As a datapoint of one I was fine with thinking in kilometers because those are generally the units I use when running (you don't typically enter 3.11 mile races).
My sense of metric vs. imperial is that metric will seep into public conscious slowly over time, and hopefully some time in the future, we'll realize it's better for everyone to use the same units, and have a referendum.
In addition to a possible esthetic preference for km, I had two thoughts for gameplay reasons why they wouldn't localize the units:
- Conversion to miles would have a loss of precision in the UI (2.0km vs 1.24m) - The name of the item is a 2.0km, 5.0km, 10km egg; it would seem odd when players were discussing the game online to refer to the items differently depending what country they are from.
Their previous game, Ingress, didn't have any gameplay reasons for using one unit system, yet it still used only metric.
See a four year old discussion about Ingress using the metric system alone here: https://reddit.com/r/Ingress/comments/13vjcw/the_real_nianti...
A program denominated in kilometers would have to undergo conversion to miles if being deposited into a US account holder. On top of that, benefit levels would be different--a Star Alliance Gold level will be 50,000mi or 80467.2km.
However, ANA Mileage Club has a better ring to it than ANA Kilometerage Club.
Interestingly, most airlines are now moving away from miles in rewards programs and moving into the Unit of Measurement that counts the most: revenue.
So, just like a good number of apps made by Americans for use in other countries.
Some apps that do change seem to do so based on location, but I don't often want to see miles and feet when I'm travelling in the USA. I assume most Americans travelling elsewhere would rather be given directions in miles.
Prior to working on Android & iOS I basically didn't bother with i18n. Now I never hardcode a string, it's always a reference to a string resource that is easily translated. I think this is a mindset shift brought about because the tools & libraries make it easy. The same is true for datetime formatting and unicode. We're collectively much better at supporting i18n in those areas than we were 15 years ago. I think the next step is for us to do the same but with numbers.
Not even a unit. I've always wanted a (majorly-adopted) language and platform where "Integer" or even "Number" are low-level mostly-ignored value types, and you instead work with a type that might be called (something snappier, but equivalent to) "RationalComplexPolynomialUnitedMeasurementWithPrecision".
Like, why can't my stdlib functions all take:
(-5/6±3.5 + i±1/2) km^2/s^2
http://search.cpan.org/dist/Language-Farnsworth/lib/Language...
It's missing the ranged/bracketed number support, but will do the rest of that.
13:27:11 < simcop2387> farnsworth: (-5/6+3.5 + i-1/2) km^2/s^2 -> "kJ/kg" 13:27:12 < farnsworth> simcop2387: (2166.66666666666 + 1000.00000000000*I) kJ/kg
It'll auto-convert things into floats if you use them, but it's 100 digit accuracy (configurable). Development has halted, mostly because I couldn't decide how I wanted to tackle adding objects as a first class data type and had a number of issues with the parser I needed to solve to make my life saner (easy way to force a difference between a variable and unit named "kg" etc.)
I might pick it up again and try using the parser combinators in Rust and actually compile the language down instead of an interpreter (though i'd remove eval[] to do that).
If you pick 'all normal distributions' as your set, that means that you can only allow addition, subtraction, and multiplication by a constant (= a normal distribution with zero variance); you won't be able to compute x^2, take a square root, compute |x|, etc. That rules out, for example, computing the variance of a set of inexactly known numbers.
To make matters worse, to do this really well, you have to track where values come from. You really want:
x = 6±3.5m
z = x - x
x = 6±3.5m
y = 6±3.5m
z = x - y
The best you probably can do is to forget about the second issue, and do interval arithmetic. That is useful, but gives you extremely pessimistic results.
Edit: a good solution also would resolve the question of how to handle conditionals. if x > 0 could pick each of its branches according to the probability that x is larger than zero, or even execute both branches partially (whatever that would mean), according to the distribution of x.
(I'm a little hazy on exactly what distribution is being assumed, but the basic idea of x and y being different random numbers is the important thing)
In principle one could also interpret x = 6±3.5m as "x is equal to 6 + a random number taken uniformly from the rand -3.5 to 3.5" or something, and then x+y would be 12+-7, but the real world numbers this is nominally supposed to represent don't really work that way. I think this is what is mean by "The best you probably can do is to forget about the second issue, and do interval arithmetic. That is useful, but gives you extremely pessimistic results."
using SIUnits, SIUnits.ShortUnits
using Measurements
((-5/6±0.1) + 1im)km^2/s^2
> -833333.3333333334 ± 100000.0 + 1.0e6 ± 0.0im m²s⁻²
typeof(((-5/6±0.1) + 1im)km^2/s^2)
> SIUnits.SIQuantity{Complex{Measurements.Measurement{Float64}},2,0,-2,0,0,0,0,0,0}
It's somewhat bitrotten but it may still be interesting if you're into this sort of thing: See [1] for an example of how it looks in practice.
