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I strongly disagree. Using the right tool for the right job is worth far more than enforcing arbitrary universal consistency. In a math course, you'd measure an

I strongly disagree. Using the right tool for the right job is worth far more than enforcing arbitrary universal consistency. In a math course, you'd measure angles in radians so you're dealing with nice small multiples of pi. I think it'd be downright dangerous to use radians in a fighter jet, say, when the precision you need is much better provided by degrees. Imagine if we enforced only one programming paradigm, since they're all equivalent. Or if we demanded that logicians and cs professors only prove things using turing machines, instead of picking the model of computation that best suits the problem. If there's a case where the english measurement system is more convenient, people should use it.

guscost 12y ago
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Havoc 12y ago
>Using the right tool for the right job is worth far more than enforcing arbitrary universal consistency. Except units of measure are not "tools"...they are ways of communicating information. And when each person feels the need to enforce their own version of "right tool for right job" then things like the mars orbiter incident happen. >Imagine if we enforced only one programming paradigm, since they're all equivalent. Hardly. A better analogy would be to enforce identical calling parameters for DLLs libraries across all languages. That would benefit all languages and improve interoperability.
- nice_uname_nerd 12y ago
  >units of measure are not "tools"...they are ways of communicating information. How you communicate information is important and has real impacts. Given a graph, you could choose to encode it as an adjacency matrix or as a collection of adjacency lists. Both convey the same information, but nobody would say we should pick one and only one. I disagree with the assertion that measurement units aren't tools or that they are exempt from similar consideration. Sure, the Mars incident is a call for consistency, but it's a call for consistency inside NASA. That shouldn't affect carpenters who need divisibility by 2, 3 and 4 more than they need 5. Or those who like to use inches because theyre significantly larger than centimeters and consequently easier to approximate by eye.
  - Havoc 12y ago
    >Sure, the Mars incident is a call for consistency, but it's a call for consistency inside NASA. No its not. Realistically space travel is going to be a humanity as a whole deal, not "inside NASA". Remember that the USA is like 4% of the world population. Even if the US contributes 10x more than everyone else per person that still puts the US in the minority. Consistency here is not a "nice to have"...its mission critical. >That shouldn't affect carpenters So you propose teaching your future carpenters and space engineers different units of measure? >approximate by eye. Approximate by eye? Seriously? Intel is aiming at 10 nanometers. Nobody is eyeballing anything in the modern world. Note...nanometers not nanofeet...this from an American company.
    - oldmanjay 12y ago
      Wow, I would not have believed someone would make the argument that everyone needs to use metric because some day we'll all be in space until I read it. Thanks for broadening my horizons.
    - Gormo 12y ago
      > No its not. Realistically space travel is going to be a humanity as a whole deal, not "inside NASA". I think it's a fair bet that when spaceflight becomes widespread and commonplace, we're going to have many discrete groups of people developing, producing, operating, and maintaining their own particular spacecraft independently of each other, and not "humanity as a whole", as a singular undifferentiated mass, working on a single uniform spaceflight project. Consistency within a specific project is clearly necessary; uniformity among distinct projects is, speaking at the macro level, a liability. Variation is an evolutionary advantage; artificial uniformity slows progress. > So you propose teaching your future carpenters and space engineers different units of measure? Why would this even be a question? Should programmers only be familiar with one single programming language? Should people in general only ever learn to speak a single verbal language? Is there ever an advantage to only being familiar with a single set of tools, and ignorant of all others? > Nobody is eyeballing anything in the modern world. Most people are eyeballing most things in the modern world. It's only in the case of activities on the scale of building spaceships and 10-nm-process integrated circuits that people require the level of precision that you're talking about. The vast majority of human activity remains outside of these domains. The original article was about American resistance to adopting metric units as a default practice in day-to-day life, and not about the use of the metric system by people engaged in highly specialized disciplines. It'd be a bit absurd to suggest that the measuring units selected for high-precision work by the small set of people currently working on microprocessor design are necessarily the optimal ones for e.g. baking a cake or tiling your bathroom. In the latter use cases, one could make a very compelling case that units optimized for alignment with intuition are vastly more useful than ones optimized for micro-scale precision.
Dylan16807 12y ago
Degrees are no more precise than radians. If you're a human you use a certain number of digits and they both work. If you're a computer using integers you're far too imprecise either way. If you're a computer using floats they are equally precise. If you're a computer using fixed point you're better off with something like 2^32ths of a circle.
Patrick_Devine 12y ago
You just get used to whatever units you're working in. If you'd been trained in radians when learning how to fly, everything would be fine. It would be funny though to hear ATC clear someone to land on runway pi/2. That's probably not as succinct as runway 9, but people would be used to it if they learned it in their primary training. The real problem though is switching costs. There are tens of thousands of planes out there and more than a million pilots. To switch all of the compasses, GPSs, flight computers, heading indicators, etc. as well as retrain a metric pantload of pilots would be ludicrous for no appreciable gain. Canada suffered through a problem similar to this when it went metric, and ended up with the Gimli Glider. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider Don't get me wrong though. I love the metric system and think it's great, however first and foremost we are creatures of practicality. If US dominance in the world slips over the next few generations, I would imagine it will at some point join the rest of the world and abandon imperial measurements.

