The Argument of Twelves and the Metric System
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US defense, aviation, and automotive have been metric for decades now. Electronics still has some inch stuff in through-hole parts.
US construction, though, is still inch-oriented.
Home Depot stocks few metric fasteners. I had a conversation there with someone from a restaurant who was desperately trying to get the fasteners needed to fix some piece of metric equipment on a weekend. Home Depot didn't even have basic metric screws.
Edit: Note that this isn't to say that aerospace engineers prefer the US units or that we don't know how to use the metric system or anything, it's just how it is. In this particular field, it's just the accepted standard.
Customary units are bigger mess than imperial vs. metric.
The Latitude circles (in the 'horizontal' plane) get smaller as you go from Equator to the Poles, but all the Longitude Circles (in the 'vertical' plane') are all Great Circles and go through both the North and South Poles and so are all (pretty much) equal in size.
But anyway, to me it doesn't actually matter.
Admittedly I don't do workshop stuff that much, but when I do, I measure with a ruler, and never needed fractions for that, numbers like 3.333 work fine.
Where do you need fractions if you've got floating point notation, plus if you'd like to use fractions nothing stops you from saying "1 third of a meter".
And the imperial system doesn't really use base 12 much anyway? The only ratio of 12 I see in there is inch and foot. All the rest is various random different ratios (e.g. a mile is 5280 foot? really? and gallon vs ounce is a ratio of 160?), and Fahrenheit is its own separate mess.
TBF you're skipping intermediate units. After all 12^3 would be 1728 so non-decimal units quick get to weird ratios.
Of course you're also right that imperial and customary measurements use seemingly random ratios even within the same unit of measure: the mile is 5280 feet because a statute mile is 8 furlong, a furlong is 10 chains, a chain is 22 yards (though technically there's the intermediate "rod" unit which is 1/4th of a chain, and thus 5 ½ yards) and a yard is 3ft.
To be fair, I should have said 1760 yards, which is equally weird (its prime factorization is 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 * 5 * 11, especially the 11 in there is weird, plus the 5 in there makes it more lean towards base 10 than base 12)
There are 22 yards to a chain, 10 chains to a furlong and 8 furlongs to the mile. The intermediate units have fallen out of use, but it's not like the mile is a completely wacky number.
> gallon vs ounce is a ratio of 160?
I see you've never cooked anything. Ever.
Have you read what you wrote? And you forgot the 4 rods to a chain (and thus 5 ½ yards to a rod).
That's 4 different ratios (none of which is 12) to go from kilometer-scale to meter-scale.
> I see you've never cooked anything. Ever.
I fail to see how finding "there are 3 tsp to a tbsp, 2 tbsp to an fl oz, 8 fl oz to a cup, 2 cups to a pint, 2 pints to a quart and 4 quarts to a gallon" odd translate to "you have never cooked anything" compared to "this is a millilitre, it works fine under the entire range, for graduation simplicity there are 10mL to a cL, 10cL to a dL and 10 dL to a L, a liter is a convenience designation for 1dm³".
If humans had evolved to have twelve fingers and twelve toes, then this could’ve perhaps happened. Even if humanity had chosen base 12 for whatever reason, I’d imagine we’d have different single digit symbols for numbers “A” and “B” that we use in hexadecimal now, with something like “10” representing what we call as 12 in decimal today.
Obviously it didn't and history won't change :)
And yep, no matter in what numeric base you are, "10" will represent the amount of symbols of that base. "10" in binary is 2 in decimal, "10" in hex is 16 in decimal, etc...
One nice thing about the international paper standard is its subdivision property: if you fold a piece of paper in half (along the correct axis), it retains its aspect ratio. That's pretty useful for printing pages 2-up, and for reducing paper waste. It's a similar argument to the "argument of twelves," but it goes in the opposite direction: the metric standard is favored.
The B series actually looks "more metric" at first glance: B0 is 1414x1000mm.
You should be long past asking about why, and should be asking why it didn't happen years ago.
When you're living inside a system, it seems perfectly normal to you, I get that. To me, when someone explains the American measurements system to me, here's what I hear:
> Mr. Zabladowski: If you must know, the currency here is a little strange. First of all, in the small money comes the drakmids. At the regular, normal rate of exchange, there are 59 drakmids to one silver zlobeck.
> Bart Collins: "Zlobeck"?
