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Death by Inches: The battle over the metric system in America

• moron4hire 12y ago
  I see we're still perpetuating the "DVORAK is inherently better than QWERTY" myth, as well as "QWERTY was designed to prevent key-sticking" myth. And I don't want to know what it suggests about the author that he still has Tommy Lee's penis on the brain. That is your go-to inch example? I had always intuited a higher opinion of Slate, just because I had friends I respected who read it, but the more I actually read it myself, the more it seems barely above the likes of BuzzFeed or HuffPo. >> "when a foot is 12 inches... it gets tough to do quick mental calculations.' Except, you know, when you want to easily divide by three or six. Or by two or four and end up with integer results. But why would anyone ever want to do that in normal, day to day living?
  • dalke 12y ago
    It doesn't say that Dvorak is better than QWERTY. It links to an article in The Atlantic titled "The Lies You've Been Told About the Origin of the QWERTY Keyboard". Quoting from it, which quotes from elsewhere: > ... the QWERTY system emerged as a result of how the first typewriters were being used. Early adopters and beta-testers included telegraph operators who needed to quickly transcribe messages. However, the operators found the alphabetical arrangement to be confusing and inefficient for translating morse code. The Kyoto paper suggests that the typewriter keyboard evolved over several years as a direct result of input provided by these telegraph operators That's why the Slate article says "the QWERTY keyboard was designed for a different age (to suit the quirks of telegraph operators)", and does not refer to the myth about key-sticking. (Personally, I thought the same as you, and it required a closer reading to understand that my thought was incorrect.) The discussion about mental arithmetic concerns conversions between different scales, like foot and mile, not in fractions of a foot. If you have a surveyor's wheel marked in feet or half-rods and want to measure 1/4 mile -- how long is that? That said, see my other post for aspects about this article that I didn't like.
• dalke 12y ago
  I have some difficulties with the issues described in the piece. "A yard is the distance from your sternum to the tip of your outstretched hand." According to folk belief, it's the distance from the tip of Henry I's nose to the end of his thumb. According to an early definition, "It is ordained that 3 grains of barley dry and round do make an inch, 12 inches make 1 foot, 3 feet make 1 yard." Who here has an idea of the size of a grain of barley dry and round? At 39.3 inches, a meter is just slightly longer than a yard, and for "traditional purposes" where the sternum/fingertip approximation is good enough, a meter and a yard can be used almost interchangeably. Somehow all those people using metric in their daily lives don't feel like they are missing something special by having "ancient, organic" units. (BTW, at what point does something become "ancient"?) "Or don’t bother, because the definition completely changed in 1960" The yard definition 'completely changed' in 1959, when it defined as exactly 0.9144 meters. Before then it was different in different countries. Since the yard is pegged to the meter, this means that the yard is now legally defined as the time light travels in 1/274130223.5952 seconds. "The first third of the 20th century, for instance, saw some quite serious efforts to rationalize our systems for dates and times." As well as the 1700s, when France ran under a rationalized calendar, which provided the name for the Thermidorian Reaction. This is part of the same movement that brought us the metric system, so I think it's odd to exclude that very serious effort.
  • keithpeter 12y ago
    UK: we work in Imperial but things are officially priced in metric, except for beer. Petrol is in pence/litre. So you get price per lb and per kg. Lengths are in millimetres on builders plans (to avoid mistakes with decimal points) but road signs are in miles. Makes teaching basic maths to adults a bit more fun... http://sohcahtoa.org.uk/pages/maths_market-metric-proportion.html http://sohcahtoa.org.uk/pages/maths_market-metric-proportion... You would be surprised how many people have issues with decimal place notation still. The low denominator fractions make a lot of sense for a lot of people. French speaking African students of mine will naturally price food in half and quarter kilos.
    • dalke 12y ago
      The UK is a very odd place when it comes to metrication. My experience in Sweden is that things sold in the 1/2 and 1/4 kg sizes are often measured in grams or sometimes hectograms rather than kg. Meat, for example, is usually given in values which are a multiple of 25 g, even when there's more than 1kg. This bypasses the need to use low denominator fractions.
• raldi 12y ago
  The article uses "Anyway, we have calculators now" as an argument for decimalization, but I see it as an argument against it. The less people do math on paper (or in their head), the less need we have to tie our system of measurement to the number of fingers the human hand happens to have; calculators divide by 12 as easily as 10.
  • yen223 12y ago
    The nice thing about the metric system is that the base is consistent - it's always some multiple of 10. With the imperial system, it gets tricky remembering whether you have to multiply by 12 or 16 or 5280 or whatnot.
    • raldi 12y ago
      That objection is growing obsolete, too: Nobody these days divides by 5280; they go to Google and type "1/4 mile in feet"
      • matymador 12y ago
        Don't you feel handicapped having to use a computer to express basic distances? In the metric system, you have to have some sort of low IQ not to be able to convert from meters to kilomethers on the fly. Hours to seconds is trickier, and would be much improved by decimal notation.
• raldi 12y ago
  I wish the article had touched on temperature systems; I feel like Celsius is metric at its weakest. Farenheit has beautiful bands: <0: So cold it's off the scales 0's: So cold you have trouble doing anything and just want to warm up immediately 10's: Wear a ski jacket with hat and scarf and gloves 20's: Wear a ski jacket and hat 30's: Wear a ski jacket but leave it open 40's: Wear a wool overcoat 50's: Wear a heavy jacket 60's: Wear a light jacket 70's: Leave the jacket home 80's: Wear shorts 90's: So hot you have trouble doing anything and just want to cool down immediately 100+: So hot it's off the scales
  • ivanca 12y ago
    Anything feels right when you are used to it, for the rest of the world Celsius feels right, you could say it's because you know anything starting by "minus" is cold as well as any single integer (0-9). Some sort of familiarity-bias.
