Multistate Disagreement over the Length of the Foot to End
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
Or does the imperial system have some advantage over metric (not including the fact that everything in the US is already using imperial) that makes it infeasible to change?
More seriously, blame the Reagan administration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_Stat...
Seems weird to fault all of these failed attempts to the Reagan administration, but I guess that's also an American thing to do, attribute issues to one group of people, not the one you're in, but "the other group".
That part reminded me of Puerto Rico. Streets are marked with kilometer markers, rural addresses are street and km and hectometers. Also everyone miles for everything else.
I’m actually not sure which conversion failed.
https://metricpioneer.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/long-scale-an...
According to wikipedia, the US do not use the "Imperial System" but the "United States customary units" and they are not exactly equivalent, although they both derive from the "English units ".¹
Also, from the article: "The international foot is exactly 0.3048 of a meter". And it seems the international yard and pound are defined using the SI units as the reference.² (Edit: So by transitivity they also are defined using caesium-133 atom's radiation, light speed in vacuum and Planck constant.)
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_imperial_and...
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_yard_and_pound
Then in 1959 the major non-metric countries (I want to say US, UK, SA, AU and NZ?) unified their units under the "International Yards and Pounds". This metrified the definitions of various non-metric units.
So for all the units with an "international" version, "US customary" and "imperial" are now the same thing (though the pre-international versions might still be used in some contexts e.g. US surveyor units are, in fact, pre-international US customary units), and there are units which were not unified, most notably units of volume which remain different in the US and in imperial dominions.
If you are working with some DIY task and everything is in Imperial measurements then it all works out as easy as Lego pieces.
In general, the secret to happiness in customary units is to only ever work in a single unit and never convert between them. If you are working in construction, you probably only ever want to deal in inches. Ceilings are 96 or 120 inches tall, doors are 32 or 36 inches wide, etc etc etc. The moment you start using two units at once you are going to have a bad time, so if you pay attention people tend to only use one, even if it confuses people who don't know why doors are 80 inches high instead of 6 feet 8 inches.
Do people really have to be fully acquainted with the US culture and/or have done full research on Wikipedia before asking a question for them to be taken seriously?
In practice it doesn't matter. For example, the floor of my bathroom is ten feet wide. I recently had to replace it, which in practice meant I had to cut a plank 9 feet 11.5 inches on one side and 10 feet 0.25 inches on the other side. It seems that the original carpenter, when dividing his plank by 3, eyeballed it it more or less so it looked right and just sort of waved their saw in the general direction of correct. It turns out that in reality, the actual arbitrary units are irrelevant.
But you know, bikeshedding on which arbitrary system of units is best is a pretty effective way to procrastinate finishing off that bathroom renovation.
A lot of the arguments though (and some of the most impassioned) mostly boil down to “I’m more familiar with this system so I assume it’s better” - for example, any time that people say that customary units are “more human scales” or “fractions are easier to understand than decimals” whatever. It actually makes basically no difference in practice, it’s just that growing up with one system or the other makes you a lot more familiar with it!
Essentially boiling down to the famous "easy vs simple" where something is "easy" if you're familiar with it and can draw conclusions via leveraging existing experience and "simple" is that it's maybe not familiar, but easier to become familiar with because it's not complex.
Blatantly stolen from Rich Hickey's "Simple Made Easy" talk: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/
Ten only lets you get a half or a fifth. It's a much sparser set of subdivisions.
The same is true if you compare a yard with a meter. There's nothing wrong with either measure, but a yard gives you a lot more factors to work with.
For instance, over here the standard size for a sheet of plywood is 1200 x 2400 mm.
I think the foot is the only unit that is useful, otherwise converting between inches/feet/yards/miles get a bit ridiculous.
Also doing mathematical operations gets weird if you have to add/subtract 4' 3/4" and 2' 1/8".
Surveyors, the subject of this article, actually use decimalized feet on their rods (IIRC) given the errors that inches and such can add. So while inches-feet may be useful in the wood shop, in other places it's a problem.
Sockets, Allen wrenches, calipers, wrenches, drill bits, taps/dies. All customary. Its just what's available used here.
Obviously anything that can be measured in customary can also be measured in metric.
Oh, and the speedometer and the odometer. The digital ones are probably counting meters and converting though.
