9 ms·

As an American with a physics background, a while ago I casually reviewed how bad our non-metric system is -- http://joshuaspodek.com/metric-system-isnt http://

by spodek 13y ago

As an American with a physics background, a while ago I casually reviewed how bad our non-metric system is -- http://joshuaspodek.com/metric-system-isnt http://joshuaspodek.com/metric-system-isnt -- and found it not nearly as bad as people treat it. Among other things, when I build things it's useful to divide in half a few times, which is easier with inches and feet. And I've found no benefit to Celsius's 0 and 100 coinciding with water's state changing. I bring that up here because I've never heard even the staunchest metric proponents use kiloseconds or megaseconds or hesitate to use hours, minutes, days, and so on. I know people experimented with decimal times, especially around the French Revolution, but it didn't stick. It's funny when someone talks about the value of using base ten and then switches to base 60, base 12, and base 24 in the next sentence. I should say that in physics experiments people used seconds only (which is where I learned that to within about a percent a year is pi times ten to the seventh).

manish_gill 13y ago
Isn't the fact that the rest of the world uses those definitions an advantage in and of itself? What is there to be gained by being inconsistent? Relevant picture I found on twitter: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bdp2YLFCIAAM1Dy.png https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bdp2YLFCIAAM1Dy.png
- edvinbesic 13y ago
  Which is precisely the reason why the US military has adopted the metric system.
  - adolph 13y ago
    Metric mils? Ha!
- raldi 13y ago
  What's that a map of, countries that have placed a man on the moon?
  - reubenmorais 13y ago
    I think it's a map of countries that lost a 125 million dollars Mars probe after failing to properly convert between imperial and metric units.
    - raldi 13y ago
      Exactly! This is why it's dangerous and irresponsible to allow the metric system into your space program.
aerique 13y ago
I think the main problem isn't the quality of the system of measurement used by the US, but more that it is one of only three countries still not using the metric system. The world would be an easier place without that headache.
edvinbesic 13y ago
As a European living in America I disagree. The one value of metric vs imperial is that you (for the most part) don't have to do any math when converting between units. If I have 1.73 miles, I have to do the math to figure out how many feet that is, 1.73*5280~=9134, which is not something that's easy for me to do in my head. However, 1.73 km is 1730 meters, which is way easier (at least for me, but that might be my bias).
- eric_the_read 13y ago
  No, you're absolutely right. Thing is, most of the time, when dealing with miles, I don't care how many feet it is. Any distance measured in miles is sufficiently large that its equivalent in feet is largely irrelevant. I suppose it's nice to know that 1.73 km is 1730 meters, but either way, it's a medium-long walk. If I needed to convert all the time ( I suspect this it's really only when using compound units like pound-feet ), that is where I find metric more useful. Also, I haven't read GP's post, but I find Fahrenheit degrees easier to work with primarily because they're smaller; differences in temperature are easier to express in whole numbers. Gallons, cups, tablespoons, quarts can go DIAF; I have to convert between these all the time, and it drives me batty!
  - smnrchrds 13y ago
    I live in a country with metric system. We use different units of measurement interchangeably because it's easy to do so and we have gotten used to it. I am 1.74m or 174cm tall. The bus stop is 500m or half a kilometer away from my home, etc. While nobody converts 250km to meters, when the value is closer to one, both units of measurement are equally useful and equally used. Also all physics and engineering formula are designed to get and return metric values. When I see K = 0.5mv^2, I know v is supposed to be m/s and m is in kilograms and the result would be in Joules. If it's E = m*c^2, the same thing could be inferred about it. I'm curios with all different units of measurement, how do you know when to use which. Is there a convention to always e.g. use ft/s or is it different in each formula?
    - riffraff 13y ago
raldi 13y ago
Similarly, people will claim it makes no sense that American M/D/Y dates are neither monotonically increasing nor decreasing, but then they'll find it totally natural to use "D/M/Y H:M:S" or "H:M:S D/M/Y" and not even notice that they share that same alleged flaw.
- drostie 13y ago
  I'm just glad that nobody in Europe seems to use YYYY/DD/MM. This means that the format "YYYY-MM-DD" is unambiguous and the lexical ordering of dates is the same as their natural ordering[1], which is useful for sorting files in folders. [1] Except for years BCE which the scheme doesn't treat.
  - raldi 13y ago
    Indeed. And even better, Y-M-D H:M:S is monotonically decreasing.
    - noselasd 13y ago
      Except at DST switch.
      - MichaelGG 13y ago
        DST and timezones in general are an abomination anyways.
- rmk2 13y ago
