Why are there 5280 feet in a mile? (2009)
petersmagnusson.org
petersmagnusson.org
It's not that hard to guess why the broken system lasted so long (delightful and interesting explanation of TFA notwithstanding), and consequently why it was replaced by a different broken system.
95% of people on this planet use, understand, and advocate metric, in which an area of 100 metres x 100 metres = 1 hectare (10,000 sq m).
A 10 x 10 grid of hectares = a square kilometre.
A millimetre of rain falling across one hectare means you've received 10,000 litres of water.
That volume of water has a mass of 10,000 kilograms (or 10 tonne).
Wait a second, indeed!
I typically prefer imperial measures in simple projects because they tend do feel more practical.
In things like woodwork, carpentry, papercraft, etc and inch, a foot, or a quarter inch tend to "fit" very well and are easily divided.
Specifically with papercraft, I prefer working in inches over centimeters because inch, half inch, and quarter inch all essentially function as "full" units and are very easily divided/combined and tend to "fit" better with most projects. A half.inch tends to usually feel like a good margin. A few inches tends to work well for a card. A quarter inch generally seems right for a small spacing. That is significantly more useful to me than base-10 conversions because (for example) 1 inch and 1 half inch feels easier to keep in mind than 1 centimeter and 5 millimeters (or 1 centimeter and 1.5 centimeters).
Woodworkers obviously don't need or want the accuracy of the 'thou' digit, but it seems to me that similarly normalising on decimal fractions and using 'huns' or 'around 12x thou' would be an improvement.
But then, they're used to it and happy with it, it's only viewers like me who aren't that are thinking about it!
(I'm British, so use Imperial in some contexts, including casually sizing small things in inches, but probably never fractional other than 1/2".)
Put another way, I think if everyone (not just precision applications) used decimalised inches, it would just be a different scale and ~nobody would care to say 'omg why don't you use metric'.
I posit that you almost definitely prefer imperial measurements because that's what you grew up with, and consequently have the most familiarity, experience, and comfort with.
And that's okay.
But it doesn't speak to objective practicality.
Papercraft - somewhat aside, have you looked at how ISO A series paper sizes [0] are determined? Now that's an exercise in gorgeous and thoughtful standards design.
I'll point out that I do a fair bit of woodwork too, and my equipment - rules, squares, drop and band saws, router table markings, screws, bolts, drill bits, etc - are all metric. I have a tiny number of imperial items (eg a dovetail jig from a company in North America) but they tend to not have to interact with any metric gear, and finding metric versions of these tools is difficult/expensive.
All of us metric-only people (let's say ~95% of the world) are just fine using what they grew up with to make & build stuff -- so it's going to be hard to demonstrate that imperial is 'more practical'.
I bought the metric version of this jig - and I'm ecstatic they make this. The metric measurements are just different scales & translations - they didn't redesign the device at all.
Decimals don't slow me down, but comparing fractions with different denominators does.
Most of the manual they mention metric values in parenthesis, but in some sections it seems the authors just, understandably, gave up.
I'm perversely envious of people who can effortlessly make sense of this:
"""
Section 8-23 : Why are the 1⁄2" and 11⁄16" [12,7 & 17,5mm] pin widths on the same scale line?
1⁄2" through dovetails are routed using a 7⁄16" guidebush.
11⁄16" through dovetails are routed with a 5⁄8" guidebush.
That's a 3⁄16" difference in size between the two bits ... and between the two guidebushes.
The 5⁄8" diameter guidebush for 11⁄16" joints requires that the guide fingers be opened up by 3⁄16".
This automatically makes the pins 3⁄16" wider but on the same scale setting.
"""
(From https://leightools.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/D4R-Pro-Us... )
This conversation would never happen in a metric shop if the people there are above 2nd grade in their arithmetic skills.
I happened to see this brief interaction in a video [0] the other day that pretty accurately illustrates my point of view. In summary: 2 makers (one german, one american) working on a device are looking at parts in hand to design as they build and one says "...if you put this 15 millimeters in from the edge. about half an inch". They first physically see/feel the distance they believe to be correct is 1.5 or 15 metric units (cm or mm) or 1 imperial unit (half inch). This is the case I find comes up frequently for me. Measures where moving a cut to line up to whole cm is too far and I end up working with half and quarter centimeters or awkward counts of millimeters.
Though, it is definitely possible that 15mm only felt right in that case due to familiarity with imperial measures and that 1cm or 2cm would have been fine.
I guess the "trick" is that even though 1/16, 1/8, 1/4, and 1/2 inch are all technically divisions of an inch, they all function in practice as distinct whole units that are (typically) easily converted. So when you are doing work in that scale range you have many options to match what you are working with.