  • Sharlin 12y ago
    Well, to a non-American like myself the Fahrenheit scale feels weird and arbitrary (and yes, I understand the "human scale" argument, just don't buy it") while the Celsius scale makes sense.
    • JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      Or is it just more familiar? We all like what we're accustomed to. Is there some reason Celsius 'makes sense'? Why does it make sense that 22 is comfortable but 40 is miserably hot? It doesn't make any more sense than 72 and 100.
      • Schweigi 12y ago
        Well its rather easy to make your own thermometer using the Celsius scale. Put quicksilver in a small glass tube and put it outside. When water starts to freeze mark the current position with 0. Drop it in boiling water and mark it with 100. Evenly distribute now 98 markings between the two existing ones and voila you have just made your own thermometer :)
• chiph 12y ago
  If we went metric on the interstates, exit 880 on Interstate 10 in Texas (at the Louisiana state line) would retain it's status as the highest numbered exit in North America. Only it'd be exit 1408. (exits are generally numbered by their mile (err, kilometer..) marker in the US, not consecutively)
  • ecopoesis 12y ago
    Not really true. In New England and most of the NE, exits are numbered consecutively, or at least started that way until ABCs got added in and others got removed.
    • chiph 12y ago
      So switching to metric would give the various DOTs in those states the opportunity to correct their numbering. They'd have fewer A,B,C exits as well, since kilometers are smaller and would increase the chance of the exit location falling nearer to a milepost.
  • micro-ram 12y ago
    880 looks like a trap to keep you in Texas :) https://www.google.com/maps/@30.1199335,-93.7106707,1513m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@30.1199335,-93.7106707,1513m/da...
• melling 12y ago
  Everyone seems to be missing the most obvious reason to convert. http://gizmodo.com/5786004/these-are-the-three-countries-who-dont-use-the-metric-system http://gizmodo.com/5786004/these-are-the-three-countries-who... We're a global economy. By the ends of the century, India and China will have pushed us down to at least #3.
  • Moru 12y ago
    Some countries aren't known for knowledge outside of the borders.
  • Zigurd 12y ago
    It would be interesting to add up which costs more: Keeping English measurement for some products and engineering (i.e. construction), or having a mixed CDMA/GSM (not to mention iDEN) mobile infrastructure. Having a global economy doesn't seem to have much impact or those English-sized wrenches made in China should cost more.
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  • alayne 12y ago
    The U.S. uses the metric system and the customary system. Even many countries that are primarily metric use non-metric units like stones for body weight or feet for airplane elevation. I agree that metric would be a better system, but your implication that we can't compete in the global economy with our mixed unit system seems hyperbolic since we have already been competing just fine.
    • XorNot 12y ago
      Haha what? No one using the metric system uses "stone" for body weight. They use kilos. Even the US doesn't use "stone" - you use pounds, which is your stand-in for the kilogram. EDIT: Seriously, I cannot think of a single country which uses "stone" for bodyweight. Maybe the British? But doctors don't, definitely not in Australia, and I've never heard anyone from any other places use it either.
• geuis 12y ago
  This whole article just feels like fluff. The very first "fact" about the origins of the qwerty keyboard are completely wrong. The Wikipedia page doesn't have a single mention of telegraph and has a complete history of its development. A history can be found in this 1996 article among others http://reason.com/archives/1996/06/01/typing-errors/ http://reason.com/archives/1996/06/01/typing-errors/.
  • ZeroGravitas 12y ago
    Are the people who link to this libertarian propaganda every time qwerty or Dvorak gets mentioned underhanded libertarians hoping to spread their brand of economic religion or people who have been utterly taken in by the former to the point that they think this is an unbiased debunking?
    • sbmassey 12y ago
      Libertarianism is at least as rational and self consistent as any other ideology, so Reason seems as good a place to read articles as the Guardian or whatever. Are you sure that you aren't in the thrall of some other economic religion, and therefore overly eager to harrumph at the unbelievers?
    • scholia 12y ago
      The article points out that: "In April 1990, we published a more detailed version of this material in a Journal of Law and Economics article titled 'The Fable of the Keys.' This journal is well known and has published some of the most influential articles in economics. In the six years since we published that article there has been no attempt to refute any of our factual claims, to discredit the GSA study, or to resurrect the Navy study." Pointing to Reason is not a valid reason for dismissing an argument that is well known from other sources that are, as a matter of fact, not libertarian. It would be more interesting if you stopped smearing sources and actually provided -- or at least pointed to -- some rational articles that try to refute the factual case.
• disillusioned 12y ago
  Even worse for cities that are laid out on a mile by mile grid, like Phoenix. Yikes.
• upofadown 12y ago
  Since our civilization seems to have moved to binary for actual computations I wonder if we will someday go back to thinking in terms of halves, quarters, eighths, etc. of some standard unit. Then people would mock the metric system for being implicitly based on the biological accident of ten fingers...
  • langarto 12y ago
    We should abandon base 10 and use base 16.
    • guscost 12y ago
      Base 12 is more useful. We should teach kids to count in binary (and convert it to base 12) then standardize all units around that. And if some country refuses to go along with the plan, we should bomb them until they capitulate.
    • Houshalter 12y ago
      Why not base 8? It's closer to 10 and doesn't require 6 more numbers, but 2 fewer.
      • NolF 12y ago
        It's not as easily divisible by 3.
  • kps 12y ago
    Indeed —​ you can't even represent 0.1 in IEEE floating point, so who in their right mind would try to build a measuring system on tenths?
    • letney 12y ago
      > "you can't even represent 0.1 in IEEE floating point" Not true, the IEEE 754-2008 standard provides a Decimal Floating Point specification in binary. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_floating_point#IEEE_754-2008_encoding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_floating_point#IEEE_754...
