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Comment by dingaling | Hacker News Reader

An interesting article but infuriating in how it translates all dimensions to Imperial first. Such as stating the depth of the Kola borehole in feet and adding metres in parentheses; it was drilled using equipment specified in metres...

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The Smithsonian is an American institution and as such caters to American's habit of using Imperial measurements. This makes it more relatable to the the passing reader.

I kinda like the idea that Americans could be gradually migrated from Imperial to metric by osmosis over the course of a few thousand measurement based scientific articles.

They may take our lives, but they'll never take our feet!

It’s hard enough to get readers for measurement based scientific articles, I imagine.

Science, even at the level of secondary school classes, has used metric in the US for a very long time. I don't know where people get this weird idea that Americans don't use SI. Imagine Americans making fun of Europeans for not speaking English, because they thought multilingual = not speaking English. That's how silly this meme is. Every car I've ever owned had km on the speedometer.

> Every car I've ever owned had km on the speedometer.

Same here. (Although, I've driven a couple cars that only had a single scale of digits on the gauge. Pressing a button would toggle the meaning of the numbers from mph to km/h and swing the needle around to point at whatever was correct.)

Problem is that the issue is not just about the numbers and units people expect to use.

The other issue relates to the fact that we build things according to imperial dimensions. (Paper is 8.5x11, bolts have sizes in imperial units, screw threads are pitched according to inches, etc.)

Some or all of this can be changed, but neither the change nor the transition are free. (ie: I two sets of tools - one for metric and another for imperial.)

You're easily infuriated.

Literally the whole world uses SI, only USA plus a few small countries chose to remain in the dark ages.

So a system of measurement determines whether people are in the "dark ages." I see.

When you set human extremities as references instead of fundamental physical properties, yes.

The US put a god damned man on the moon, they're far from dark ages.

And lost a mars orbiter thanks to the US customary units.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_...

Think what could have happened if the Apollo Program was an international effort and not a U.S. only one.

Probably wouldn’t have left low Earth orbit [0].

For better or worse more effective organizations generally present themselves as a unit with aligned interests. Organizations with misaligned internal interests get as far as the lowest common denominator among their interests weighted by the relative power of members. That’s a far more significant factor than choice of measurement standards.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station

You're misinformed. A foot as a measurement in 2018 has no more to do with a human foot than a computer chip has to do with a potato-powered calculator. Imperial units have had standard metric translations for a long time.

Of course, you can use or invent whatever measure system you like, if you provide a translation. But why translate? Why not use what the rest of the world uses?

When you come from the outside, it feels like a trip to middle ages reading about 'furlongs', 'hogsheads' and 'pennyweights'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units

"There's this widespread legacy system. Why won't those stupid people just migrate to the newish and better one?" (Key words: legacy, migrate. I still see dozens of WinXP systems around, alive and kicking.)

That's exactly it. Metric is on every single food item. Food is like a modern 64 bit system. Meanwhile, the roads are still in miles per hour and all temperatures are in Fahrenheit, so I need an 8 bit subsystem to run it.

I would have to convert back to feet and miles if the article didn't have it because I'm not used to those units since I never have an opportunity to use them in my daily life. Metric is not as intuitive as its promoters insist. Intuition is developed through use.

Civilization-scale issues require civilization-scale solutions. I can't unilaterally convert to metric in every context because it would be terribly impractical. I would spend my days doing conversions. That's a huge waste of finite time and energy.

> Food is like a modern 64 bit system. Meanwhile, the roads are still in miles per hour and all temperatures are in Fahrenheit, so I need an 8 bit subsystem to run it.

The problem with that analogy is that a 64-bit computer is inherently, in isolation, much more powerful than an 8-bit. For the vast majority of cases, the same is not true for a switch from from, say, ounces to ml to measure the size of a bottle of water.

