As for the U.S. refusing to adopt the planet-wide metric system? You've got me there. That's just… Weird.
Language isn't close to a solved problem. Hopefully the next hundred years can finally see the reconstruction of the Tower of Babel for a generation of the world soon to come. But there also needs to be a legitimate reason for us to want to unify language. If we operate independently of one another and let businesses control any interactions by proxy of money, we will stay separate.
It doesn't have to be a federal law. Change can start gradually with private companies. Pokemon Go, for instance, shows only kilometers and doesn't offer imperial units as an option. All water bottles in the US have both mililiters and fluid ounces on their label.
For instance, a 4 x 8 foot sheet of plywood down at Home Depot isn't really 4 x 8 feet; it actually has an imperial measurement of 47.938 x 95.938 inches, which is approximately 1217 x 2437 mm - the standard metric size is 1220 x 2440 mm:
http://cwc.ca/wood-products/panel-products/plywood/sizes/
Thicknesses (as noted in the table too) have similar "whole" metric numbers. You see this also on some (not all) general materials sold to the American consumer public - the actual material is metric sized, but marketed with imperial measurements.
I think this is done both for cultural reasons, as well as just "momentum" and that the public is used to it. But the reality is (almost) everything is now metric, the public just isn't fully aware of it yet.
Also, since the gap between plywood takes space, plywood (and drywall) is a bit less than stated size to give you breathing room to put 4x8s repeating every 4 and 8 feet.
That said I don’t know why a nominal 2×4 is actually 1½ × 3½. Used to be finishing work shaved it down, now they just make ‘em that way to be ornery.
That's actually required by federal law. A lot of commercial regulations in the US require metric measurements in addition to imperial.
Don't tell people who are annoyed by metric, but all the 'imperial' units we use now are 100% based on metric units. Our metrology has been metric since that time, all the day-to-day usage is derived units.
Which is why an inch is exactly 2.54cm instead of some rounded fraction.
As for language, I'm kind of split. On one hand language is a tool for communication that becomes more efficient the more standardized it is. On the other hand, language is closely related to art and culture. I'm Icelandic (and a poet at heart) and I love my language deeply. I can succintly say things in Icelandic that can't esaily be expressed in English. And that probably applies to every language.
So I'm torn. I don't want to lose my language. But I also want a more integrated world.
The transition happens much slower, although I've been watching it accelerate over the past couple of decades. English is encroaching on the language. We speak Icelandic, but there are small grammatical changes happening, making the language more English - and at the same time, we're losing Icelandic vocabulary.
My prediction is that my grandkids (that's probably at least 13-15 years in the future (hopefully)) will speak Icelandic very similar to what I do, it'll just be a liiiittle different.
But these small changes will certainly accumulate and the pace of change will probably accelerate with more communication and integration. So who knows what will happen in the next 50-100 years.
Language is the major barrier of freedom, I can theoretically get a job and move to Dublin, London, Berlin, Rome, Cadiz, Porto, Budapest, Taliin or Athens. In reality the language prevents it in most cases.
In 100 years time we could either live in a fuedal society where you can live/work in a small area owned by a local baron who reports to an international mega corporation, with international style communications in a language nobody knows - just like 14th century England and Latin, or we could have a free borderless world where there is fictionless movement and communication. I hope technology will enable the latter before the former entrenchs again.
Edit: Not sarcasm. I work with imperial daily farming, and worked with metric doing chemistry in college.
Don't get me started in "tiny pints" used in the u.s.
Half of 12 is 6, half of 1/4 is 1/8, I drill the hole at 6 and 1/8".
It's easy to get a fractional measurement of whatever is in front of you and immediately work with that measurement in your head then find the corresponding mark on your measuring tool. There is no reason the same system would not work with metric, it just seems to be more common with imperial units.
E.g. IKEA cabinets are 60 cm wide (90, or 120 for larger cabinets), common countertop depth is 60 cm, and so on.
That way we get to use sane and consistent units and we can easily see/measure the middle of a 60cm piece of wood or whatever.
It also tickles me how eyeballing these things is apparently something desirable. Whenever I work around my house I measure everything twice to be sure...
Not everything in the world is (or should be) provided by Ikea :)
Or the length of one's foot, even.
You're right about meters not being as good a "human scale" measurement as feet. The idea of average height being 1.8 m is pretty awkward on its face. Turns out, though, the metric world has settled on starting with centimeters, though. But it's not clear that this is better, because now you end up throwing around high magnitude numbers like "183 cm" rather than "6 ft".