• SideburnsOfDoom 12y ago
  > Well, to be fair, those anti-metric folks had at least one point in their favor: Customary measures make a lot more sense to us. The author is full of it. Whichever system you grew up with will seem natural to you. This misconception comes up time and time again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7821501 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7821501 The article seems like fluff; the author isn't even making novel mistakes. He even says that the metric system "died". Hah. That's true only in a very limited parochial sense; it's the most popular system of measurement on planet earth even if it's isn't used for day-to-day things in the USA.
  • vpeters25 12y ago
    > The author is full of it. Whichever system you grew up with will seem natural to you This is true to at least my case: grew up under the metric system and after 15 years living in the US, still have to mentally convert dimensions to metric in order to make sense of them: - If you point at something and ask me how far it is, the first number that comes to my mind is in meters, then I say that number and add "yards" or mentally multiply it by 3 and add "feets" - If you ask me to grab something and give you the weight, the number comes in Kg and I mentally multiply it by 2.2 to give and approximate weight in pounds.
    • Natsu 12y ago
      Just FYI, "feets" isn't a word. The plural of feet is feet :) Similarly, "softwares" isn't a word either, but I hear it a lot. There's only software. I say this because it's a common mistake among people who speak well, otherwise.
      • walshemj 12y ago
        And "codes" !!
        • ScottBurson 12y ago
          Actually, the use of "code" as a count noun is quite old and well entrenched in the numerical modelling community. I can recall back in the early 1970s hearing Fortran programs routinely referred to as "codes".
• hrbrtglm 12y ago
  I love the metric system for no better reasons that it's the one I always used as a french, it just seems as natural for me as my ten fingers, I never really thought about it. Yet, I can understand why some would not change their “English customary measures”, they must feel it the same way, thinking it's as natural as their feet. For instance, our screens size (TV, computer, phones) are expressed in inches for whatever good reasons ... I don't have a clue at all about the size it represents, I just know 13 is smaller than 15, 11 is too small for me for a computer screen, and that 42 is a pretty good decent size for a TV. My surfboard is a 6.2, and for all I know, it's taller than me ... If I were told, we were going to change our measure system, I would be kind of scared, could it be better or worse ! After all, the hardest part is not the real use but the idea of the switch. Now, if you could just use the international ISO 216 paper size, I wouldn't have to mess with my PDF export settings and just push some A4.
  • Pxtl 12y ago
    Inches to cm and back are actually an easy conversion so thinking in both isn't hard - 2.5cm/in, 30cm/ft. 1.6km/mi and 2.2 lbs/kg are a bit more annoying, and Fahrenheit are a freaking abomination.
    • jimbobimbo 12y ago
      C is roughly (F - 30)/2, not too bad. To make my life easier I also measure lb as 1/2 kg and driving distances as time.
      • xxs 12y ago
        I still remember the formula by heart C=5/9*(F-32), learned it a kid while reading books on electronics. Mentally I still use it to convert while watching a movie for example. However I still don't know how people prefer it over Celsius, the latter feels a lot more natural. Pound to Kg is rather easy as it has to be multiplies by 2.2, adding 1/10 after multiplying by 2.
      • deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
• chj 12y ago
  I am really glad that a second wasn't broken further into 72 pieces.
  • spiritplumber 12y ago
    In some fields (cinematography) it gets broken into 29.9 pieces...
• acomjean 12y ago
  The things that remain often get 10 ized. we have measuring tape with feet and tenths of feet. Inches are divided into mils (1000th of an inch). So we get base 10 with familiar units of measeure.
• u124556 12y ago
  How about "either is arbitrary so fighting over which is better is pointless, just choose the one with higher acceptance."
• dghughes 12y ago
  Someone (a jogger/runner?) on reddit a few days ago made an interesting observation, maybe this was known. The Fibonacci sequence can be used as a rough guide to convert km to miles and vice versa. 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 The first four don't work very well but: 3km is about 2 miles 5km is about 3 miles 8km is about 5 miles 13km is about 8 miles 21km is about 13 miles 34km is about 21 miles and so on
  • readerrrr 12y ago
    Nothing mysterious there; in the Fibonacci sequence, the ratio of the number and the one before it converges to the golden ratio which is almost the same as the conversion rate between km and miles. I think it is easier to multiply by 0.6. Or do the simpler approximation: n/2 + n/10 + ( n/100 )*2 You can drop the last term if you don't need an accurate result. Divisions and multiplications by 2, 10 and 100 are really easy. 850km to miles: 425 + 85 + 17 = 527 miles , the correct result is 528.166 miles 258km to miles: 129 + 26 + 5 = 160 miles , correct result is 160.314 miles
• dghughes 12y ago
  Someone (a jogger/runner?) on reddit a few days ago made an interesting observation, maybe this was known. The Fibonacci sequence can be used as a rough guide to convert km to miles and vice versa. 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 The first four don't work very well but: 3km is about 2 miles 5km is about 3 miles 8km is about 5 miles 13km is about 8 miles 21km is about 13 miles 34km is about 21 miles and so on
• harshpotatoes 12y ago
  Could you imagine Boeing/lockheed/GM/some some oil company or any other manufacturer going up to their stockholders and saying: "This next year, profits will be significantly reduced as we replace every piece of equipment we own, replace every 1/4-20 screw with an M5, and redesign every aircraft/automobile/widget to meet new metric specifications"
  • venus 12y ago
    I suppose it'd be better than being Boeing and going in front of your stockholders to explain why your marketshare is radically down because you refused to conform to the measurement system 95% of your customers are using. It's a non-question anyway. Boeing planes already report fuel load in litres. Funnily enough, flight levels are internationally represented in feet (well, 100-feet) so there's a "win" for you. Also, ground speed is measured in knots!
    • teamonkey 12y ago
      The knot isn't quite as arbitrary as most imperial measures. 1 knot = 1 nautical mile/hour 1 nautical mile ~= the distance travelled by someone at the equator in one minute due to the Earth's rotation Since navigation at sea was strongly dependent on the position of the sun and stars, it makes sense to use a unit of speed that makes your calculations easier. Even for modern navigation it makes sense to use a unit of measurement based on the circumference of the great circle surrounding the Earth.