  "They" really don't. Either way you described is still either sorted in ascending or descending order: H:M:S D/M/Y (321 123) or D/M/Y H:M:S (123 321), as opposed to using MDY, which is neither ascending nor descending, but 213. Additionally, the point of doing it the other way round is that the most important thing is on the left, where we start reading, followed by less important things. If I need to know the time of day, the hour is the most important thing, once I know whether it's 4 or 6, I can look at the minutes and first then do I perhaps (and does one really ever?) care about the seconds. As a matter of fact, my old wristwatch only had hour and minute hands... The opposite is true for the date. It starts, again, with the most significant thing on the left: the day. This assumes that people will probably have it easier to remember the month or year they live in. And a final example: I have an appointment on the 24/01/2014 at 10:15:00. The most important questions are: What day do we have? And if it happens to be the 24th, what hour of the day is it? Is it 5? Good, 5h left. Is it 10? Oh boy, better look at the minutes...
zanny 13y ago
In theory I'd prefer a timekeeping system that had its base unit in terms of the smallest discrete unit of time (basically planck time) and let everything else arise naturally from that. Sure, days may not be a perfectly XX kilo-mega-ultra-plank times (I'm unsure of the Metric nomenclature going from a power of -44 to a power of around +4) but I am always peeved we have designed our timekeeping, temperature, pressure, etc measurements bound to arbitrary properties of things on the surface of our planet than on the fundamental properties of the universe. It is going to make space travel a much bigger hassle, to say the least.
- dodo53 13y ago
  like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units ?
- bostonpete 13y ago
  Does it also peeve you that the decimal system is based on the number of fingers we have? I can only assume you're being facetious -- I can't see any practical reason for wanting a system of measurements that isn't designed around the world we all live in.
drewblay 13y ago
>And I've found no benefit to Celsius's 0 and 100 coinciding with water's state changing. I agree, I like how Fahrenheit degrees are smaller and therefore degrees in Fahrenheit are more exact.
- icebraining 13y ago
  We just use decimal degrees, e.g. 23.5ºC. That said, and as an European, if had to stop using one unit of measure it would certain be the Celsius scale.
- vadman 13y ago
  I can hardly think of a situation where a centigrade is not granular enough. The example GP gives with the air conditioner is IMHO a huge stretch - a 1 deg Celsius difference is pretty negligible. Disclaimer: Fahrenheit is the most annoying and nonsensical of imperial measurement scales to me, so I am biased against it.
- MereInterest 13y ago
  Can you feel a difference of 1 degree Fahrenheit? Does it change your behavior? Do you need an extra sweater because it is 57 degrees inside instead of 58? As someone who has grown up with it, I would argue that the Fahrenheit system is too granular. In general, if I ask someone what the temperature is, it will be estimated as "low 70s" or "high 50s". Never have I met anyone who would feel the temperature and then declare that it is 72 degrees, as opposed to 71 or 73. This suggests that the granularity is greater than what people feel, and is unnecessary for day-to-day use.
- kzrdude 13y ago
  W.r.t the Celsius scale, a comment from Celsius' country of origin in response to: > Nobody lives their life around freezing and boiling temperatures. I live my life around 50 to 90 degrees and if you live yours around 10 to 40, I don’t see the advantage. The natural response is of course we live close to freezing! 0 °C is the temperature that differentiates frozen lakes from open lakes, snow from rain, slippery dangerous roads from regular.
drostie 13y ago
It is extremely inconvenient that time is base-24 and base-60 while everything else in the metric system is base-10; it leads, for example, to a difficult conversion between the "meters per second" of the physics class and the "km/hr" of the highway. One surprisingly frustrating thing is that if you view a day as a million "instants" then an instant is actually a very human number, about the human reaction time or so; and a kiloinstant is a very human timescale too; 86.4 seconds or just shy of a minute and a half. We already know that when someone says "be there in five minutes" they mean 7-8; if they said "be there in five ki" they would be more accurate. Fun things: 1. I wrote an HTML5 base-10 clock here with some togglable layers. Try out base-10 time: http://drostie.org/time/ http://drostie.org/time/ . It's actually much easier than reading a normal clock because it's a digital readout, "8, 5, 6" rather than "two past a quarter after 8, that's 8:17." (It might not seem that way at first -- but that's because we spent long hours learning to tell time.) 2. For the exactly opposite view, that the number system should be base-12, see http://www.dozenal.org/ http://www.dozenal.org/ . It's actually a good way to work with numbers, and I've used the "counting on the joints/pads of your proper fingers" trick a number of times; sometimes you only have one hand free and want to count to something that's less than 48 (you can encode 2 extra bits with "hand facing up, hand facing down, hand facing up again, hand facing down again"; I've found it gets confusing after 4 or 5 of these though.) 3. I am very sympathetic to Feynman's "we don't need more units!" claim, but the reason we use various units is because we have different interests -- masses in eV/c^2 for example reflect someone who is interested in the atomic interaction energies (eV) of relativistic particles (c^2); energies in Kelvin reflect someone who is interested in how much they need to cool their experimental apparatus to see certain effects; energies in inverse centimeters reflect people who have spectrometers. Following this, I've tried to think whether the base-10 clock could be used to construct a set of "rational units" which would try to get the "human scale things" right while making all of these other units amount to a power-of-10 difference. I've not condensed these speculations to a final form yet but the speculations are themselves at: https://github.com/drostie/essay-seeds/blob/master/misc/rational_units.md https://github.com/drostie/essay-seeds/blob/master/misc/rati... .
