is easier for a human to estimate. Of the the experiments was asking for people familiar in each to guess the length of some objects. The people who gave an answer in feet and inches were more accurate than people using centimeters. They postulated that it was because the values in the Imperial system "evolved", and are they way they are because of their convenience for measuring objects in a human scale. Eg, when eyeballing something hand-sized, its easier to pick out a few inches than it is dozens of centimeters. I'll post a link to that article if I can find it.
    - wheels 18y ago
      Imperial units also tend towards being more division oriented, for instance a foot divides cleanly into halves, thirds or quarters. A gallon divides into 4 quarts which divide into two pints, which divide into two cups. That same series would be (starting from 4 liters), 4l, 1l, 0.5l, 125 ml, 62.5 ml.
      - seano 18y ago
        In your volume example, imperial units only divide cleanly for certain factors (e.g. 2 in your example), from certain starting points (e.g. two pints) and within certain ranges (keep dividing a cup by 2 and it stops dividing cleanly).
        wheels 18y ago
        Yep. But it stops at ... one ounce. So a gallon can be divided cleanly by two seven times. It's naturally no coincidence that a gallon is 2^7 ounces. :-) I'm in favor of the US switching to metric (I'm American, but have lived in Europe for the last 7 years), but just trying to give some context on what I believe are some of the niceties of the Imperial system. A "cup" is a much easier notion to get your head around than "about 50-70 ml".
        trezor 18y ago
        A "cup" is a much easier notion to get your head around than "about 50-70 ml". This opinion can only come from exposure. Whenever I see "one cup" in a recipe I'm 100% baffled. A big cup? A tea cup? One of those larger coffee mugs? Trying to judge what is actually meant here can leads to volumes differing about two to three times in scale. Give me centiliters, desiliters and liters any day. I still have no idea what a cup is. And 50-70 ml seems way too little to make sense, so I will just assume you pulled those numbers out of thin air.
        juanpablo 18y ago
        1 cup = ~250 mL = ~1/4 Liter = 237 mL
  - wheels 18y ago
    Fast ballpark conversion that's easy to do in your head that works for most outdoor temperatures -- F -> C: subtract 30, divide by 2
    - ahoyhere 18y ago
      Oh, that's really useful. I had my own mental approximation, but it was much mushier than this, and this is pretty darn accurate. Much easier than multiplying by 5/9ths. Or 9/5ths. Whatver.
  - easyfrag 18y ago
    Seems like imperial is used http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric.02/ http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric.02/
ewanmcteagle 18y ago
Not at all. There's nothing obsolete about it. There's a social aspect to switching because others have done so but that's all. Except for that it's change for change's sake. An inch, a foot, a yard are all very intuitive measures that have good rough ways of being measured without any tools. I'm not sure what I get from metric that beats this. It's just convention. If anything metric is more arbitrary. Metric is design by committee, as hacker's we should consider that a mark against it.
- litewulf 18y ago
  You know that if you started off with metric, metric would feel intuitive too right? (Aza Raskin has a video where he basically says that what most people call intuitive they really mean "familiar".)
  - laut 18y ago
    Right. I grew up with the metric system. (Just like anyone else outside Britain or their old colonies.) To me gallons and feet are not intuitive. But a meter and a liter and a kg is familiar, so I can roughly tell how much that is without a measuring instrument. The fact that a foot is supposed to be the length as a foot doesn't seem like any useful advantage to me. My foot is not precisely 30.48 cm anyway. Some imperial units are still in use outside of the British world. Inches for TVs and computer monitors and car wheels. Feet is used for boat lengths although meters is also used sometimes. Knots and nautical miles in sailing. Feet is also used in aviation.
- trezor 18y ago
  Metric is design by committee, as hacker's we should consider that a mark against it. Just like http really. We should all be rolling our own protocols.
- alain94040 18y ago
  >Metric is design by committee, as hacker's we should consider that a mark against it. Sorry but this is a sign of ignorance. Read the biography of Condorcet. Coming up with the metric system was extremely smart. In hacker terms, think of it as a beautiful, elegant fully rescursive and reentrant function that replaces mountains of ugly legacy code. It's amazing that at the time (1790), each profession used their own measurement system. An ounce for one trade was different from an ounce for another trade. You are somewhat aware of that of course because the difference between the US and British gallon carried to this day. Finding a way to universally cover all measurements (weight, distance, speed, etc.) so that everything is self-consistent is not committee design. It's extremely smart engineering. It removed the need for conversion constants and factors. In hacker terms, it was a major code cleanup effort.
wvenable 18y ago
What about Canada, we officially use the metric system. Kids are taught metric, roads signs are in kilometers, temperature in Celsius, but almost no Canadian can tell your their own weight in kilograms or their height in meters! If the US ever went all the way metric, I think they'd still end up using all their legacy measurements for decades. Certainly the US letter paper size isn't going anywhere -- everything is designed for it. The chicken and the egg are both well established.
- tallanvor 18y ago
  Most definitely. Even in the UK, where they switched to metric some time ago, imperial measurements can still be seen all over, and many papers still provide both Celsius and Fahrenheit measurements. While it would be nice if we Americans were exposed more to SI (rather than just in science classes), I don't really think it's important that imperial measurements be abandoned. They still serve their purpose in everyday life, so there's no real reason to switch.
axod 18y ago
"and USA is stuck using obsolete weights and measures" Read that again, and tell me how it makes any sense whatsoever. Obsolete: 1. no longer in general use;
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
- StrawberryFrog 18y ago
  Simple, No one but the USA (and Malaysia or somewhere) uses them. So, the USA uses them, and they're not in general use.
  - axod 18y ago
    Pretty odd logic you have there. Why not just go the whole hog and say Metric is obsolete. After all, the chances of aliens in other universes using it is small, so we're likely the only ones using Metric. edit: The UK is also pretty non-metric.
    - fabjan 18y ago
      I guess that is how most Americans see the world, the rest of us are aliens.

ensignavenger 18y ago

Officially, the US kind of, sort of, has converted to metric- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_Conversion_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_Conversion_Act