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>units of measure are not "tools"...they are ways of communicating information. How you communicate information is important and has real impacts. Given a grap

>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.
  - Havoc 12y ago
    >Consistency within a specific project is clearly necessary I'll concede that it only matters within a project...but projects invariably consist of many people and each of them "think" in their unit of measure. Sure you can mix them and hope they remember to "think" in metric at 1AM when pushing for a deadline, but really... >Is there ever an advantage to only being familiar with a single set of tools Thats the thing. These are not tools. They are units of measure. Aside from the odd instance where its easier to divide by X all you're gaining from using many units of measure is chaos. >Most people are eyeballing most things in the modern world. Definitely. Eyeballing happens regardless of unit of measure. And usually when someone is eyeballing it its not life/death. >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 Absurd indeed, but not what I was getting at. Units of measure is something thats internalized from a high-school age. So unless you have a way of splitting the kids between space engineers and carpenters at that age then why tech imperial? And even if you could split them, the mix of units of measures employed nationally would be much worse than randomly picking one. I get that Americans are attached to imperial...its just very difficult for everyone else to under why given this: http://i.imgur.com/YJzhkZl.jpg http://i.imgur.com/YJzhkZl.jpg
    - Gormo 12y ago
      > but projects invariably consist of many people and each of them "think" in their unit of measure. Obviously, you'd assemble project teams who are familiar with the tools, techniques, and conventions that you intend to use with your project. > Sure you can mix them and hope they remember to "think" in metric at 1AM when pushing for a deadline, but really... And the Chinese engineer who's working on a project where all of the documentation is in English might slip up when he's punchy at 1 AM and accidentally complete some of his work in Chinese. This is a good argument for making sure that team members are well-rested and alert while doing their work. It's also a good argument for scheduling work reviews, proofreading, and time for correcting errors in the project plan. It's not at all an argument for abolishing the Chinese language. > Thats the thing. These are not tools. They are units of measure. Units of measures are tools. Tools are devices, whether physical or conceptual, that we use to extend our capacities for interacting with the world. In this case, since human beings do not natively have the capacity to quantify continuities, we apply the tool of measuring units to break continuities down into discretely countable chunks. And, like all tools, how well they work depends on what goals you're trying to accomplish, and in what order of priority, in a given set of circumstances. Metric units are great in a limited set of contexts in which uniformity of post-hoc representation is more important than practicality in the activity of measurement itself; but this means that they are, for the same reason, less effective than customary units for the vast majority of situations that involve measurement. > Definitely. Eyeballing happens regardless of unit of measure. And usually when someone is eyeballing it its not life/death. Very few situations are matters of life and death, and in those rare circumstances that are, people will naturally be cautious and rigorous in their methods: I'd expect people to use precise measuring instruments, and to perform measurements multiple times, so in such a situation, questions of familiarity with particular units are scarcely relevant. When you're relying on the precision of instruments, the actual measuring units you're using are less important: metric, imperial, or otherwise, they'll all work just as well. > Units of measure is something thats internalized from a high-school age I don't know how much anyone "internalizes" any measuring units, but to the extent that they familiarize themselves with theDefinitely. Eyeballing happens regardless of unit of measure. And usually when someone is eyeballing it its not life/death.m, there's certainly no cause to familiarize oneself with only one set, at the exclusion of another. > So unless you have a way of splitting the kids between space engineers and carpenters at that age then why tech imperial? How about we keep doing things the way we are - teaching everyone both sets of units - and letting them determine for themselves which ones are most useful to them for each particular application? > I get that Americans are attached to imperial...its just very difficult for everyone else to under why given this: http://i.imgur.com/YJzhkZl.jpg http://i.imgur.com/YJzhkZl.jpg All that graphic demonstrates to me is that while, with imperial/customary measures, there are a variety of separate base units to choose from, each appropriate to a particular scale of operation, the metric system only offers one base unit, and pretends that applying a 10^x coefficient to that single base unit somehow makes it a different unit. That's what you're not getting: feet, yards, inches, etc. are fundamentally distinct units that have been tweaked to relate to each other, where necessary, by factors that are often much more convenient than 10. But you're just as capable with customary units as with metric of sticking with a single unit and applying scaling factors: I can just as easily say e.g. 24.2 x 10^4 feet as 45.83 miles. I can even use metric prefixes if I'm so inclined, and say 24.2 kilofeet! Or 2.9 megainches! All the same value. But using these prefixes is just a bizarre re-implementation of scientific notation: in what way does it make sense to encode quantitative information as a verbal prefix appended to the name of the thing you're counting, instead of just using numbers?