- ctdonath 13y ago
  "we don't need more units!" Yes, some units are useful for particular interests. Create them as they're needed and useful. Base-10 time would make more sense. Celsius at least coordinates notable values with common materials. Some units are just stupid. The lead article gives an unsatisfactory explanation of base-12/60 time (admitting near the end the reason for base-60 is unknown); trying to explain clocks to toddlers is proving annoying (I can't explain it if it doesn't make sense, and it doesn't make sense). Fahrenheit is just an arbitrary marking on a scale and seeing how reality happened to line up. http://xkcd.com/927/ http://xkcd.com/927/
raldi 13y ago
Here's another example: One of this past weekend’s NFL games had a final score of 23 to 10. A nice, natural measurement that's easy to grasp. But under the metric system, the score would have been 14.38 to -6. Completely awkward and out of touch with the human scale.
kps 13y ago
> when I build things it's useful to divide in half a few times Fahrenheit adjusted his earlier scale, changing from 30° to 32° for freezing, and 90° to 96° for body temperature, in order to simplify constructing thermometers by bisecting between the calibration points.
js2 13y ago
As someone who bakes, I loathe imperial measurements. For one, measuring by weight instead of volume is just much easier and more precise. (I'm looking at you "cups of flour.") For two, it's a lot simpler to scale recipes given in metric amounts.
wikwocket 13y ago
On the topic of metric vs. otherwise, you may enjoy Matt Parker's "Guide to the Imperial Measurement System." [0] Matt Parker is an eminent stand-up mathematician, often featured on James May's excellent Number Hub series 0: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7x-RGfd0Yk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7x-RGfd0Yk
desireco42 13y ago
Imperial system is bad, even for you who grown up with it, it should be obvious how inconvenient it is. As for temperature, while F is not telling me anything useful, C is always telling me if it will rain or snow, actually when it snows it is always closer to 0 (or 32). As article mentioned, we got time from Babylonians, who got it from Summerians. Time and calendar are one of the weirder things we deal with. I used internet time for a while, you know the Swatch thing. It looks weird in the beggining, but very quickly you get it and it works well and it is convenient that it is not time-zone dependant. And that was just a marketing gimmick from Swatch. I think the whole idea that we somehow manage to create bridges and build buildings despite weird measures we use, is more testament to our ability to overcome difficult obstacles.
ArbitraryLimits 13y ago
IMO the reason why Americans prefer Farenheit to Celsius is that the 0 and 100 points correspond to roughly the limits of common outdoor temperatures, rather than water's state changes. Pretty much the same argument for miles per hour vs kilometers per hour - 100 mph is all anyone's ever going to go during a normal day. That's an interesting point about being able to divide by half more than once for feet/inches, though - I hadn't thought of that before. (From another American with a physics background)
- nfoz 13y ago
  Let's face it -- people have a strong preference for whatever system they are used to. There's extremely strong inertia, and efforts to try and justify one system over the other are not especially effective.
jhanschoo 13y ago
You seem to have missed the convenience of secondary definitions using SI. Using SI, 1 J = 1 N * 1 m = 1 W * 1 s. You can't do the same with calories, miles, horsepower, and other Imperial units.
Someone 13y ago
"to within about a percent a year is pi times ten to the seventh" The way to remember that is "pi seconds in a nanocentury"
Crito 13y ago
It is the non-metric units for volume that really turn into a shitfest. I grew up in America, went to public schools, learned to cook from American cookbooks, and still can't keep all of them straight. Pints in a gallon? Quarts in a gallon? Quarts in a pint? Teaspoons in a cup? Cups in a pint? Who fucking knows? The best I can do is a pint is roughly how much beer you get at a bar (but that changes from region to region!) and milk comes in a gallon while other beverages do not.
elspecial 13y ago
"Among other things, when I build things it's useful to divide in half a few times, which is easier with inches and feet."... If you find it easier to work with base 12 than base 10, you are not like most of the people. "And I've found no benefit to Celsius's 0 and 100 coinciding with water's state changing." So the fact that pure water freezes at 0 and boils at 100 is of no benefit to you? I don't buy it.