Paper sizes are also another good example of what I am talking about. An imperial "letter" size page is 8 and 1/2 by 11 inches. To cut one in half in either direction, the calculation is easy: horizontal 8 divided by 2 is 4 plus 1/2 divided by 2 is 1/4 or vertical 11 divided by 2 is 5 and 1/2. The similar ISO size (A4) is 210mm x 297mm would be cut at 10.5cm or 14.85cm. Sure you could just pull two A6 out of the drawer instead of cutting one A4 but then you are using ISO216 as your units of measure instead of cm/mm. In terms of practicality, cutting material stock in half is a pretty basic operation.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxLOoriXkMc&feature=youtu.be...
Can I ask why you consider consider 0.5 inches to be 'one unit' - but think 1.5 cm is not?
For me, a unit is akin to atomicity.
But units don't dictate what size something is or should be - that's what multiples are for.
> Measures where moving a cut to line up to whole cm is too far and I end up working with half and quarter centimeters or awkward counts of millimeters.
It's a poor tape measure that does not show mm.
Similarly it would be a poor tape measure that does not show 1/32 of an inch.
The fact that your measuring device shows these gradations doesn't mean your design needs to be aligned to any arbitrary subset of multiples / divisors though, surely?
> I guess the "trick" is that even though 1/16, 1/8, 1/4, and 1/2 inch are all technically divisions of an inch, they all function in practice as distinct whole units that are (typically) easily converted. So when you are doing work in that scale range you have many options to match what you are working with.
1/16th of an inch isn't just technically a division of an inch. : )
When you're working down to something tiny, both measurement systems will be able to represent absolute distances just fine - do we agree on that?
It's a matter of whether manipulating those numbers is easy or difficult (for me, working with wood almost always means working with integers - mm - so all calculations are delightfully easy). Refer my other post about the Leigh dovetail jig description of router bit and bush sizes - there's 4 different dividends in use in just that one short paragraph, so you have to convert them all to common denominators before doing any mental arithmetic with them.
Yes. I guess it was implied by omission but I don't think either system is bad. My original statement was: "I wouldn't call imperial measures 'broken'"
> Can I ask why you consider consider 0.5 inches to be 'one unit' - but think 1.5 cm is not?
>1/16th of an inch isn't just technically a division of an inch. : )
Because I don't think of 1.5 inches as 1 inch + 0.5 inches, I tend to think of 1.5 inches instead as three 1/2-inches. What I mean by stating that while 1/16 is (and 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 are) "technically" divisions of the inch, they are _practically_ (or effectively) separate whole units that you step up or down to the same way you convert up or down between mm and cm.
I find sub-dividing material (or design) by a power of two to be very common. Working with metric units, this tends to always lead to handling multiples of 5 which I tend to find more difficult than handling multiples of 2.
Working with imperial inches and subdivisions of an inch in this way (for "normal" sized projects of the type mentioned in previous comments) means there are more options to match "whole" units to the specific measurement and you generally make new measurements in your work by changing units and adding/subtracting integer values of that unit. It is literally practical because it was derived from existing practices and matches them inherently.
The dimensions you're mostly using are 0.5 cm, 1 cm, 1.5 cm, 2 cm, 2.5 cm, 5 cm, 10 cm.
> A quarter inch generally seems right for a small spacing.
A quarter inch is 6.35 mm compared to 5 mm (0.5 cm) which is basically the same for estetic purposes, any preference will be caused by familiarity more than any objective criteria.
> 1 inch and 1 half inch feels easier to keep in mind than 1 centimeter and 5 millimeters
Nobody says or thinks "1 centimeter and 5 millimeters" just like nobody says "I'm 1 meter and 80 centimeters tall". You're "180 centimeters tall" or (less often) "1.8 m tall".
There's even a word in my language "półtora" which means "one and a half", so 1.5 cm is just "półtora centymetra". But even with languages without this word people think "one and a half cm" not "one cm and five mm". You almost never mix units in metric in the same expression, it just makes everything difficult for no reason.
I think Americans don't understand that decimals are second nature to people using metric. When you write 1/2 we write 0.5 but we think the same - "half".
one-eighty is quite common. That might depend on the country and language.
I was very surprised that English people say "fifteen hundred" for 1500, I never thought about that number this way before, it was always "tysiąc pięćset" (one thousand five hundred).
en-GB: Today is the thirty-first of August, twenty twenty. The USA has reported an additional one thousand, seven hundred and seventy one Covid-nineteen cases. I would normally leave work around five-thirty, since I can catch the seventeen forty-five train home and watch the end of the six o'clock news. If I miss the train, I might take the two thirty bus instead [i.e. bus 230], or else the one three five.