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.
- Havoc 12y ago
  >Consistency within a specific project is clearly necessary I'll concede that it only matters within a project...but projects invariably consist of many people and each of them "think" in their unit of measure. Sure you can mix them and hope they remember to "think" in metric at 1AM when pushing for a deadline, but really... >Is there ever an advantage to only being familiar with a single set of tools Thats the thing. These are not tools. They are units of measure. Aside from the odd instance where its easier to divide by X all you're gaining from using many units of measure is chaos. >Most people are eyeballing most things in the modern world. Definitely. Eyeballing happens regardless of unit of measure. And usually when someone is eyeballing it its not life/death. >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 Absurd indeed, but not what I was getting at. Units of measure is something thats internalized from a high-school age. So unless you have a way of splitting the kids between space engineers and carpenters at that age then why tech imperial? And even if you could split them, the mix of units of measures employed nationally would be much worse than randomly picking one. I get that Americans are attached to imperial...its just very difficult for everyone else to under why given this: http://i.imgur.com/YJzhkZl.jpg http://i.imgur.com/YJzhkZl.jpg
  - Gormo 12y ago
    > but projects invariably consist of many people and each of them "think" in their unit of measure. Obviously, you'd assemble project teams who are familiar with the tools, techniques, and conventions that you intend to use with your project. > Sure you can mix them and hope they remember to "think" in metric at 1AM when pushing for a deadline, but really... And the Chinese engineer who's working on a project where all of the documentation is in English might slip up when he's punchy at 1 AM and accidentally complete some of his work in Chinese. This is a good argument for making sure that team members are well-rested and alert while doing their work. It's also a good argument for scheduling work reviews, proofreading, and time for correcting errors in the project plan. It's not at all an argument for abolishing the Chinese language. > Thats the thing. These are not tools. They are units of measure. Units of measures are tools. Tools are devices, whether physical or conceptual, that we use to extend our capacities for interacting with the world. In this case, since human beings do not natively have the capacity to quantify continuities, we apply the tool of measuring units to break continuities down into discretely countable chunks. And, like all tools, how well they work depends on what goals you're trying to accomplish, and in what order of priority, in a given set of circumstances. Metric units are great in a limited set of contexts in which uniformity of post-hoc representation is more important than practicality in the activity of measurement itself; but this means that they are, for the same reason, less effective than customary units for the vast majority of situations that involve measurement. > Definitely. Eyeballing happens regardless of unit of measure. And usually when someone is eyeballing it its not life/death. Very few situations are matters of life and death, and in those rare circumstances that are, people will naturally be cautious and rigorous in their methods: I'd expect people to use precise measuring instruments, and to perform measurements multiple times, so in such a situation, questions of familiarity with particular units are scarcely relevant. When you're relying on the precision of instruments, the actual measuring units you're using are less important: metric, imperial, or otherwise, they'll all work just as well. > Units of measure is something thats internalized from a high-school age I don't know how much anyone "internalizes" any measuring units, but to the extent that they familiarize themselves with theDefinitely. Eyeballing happens regardless of unit of measure. And usually when someone is eyeballing it its not life/death.m, there's certainly no cause to familiarize oneself with only one set, at the exclusion of another. > So unless you have a way of splitting the kids between space engineers and carpenters at that age then why tech imperial? How about we keep doing things the way we are - teaching everyone both sets of units - and letting them determine for themselves which ones are most useful to them for each particular application? > I get that Americans are attached to imperial...its just very difficult for everyone else to under why given this: http://i.imgur.com/YJzhkZl.jpg http://i.imgur.com/YJzhkZl.jpg All that graphic demonstrates to me is that while, with imperial/customary measures, there are a variety of separate base units to choose from, each appropriate to a particular scale of operation, the metric system only offers one base unit, and pretends that applying a 10^x coefficient to that single base unit somehow makes it a different unit. That's what you're not getting: feet, yards, inches, etc. are fundamentally distinct units that have been tweaked to relate to each other, where necessary, by factors that are often much more convenient than 10. But you're just as capable with customary units as with metric of sticking with a single unit and applying scaling factors: I can just as easily say e.g. 24.2 x 10^4 feet as 45.83 miles. I can even use metric prefixes if I'm so inclined, and say 24.2 kilofeet! Or 2.9 megainches! All the same value. But using these prefixes is just a bizarre re-implementation of scientific notation: in what way does it make sense to encode quantitative information as a verbal prefix appended to the name of the thing you're counting, instead of just using numbers?