by spodek 13y ago

manish_gill 13y ago

Isn't the fact that the rest of the world uses those definitions an advantage in and of itself? What is there to be gained by being inconsistent? Relevant picture I found on twitter: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bdp2YLFCIAAM1Dy.png https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bdp2YLFCIAAM1Dy.png

edvinbesic 13y ago
Which is precisely the reason why the US military has adopted the metric system.
- adolph 13y ago
  Metric mils? Ha!
raldi 13y ago
What's that a map of, countries that have placed a man on the moon?
- reubenmorais 13y ago
  I think it's a map of countries that lost a 125 million dollars Mars probe after failing to properly convert between imperial and metric units.
  - raldi 13y ago
    Exactly! This is why it's dangerous and irresponsible to allow the metric system into your space program.

aerique 13y ago

I think the main problem isn't the quality of the system of measurement used by the US, but more that it is one of only three countries still not using the metric system. The world would be an easier place without that headache.

edvinbesic 13y ago

As a European living in America I disagree. The one value of metric vs imperial is that you (for the most part) don't have to do any math when converting between units. If I have 1.73 miles, I have to do the math to figure out how many feet that is, 1.73*5280~=9134, which is not something that's easy for me to do in my head. However, 1.73 km is 1730 meters, which is way easier (at least for me, but that might be my bias).

