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Comment by vvvv | Hacker News Reader

It bothers me (too much) that we are going to space and still using 'feet' as a unit of measurement.

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We don't use the imperial system for space, but the American readers do.

https://www.space.com/3332-nasa-finally-metric.html

I'm just as guilty as the next person when I post numbers. Occasionally, I'll also show metric. However, as an old(er) dog, my first instinct is to use feet, miles, etc.

Perhaps we should agree to use only the metric system on HN?

It's a mistake that sometimes even Americans do, but the USA uses the US customary units system, which is closely related, but slightly different to the British imperial system.

Imperial pints are bigger than customary pints, for example.

...the sad fact of which rears its head in American drinking establishments nationwide.

In my country, NZ, we refer to beer as pints, and order them as such, but a pint isn't a legal unit of measurement, so it's accepted that your pint will vary. The good establishments have a chart on the wall explaining how many millilitres map to their "pint". And a pint of high alcohol beer will often be less than a pint of average alcohol beer. 473mL vs 568mL typically.

It's not illegal to serve someone a "pint" if they ask for one, but it is illegal to offer a "pint" for sale.

So at the same establishment you could order two pints of beer and the high ABV one would be smaller in volume? That would really bother me or anyone calculating the unit cost of ethanol.

They make it clear what size they serve it in on their beer menu, so it's not too bad.

Americans also call US customary units "imperial units", even though they're not the same as the British ones.

As a younger person who predominantly uses metric - as long as there's a conversion I don't see the issue. Just list both. I'm not sure why the sight of imperial units makes some people irrationally angry.

He’s probably referring to the time NASA lost the $125 million spacecraft because teams used different systems.

https://www.wired.com/2010/11/1110mars-climate-observer-repo...

It’s helpful when there’s only one system. In the US, it’s too costly to switch. HN readers are global and we’re technical so there’s no reason not to simply use metric.

> In the US, it’s too costly to switch.

What is the estimated cost out of curiosity?

I estimate the cost to be 1 unit of national pride.

Everything has a cost. NASA estimated their cost was $370 million to switch to metric.

https://www.cnbc.com/2015/06/04/why-the-us-hasnt-fully-adopt...

The cost of switching road signs alone was quite expensive. Exit numbers, for example, are often the mile marker number.

Oh yeah, I'm not saying there's zero monetary cost. I'm saying the blocker isn't affordability.

Honestly. Communication is about clarity, not about arbitrary 'correctness' in word-choice. Put both so everyone can understand it.

95% of the world officially uses metric.

https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/2cjiau/self...

Do they still teach the metric system in US schools? I learned it over 40 years ago. Metric is the official system for science.

It’s hard to believe that we’re so close but we still have holdouts. It’s not an arbitrary choice at this point.

Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft grabs close-up 9.6652e-16 light-years above asteroid

Japan's Hayabusa spacecraft grabs close-ups 30.5 light-nanoseconds above asteroid

Wonder how many stones the Hayabusa spacecraft weighs? Perhaps i will have the answer within a fortnight.

600kg is 94.48 stone

https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2019/06/05/tucker-carlson...

Tucker Carlson: God bless you, and that's exactly what it is. Esperanto died, but the metric system continues, this weird, utopian, inelegant creepy system that we alone have resisted.

...I had to look up Tucker Carlson to discover if this was satire or not.

At least it wasn't...

Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft grabs close-up 1/10th of an American football field above asteroid

Japan doesn't if that helps.

You should be happy that they don’t measure it in “baseball fields” or something like that. That’s how usually things are reported.

9 football teams stacked on top of each other

Somehow I was thinking about Shaquille O’Neal as the unit :)

My pet peeve is energy reporting that uses "average households" as a unit of power.

Who's "we"? This article is about Japan. The Japanese do not ever use "feet" as a unit of measurement.

It's only Americans who still use feet and other imperial units, which is why they lost a Mars probe.

You mean the British-built one?

I think us Brits are the worst of the worst when it comes to mixing units. Fuel is sold in litres but consumption measured in miles per gallon. Milk is sold in 1 pint or 2/4/6 litre bottles. Road signs to towns are in miles but in roadworks are in metres. And so on.