Anyway, the US already has the metric system for things that matter; science and most manufacturing. For things with wide reach, like distance signs, and speed limits, and quantities at the grocery store, those tend to be in customary units, because the switching cost is too high for the benefit.
Plenty of things end up as imperial elsewhere in the world, though. My lathe and milling machine dials are graduated in thous (thousandths of an inch). I've seen those on YouTube channels in other countries.
But if you're e.g. repairing existing equipment, then the customary and SI units are incompatible. Say, a 1/4 inch bolt head is too large for a 6 mm wrench, but too small for a 8 mm (which is typically the next step up from 6mm).
For this reason I had to buy some wrenches in customary units to fix a lawnmower engine.
Where is the problem? Buy a 6.35mm wrench for your 6.35mm bolt head.
However, this means that really changing over to metric, meaning also using international standards for tools, screws, bolts, wires, etc., needs buying new tools and material. I'm not sure how many metric tools there are in a typical US workshop, but I can imagine that they are not too common at the moment.
Buying two things to do one job - as is tradition.
TBF mpg is a terrible unit to compare car efficiency regardless of which gallon you use. It's only more convenient to evaluate the range you have on a tank.
I know that such measures are always imprecise due to different driving styles/conditions etc. So what is a better way to measure the efficiency of a car?
Because it has a sublinear relationship to absolute efficiency: an 11mpg car is significantly more efficient than a 10mpg car, while a 41mpg car much less so in relation to a 40mpg car: both provide an extra mile per gallon, which translates into a 10% and 2.5% increase in efficiency respectively.
> So what is a better way to measure the efficiency of a car?
gpm (aka L/100km which is what's used in most metric countries).
It's less convenient when you know how much fuel you have and want to know what distance you can expect, but it's way more convenient to compare efficiencies, as well as to calculate how much fuel you'll need for a given trip: the examples above are 21.4L/100, 23.5L/100, 5.7 L/100km and 5.9 L/100km. From this, it's obvious that the absolute gain in efficiency is much greater going from 10 to 11 (2L/100km economy) than from 40 to 41 (0.2L/100km)
Basically, it makes it easier to compare fuel economy differences at different points in the scale because they become subtraction problems instead of division problems. This is because usually the amount you are going to drive is fixed, and MPG puts the miles in the numerator, while "gpm" puts the fixed miles in the denominator, I think.
But to your point: mpg makes it easier to know how far you can travel on a given volume of fuel, L/100 makes it easier to compare fuel efficiencies, and to know how much fuel you would need for a given distance to travel.
To me the latter seems generally much more useful than the former. The former provides an easier answer to "how far can I go burning this tank", which feels like a much rarer use-case than "how often will I need to refuel to my destination" (and "can I reach my destination on a single tank") for the general population.
Realistically though, once you've driven the vehicle for a while, you pretty much know the total distance it will get in a tank regardless of the way fuel usage is measured.
In modern parlance most of these should be identical under the 1959 international yard and pound whose entire point was to unify measurements which previously diverged slightly (as well as define them in metric/SI terms). US "Survey" units are really the pre-intenational versions.
The units which were not unified are mostly those of volume, so imperial volumes and US customary volumes differ quite a bit (plus the US has "fluid" and "dry" units): imperial units are the largest, then come US dry units (97% of imperial) followed by US fluid units units (83% of imperial).
Like the pound being a unit of currency, a unit of mass, a unit of force, a unit of energy and a unit of torque (especially the latter two, who doesn't love having foot-pound and foot-pound being completely different things?)
the main thing metric has going for it is that it's the same radix as our counting system and is consistant (as opposed to base12 and then base5280).
Yes, the changeover will be ugly and involve redoing all your plans at some point. But after that you will see how much you are missing out...
clearly we should create another standard to encompass all these cases and alleviate confusion.
I think this is the thing that is usually lost. Metric isn't about the units. No one cares whether the length unit is the size of a finger or a foot.
What's important is the radix, ease of conversion conversion and relation between the units of different dimension. A swimming pool can be 10m long and 5m and 2m deep. That means its volume is 100m^3 or 100 thousand liters and the mass of the water is a hundred tons. There are 3 coke cans in a liter (or kilo) so the pool could room 300k coke cans. Quick in-your-head conversions like that are so difficult in some cases with pounds, gallons, fl.ounces etc.
EDIT: to all the people downvoting this comment without explaining why: you are actually proving my point.