eric_the_read 13y ago
No, you're absolutely right. Thing is, most of the time, when dealing with miles, I don't care how many feet it is. Any distance measured in miles is sufficiently large that its equivalent in feet is largely irrelevant. I suppose it's nice to know that 1.73 km is 1730 meters, but either way, it's a medium-long walk. If I needed to convert all the time ( I suspect this it's really only when using compound units like pound-feet ), that is where I find metric more useful. Also, I haven't read GP's post, but I find Fahrenheit degrees easier to work with primarily because they're smaller; differences in temperature are easier to express in whole numbers. Gallons, cups, tablespoons, quarts can go DIAF; I have to convert between these all the time, and it drives me batty!
- smnrchrds 13y ago
  I live in a country with metric system. We use different units of measurement interchangeably because it's easy to do so and we have gotten used to it. I am 1.74m or 174cm tall. The bus stop is 500m or half a kilometer away from my home, etc. While nobody converts 250km to meters, when the value is closer to one, both units of measurement are equally useful and equally used. Also all physics and engineering formula are designed to get and return metric values. When I see K = 0.5mv^2, I know v is supposed to be m/s and m is in kilograms and the result would be in Joules. If it's E = m*c^2, the same thing could be inferred about it. I'm curios with all different units of measurement, how do you know when to use which. Is there a convention to always e.g. use ft/s or is it different in each formula?
  - riffraff 13y ago

raldi 13y ago

Similarly, people will claim it makes no sense that American M/D/Y dates are neither monotonically increasing nor decreasing, but then they'll find it totally natural to use "D/M/Y H:M:S" or "H:M:S D/M/Y" and not even notice that they share that same alleged flaw.

drostie 13y ago
I'm just glad that nobody in Europe seems to use YYYY/DD/MM. This means that the format "YYYY-MM-DD" is unambiguous and the lexical ordering of dates is the same as their natural ordering[1], which is useful for sorting files in folders. [1] Except for years BCE which the scheme doesn't treat.
- raldi 13y ago
  Indeed. And even better, Y-M-D H:M:S is monotonically decreasing.
  - noselasd 13y ago
    Except at DST switch.
    - MichaelGG 13y ago
      DST and timezones in general are an abomination anyways.
rmk2 13y ago
"They" really don't. Either way you described is still either sorted in ascending or descending order: H:M:S D/M/Y (321 123) or D/M/Y H:M:S (123 321), as opposed to using MDY, which is neither ascending nor descending, but 213. Additionally, the point of doing it the other way round is that the most important thing is on the left, where we start reading, followed by less important things. If I need to know the time of day, the hour is the most important thing, once I know whether it's 4 or 6, I can look at the minutes and first then do I perhaps (and does one really ever?) care about the seconds. As a matter of fact, my old wristwatch only had hour and minute hands... The opposite is true for the date. It starts, again, with the most significant thing on the left: the day. This assumes that people will probably have it easier to remember the month or year they live in. And a final example: I have an appointment on the 24/01/2014 at 10:15:00. The most important questions are: What day do we have? And if it happens to be the 24th, what hour of the day is it? Is it 5? Good, 5h left. Is it 10? Oh boy, better look at the minutes...

zanny 13y ago

In theory I'd prefer a timekeeping system that had its base unit in terms of the smallest discrete unit of time (basically planck time) and let everything else arise naturally from that. Sure, days may not be a perfectly XX kilo-mega-ultra-plank times (I'm unsure of the Metric nomenclature going from a power of -44 to a power of around +4) but I am always peeved we have designed our timekeeping, temperature, pressure, etc measurements bound to arbitrary properties of things on the surface of our planet than on the fundamental properties of the universe. It is going to make space travel a much bigger hassle, to say the least.

dodo53 13y ago
like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units ?
bostonpete 13y ago
Does it also peeve you that the decimal system is based on the number of fingers we have? I can only assume you're being facetious -- I can't see any practical reason for wanting a system of measurements that isn't designed around the world we all live in.