Given that we're clearly comfortable going with a diminutive unit (viz. cm vs m), I've always thought it would be better for the world to settle on the decimeter as the reference unit instead. It's larger than a centimeter but smaller than a meter, which is what we're after, and it's about the width of one's hand, which is arguably a more natural choice for something "human scale" than the foot. The snag is that "foot" still rolls of the tongue a lot more easily that "decimeter". So we go ahead and say 1 dm = "1 hand". It's a great unit, because if we want, we can scale up or down to meters and centimeters with (base 10-derived) constant factors, which is so easy that anybody can do it in their head.
The only snag left is that "hand" is already in use as a unit. This turns out to be less problematic than it sounds, because the legacy hand is an obscure unit really only used in horse breeding. And we're in luck, because as its name suggests, the imperial "hand" is named after the span of one's hand (with fingers extended), so they're roughly the same—it's not as if you end up with one name for two wildly differing sizes. This is the same kind of "conversational equivalence" we get with a ton and a metric tonne. That is, in conversation you're basically never reduced to needing the speaker to clarify which it is that he or she means, because you just don't need that kind of precision—a ton and a tone are both two very large masses that are in the same ballpark as one another.
Perhaps most importantly, the transition from feet to hands is fairly straightforward in conversational use, because end up saying that "1 ft" equals "about 3 hands".
People make a big deal about pi versus tau, but getting widespread adoption of the "hand" as a unit seems to me to be a much more worthwhile cause, because it would have a much bigger practical impact on everyday life than tau ever would.
>Or the length of one's foot, even.
-If you're using size 14 (US; male), 15,5 (US; female), 48 (Europe), 12,5 (Mexico)...
The good thing about standards is that there's so many to choose from.
thus underscoring your point: we can't even agree on how to represent numbers, let alone measurements!
> Edit: Not sarcasm.
Heh. I think you'd be disappointed. I haven't heard of of any modern country seriously considering moving from metric to imperial units.
> They're sane and easily divisible into eighths and more with a single significant digit of the next smaller
Divisible maybe. But definitely not sane.
Let's take a look at lengths and weights for example:
How many inches in a foot? 12. Ok. Then it must be 12 feet in a yard. Nope. It's 3. How many yards in a mile? Guessing 1000 or 1200. Nope. Apparently 1760.
Let's try weights. Going up from ounces. Since we already did imperial lengths and saw there are 12 inches in a foot, guessing there should be 12 ounces in a pound. Wrong again. It's 16. Ok, so then 1 US ton should be 1600 pounds right? Nope, wrong again. Apparently it is 2000!
I grew up with metric then came to US and lived here for more than a decade. Apart from knowing how many inches in a foot I had to look up all the other ones because they are non-intuitive and don't follow any pattern to me. I can estimate how much is a yard, an ounce, a pound, an inch, and a foot. But again I could intuitively estimate things even better when it came to meters, kilometers and kilograms.
Your biggest complaints are that (1) metric units are not quantities you use in everyday life and (2) that you don't know how large a metric quantity is.
Both are just because you are unfamiliar with the system, people working with this system do not have this problem at all. Regarding (1), people don't care that a litre is too large too drink, they just know that a glass is 0.2-0.25L, so you can get 4-5 glasses out of a litre bottle. The benefit base 10 units is that they're easy to convert and use, people don't care if something is in cL/dL/L because it's just a comma placement away.
Regarding (2), people have a very good feeling about how big their everyday units are. E.g. a metre is about a step (large/small step depending on your size), that's fine for rough measurements, and about as (in)accurate as your "a foot is my forearm".
As well as the Dvorak keyboard layout, I imagine
Also, Esperanto is ugly as fuck. It has I believe 4 accented letters, and I have no idea why anyone would think when divising a new language that accents or umlauts are good ideas (unless all the letters supported them and had consistent meaning). Otherwise, just use new characters.
The U.S. is on metric; NIST defines and curates standards on the ISU and is a critical, founding participant in the GCWM. Manufacturing and engineering specifications (especially for the military) are usually ISU. It's just that commercially imperial units are still popular. Most people aren't engineers or scientists and so they don't think about this a lot, but marketing loves inertia.
I worked as a scientist in the US. Everything is metric. Cars are assembled with metric bolts.
The only thing left that's imperial is generally the consumer facing untold of pounds and gallons.
You're right that consumer marketing is still toward imperial. I think it's just going to be a slow process of gradual weaning away as older people pass on. I'm personally of a "in-the-middle" generation (X) - I tend to be more comfortable with imperial units, but if metric is required, or I think it might be a better measurement to use (depending on the purpose), then I'll use it instead.