Comments like yours which obfuscate basic facts like this are a perfect example of the kind of politicization I'm talking about.
I'm Canadian, so I frankly have no direct stake in US politics, but if people on both sides can't agree on basic facts, then there's no hope.
Finally, I don't think the protection afforded is really all that "minimal" for numerous reasons, but the degree of protection wasn't the main thrust point of my post so I didn't (and still don't) want to go into it.
And yet you just did.
They knew there would be panic buying so they had this bit of subterfuge ready to go when a pandemic hit. The problem is that it is a bee-sting solution: one use only. Now that COVID19 has turned out to be far less dire than predicted, that bee-sting solution is gone and wasted. When we get a much more deadly pandemic, and we will, that tool will no longer be available. It's a shame it was used for this situation.
Sure, we could learn from this to always have enough PPE in stock but once this pandemic is over, every year there is going to be pressure on budgets on every level to cut the size (and cost) of PPE storage until it eventually shrinks down to what it was when this pandemic started.
If the medical community wants to regain some of its credibility it needs to stop circling the wagons and pretending this wasn't an intentional but well meaning lie they told the public. The longer it takes them to stop spinning the issue, the longer it is going to take them to regain the trust of the public, which will be detrimental to public health.
But since then we’ve discovered that the overwhelming majority of spread has been due to direct transfer of the virus usually through water droplets.
The virus is too small for masks to stop them. But most masks are good enough to stop water droplets.
You can _think_ that, or you can look outside at who’s protesting masks and which president is discouraging their usage.
See the recent presidental campaign of Lincoln Chafee. Or the very humorous "Stonecutters' Song" from the Simpsons (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoSLiHKrzRU), in which a parody of the Freemasons confesses to covering up UFOs, sabotaging electric cars, and suppressing the metric system.
As someone else noted, even if you look at the UK, they use the metric system more than the US does, but they also still use imperial units in a lot of contexts--including some we don't use in the US like stones.
Tucker Carlson of Fox News thinks that metric system is a form of tyranny:
> CARLSON: Almost every nation on Earth has fallen under the yoke of tyranny -- the metric system -- from Beijing to Buenos Aires from Lusaka to London, the people the world have been forced to measure their environment in millimeters and kilograms.
* https://www.foxnews.com/transcript/can-the-us-continue-to-st...
Nothing new, with things going back to 1977:
> Dean Krakel thinks metric is more about Marxism than measurement. As director of the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma, Krakel is waging a war against metric on political grounds. In this 1977 clip from As It Happens, he says it reflects "the philosophical way communists want one of everything" - one world, one monetary system, one educational system and, now, one measurement system. "We're Americans, we're different. We're individualistic, we're strong," he says with passion.
* https://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/is-the-metric-system-a-com...
The US actually originally planned to use metric, but if I recall correctly, the guy thomas Jefferson had invited to bring metric standards to the US ended up getting captured by pirates, so we never had the standards needed to switch and just didnt bother. But he time metrification was sweeping the globe, we'd already industrialized.
And one advantage that imperial has over metric - there are more multiples of 12. 12 is more divisible. A third of a foot is 4 inches, while a third of a meter is 33.333333333333333 etc centimeters
In general contexts, either 30, 33, or 35 cm are perfectly acceptable. When accuracy is required, we use millimetres anyway (or micrometres, or nanometres, or angstroms...).
I really don’t see how more integers factors is an advantage that outweighs the clusterfuck that are conversion factors between points, inches, feet, miles, and the other stupid units, or the fact that a nautical mile is not a mile.
Besides, there’s absolutely nothing stopping anyone from using “a third of a metre” as a unit. For example, it’s common to have a line for 1/3 l in measuring cups.
Using base-ten units, you can divide precisely by only 2 and 5. Not only are 1/3 and 2/3 not integer subdivisions of ten, they're not even precise decimals, but asre repeating.
Under base 12, there are precise subdivisions of 2, 3, 4, and 6 units. Under base 30 you can evenly divide by these as well as 10 and 15.
Under base 60 (a commonly used measurement base, a usage example will come to you in time), subdivisions are the above, plus 12, 20, and 30.
For practical use and arrangement, these can be highly useful capabilities.
In angular measure (base 360, 60*4), there are divisions which relate to trigonometric functions but not decimal scales. And to truly transcent the rational there are radian measures based on pi.