guscost 12y ago

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Havoc 12y ago

>Using the right tool for the right job is worth far more than enforcing arbitrary universal consistency. Except units of measure are not "tools"...they are ways of communicating information. And when each person feels the need to enforce their own version of "right tool for right job" then things like the mars orbiter incident happen. >Imagine if we enforced only one programming paradigm, since they're all equivalent. Hardly. A better analogy would be to enforce identical calling parameters for DLLs libraries across all languages. That would benefit all languages and improve interoperability.

nice_uname_nerd 12y ago
>units of measure are not "tools"...they are ways of communicating information. How you communicate information is important and has real impacts. Given a graph, you could choose to encode it as an adjacency matrix or as a collection of adjacency lists. Both convey the same information, but nobody would say we should pick one and only one. I disagree with the assertion that measurement units aren't tools or that they are exempt from similar consideration. Sure, the Mars incident is a call for consistency, but it's a call for consistency inside NASA. That shouldn't affect carpenters who need divisibility by 2, 3 and 4 more than they need 5. Or those who like to use inches because theyre significantly larger than centimeters and consequently easier to approximate by eye.
- Havoc 12y ago
  >Sure, the Mars incident is a call for consistency, but it's a call for consistency inside NASA. No its not. Realistically space travel is going to be a humanity as a whole deal, not "inside NASA". Remember that the USA is like 4% of the world population. Even if the US contributes 10x more than everyone else per person that still puts the US in the minority. Consistency here is not a "nice to have"...its mission critical. >That shouldn't affect carpenters So you propose teaching your future carpenters and space engineers different units of measure? >approximate by eye. Approximate by eye? Seriously? Intel is aiming at 10 nanometers. Nobody is eyeballing anything in the modern world. Note...nanometers not nanofeet...this from an American company.
  - oldmanjay 12y ago
    Wow, I would not have believed someone would make the argument that everyone needs to use metric because some day we'll all be in space until I read it. Thanks for broadening my horizons.
  - Gormo 12y ago
    > No its not. Realistically space travel is going to be a humanity as a whole deal, not "inside NASA". I think it's a fair bet that when spaceflight becomes widespread and commonplace, we're going to have many discrete groups of people developing, producing, operating, and maintaining their own particular spacecraft independently of each other, and not "humanity as a whole", as a singular undifferentiated mass, working on a single uniform spaceflight project. Consistency within a specific project is clearly necessary; uniformity among distinct projects is, speaking at the macro level, a liability. Variation is an evolutionary advantage; artificial uniformity slows progress. > So you propose teaching your future carpenters and space engineers different units of measure? Why would this even be a question? Should programmers only be familiar with one single programming language? Should people in general only ever learn to speak a single verbal language? Is there ever an advantage to only being familiar with a single set of tools, and ignorant of all others? > Nobody is eyeballing anything in the modern world. Most people are eyeballing most things in the modern world. It's only in the case of activities on the scale of building spaceships and 10-nm-process integrated circuits that people require the level of precision that you're talking about. The vast majority of human activity remains outside of these domains. The original article was about American resistance to adopting metric units as a default practice in day-to-day life, and not about the use of the metric system by people engaged in highly specialized disciplines. It'd be a bit absurd to suggest that the measuring units selected for high-precision work by the small set of people currently working on microprocessor design are necessarily the optimal ones for e.g. baking a cake or tiling your bathroom. In the latter use cases, one could make a very compelling case that units optimized for alignment with intuition are vastly more useful than ones optimized for micro-scale precision.

Dylan16807 12y ago

Degrees are no more precise than radians. If you're a human you use a certain number of digits and they both work. If you're a computer using integers you're far too imprecise either way. If you're a computer using floats they are equally precise. If you're a computer using fixed point you're better off with something like 2^32ths of a circle.

Patrick_Devine 12y ago

You just get used to whatever units you're working in. If you'd been trained in radians when learning how to fly, everything would be fine. It would be funny though to hear ATC clear someone to land on runway pi/2. That's probably not as succinct as runway 9, but people would be used to it if they learned it in their primary training. The real problem though is switching costs. There are tens of thousands of planes out there and more than a million pilots. To switch all of the compasses, GPSs, flight computers, heading indicators, etc. as well as retrain a metric pantload of pilots would be ludicrous for no appreciable gain. Canada suffered through a problem similar to this when it went metric, and ended up with the Gimli Glider. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider Don't get me wrong though. I love the metric system and think it's great, however first and foremost we are creatures of practicality. If US dominance in the world slips over the next few generations, I would imagine it will at some point join the rest of the world and abandon imperial measurements.