There's a lot of domain-specific units in use which aren't even imperial originally (fluid barrel, troy ounce/carat, ton of cooling, horsepower, AWG) that will stick around for a long time since they're used so frequently in finance, planning and B2B transactions, along with other imperial units that'll remain because they've taken on domain-specific uses (acre of land, fabric yard, bushel, mils) even when the engineers and logistics folks touching that same stuff are using SI equivalents.
Admittedly these are oldish examples, but https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter springs to mind, and my 2005 Jeep is a crazy hodgepodge of metric and imperial bolts.
The great idea was having larger and smaller units for a given thing related to the base unit by powers of 10. That's a lot easier to work with than 12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to a yard, 1760 yards to a mile.
The stupid idea was basing the meter on the distance between the North Pole and the Equator.
What they should have done is based it on existing systems of units. The meter should have been equal to 3 feet. The definition of the foot at the time, in both England and on the continent I believe, was a bit fuzzy, but they all had such a unit and it was reasonably consistent everywhere. Then they could have worked at making the definition of the foot/meter more precise and reproducible, keeping it within the range of existing practice.
That would have given us the benefits of a metric system, but with the conversion between metric and prior units easier. Converting feet to meters would have then been a simple division by 3. An inch would be exactly 25 mm. (25 is easy to multiple by in your head: just divide by 4 and shift the decimal point two to the right. Similarly it is easy to divide by in you head if you do it as a multiply by 4 and then shift the decimal two to the left).
Similarly for all other metric base units except for temperature.
For temperature, as far as I can tell, there was NO good reason to switch to Celsius. Unlike with distance, we don't make bigger or smaller units out of multiples of the base unit. We just state the numeric value, in decimal, possibly with modifiers like kilo or micro, and the base unit. In other words, with temperature we were kind of already doing metric, in the sense of using powers of 10 and writing things in decimal.
So the only thing switching from the older, widely in use Fahrenheit scale to Celsius actually made better was changing the anchor points for the scale. Fahrenheit based his scale on a 0 point of the coldest temperature he could make in his lab, and his 100 point at what he thought was human body temperature.
Celsius based his on water freezing at 100 and boiling at 0, but the whole universe thought having lower numbers mean hotter was stupid, so it was quickly flipped to freezing at 0 and boiling at 100.
Now those anchor points are better than the ones Fahrenheit picked, because they are easier to reproduce and more consistent. (They still suck...but they suck a lot less). Fahrenheit's degree size was better, though, especially for the range of temperatures that most people live in. Celsius' degree is too coarse.
The right approach would have been to make Fahrenheit the scale for metric temperature, but anchor at it better points. Instead of 0 as coldest Fahrenheit could make in his lab and 100 human body temperature, use the same anchors Celsius did: freezing and boiling of water. Define freezing as 32 Fahrenheit and boiling as 212 Fahrenheit.
This would have made as much sense as adopting Celsius, and no one would need a new thermometer.
Same comment for temperatures. Both scale emerge around the time (mid 1700s). It's not like people switched from Fahrenheit to Celcius...
Why is that stupid?
The point of SI (and its predecessors like MKS and CGS dating from the early 19th century) is readily achievable, coherent and replicable standards for not just length, but also mass, time, temperature, electric current, amount (of a uniform subsatance), luminous intensity and several derived units like volume (of an arbitrarily shaped container), pressure, electric charge, force, and so forth.
Some of the fundamental units were harder to insert into a coherent system in an easily replicable and achievable way.
You've chosen to look at two such units -- length and temperature.
The metre has an interesting history whose beginnings suffered from difficulties in achieving independent reproducibility of the standard metre. Starting in the 17th century, various approaches were explored, with two leading candidates surviving into the 19th century, both relating to the geometry of the Earth in principle measurable everywhere with suitable equipment. One candidate required a detailed survey of a meridian and an almanac of angular measurements one could make against objects in the sky or objects receding over the horizon or alternatively with a map angular measurements of objects of known height disappearing over the horizon. Another candidate required an excellent portable frequency standard and an almanac relating that to time-of-day in a location-dependent fashion.