      • ScottBurson 12y ago
        > 1 nautical mile ~= the distance travelled by someone at the equator in one minute due to the Earth's rotation No. It's approximately one minute of arc, that is, 1/60 of one degree. In fact the speed of the earth's rotation at the equator is more like 15 nautical miles per minute.
        • teamonkey 12y ago
          Yes, you're right of course. The Earth rotates through 15 arcminutes in 1 minute.
• wolfgke 12y ago
  Relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/526/ http://xkcd.com/526/
  • anotherevan 12y ago
    +1 for “spit goes ‘clink’.”
  • xxs 12y ago
    What 26C cold to swim? 26C is absolutely warm, around 20C is cold and below 16 is when the balls :freeze:, still doable though.
• JohnDoe365 12y ago
  > Likewise, employer-provided health insurance was a historical accident As an European, a stance like that is near to instant execution.
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  • johan_larson 12y ago
    What are you talking about? In some places, health care is a matter between you and the government. The US has an odd system of subsidized employer-provided health insurance. It covers most workers, except at the low end of jobs. The government, meanwhile, provides direct coverage of the very old and the very poor. The people who really get screwed in the US system are the ones in crappy jobs, who aren't poor enough that the government steps in directly, but don't make enough that it's worthwhile for their employers to take advantage of the subsidies of employer-provided insurance.
    • true_religion 12y ago
      Or anyone who is self-employed or own their own business.
  • analog31 12y ago
    As I understand it, employer-provided health insurance was first introduced by Ernst Abbe through his oversight of the Carl Zeiss company, in Germany. Abbe is one of my favorite unsung tech heroes.
• acd 12y ago
  We should all use the metric system and UTC time.
  • bluecalm 12y ago
    UTC time would make it convenient for internet sites and international travel but would suck for things like talking/writing about daily activities, schedules, times of the day. Now "a jog at 5:30am was pleasant experience because there was barely a soul on the streets" wouldn't allow you to imagine what the experience was (was it before sunrise or maybe late evening, or maybe middle of the night?).
• kazinator 12y ago
  I was born and raised in Europe. I live in Canada that has (mostly) gone metric in the 1970's. Yet, I use inches. They are nicer! I recently built a shelf and hanger rack in a weirdly-shaped closet. I used Sketchup to design it, and naturally made everything in inches. Inches are "semi-metric" too, thanks to mils: thousandths of an inch. Mils are very nice units for fine work, like circuit boards. Millimeters are way too crude, and micrometers are outside of macroscopic human experience. When doing PCB work, I use mils, which create a virtual metric system within the space of an inch. E.g. the pins of old-school DIPs are 100 mils apart, or 0.1" Through holes are in mils: 25 mils, 40 mils. Same for track widths: 8 mils, 10 mils, ... very nice numbers to work with at that scale: one, two or three digits, no decimals.
  • notastartup 12y ago
    Canadian here as well, but I always thought that we had metric system all along! I just assumed that everyone was using such standards when I was little and then came things like miles, pounds, yards, foot and I was like wtf, it's so complicated. I know how long a cm is by pinching my index and thumb finger and measuring the distance between the nails. I know roughly how long is a meter based on my height. I know roughly how long is a km based on my running distance.
  • notastartup 12y ago
    Canadian here as well, but I always thought that we had metric system all along! I just assumed that everyone was using such standards when I was little and then came things like miles, pounds, yards, foot and I was like wtf, it's so complicated. I know how long a cm is by pinching my index and thumb finger and measuring the distance between the nails. I know roughly how long is a meter based on my height. I know roughly how long is a km based on my running distance.
• jccalhoun 12y ago
  When I read t he Tommy Lee dick joke I had to check to see how old this was. Who still makes Tommy Lee jokes?
• jwecker 12y ago
  I am not anti-metric by any means, but having done carpentry a lot in the past it always strikes me when this comes up that one of the central arguments for (a limited use-case of) the imperial system is usually glossed over: the fact that in many crafts (especially historically), using base-12 makes certain things much easier. It divides into 3rds far more easily, divides into 4ths slightly more easily, and still divides into 5ths with only one digit after the decimal. Just like computer programmers have no problem immediately recognizing that 256 is 2^8, it became intuitive when working with the Imperial system (at limited scales) that 48 inches is the same as 4-feet but that it is also 3-stud-distances long (studs in walls are often placed 16 inches apart). Even if you don't work in crafts where dividing things by 3 is more frequent than dividing by 5 it is easy to imagine how certain things might be more difficult if we used base-10 for time (as, it has been pointed out, has been attempted)- and thereby using the ability to easily divide an hour into 3 parts (for example). Consistent base-10 and international standardization has advantages that far outweigh these minor things- but I think it's important to recognize that there is, surprise, a rational practical reason for sticking in some cases to Imperial units- it's not purely tradition or politics or their "organic-ness" (anymore).
  • Havoc 12y ago
    >a rational practical reason for sticking in some cases to Imperial units That to me is the worst of both worlds. The optimal solution is to use one consistent system and the winner is pretty clear. >carpentry Certainly. The future is full of 3D printers though.
    • gilrain 12y ago
      Wood is an easily workable, relatively inexpensive, and, importantly, renewable resource. We'll be seeing more of 3D printing for sure, but you're kidding yourself if you think it'll replace carpentry.
      • spiritplumber 12y ago
        I want a 3d printer / wood router hybrid. All I've managed to do so far is a 3d printer / laser cutter hybrid, but it takes forever for it to cut wood.
• tim333 12y ago
  From the geek point of view we should really all switch to Planck units of course.
• MrJagil 12y ago
  Sort of related: Discussion of the Time Zone article mentioned: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8138200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8138200
• tfinniga 12y ago
  Here's my proposal: America goes metric, and the rest of the world starts driving on the right hand side of the road.