[1] https://github.com/haasn/units/blob/master/tests/Tests.hs
It was 1965 legislation was passed to fully metricate within 10 years. We taught only metric in schools since the early 70s. A huge publicity campaign and changeover began. Only the EU really pushed it along by requiring only metric measurements, since around 2000, on packaging with a few exceptions. The previous 30 years was a weird half hearted mix of units mainly down to where something came from. So now we buy a 454g jar of jam etc. There's no need for it to be 1lb, but it almost always still is. You'll still hear folks young enough that even their parents were only taught metric ask for half a pound of something at the supermarket counter. The shop then gives them a metric marked equivalent.
Youngsters still talk of weight in pounds, and height in feet and so forth but have never been taught imperial units. A good part of must be social (hearing on tv, from parents etc), but I suspect the human friendliness of imperial units, being generally coarser (6ft or 182cm, 454g or 1lb) and often derived from body parts, is part of the reason they still stick around so tenaciously.
The thing outside EU weights and measures, weed, is also still always in ounces and quarters! :)
Yes body weight is usually stone and fractions, or stone and pounds. I expect everyone over 15 knows their weight in stone. I doubt most of them know how many pounds in a stone any more! :)
edit: in addition, military servicemembers should all have a good practical feel for 1km (one "klick").
I'm actually wondering what is 1L? The only thing I can think off is either the medium milk bottles or the "meal size" soft drink bottles that some convenience stores stock. Unless Finland has a very different bottling system than even Sweden I think you need to think again.
* 12 fl oz (355 mL) aluminum can
* 20 fl oz (591 mL) plastic bottle
* 2L plastic bottle
Depending on the brand and store availability I've also seen 12 fl oz glass bottles, 1L bottles, and sometimes smaller sized cans as pretty standard sizes. Other types of drinks (such as energy drinks) can vary in what containers they use.
In general, though, if you're buying soda for a family or for more than one drink/meal, you're going to be buying a 2L bottle (and refer to it as such).
As far as soft drinks go bottles like these http://www.premierexports.co.uk/1595-2155-thickbox/diet-coke... are as far as I know standard across all of Europe and they are 2 liters.
Honestly the problem is we needed to keep tooling for manufacturing (eg, Detroit).
Housing, however, hasn't converted at all. Building dimensions, HVAC and plumbing in the US are still on inch units.
Let's not forget the monitor screen sizes. You can only get it in inches, so pretty every IT guy has a rough idea of how much is 14" and so on.
Which actually measures 1-1/2" by 3-1/2", but let's not go there...
Or do countries that use the SI system generally not use wood for framing?
Oh and Farenheit for water and cooking temperatures. No idea why because I have no freaking idea what a Farenheit is otherwise.
In the UK 2x4, 2x2 etc is still commonly available, but it's 50x100mm. Probably has been for 30 years but only sold as 50x100 for ten or less. Metricating timber was easy because no one's going to notice or care if they get 25mm instead of each inch.
Metals, fastenings, pipes etc converted much slower because metric was often incompatible sizes without adapters.
> Which actually measures 1-1/2" by 3-1/2",
Isn't that because it's 2x4 before planing. cut lumber would be actually 2x4.
It used to be, but now we're more efficient in our rough cutting and a 2x4 you buy was never actually a full 2x4.
I don't try to figure out their fake dimensions; I just measure and buy what fits.
Oh, and this is why composites like MDF and plywood are better sometimes.
An interesting frustration I've found in working with an immigrant friend: even though most of the fasteners we're turning are "imperial", he simply can't use imperial wrenches, because they require a familiarity with fractions. I'm fine with moving from half-inch to nine-sixteenths when the wrench is a bit too tight to fit, and frankly at this point I can usually tell the difference by eye before even opening the toolbox. OTOH my friend just goes from 13mm to 14mm to 15mm, ruining nuts and bolt-heads in the process.