The first is the version that survived until the definition of the metre was tied to the properties of atoms and the universality of the speed of light, mostly because it was more reproducible. This was the "meridional" version; one could readily produce a high precision metre prototype with good equipment and a stable platform on a large calm body of water extending to the horizon along a meridian (this means one could do so essentially on the shore of a large lake). The definition is 1/10000 of 1/4 of a great circle through both poles of a geoid that averaged out slight differences in oblateness of the Earth's surface. Apart from error terms relating to the non-uniformities in the Earth's true surface, realizations using trigonometry against objects in the sky suffered uncertainties because of the several sources of variation in the rotational speed of the planet. With the advent of GPS and decent approaches to defining a working geoid, a "meridional" approach is still viable, although I would be surprised if anyone seriously proposed dong so as a replacement for the present definition based on the speed of light.[1]
The other leading candidate was the "pendulum" method. When one constructs any pendulum whose half-period is one second anywhere on the surface of the planet, the arm of the pendulum will have a length very close to one metre. One critical problem is that local mass concentrations, altitude, and latitude all influence the length, and already in the 18th century it was clear that the length of the pendulum could vary by several millimetres within a radius of even a few hundred kilometres in some places, and there was no a priori way to determine all of the local contributions in order to achieve the same accuracy possible with the meridional method. Worse, precisely calibrating a seconds pendulum was a difficult technical challenge even in laboratories, even though the underlying mathematical formula was fairly simple. The problem is that in ideal situations the dominant driving term is "g_0", the standard acceleration of terrestrial free fall (as it is now known). Unfortunately the actual acceleration of objects near the surface in free fall in vacuum varies significantly across the whole of the planet, and can even vary over relatively short timescales at one location, and there is no a priori way to determine the expectation value with great reliability. Indeed we've had relatively poor data with which to build a global almanac until the 21st century with satellite observatories like GRACE and GOCE[2], and even now relying on a seconds pendulum for defining a metre is an unattractive proposition.
The metric unit of temperature is the kelvin, not the degree Celsius. The Celsius scale is based on kelvins, but with a 0 point (that of the triple point of a particular standard of purified water at a particular pressure) that is fairly straightforwardly achieved with decent precision even in a typical school science classroom setting. The kelvin is defined in terms of of an exact fraction that triple point, and it "only" suffers some difficulties in the exact definition and realization of 0 K.
The kelvin is due to be redefined in the next few years taking a fixed value for the Boltzmann constant k_B which can be expressed in terms of J K^-1 where J is Joules and K is kelvins, while the modern Joule is already defined in terms of the Planck constant h, the speed of light in vacuum, and the second. This redefinition is aimed principally at coherency as mentioned at the top, as we replace features common near the surface of the Earth everywhere people live with physical constants expected to be the same everywhere in the observable universe. A strong parallel goal is reproducibility and realizability of the units; the kelvin was already easily reproduced with high precision, and few metrologists are wholly comfortable with a definition that could be much harder to "show" in a lab or factory.
> "more consistent"
The Kelvin scale has always been well-integrated with the other units of SI and its predecessors, particularly since the beginning of the late 19th century programme of defining units in terms of universal physical constants.
The equivalent in U.S. Customary Units is the Rankine scale, which has the same 0 point as the Kelvin scale, but using Fahrenheit-sized degrees (which in the U.S. are anyway defined by NIST as 5/9 K, and NIST prefers "rankine" over "degree Rankine"). There is no (formal) "Imperial" rankine; AFAICT the whole of the former British Empire uses kelvins either in the Kelvin scale or (when discussing weather or cooking, for instance) the Celsius scale, although proximity to the USA and aborted-by-1980s-politics conversion to metric leads to Canada using a mix of units -- e.g. Celsius in weather reporting and Fahrenheit in household cooking.
However, given the 5/9 constant conversion factor, using rankines vs kelvins is a matter of choice. The placement of a zero point in a scale with such degrees is almost essentially arbitrary (although there are obvious attractions for some realizable ground state as the zero point. While "absolute zero" might be reached asymptotically with close approximations of an ideal gas it is not an obviously perfect choice on theoretical grounds), and is a matter of suitability. Thus there is no clear "better" between the two everyday temperature scales; each has advantages and drawbacks. Equally importantly, neither offers scope for improvement of definition of degree or zero than the other.
Essentially all scientific applications use the Kelvin scale; most of the world is comfortable using Celsius in non-scientific applications. There is almost no use of the Rankine scale (even in the USA), and most people in the USA are comfortable using Fahrenheit in non-scientific applications. Some cultures use a mix of Celsius and Fahrenheit in everyday situations. And of course, many cultures have never used the Fahrenheit scale. None of these cultures or the economies they participate in seem to be on the verge of collapse because they have made a "wrong" choice of temperature scale, however it is notable at how quickly the everyday use of Fahrenheit in most of the former British Empire collapsed.