drewblay 13y ago

>And I've found no benefit to Celsius's 0 and 100 coinciding with water's state changing. I agree, I like how Fahrenheit degrees are smaller and therefore degrees in Fahrenheit are more exact.

icebraining 13y ago
We just use decimal degrees, e.g. 23.5ºC. That said, and as an European, if had to stop using one unit of measure it would certain be the Celsius scale.
vadman 13y ago
I can hardly think of a situation where a centigrade is not granular enough. The example GP gives with the air conditioner is IMHO a huge stretch - a 1 deg Celsius difference is pretty negligible. Disclaimer: Fahrenheit is the most annoying and nonsensical of imperial measurement scales to me, so I am biased against it.
MereInterest 13y ago
Can you feel a difference of 1 degree Fahrenheit? Does it change your behavior? Do you need an extra sweater because it is 57 degrees inside instead of 58? As someone who has grown up with it, I would argue that the Fahrenheit system is too granular. In general, if I ask someone what the temperature is, it will be estimated as "low 70s" or "high 50s". Never have I met anyone who would feel the temperature and then declare that it is 72 degrees, as opposed to 71 or 73. This suggests that the granularity is greater than what people feel, and is unnecessary for day-to-day use.
kzrdude 13y ago
W.r.t the Celsius scale, a comment from Celsius' country of origin in response to: > Nobody lives their life around freezing and boiling temperatures. I live my life around 50 to 90 degrees and if you live yours around 10 to 40, I don’t see the advantage. The natural response is of course we live close to freezing! 0 °C is the temperature that differentiates frozen lakes from open lakes, snow from rain, slippery dangerous roads from regular.

drostie 13y ago

It is extremely inconvenient that time is base-24 and base-60 while everything else in the metric system is base-10; it leads, for example, to a difficult conversion between the "meters per second" of the physics class and the "km/hr" of the highway. One surprisingly frustrating thing is that if you view a day as a million "instants" then an instant is actually a very human number, about the human reaction time or so; and a kiloinstant is a very human timescale too; 86.4 seconds or just shy of a minute and a half. We already know that when someone says "be there in five minutes" they mean 7-8; if they said "be there in five ki" they would be more accurate. Fun things: 1. I wrote an HTML5 base-10 clock here with some togglable layers. Try out base-10 time: http://drostie.org/time/ http://drostie.org/time/ . It's actually much easier than reading a normal clock because it's a digital readout, "8, 5, 6" rather than "two past a quarter after 8, that's 8:17." (It might not seem that way at first -- but that's because we spent long hours learning to tell time.) 2. For the exactly opposite view, that the number system should be base-12, see http://www.dozenal.org/ http://www.dozenal.org/ . It's actually a good way to work with numbers, and I've used the "counting on the joints/pads of your proper fingers" trick a number of times; sometimes you only have one hand free and want to count to something that's less than 48 (you can encode 2 extra bits with "hand facing up, hand facing down, hand facing up again, hand facing down again"; I've found it gets confusing after 4 or 5 of these though.) 3. I am very sympathetic to Feynman's "we don't need more units!" claim, but the reason we use various units is because we have different interests -- masses in eV/c^2 for example reflect someone who is interested in the atomic interaction energies (eV) of relativistic particles (c^2); energies in Kelvin reflect someone who is interested in how much they need to cool their experimental apparatus to see certain effects; energies in inverse centimeters reflect people who have spectrometers. Following this, I've tried to think whether the base-10 clock could be used to construct a set of "rational units" which would try to get the "human scale things" right while making all of these other units amount to a power-of-10 difference. I've not condensed these speculations to a final form yet but the speculations are themselves at: https://github.com/drostie/essay-seeds/blob/master/misc/rational_units.md https://github.com/drostie/essay-seeds/blob/master/misc/rati... .