Since tools should work for people rather than the other way around, one must conclude that metric-sized fasteners are superior to imperial-sized ones. It does seem odd that imperial fasteners were never sized by e.g. the twentieth of an inch, since that would have solved this problem completely.
I don't know if I'd call it "trivial". It's not a difficult and challenging problem, but it's boring and tends to be a pain in the butt because somebody has to hunt down everywhere numbers with units are displayed, and it's easy to miss some because it's not easy to notice at a glance whether a number is in metric or imperial, etc.. Even NASA has had problems with unit conversion.
And the conversion in software is easy, but it raises questions of how the converted units would affect gameplay. Would "Walk for 2 km" directly become "Walk for 1.24 miles". Or should everything change a bit so it becomes "Walk for 1 mile," so the numbers work out better.
At the end of the day, Americans aren't completely stupid. Kilometers aren't completely unheard of. They'll convert and get over it. Nobody's going to stop playing the game over it, so there's no point spending money to do the conversion and work out the issues around it.
Metric vs US Customary is a completely different matter and I couldn't possibly comment.
Imperialeave!
Yet here we are over 40 years later and the penetration of metric is still basically nil (in day to day scenarios, not science/engineering). I'm not convinced America will switch to metric in my life time.
There's talk of it happening regardless, as without the EU there's no requirement here to use SI units - and one pundit even suggested a return to pre-decimal currency.
Either way, people tend to value tradition more than progress or rationalisation. Having a system of weights based on the weight of a grain of emmer wheat is preferable to plenty of people, who don't have to write code or multiply weights or do science, and just want familiar human-scale units. Hell, I'm sure plenty of the aforementioned would prefer imperial too, for the same reason.
The EU did initially have the goal of getting rid of all non-metric units, but gave up in early 2000s since the UK was opposed.
A part of me could see an UK-in-the-EEA being forced to switch to metric, if the EU were to go full metric (with the UK not having a vote of course), and that's applying to the EEA (incl UK). And if the UK were to apply to rejoin the EU, I suspect metricification would be one of the requirements of reentry.
So the brexit vote might increase the chance of the UK going metric. :)
Don't get me wrong, I'm pro-metric, but the old units are not entirely irrational.
For instance, there are 12 inches in a foot, which may seem odd, unless you need to measure 1/3 of a foot. You might argue that the foot represents a future society that uses base-12, while metric lags behind, in the not-as-divisible base-10 world.
It's also interesting to note that on rulers, in the US anyway, each inch is subdivided into 16 sub-units, so measurements are usually given as, say, 3 3/16 inches rather than 3.1875 or (rounding) 3.2 inches. In other words, hexadecimal rather than decimal.
Also, people rarely need a third of a mile, so why bother giving that a name or even making that an integral number of yards? But hey, if you happen to need one eleventh of a mile, rejoice: that's 160 yards, and one eighth of a mile, apparently, is used so much that it has its own name.
Correlation is not causation, but chances are a third of a foot is more popular because there are 12 inches in a foot, not the other way around.
But my point is that people who prefer old units are not being entirely irrational, or averse to change.
It's just that for their particular use case (making human-scale furniture out of wood, for example), the Imperial system works pretty well, and perhaps better than the base-10 metric system.
If they had to spend their days converting between acres and square feet (43,560 of the latter go into the former, by the way), they might be more inclined to switch to metric.
A property of the US customary units is they tend to be more optimized for specific uses at a given scales, with little thought given to changing scales. Metric units make conversion easier, at the cost of often less suitable for use at scale - how many steps does it take to go a kilometer?
Adult males of roman military height, so probably about 5'7" (170cm): http://history.stackexchange.com/questions/17072/average-hei...
Playing Pokemon Go?
Besides, it takes about 10 minutes of walking to go a kilometer. You don't count paces, do you?
Erm... no. Anyone over 60, probably, but young people here don't even have any idea what a pound or ounce is.
This seems different than the sky-is-falling metric appeals we see from time to time.
Localization has to be done, sure. That doesn't mean it's binary, that you either localize or you don't. The more things you have to localize, the more effort it is, and that's why standards are good.
I don't agree with "if it's hard for you to spend time on things that aren't necessary, it will be hard to spend time on things that are necessary, too". I think it's objective that the fewer changes you have to do because of arbitrary legacy, the better it is.
It would be easier to reach everyone if we all spoke the same language, had the same culture, used the same units, etc. It's hard to teach everyone the same language, but it's less hard to agree on a system of units. Almost everyone else has done it.