Thinking about it, if I measure something with a folding ruler, I would more naturally say "it's one meter eighty long" (German native speaker here, as already said elsewhere, with other languages YMMV).
But the point still stands. In metric, you can slap the numbers together or separate them, convert them to different units or sprinkle easily units in between or not. It all works. At worst it is just moving the decimal point around or adding/removing zeros. Very easily done in your head.
But yes, that's exactly how you would say it in German. There might be some part of the brain reserved to parse that sentence as "I'm (one) (four and 80)" but this doesn't feel weird or confusing at all.
Telephone numbers on the other hand are more confusing. Luckily you don't need to say them out loud anymore these days.
And in fact so does English — it’s twenty-four but fif-teen (five ten, not ten five). In german we do that until 99 (nine and ninety).
You may be convincing me though, since in feet and inches it does matter, and it would mean as you say - 'looks about 10 11' means 10'11", not 1011".
In the UK though we generally don't mix metres and centimetres - '1 8' would mean '1.8' not '1.08', though I'd say the decimal point would rarely be elided, so that's clear.
So I just wouldn't say 1 80 about metres unless the question was 'how many metres' - and then I'd mean 180m.
"One dollar/pound twenty," etc.
While English is a "lingua franca" in Western countries, the two main native-English-speaking countries in Europe are very recent metric adoptees.
Ireland didn't finish adopting the metric system until 2005, so still use imperial units for many colloquial uses; e.g. human height & weight.
The U.K. is further behind, and if you couple that with the nationalistic associations the imperial system will have there, colloquial uses are even more widespread.
I think metric use in English is only going to become more natural and fluent with generational use.
It looks to be quite complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltese_units_of_measurement
Also, I think English, while an official language of Malta, is much less dominant than it would be in Ireland (or the UK).
Whether this destroys your argument or not, I don't know. I don't think preferred measures really depend on this sort of thing.
I find 0.5cm grid perfectly fine for writing, prefer it to the 0.9cm line notebooks (we have them too - for "soft" subjects like language learning where you don't need to graph anything).
https://kamionkawielka.szkola.pl/files/zadanie%202%2024.03.j...
You're not supposed to cram your letters into that 5 mm space: you generally use two lines, which gives you a 1 cm lineheight.
That being said, I don't like that raster size for writing. They're nice for drawing schematics and stuff, but for writing I very much prefer a grid of 4mm × 8mm (like this: https://www.dbs.be/images/vergroot/2518_2.jpg).
So yeah, decimals are so used that you don't even need to tell the unit, it's implicit. I once had an american argue with me about Fahrenheit vs Celsius, because "Fahrenheit is more precise". I guess he was either a superhuman who can feel the difference between 20°C and 21°C, or someone who never heard about decimals.
UK had been officially metric my whole life and EU were at the time mandating pricing in metric.
Supermarkets were very reticent to use metric - or at least flouted the regulation, presumably as prices seem lower in pounds (UK 'lb') than kilograms. Now I find they often don't show weights but hide behind pack sizes for fruit pricing; presumably to prevent customers comparing. They do still have scales but it's a PITA weighing half your produce.
Getting comfortable so I could 'feel' what a particular mass (and £/kg) of apples was, say, took effort for me. Same with heights, and shifting to using kg for person-masses too.
Not legal, btw, unless you mean e.g. 'Lemons £1 (12p/ea.)?
The usual complaint is that the denominators haven't been standardised, so you might get A selling lemons /ea. and B selling them /100g.
But then, when they are literally sold as a number (or a rough number) in a net, as opposed to being weighed and stickered, even if there were a /100g (or whatever) price, it'd be +/- 10% or something. (That actually is standardised, that funny 'e' symbol for net weight, but the tolerances vary with nominal figure, so I'm not sure off-hand what it is at 100g.)
In Australia supermarkets are obliged to have a pricing per 100gm for every packaged item on the shelves.
It's slightly smaller print, of course, but it's clearly legible and allows for a wonderfully simple price comparison.
EDIT: Btw, this story came out a while ago, and includes a fascinating montage clip from 1978 - a vox pop of UK citizens, obviously the most whacky people are chosen - but it's a magnificent blend of dumb (you'll use more petrol because you don't get as many kilometres to the gallon) and sad (I don't want to be part of a community).
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/shortcuts/2019/feb/05/w...
There are some exceptions, supposed to help market traders sell 6 apples etc. The supermarkets are using those, which I think was unexpected when these exceptions were allowed.
Otherwise I observe that many things like fitness devices look way more bulky when they're from the US. I have the feeling that it's partially because of the system you use, since people tend to gravitate to whole numbers you might say "a 2" bar would be about right" and somebody from Germany would make it 4cm instead. Both whole numbers but the German fitness machine would be sleeker.