That's a bit of a mixed bag. Once you do realize that 1 cm3 (1 ml) of water is also 1 g (as it's 1000g/1l = 1g/1ml), and that a 10x10x10 cm cube is 1 l (and is 1 kg), it does get powerful in unexpected ways ("cook half liter of water...hm, how do I measure...well that's 500 ml, so I'll just weigh 500 g, exactly the same thing"); and a 10 l bucket of water weighs 10 kg; similarly with other decimal units. This, I think, is intrinsically useful - how does this translate into US units, are there such simple conversions? (IDK, so this is not a rhetorical question)

> how does this translate into US units, are there such simple conversions?

Not really. I have a couple of these types of conversions committed to memory (1 gal water = 7 pounds, etc.), but it's all pretty ad hoc. That said, I haven't found too much use for it.

All that said, I very much appreciate the orthogonality and consistency of SI. In an ideal world, the US would be on it, or at least on something the same as the rest of the world. Aside from sheer habit, I think the most compelling argument for the reason we aren't is that the units we use are so heavily baked into physical objects.

> it feels like a trip to middle ages reading about 'furlongs', 'hogsheads' and 'pennyweights'.

I've lived in the United States for my entire life (43 years) and have never come close to ever seeing these units in use. To be honest, while I've heard of them, I couldn't even give a reasonable definition. I'm pretty sure the primary modern use for these units is either as a historical curiosity or as a way to pass judgement.

This is of course not true. If I go to England I’ll see & hear references to ‘stone’ for weight.

Similarly most of the world uses Celsius instead of Kelvin for temperature.

In China you’ll see measures denominated in duplicate units at times.

The world over you’ll see variations in what units people use.

The UK also uses mpg, and confusingly enough, the Imperial gallon is significantly larger than the American one.

And in India, we still use a more traditional counting system beyond thousands - we say "lakh" for 100,000 and "crore" for 10,000,000. The words million and billion are not in common use.

The US uses SI and has for a long time. This is ridiculous propaganda. Source: Personal experience - I took high school science classes in the US, in the first half of the 90s. I've also owned metric tools purchased in the US, and several cars with metric measurements on the gauges.

The metric system is widely used in the U.S. school system? That is news to me.

Even back to the early 90's, it was the one and only unit system used in science classes.

I grew up in the U.S. We were taught to use the metric system throughout my schooling and used it (metric) for all science courses in university.

But in my university engineering labs on machining and machine tools, it was all taught in inches and feet. Not sure if that's because that's what industry used. I never entered my career as a manufacturing engineer.

For some odd reason, a lot of mechanical engineering and machining in the US is still done in inches and feet, though I think most of it is related to the defense sector. If you get into the automotive sector, for instance, you won't see that any more; they finally went all-metric in the 90s or so. Anything where the product is going to be sold internationally is probably metric.

In other engineering disciplines (except maybe civil), it's all metric. You won't hear EEs talking about semiconductor feature sizes in fractions of an inch.

Since at least 1975 when a federal law was passed making metric the “preferred” measurement system.

In the 80s I was doing metric conversions in years 4 or 5.

I routinely buy my liquor in ml, though I refer to them by non-imperial measure (“a handle”).

As far as I know everything you'd find in a US grocery has the measurements printed in metric and avoirdupois, but sometimes the metric measurement is a round number, and sometimes the other one.

If you look at the Wikipedia page about the 2L soda bottle, it states that round metric numbers are rare in the US, but I don't know that this is accurate* - if I look at alcohol on Wal-Mart's web site, it generally seems to be in quantities of 750ml, 1.75L. That's hard liquor, but for example rice cooking wine is also sold in 750ml. Regular wine is standardized on 750ml (occasionally 1.5L) bottles as far as I know.

Then there are things that don't make sense in any units - there is a bottle of cooking wine that is 12.9 fl oz and 381 ml.

*And it had no citation.

There are countries that use the metric system and countries that have been to the moon. :-)

The Third Reich? Ah no, it was just their rocket scientists wasn't it.

Von Braun never was an astronaut, much less traveled to the moon. And, I presume Nazi Germany used metric.

Well... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunokhod_programme

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