To add to the mix, some signs are in yards - who even knows what one of those equals these days?!

Yards are the easiest to translate. A yard is roughly a meter (~9/10's).

I don't usually complain about downvote... but seriously? Someone really thinks it's OK to have signs in all of miles, metres and yards?!

Yeah, the strange half-transition to metric in the UK is really odd. I'm from Australia, another Commonwealth country, and we're -entirely- metric here. The only thing I can think of is that people still talk about height of people in feet and inches, but on official forms it's in centimetres.

I wonder why the UK couldn't quite make the jump over?

At least the US has agreed that the Moon is a metric only zone! https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2007/0...

> I think us Brits are the worst of the worst when it comes to mixing units.

McLaren recently failed to qualify for the Indy 500 (McLaren!) due in part to a unit conversion problem made prior to the last day of qualifying.

https://autoweek.com/article/indy-500/mclaren-ceo-zak-brown-...

To be fair, from my reading of the article, this was a metric-to-imperial conversion problem, meaning McLaren was used to working in metric, but the Indy 500 is in the USA, which uses the backwards and archaic US customary units, so someone screwed up in converting to those. This could have happened to any non-American racing team, and doesn't serve at all as an example of Brits sticking with obsolete units, but rather the opposite.

It does seem that McLaren made a lot of boneheaded mistakes here, but this example just doesn't go with the "Brits are still using imperial units" theme of this thread at all.

Calm down. I clearly understood that as we humans, a collective whole.

Humans, in general, do not use "feet" for measurement. It's only dumb Americans. They don't represent humanity: they're only a small fraction of all humans (around 4%). Don't blame humanity for something that only Americans do.

And even then it's only the American public; NASA development is in metric.

(Part of the Mars orbiter fiasco was that it was being developed during the transition.)

Not really. The problem with the Mars lander (not orbiter, it was a lander that crashed) was that they got some data from a defense contractor (Lockheed Martin I think) which was in imperial units, and then NASA assumed it to be in metric units. Both sides made a stupid mistake here: the contractor didn't even provide any units at all on the data sheet they provided, and NASA didn't bother to ask, and just assumed some units. IIRC, these weren't some simple 1-dimensional unit like meters or liters, they were some compound unit (like lb-ft/N-m), so it was a stupid mistake, because even if you have metric units, you don't know if, for instance, there's some prefix, such as kilograms instead of grams, kiloNewton-meters instead of N-m, etc. It was really unbelievable IMO that they just took a bunch of bare numbers and assumed them to have some units associated.

I went all metric when we started the new millennium. I try to do all my personal measurements in metric. It has been my own personal battle to make progress, every little bit helps..

It's funny how life fights with you though. My wife and I share a scale in the bathroom, it's a fitbit wifi thing and she finally laid down the law, it uses pounds now. Chasing 130lbs is somehow more satisfying than 58.9 or 59Kg. Our electronic outdoor thermometer is in Fahrenheit now too; this one sort of pisses me off, metric is simple, below 10 you need a coat, 10 to 20 probably want a light jacket, 30+ is shorts because it's hot. Mind you, she is an actual scientist, a real deal scientist that works on viruses and immunology, which is somewhat frustrating. You wouldn't believe the fit she had when our electronic human thermometer was found to be metric... When you call the doctor because your child has a fever, it is better to use whatever units the doctor uses.

I suspect that major new papers could probably start using metric units with translation in parens and only the wingnuts that think the papers already harbor a liberal bias would say anything about it. Other than temperature and like human height, you can toss out metric measurements to most folks when they ask something and they seem to absorb it well; from time to time you get a question or push-back, rarely I'll translate the unit for them. We're at the point where people just need to see it more. It would be an interesting experiment if some media organizations started to make metric more prominent. Hell the US military uses it, mostly for NATO reasons... we could probably somehow put a patriotic spin on it.

> Chasing 130lbs is somehow more satisfying than 58.9 or 59Kg.

I mean, chasing 60kg is more satisfying than 132.2lbs. There's nothing intrinsically important about 130lbs except that it's a round number in base 10. In metric you just pick a different round number to chase.

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