ctdonath 13y ago
"we don't need more units!" Yes, some units are useful for particular interests. Create them as they're needed and useful. Base-10 time would make more sense. Celsius at least coordinates notable values with common materials. Some units are just stupid. The lead article gives an unsatisfactory explanation of base-12/60 time (admitting near the end the reason for base-60 is unknown); trying to explain clocks to toddlers is proving annoying (I can't explain it if it doesn't make sense, and it doesn't make sense). Fahrenheit is just an arbitrary marking on a scale and seeing how reality happened to line up. http://xkcd.com/927/ http://xkcd.com/927/

raldi 13y ago

Here's another example: One of this past weekend’s NFL games had a final score of 23 to 10. A nice, natural measurement that's easy to grasp. But under the metric system, the score would have been 14.38 to -6. Completely awkward and out of touch with the human scale.

kps 13y ago

> when I build things it's useful to divide in half a few times Fahrenheit adjusted his earlier scale, changing from 30° to 32° for freezing, and 90° to 96° for body temperature, in order to simplify constructing thermometers by bisecting between the calibration points.

js2 13y ago

As someone who bakes, I loathe imperial measurements. For one, measuring by weight instead of volume is just much easier and more precise. (I'm looking at you "cups of flour.") For two, it's a lot simpler to scale recipes given in metric amounts.

wikwocket 13y ago

On the topic of metric vs. otherwise, you may enjoy Matt Parker's "Guide to the Imperial Measurement System." [0] Matt Parker is an eminent stand-up mathematician, often featured on James May's excellent Number Hub series 0: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7x-RGfd0Yk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7x-RGfd0Yk

desireco42 13y ago

Imperial system is bad, even for you who grown up with it, it should be obvious how inconvenient it is. As for temperature, while F is not telling me anything useful, C is always telling me if it will rain or snow, actually when it snows it is always closer to 0 (or 32). As article mentioned, we got time from Babylonians, who got it from Summerians. Time and calendar are one of the weirder things we deal with. I used internet time for a while, you know the Swatch thing. It looks weird in the beggining, but very quickly you get it and it works well and it is convenient that it is not time-zone dependant. And that was just a marketing gimmick from Swatch. I think the whole idea that we somehow manage to create bridges and build buildings despite weird measures we use, is more testament to our ability to overcome difficult obstacles.

ArbitraryLimits 13y ago

IMO the reason why Americans prefer Farenheit to Celsius is that the 0 and 100 points correspond to roughly the limits of common outdoor temperatures, rather than water's state changes. Pretty much the same argument for miles per hour vs kilometers per hour - 100 mph is all anyone's ever going to go during a normal day. That's an interesting point about being able to divide by half more than once for feet/inches, though - I hadn't thought of that before. (From another American with a physics background)

nfoz 13y ago
Let's face it -- people have a strong preference for whatever system they are used to. There's extremely strong inertia, and efforts to try and justify one system over the other are not especially effective.

jhanschoo 13y ago

You seem to have missed the convenience of secondary definitions using SI. Using SI, 1 J = 1 N * 1 m = 1 W * 1 s. You can't do the same with calories, miles, horsepower, and other Imperial units.

Someone 13y ago

"to within about a percent a year is pi times ten to the seventh" The way to remember that is "pi seconds in a nanocentury"

Crito 13y ago

It is the non-metric units for volume that really turn into a shitfest. I grew up in America, went to public schools, learned to cook from American cookbooks, and still can't keep all of them straight. Pints in a gallon? Quarts in a gallon? Quarts in a pint? Teaspoons in a cup? Cups in a pint? Who fucking knows? The best I can do is a pint is roughly how much beer you get at a bar (but that changes from region to region!) and milk comes in a gallon while other beverages do not.

elspecial 13y ago

"Among other things, when I build things it's useful to divide in half a few times, which is easier with inches and feet."... If you find it easier to work with base 12 than base 10, you are not like most of the people. "And I've found no benefit to Celsius's 0 and 100 coinciding with water's state changing." So the fact that pure water freezes at 0 and boils at 100 is of no benefit to you? I don't buy it.