> Mr. Zabladowski: Three silver zlobecks make one golden kratchmuk. A pastoola normally is, uh, 44,000 kratchmuks. But these, they tell me, are not normal times...
(From the movie "The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T".)
People still mostly refer to their height in feet & inches, buy a pint of beer, but petrol's in litres, they drive at 40 mph, and calculate mpg. When it's cold most people use Celsius, but when it's hot, people always remember Fahrenheit and it's 80s, 90s, etc. Never quite worked that one out. :)
It's going to take a bloody long while, whenever the switch starts, whether it includes road signage or not.
UK was probably too lax about it to be honest. They didn't require all packaging to use metric only until the last 20 years, so plenty of shops kept on putting up signs in pounds even if the till worked the price in kilos.
Since metric packaging was required there's been one clear downside - you're far, far more likely to have manufacturers hide price rises by dropping 5 or 10 ml or grams from a product, in an apparently identical pack. Repeat a few times and much is now randomly sized, where once all brands had comparable sizes. Choc bars, jam, used to be 1lb, 1/2, 1/4. Now some random number of g.
The US is the only country using Fahrenheit as far as I know, I never heard anyone in the UK using anything other than Celsius. You don't even say "Celsius", just "degree", it's implied it's Celsius.
"What's the temperature?"
"It's gonna be 21."
"Got it, thanks."
That's how it usually goes.
No one ever adds C or F, or even degrees very often, unless writing. It's -5; it's 30; it's 92, which are all self defining in UK climate.
Just this past week for example, my colleagues were complaining about the 33 degree heat wave, were excited for the weather to drop back down to the 20s on Friday, and were complaining about the random 31 degree heat wave coming on Saturday.
These are the same tabloids that will do anything anti-European they can think of. I don't think it matters that people don't really know what 100°F is.
This is not really a problem I think. It's become an object in itself and you don't really use this as a reference when buying milk or water I imagine. In France you can also get a "pinte" of beer (pronounced as "paint"), it's probably a relic from before the metric system and probably not the same as the English pint though.
Celsius vs Fahrenheit is tricky because Fahrenheit does have some nice properties and several sciences use Kelvin anyway. I think the best one would be a new one, rescaled to match with 0°C and 100°F.
Calculating mpg is an interesting one because even if you moved to calculating km per liters it would still doesn't match the most common usage, we use liters per 100 km.
One thing where almost everyone fails in my opinion is shoe sizes. Why can't we just use centimeters? Instead we have four competing standards and the EU one doesn't relate to anything.
Which exactly? Walter melting at 0°C and boiling at 100°C seems the most practical.
0°C is absolutely super practical and is imperative to have as a landmark. 100°C boiling water... it isn't really that practical in day to day use in my opinion (when was the last time you saw 100°C written on a device?). In the high temperatures the ones I care about in a practical sense are on the oven for cooking and on my soldering station, both much higher than 100°C anyway. The only time I care about boiling water temperature is when I am boiling water in which case I don't need a thermometer.
So I think 100°F is more interesting as a landmark than 100°C for intuiting temperatures. You can think of it as the percentage of how hot it is. But 0°C is more interesting than 0°F.
We use 0.1°C for even better granularity. E.g. weather sites, all my digital thermometers, etc.
It doesn't even matter much for meters and kilometers, since I very rarely need to talk about things that are kilometers away and meters away in the same context. It's handy to have sane units for those, though, since there you can multiply and divide in your calculations.
Temperature arguments never seemed particularly compelling to me. They assume 100 is more convenient, which I find wrong, since you're usually talking about 102, 86, 95, etc anyway.
One decimal place is commonly used.
Daily. Ovens in Europe typically will have a temperature range that's something like 50-400 C. I've never seen oven without a 100 C setting. Sauna thermometers will typically go from ~20 degrees to either 120 or 140 Celsius.
You'd be surprised on milk - I'd say the commonest supermarket sizes are still really pints. Usually 2.272l (4.0 pints), and 2 and 6 pint equivalents. Posh variants like some organic, filtered etc are in 2.0 litre packs - mostly opaque so you don't notice the 4 pint capable pack with lower fill level. :)
Shoe sizes are infuriating. Would be nice to find a way to standardise, and have manufacturers agree on what size x means, as they've diverged wildly from reality.
I moved to Finland and I'm still not used to the idea of giving my height in cm/m, or weight in kg. Until now I've never needed to know either.
I would not go as far as to say it probably means something but here we are... :)
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