  • jonathansizz 12y ago
    Most of the world already drives on the right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-_and_left-hand_traffic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-_and_left-hand_traffic
  • pbhjpbhj 12y ago
    I'd be fine with that. You call Obama and I'll call Cameron and we'll get the ball rolling.
  • anonymfus 12y ago
    Can America also adapt Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals? Please.
    • farva 12y ago
      "MUTCD specifies yellow lines between lanes of traffic moving in opposite directions and white lines between lanes moving in the same direction, whereas the Vienna Convention uses white for both." (Wikipedia) No thanks.
  • yen223 12y ago
    No way. Driving on the left makes so much more sense than driving on the right. If you're driving a manual transmission car on the left side of the road, you'd steer with your right hand and change gears with your left. This works out nicely for right-handed people, i.e. 90% of the population.
    • xkiwi 12y ago
      Right way. Driving on the right makes so much more sense than driving on the left. If you're driving a manual transmission car on the right side of the road, you'd steer with your left hand and change gears with your right. This works out nicely for right-handed people, i.e. 90% of the population.
• analog31 12y ago
  I started grade school around when the big push for metric occurred in the US. Here's what I remember. Inches were taught as inches. Here's a ruler, measure some things. Metric was taught as a bunch of math. Here's how you convert between different units. Many years later I was talking to a machinist who told me: "My daughter is learning metric in school but I don't like it because of all the math."
• chrismcb 12y ago
  One of the biggest arguments for metric (other than the rest of the world uses it) has been that it is easy to convert from liters to kilometers. In your day to day life, how often do you need to convert from one thing to another? For most people, the answer is they don't. Occasionally in cooking you need to convert, other than that you rarely need to convert. So don't go and switch the system just because something people rarely do is easier. And yes there are lots of jobs that require doing conversions. Many of those jobs already use metric.
  • MisterBastahrd 12y ago
    Converting liters to kilometers? I need to know how to do this! How many beers is a kilometer? Gonna get my jog on.
    • alayne 12y ago
      A liter of water weighs a kilogram and is 1000 cm^3 (.001 m^3). These units are easily related. That's what GP is referring to.
    • fennecfoxen 12y ago
      Assuming a 500ml beer... (500ml / 1 km) = 0.5 square millimeters. For interpretation advice, see also: xkcd. https://what-if.xkcd.com/11/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/11/
      • T-hawk 12y ago
        This actually has the same physical interpretation, right? If you took 500ml volume of beer and stretched it out to 1 km long, the stretched form would be 0.5 mm^2 in cross-section.
  • anotherevan 12y ago
    Another advantage is that a metre is a metre everywhere, and a litre is a litre everywhere (spelling notwithstanding.) A lot of the imperial units are regional. A tablespoon may be either three or four teaspoons. Who knows how much a fluid ounce is. One very real PITA is reading cooking recipes and having to do some deduction to figure out how much the units actually are.
• spullara 12y ago
  Even though I'm an ex-physicist where nearly everything was done in metric, I'm decidedly anti-metric. Most of the metric system has no empathy for the everyday life of humans and is better suited for making scientific equations easier. It is roughly the equivalent of choosing esperanto for consistency.
  • yen223 12y ago
    I grew up in a metric country. The metric system is totally fine for everyday use. We know that 1.8m is tall, that anything below 5 celsius is cold, and that 100kg is heavy. The only downside is that some stats are only published in imperial units - fuel efficiency being the worst offender.
    • shdon 12y ago
      Except when you're Dutch and male, then 1.8m is not so tall.
    • spullara 12y ago
      It really isn't the point that you can learn those things. People can also learn phone numbers and SSNs but we still use names. Wouldn't everything be much easier if we just referred to each other by our unique number? Addresses are also superfluous, just lat+lon with a unit # should be sufficient. Imperial measurements and their now American counterparts are based on human experience rather than something convenient with which to do calculations. Though the carpenters make a good case for 12in since it is so easily divided into 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/6ths which are used often in construction. Even 1/5ths and 1/8ths go to only 1 decimal place. Metric is convenient for calculation and computing and not much more. Otherwise it is just a tradeoff you are making for a measurement system that wasn't designed around everyday life.
      • stephen_g 12y ago
        Take it from someone who grew up in a metric country - it makes absolutely no difference in everyday use. You are used to imperial units, so they make more sense to you. I'm not, so they feel weird, complicated and completely arbitrary. Typically I have to mentally convert to a metric measurement to have any intuition of how big or heavy something is. In everyday use, I don't care if something is one and 3/5ths of some part of somebody's finger - I'm used to metric so it looks about 4 centimetres... I'm not a builder, but I've never once heard any hint from my friends in construction that using millimetres has ever been a problem for them in their work, as they are used to it and the construction industry in every other country except the US is geared towards metric...
• jjindev 12y ago
  As a guy with a chem degree, I prefer Metric in the lab, and Imperial (US) in the kitchen or workshop. It isn't really that hard to shift gears/units for your task. Even better is when you learn to cook or build without measurement, just transferring sizes directly. See James Krenov on building a cabinet.
• __david__ 12y ago
  The thing about measurements is that they don't matter in your everyday life. I get that it makes physics calculations easier and international machining companies need to interface with the world, but measuring the speed of my car in miles per hour and knowing my couch is 7 1/2 feet long are perfectly fine, and there is absolutely no compelling reason to switch to metric for those kinds of things. People don't want to switch because it's a huge burden to retrain yourself to think in those units. I remember growing up that the US tried to do it—roadsigns in California had both miles and kilometers on them and our speedometers had both readings for a while. But it didn't stick because there's absolutely no point—it doesn't improve anything, it's just churn. I've got a very intuitive notion of how long a mile is, and Europeans have a very intuitive grasp on how long a kilometer is. It isn't because one system is intuitive and one isn't, it's just what you're used to—you know it because you use it every day. The article is wrong. Imperial Units are not "better". But, the system you know and use every day is better than the weird foreign system. As Abe Simpson once said, "The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!"