Under metric, you can still come up with precise divisibility, but only by disposing of the base-ten rationality. E.g., using 60cm or 60kg as a division basis.
Ultimately, base ten is an arbitrary anatomical accident.
But why does it matter? Why do you need 1/3 of a metre, and in which context would the 0.333...cm difference with 33 cm matter? This is smaller than the measurement error with common instruments we are likely to use in our daily lives. And there's nothing special about 1/3 m as a physical length, there's no reason why 1/3 m would be more useful than 0.30 m. I am not trying to be flippant, but I never got an answer to that question.
Also, the conversion factor matters only when you actually convert values, not when you measure them. Again, there is nothing stopping anyone from using 1/3 m, or 1/42 m, or 1/π m as units, or even giving them fancy names. As a matter of fact, this is exactly what you do when you use an inch: by definition 1 in = 127/5 m.
In practice the number of dividers is utterly insignificant, because using all the multiples of a centimetre (and millimetres if you're pushing it) is trivial. So getting a feeling for the difference between 32cm, 33cm and 34cm is very easy, and you end up with much better accuracy than if you limit yourself to eights, sixths and quarters.
It's also the same scale down from sub-atomic scales all the way to the whole planet (I understand the use of AU, light-years and parsecs, as the SI prefixes tend to become ridiculous at these scales).
Care to write the proposal?
it may be easy for us to think in fractions with repeating decimals, or irrational numbers ,it is super hard for computers which do Floating Point arithmetic, fractional arithmetic is not common from assembly, higher languages, or libraries we typically use to develop apps.
This is why engineering is always in SI, and errors happen in the interface between people refusing to change,
Given that most computing well happens in computers, It is lot more convenient for us change to a system computers understand, rather than keep a system we understand
Sadly several significant NASA failures would disagree.
Um, what? Computers understand base 2 (or 16 for compactness), not base 10. A centimeter is not 0.00999999977648258209228515625 meters.
The U.S. foot mentioned in the article is defined as 1200/3937 of a meter which is 0.304800609601... depending on the precision you want the number will keep changing.
In Imperial you will find a lot of unit conversions like this which will need fractional arithmetic in base 10 like a foot is 1/3 yard etc. You will not find that in SI units as the base(10) and unit conversions (10) are the same making the definitions precise and avoid fractions between unit conversions
Outside the US, almost nobody has non-metric tools. So Imperial stuff is unacceptable for export.
Home Depot creates the illusion that the US is mostly Imperial. They don't stock metric fasteners. One day I was in a Home Depot on a Sunday, and a Chinese woman was desperately looking for some screw she needed to repair some crucial appliance in her restaurant. It was metric, of course, and Home Depot didn't have an ordinary metric screw.
How far is one thousand feet?
The imperial units are all defined in terms of metric units. There's no standard inch sitting in a vault somewhere.
Machine tools can switch from one to the other in a jiffy. Most design drawings give both units.
There are some odd things that still come in imperial units such as building materials, but a "2x4" is anything but 2 x 4 inches. Plywood is imperial length, but metric thickness, rounded to the nearest convenient inch fraction.
Food still uses imperial units of measure, most of the time, but people just eyeball the quantities and probably don't even know the actual amount. Most people can't look at a container and tell you if it's a pint or a quart.
I believe what happened is that the metric system was taught as a bunch of math, and people hate math. The big push came while I was in grade school, and I remember being taught: "The metric system is easy, all you have to do is some math." Metric was math and conversion factors. I remember a machinist telling me: "I hate metric because of the math." Yet he could add fractional inches in his head.
edit: thinking about it, it still doesn't make sense. The difference in distance would be about 2 cm over 10 km.
That's like nautical miles. If you're in a nautical context "mile" can be ambiguous, but if you're not then it's just the mile (well except there's also a survey mile).
Anyway the answer to your question is that in 1959 all non-metric units of length (and weight) were standardised internationally and defined in terms of metric units.
So outside of specific contexts (like surveying), an inch is 2.54cm and a foot is 12 inches of 2.54cm or 30.48cm. The "reference" unit is actually the international yard at 91.44cm, with there being 3ft to a yard, and 12in to an ft.
There's a midpoint between science and day-to-day (engineering). Anyway, if you want the US to continue its decline, such a can't-be-bothered attitude will help.
Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter
"However, on September 23, 1999, communication with the spacecraft was lost as the spacecraft went into orbital insertion, due to ground-based computer software which produced output in non-SI units of pound-force seconds (lbf·s) instead of the SI units of newton-seconds (N·s) specified in the contract between NASA and Lockheed."
Some people don't learn.
The mars orbiter loss was due to a failure to perform the necessary checks etc to make sure the mission was on track. Continue reading the section about the failure report. The discrepancy had been noted by humans and had been brought up, but the concerns were ignored because they failed to fill out the correct paperwork, and NASA takes responsibility for the loss, and does not blame lockheed.
The Mars Climate Orbiter was a research vehicle, no? It wasn't expected to make money I'm sure.
> was due to a failure to perform the necessary checks etc
Which would have been unnecessary had they both used the same units.
> and NASA takes responsibility for the loss, and does not blame lockheed.
I did not mention blame, why did you bring that up? Point is, had they used the same units this failure mode would have been closed off.
Almost every other nation uses the meter.
I don't think I'd have the mental arithmetic required to calculate things in terms of sixteenths!
There does also seem to be a more extreme reluctance in the US to change to more widely adopted units and conventions (e.g. day/month/year) and if anything being one of the only countries left using non metric units seems to be a point of pride. About the only SI units the us seem to use relate to fields invented after science as a whole adopted it as standard (e.g. electrical units).
In one sense inches have a pleasant form of being subdivided into more easily divisible Power of two units but even that falls apart over small distances where they turn to ‘thousandths of an inch’ rather 1024ths. Useful in a world of pre-computer drawing because you could easily scale up plans but not particularly useful now.
It even goes beyond that though. Although this is on its way to becoming a largely academic point, the US also hasn't changed the bills and coins in common circulation for probably close to 100 years. We still have a penny, the dollar coin didn't take off (which I'm actually fine with as I prefer a bill for a $1-$2ish denomination), and you still can't count of being able to use $100 bill at a random store in the US.
The US system has lots of power-of-two factors in it, which suggests that it was born in the marketplaces and workbenches of people who did most things by hand, rather than our modern world where we design everything on paper first.
This reminds me of the great Mythbusters who, to me, came across a bit stubborn to insist on US units -- it felt unsciency. I do understand that they wanted to use the 'normal' system that 'normal' people use -- I always recalculated all their psi and inches of mercury and fathoms per fortnight to SI.
So weird!
That means favouring Imperial over metric units. They'd lose the audience otherwise.
Kilometers? We have more than four million miles of road in the US, and lets rough-guess at the VERY least two speed signs each mile, one each direction. The real number on average is probably double that.
Then there are "mile markers" and every freeway sign that lists distance by miles.
Then there are cars that don't have highly visible kM speedometer markings.
Specific industries may shift to metric, and surely things like surveys probably could. But the total conversion? I would bet on many structural changes in the United States before that ever happens.
Voting reform, Constitutional amendments, DC and PR statehood, banning reality TV, all seem more likely than moving to metric.
Yes, you need to remember what the rather arbitrary seeming freezing and boiling temperature of water are, but that's not a big deal. And you actually get a finer grained measurement system without resorting to decimals. And you're less likely to need negative numbers for ordinary temperatures. (And, if you do, you know it's really really cold.)
Finally, while the Celsius degree size is used in a lot of technical calculations, the absolute scale isn't usually. Kelvin is used instead. So if anything were the "right" unit to use it would be Kelvin, but that would be fairly obviously silly for day to day use.
More like 10 miles on interstates and rural roads.
Perhaps mile markers could be re-used since the only have the number...
But yah, seems unlikely.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_Stat...
- 1 International Foot = 0.3048 m
- 1 US Survey Foot = 1200/3937 m ~= 0.3048006096 m
- 1 light-nanosecond ~= 0.2998 m
This while confusion over different types of feet is the entire reason why the metric system caught on like a wildfire. Before the metric system, every city used to have its own foot. Most, not all, were 12 inches, but they also all had their own inch.
I really cannot fathom how such an inconsistency as the disagreement over a unit that is nonstandard, weird and custom anyways could be allowed. The rest of the world got its act together roughly 200 years ago, admittedly with some leftovers, but those vanished over time...
Cars and machinery are Imperial as well but they have much lower lifetimes than houses.
I remember reading somewhere that just changing speed limit signs would cost more than 100 Billion to change and that was a modest estimate. I wish I could find where they did the math.