- --
[1] advances in (long-baseline) interferometry in the late 19th century could have been directed at improving the definition of the "meridional" metre, but it would have been odd not to take advantage of short-baseline interferometry that is at the heart of the "wavelength" definition proposed by Michelson (of the famous Michelson and Morley experiment). Unfortunately a consistently reproducible monochromatic emitter was unachieved until the middle of the 20th century, and even with the advent of solid-state lasers, the "wavelength" interferometry approach has more sources of uncertainty than the present light-second definition.
[2] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/04/110406-new-m...
1. I like the sentiment though (base the unit on something universal in nature).
2. It explains, btw, why 10000 km are about 5400 nautical miles (90 degrees between equator and pole, 60 minutes per degree)
It's frustrating not being able to repair the tools I buy from home depot using tools bought from home depot. I couldn't even go metric if I wanted to. They don't sell raw materials in metric. You get 4x8' sheets of plywood and something called a 2x4 which seems to have nothing to do with either measuring system. It's not even Cartesian.
That is why standards are hard. Because it requires those with power to voluntarily relinquish it, which very rarely will happen. And then to never try to circumvent standards with first mover advantage to reclaim that kind of monopoly power. At least right now societies around the world are very poorly structured to align the incentives towards cooperation.
My favourite is using the FAT file system format for the system partition. No checksums, fragile on disk format, and no built in support for mirroring just to name a few.
And why they kept the idea of having the clock in local time is baffling. That just leads to errors when DST failed to apply or was applied twice.
To be fair, humanity did standardize that long ago. There is a country that is refusing to switch to the standard.
Meanwhile, more people in Africa have cell phones than plumbing, and there is realistically almost nowhere in the world without some form of cellular data service now. All these people, however, are in isolated language specific silos of content. Even the Indian Internet is radically different from what I see despite both being in mostly the same language (with some Hindi mixed in).
I am always worried about how little interaction there is, through a medium of effectively no barriers than the ones we make ourselves, between the people of western powers and everyone else who is currently online but either not informed about what the Internet is (and thus just uses SMS) or is isolated from us by language barriers.
So many crazy machines were built before there was either a need or an effective way to standardize anything power related. Keep in mind that many kinds of manipulations of electricity are easy and cheap now, but that certainly wasn't the case when people started converting from steam/water to electricity!
One of my favorite, somewhat related, such machinery was those multi-pole "generators" that were used to create carrier waves for radio transmission between the thin era of spark-gaps and vacuum tube oscillators.
Most "waterwheels" turned far more slowly than 1000 rpm. More like a few hundred at most. They used pulleys and belts, and eventually CVTs.
Edit: http://www.alternative-energy-tutorials.com/hydro-energy/wat...
Doesn't work. If you want fast standardization at all costs, only way to it by forced standardization with "obey or goto gulag" orders send from a "tyrannical government" and "violent" and feared standards enforcement authorities.
When you let people vote standardization takes aaaages. When you let corporations vote, it gets even worse... it may never truly happen because the agreed upon "standards" have purposeful ambiguities sprinkled everywhere 'cause "but that's too hard to implement", and practical implementations never fully obey because "what you gonna do, can't practically sue us for not implementing this". Also standardization favors commoditization, hence doesn't make much business sense to do it if you're the "big guy", and isn't so easy to do if you're the little guy (and you're also eating away your future profits if you're the small guy that knows it's gonna grow bug fast).
Personally, I believe Microsoft helped to engineer the downfall of SGI, via the whole Fahrenheit graphics "co-operation" - which also led to SGI making Windows NT workstations (in place of Irix).
That isn't to say that SGI didn't have some bumbling management of the time, but I do think that Microsoft took advantage of the situation to get them to chase a red herring to accelerate their demise, while also gaining a lot of new knowledge and IP via the sharing agreements they had for Fahrenheit.
Then again, had SGI not imploded, we wouldn't have NVidia today...
nvidia is basically one of the worst actors in the market, though. Artificially increasing prices and artificially segmenting the market, using anticompetitive methods to gain an advantage (oh how everyone loves gameworks), etc.
You are right about fahrenheit, it doomed everything.
Understatement of the century.
> Then again, had SGI not imploded, we wouldn't have NVidia today...
That gets the timeline all wrong. Nvidia is a much older company than you are probably aware of, and might have been quite successful (and quite capable of attracting top talent) had SGI managed to stagger along for quite a bit longer. SGI never, ever had a shot at making the mass-market stuff that let Nvidia grow as quickly as they did. It wasn't in their DNA.