  • mpyne 12y ago
    > But it didn't stick because there's absolutely no point—it doesn't improve anything, it's just churn. This is pretty much it, though I'd throw on that Europeans acting like they're morally superior for using metric as their native measuring system (and that Americans are intellectually slovenly for not) certainly doesn't do many favors for the cause of metricization in the U.S.
• transfire 12y ago
  Sumerian base 60 and kumbaya y'all!
• ted5555 12y ago
  A recent issue of Nature featured a 100 years ago in Nature clip that showed the USA thought it would be too hard to switch to the Metric system in 1914. 100 years and counting.
• Houshalter 12y ago
  I prefer Imperial but I'd be willing to switch, provided we also switch to a new spelling and time system. It's funny the same people that make fun of the Imperial system also cling to bad standards because they are more familiar and have a high switching cost.
• watson 12y ago
  I think the "but it's easier to visualize" claim is BS. I would argue that it's just as hard for a person who's is used to the metric system to visualize inches, feet and yards as it is for a person used to those units to visualize centimeters and meters. It's all a matter of which units your brain is used to thinking in. When I speak to my US friends and they say stuff like, "I'm 7 feet and 10 inches tall", I have no internal visual metal picture at all. But if I say, "I'm 193 cm tall" I would guess they don't have either.
  • xxs 12y ago
    You have some really tall friends: 7feet,10inches would be uber-tall - 239cm. To convert I use some baselines 5'7 is 170, 6' is 183, then adding/subtracting inches to fit.
    • watson 12y ago
      I think this illustrates my point ;) But since when do I get down-votes for favouring the metric system??
• whiddershins 12y ago
  It drives me crazy that people think base 10 systems are so great. The choice of base 10 is so deeply irritating to me. Divisions of 60 are fantastic, obviously, and we all benefit from being able to divide an hour in to 5ths, 6ths ... Meanwhile splitting a check three ways is likely to always be uneven. Base 12 or 60 end up being more precise in every day life, and i wish whoever thought up the metric system had been smart enough to realize that.
  • Jedd 12y ago
    As has been pointed out elsewhere, the 95% of the planet that uses metric systems (including dollars and cents - a decidedly metric-friendly currency) has not ended up starving due to an inability to split a food bill by the number of people at the table. Of course, you're right that if you and 59 of your closest friends were out for dinner, it'd be easier if currencies were based upon divisions of 60, that certainly makes some sense. Maybe whoever thought up the metric system was smart in ways that you don't yet fully appreciate?
• Taniwha 12y ago
  If I visit Starbucks they sell something called a "Venti" it's part of Starbucks attempt to change the language of coffee so that their regular customers can't order elsewhere. "Venti" is of course Italian for 20, let's ignore the fact that Starbucks appear to invalidly trademarked a number, when I find myself stuck with a Starbucks in an American airport I love to ask "that's Italian for twenty, twenty what?" the usual answer is "fluid ounces" .... but "that can't be true, Italy uses the metric system, it must be litres or millilitres ..." usually they choose "litres", it is a big cup Of course the American fluid ounce is a weird thing, different from the Imperial fluid ounce (which is exactly 1oz of water at 62F)- a strange historical thing due more to British Kings monkeying with the tax system than anything else
  • Havoc 12y ago
    >they sell something called a "Venti" I just stick to small/medium/large and keep insisting on that. The employees inevitably cave (realistically they know exactly what I mean).
  • beloch 12y ago
    Occasionally people blurt out "venti" in a place that isn't a Starbucks. The staff always knows that means "biggest cup we've got". Conversely, if I order an "extra large" in Starbucks they always force me to pick one of their sizes and say it's freakin' nonsense name. Also, I'm in Canada (a country that uses metric) and they list their sizes in fluid ounces.
    • billpg 12y ago
      Is that a Canadian Starbucks thing? In English Starbucks I've never had a problem with asking for a "large" or "medium".
  • kiiski 12y ago
    > ... it must be litres or millilitres... Why would it have to be one of those? Obviously it's centilitres; at least here in Finland that's the size of a regular drinking glass (although usually it's called "2 desilitres").
• Htsthbjig 12y ago
  For me this is too much rationalization for a single fact: people hate to change, even if it is for the better. So simple. I study Chinese and I am 100% certain than the reason Chinese did not develop like the West was the printing press and the superior method it is to have to print 25-30 symbols instead of 30.000. Just look at Chinese and even Japanese delay in getting to use computers as ASCII was so simple compared to their language. Japanese use kanji(chinese symbols) for lots of things. The Chinese writing came first, the Indian copied the Chinese language and basically improved over them, then the Greeks copied that via Persia, and then the Romans copied the Greeks. Romans started copying Greek culture because they were so ignorant compared with the Greeks, let alone Chinese at the time. But at the same time, they started anew.The language was so refined, and it took the best thing of each iteration(better than Greek, better than Indian Scripts, better than Chinese). I worked with someone doing programming and the fact that I used Vim instead of a visual text editor really infuriated him. So one day I explained it to him and expended 30 to 40 min teaching him why it was so good for me. He looked confused. One month later he only used vim. The reason most people don't use programs like vim or emacs is because it takes some effort to learn before you get the benefits. The same happens with metric or any other measurement system.
  • richdougherty 12y ago
    > The Chinese writing came first, the Indian copied the Chinese language and basically improved over them, then the Greeks copied that via Persia, and then the Romans copied the Greeks. Latin script's origins are in Egypt and Sumer, not in China. Writing was invented in the Near East about 3200BCE and about 1200BCE in China.
    • Htsthbjig 12y ago
      When I say the Chinese came first I did not want to say that they invented writing. I am talking about sophistication in language,not just script. Most of the early Egyptian and Sumer writings are very simple accountings, mostly numbers. Very little to do with what we consider writing today. latin is called an Indo-European language becomes it comes from India. Not just the language, but the race.
• beloch 12y ago
  A yard is currently defined by the metric system. Metrology is the discipline of measuring. It concerns itself with ensuring that everyone has the same definition of measuring units. For a long time, the yard was based on physical standards. i.e. Somewhere there sat a physical rod 1 yard long that all other rods were measured against to define the yard. The meter was defined this way until 1960 too. The unfortunate problem with physical standards is that they change. A physical rod is different lengths at different temperatures and will, of course, gradually get shorter as it's handled and wear occurs on its ends. The meter is now defined in terms of how fast light can travel in a given period of time. That period of time is defined in terms of hyperfine ground state level transitions of a Cesium atom. Yes, it's complex. However, while a physical standard changes, these standards are built into the laws of the universe and are thus reproducible and fixed for all time. For this reason, the yard is currently defined as 0.9144 meters in the U.S.. No matter how the metric system defines the meter, a yard is 0.9144 meters. So, the U.S. really has gone metric, at least where it counts. The average American is just ignorant of the fact. P.S. Even the metric system is not completely free of physical definitions... yet. The kilogram is still based on a physical prototype. However, there are proposals to change that to something based on physical constants. Once this is done, the metric system will be defined entirely in terms of physics.
• adventured 12y ago
  I agree the US should fully adopt the metric system, it makes logical sense. And Europe should abolish about three dozen major languages that should no longer be in use and adopt English (or perhaps Spanish). Why does Bulgaria need its own language? Or Romania, or Sweden? Why does French still exist? We're talking about efficiencies here, right? What's less efficient than people not being able to easily communicate by sharing a common language. I always get a kick out of bringing this up, because while it's extraordinarily logical to narrow down dozens of languages to one or a few, people lose their minds about it and regard it as a sacred cultural issue that is to never be touched. Whereas converting to the metric system... well but of course, that only makes sense!
  • anotherevan 12y ago
    Please describe the sacred cultural issues around retaining imperial units of measure.
    • Broken_Hippo 12y ago
      I'd be happy to, but it is difficult to understand. For some reason things like changing to metric, in some people's mind, means adapting 'European culture' and is anti-traditionalist. From what I can tell, the same group that holds onto the imperial system is the same group that is upset that cursive writing isn't a mandated subject in schools (how will kids read the constitution) and other such aversion to change.
• amenghra 12y ago
  I remember listening to this podcast a while back: http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/why-isnt-the-u-s-on-the-metric-system/ http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/why-isnt-the-u-s-...
  • anotherevan 12y ago
    I remember listening to that podcast and being quite annoyed by it. One of the protagonist's who was obviously in favour of sticking with imperial units kept smugly saying the US is already metricated. Comes across disingenuous as best. The US rarely uses metric in it's popular culture. Weather reports are in Fahrenheit, movies almost always use miles and pounds. By any measure of cultural output that they export that I've seen (and Australia is a huge consumer of US popular culture) they do not use metric.
    • vacri 12y ago
      Temperature is a weird one, and shows the difference between 'metric' and 'SI unit'. Fahrenheit is neither, and for me is far from intuitive. Celsius is a metric unit, but it's not the SI unit, which is Kelvin. Celsius certainly makes more sense on the human scale than the other two - the general public is familiar with 'water freezes' and 'water boils' - but it's a neat example of a metric unit not being the SI unit.
• infra178 12y ago
  In an age where everyone carries a computer in their pocket, the metric system's only advantage (that it makes converting units easier) is irrelevant.
  • stephen_g 12y ago
    Conversions being easier is nice, but the main advantage of the metric system is that it is a set of properly standardised units that the rest of the world uses... Having a computer in your pocket is never going to change that.
• pavanred 12y ago
  >> The Mars Climate Orbiter disintegrated due to an error introduced because its software used metric measures, while its ground crew used pound-force units. There was an incident in 1983 where Air Canada Flight 143 ran out of fuel at 41,000 feet (12,500m) altitude [1] about half way through its flight. An investigation revealed that one of the cause was a conversion error between metric and non-metric units for the fuel loading calculation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider
• shmerl 12y ago
  > Customary measures make a lot more sense to us. Did they make any less sense in UK where they originated? Yet UK pushed through with switching to metric and went way further than US did. So this excuse isn't really valid. The real answer is, that in US politicians were too weak to push this through, because all kind of manufacturers and unions were pressuring them to stop the effort. In UK they just ignored the pressure. In US they budged. I wish US would already push this through, but so far it doesn't look very promising. About natural. Take for example Celsius and Fahrenheit. Celsius based his scale on water freezing and boiling points, which are quite intuitive borders. At 0°C weather changes significantly since water freezing / melting has a noticeable environmental impact. So if you see -1° or +1° you can expect quite a change. On the other hand what are 31° and 33°? Fahrenheit took his scale without any pragmatic or practical goals of common usage. He did it for his scientific purposes. People more naturally operate with two digit numbers, which in Celsius case covers most of the normal range temperatures. It's good that at least Kelvin's scale didn't become commonly used in some countries...
  • shakethemonkey 12y ago
    Like the other Imperial units, Fahrenheit is also one designed to be pragmatic -- it is scaled so that most temperatures are two digits. 100°F is approximately body temperature, and 0°F is a temperature about as low as one might expect the weather to naturally exhibit.
    • shmerl 12y ago
      0°F is quite a pointless border. Brine freezing? Why would you care about that event to make the scale based on it? Water freezing on the other hand is way more relevant for common matters. So lower border of the 0-100 scale was chosen quite poorly from pragmatic standpoint. And natural temperatures can go above 100°F, so the upper border wasn't chosen conveniently as well. It's not as uncomfortable as Kelvin, but it's still way less pragmatical than Celsius.
      • StuffMaster 12y ago
        >relevant for common matters Put it this way: 0 degrees is really cold for a human and 100 is really hot for a human. Water doesn't care if it's cold.
• arnehormann 12y ago
  There's a great video treating imperial measurement units. I instantly fell in love with it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7x-RGfd0Yk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7x-RGfd0Yk I landed there after watching one on paper sizes on the same channel. Also pretty much worth it!
• ajuc 12y ago
  Centimeter is about 2 grids in a school "checked" notebook. Everybody know after using these notebooks fot the whole education how long exactly that is. No problems with eyeballing. I have problems eyeballing an inch (only used in 5.25 or 3.14 disk sizes and in monitors' sizes). Milimeter is close to smallest unit useful in human scale - when you try to draw 0.5 milimeter scale with a regular pen, for example, the lines will probably touch each other. You can't cut with regular tools with better than 1mm accuracy, too. Tools are commonly scaled in milimeters, and you can almost use 14 key for 13 screw etc, so no point in smaller units for regular mechanics work either. Food stuff is bought in "dekos" (dekagrams). You say "10 deko of this meat, 40 deko of that cheese, and 1 kilo of these berries, please". Somehow hektagram haven't caught up. Land is measured in ar (10x10 meters), hektar (100x100 meters) and squared kilometers for anything bigger. Flats are measured in squared meters (50-300 m2 for most flats). 1 kg of water (and most other common liquids, with precision good enough for cooking etc) is 1 liter, everybody know that and use them interchangeably. 1 glass is 250 ml is 250 g of most liquids and powders, people measure stuff with glasses when cooking assuming 1 glass = 250 g. There's a joke about this 1 liter = 1kg assumption. When asked what's 10 times 100g everybody answered 1kg except Russian and Polish who answered 1 liter (because shot glasses of alcohol in pubs are sold as 100g). 1 meter is almost exactly 1 step, 1 km is how far you can walk in 10 minutes. I don't think one system is better than another in everyday usage, except the much easier calculations in metric.
  • stephen_g 12y ago
    > Food stuff is bought in "dekos" (dekagrams). Where? I've lived my whole life in a metric-using country and I'm fairly sure I have literally never heard of that unit until just now... Our food here is all in grams (i.e. a 100g packet of chips, 300g steak) or kilograms (1.5 kilo bag of rice).
    • edejong 12y ago
      In Slovenia, for example, food is measured in decagrams.
    • jarek 12y ago
      ajuc's examples are for Poland
• ivanhoe 12y ago
  Author wrongly presumes that people using the metric system are not visualizing the measures in almost the same way. We do. One step is about a meter, or the width of finger is about 1 cm. More often used 10 centimeters (1 decimeter) is approx. a distance from your thumb to the index finger. It's all about being used to certain system of measures, so that you can automatically relate the measure to something from the real life for comparison, e.g. my car is 5m long, also the wall in my room is around 5m, so if you ask me how big is 5m I can instantly visualize the distance very accurately (without even consciously thinking about cars or walls)
  • JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Whereas my foot is ... a foot. My pace is a yard. My thumb is about an inch. Works both ways.
    • ivanhoe 12y ago
      absolutely... problem is that I have to think hard to figure out how much a yard is, and you have the same problem with meters. That's what standards are for.
• Tloewald 12y ago
  The beauty of the old system was that it mapped onto the everyday experience of farmers. I am sure hundredweights and furlongs and so forth all made lots of sense. But units have to cross cultures and times — the only intuitive units left to boast about are the foot and the yard, which are 30cm and roughly a meter. Indeed, we are probably taller now than when the yard was defined to the extent that the meter is probably closer to an intuitive yard than the yard is. Incidentally, the official definition of an inch is 2.54cm. Now that's intuitive.
  • JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Or by Wikipedia: 25.4 millimetres
• mmagin 12y ago
  I've wanted the USA to finish going over to the metric system for about as long as I can remember. It annoys the heck out of me that I have to have two sets of tools at hand, have to determine if fasteners are one or the other (both in their threading and drive mechanism), etc.
• Gormo 12y ago
  The biggest liability of the metric system to me is its system of unit prefixes: this is just a bizarre reimplementation of scientific notation that expresses the most significant quantitative information not as part of the actual quantitative component of its notation, but as an arcane verbal prefix attached to the name of the thing being counted. What on earth is the advantage of a notation that makes it easy to scale a value by an order of magnitude without having to alter its numeric representation? This seems to be a much more significant "WTF" of the metric system than the fact that its base units don't seem to have any meaningful anchor in any substantive context.
  • ygra 12y ago
    You get several related units of measurement that each have sane conversion factors. If something goes well beyond centimeters, meters and later kilometers are much nicer to handle. Inches to feet to yards to miles doesn't scale nearly as nicely because of conversion factors of 12, 3 and (I think) 1760 involved there. And since this property is shared by every unit you have the same conversion factors everywhere. No need to memorise hundreds of units, just a dozen and a pattern. Also when combining units (e.g. N being kg⋅m/s²) the conversion factors stay sane.
    • Gormo 12y ago
      It seems like you have only a single base unit of measurement; the rigid powers-of-ten scaling factors prevent any other useful base units from being applied, e.g. there's nothing that approximates a foot in the metric system. So it seems a bit disingenuous to treat a centimeter as a distinct unit when it's really just 1 x 10^-2 meters. The whole "conversion factors" thing seems like a superfluous gimmick. Why would you start working with one unit, then spontaneously decide to start using a different unit in the same context? But in the unusual circumstance where you would need to switch units, perhaps due to a shift in the scale you're operating at, the metric system still prevents you from using a unit appropriate to the context, and limits you to only scaling a less appropriate unit up or down by a power of ten. It really is just scientific notation re-implemented in a bizarre and arcane way. With customary units, you can still represent quantities with scientific notation, and use inches, feet, miles, etc. as your base unit as the context demands, but you've still got a variety of base units to choose from, each more optimal than the others when operating its appropriate context.