In an ideal world we would count 12-based and use the metric system.
2.75 - 1.5 is much easier for me than 2 and 3/4 - 1 and 1/2
Another advantage is that half cm is roughly a quarter inch, so you usually don't need to go down to quarters, just use wholes and halves (or millimeters if you need precision).
I'm not sure imperial is easier for thirds in practice. I have 2 by 4 inches (5x10 cm) board and want to drill 2 equally spaced holes at 2/3 inches and 4/3 inches into it - how would I do this? There's no 1/3rd inch on an imperial ruler?
I google and I got this :)
https://science.blurtit.com/1709608/where-is-13-of-a-inch-lo...
I agree base 12 or base 60 "decimals" would be the best of both worlds.
To me, an inch is a weird measurement that is slightly longer than 2cm, a mile is a bit farther than 1.5km, a gallon is about 4 litres, and I always have to lookup up what ounces are (let alone fluid ounces -- which I have to constantly remind myself are not the same thing). But that isn't because the imperial system is "less practical" in any meaningful sense -- it's just that I didn't grow up with it and so I have to constantly convert back to the system I know (and since the conversions will never be nice integer ratios, of course your "native" measuring system will appear to work better).
As for the whole "imperial fractions are easier to deal with" thing, I personally disagree but I suspect that's also because I'm not used to the idea. In everyday life I'm so used to seeing decimal quantities that from a young age I learned how to quickly deal with them. However, I must admit I struggle to handle fractions as quickly because it isn't as common as decimal division in my everyday life. I imagine the inverse is probably true for people who have dealt with fractional quantities their entire lives. I hasten to point out that most people wouldn't say nor think of 1.5cm as "1 centimetre and 5 millimetres", just as you wouldn't say nor think of 1⅝ inches as "1 inch and 5 eighths-of-an-inch".
Honestly this whole argument has always felt pointless to me -- is it not obvious that you will always find things you are most familiar to be the best tools for the job? It's almost like watching an Englishman and a Frenchman hotly debating which language is uniquely better suited to writing poetry -- all the while ignoring that equally brilliant poetry has been written in both languages.
I think the French won that argument when they managed to kill off English alliterative verse.
Really wish book translators would translate the units inside as well. In fiction the exact numbers don't matter much, so that'd be perfectly fine.
Eg: to pay for some timber at bunnings you might say: "ninety by fourty-five. one length at two-four". (90x45mm timber, 2.4m long). On site - if you needed to cut it - you would measure and cut at "twenty-three-fourty-two" (eg: 2.342m or 2342mm)
If I could get a natively dozenal (or seximal) calculator with a decent UX, it'd probably be worth it to relearn mental math (common times and divs) in base 12 or 6.
It seems that context and experience are more responsible for the comfort with a particular measurement system than anything inherent to any particular measurement system.
That's true, but not for the reason that people usually think.
The common misunderstanding of the history here is that the world went straight from measuring things with bodyparts to metric. It did not. Even if we count Charlemagne as having done that (which he didn't; he having received physical standards from Harun al-Rashid), there were nine centuries of mucking about between that and the invention of the metric system, during which time physical standards were used, lost, stolen, forged, damaged, cunningly altered, eroded, deformed, and replaced. Furthermore, people did various gymnastics to account for the results, such as changing the number of onces to the livre or to the marc.
England was one part of a wider world, and that world was a Hell of a mess.
Metric was not just decimalization, it was consolidation on a single standard, which was particularly pressing in 18th century France, by which time the Carolingian system had shattered into hundreds of thousands of different systems in France alone. (Lookup tables of the time also included conversion factors for towns in France's neighbours. The mess wasn't limited to France by any means.)
Modern stuff like the last few official users of the pint in the world not agreeing on how big it is, is in fact peanuts compared to the mess that the metric system replaced.
The meter was basically the Parisian yard; the crazy definition of 1/10,000th the length of a quarter-circle running from the north pole to the equator through France was picked because (a) it gave something very close to the Parisian yard and (b) it gave an agreed upon standard for all of the hundreds of disjoint local variants of the yard, as you mention.
So now that everyone has already adopted the meter, it's the standard, but if you're back in 18th-19th century England, which already had a well-standardized national system of measure, and here comes your long-time rival France with a new standard system of measure, derived from first principles, they say, perfectly rational, and it just coincidentally is the same as their old unit of measure, you're going to be a bit skeptical that you should abandon your units in favor of theirs.
I haven't done the necessary research, but I expect that it wasn't as simple as only some Chauvinistic national rivalry. In the case of the United States, for example, the course of metrication was significantly altered by the weather.
660 ft/furlong * 8 furlongs/mile = 5280 feet/mile != 5000 feet/mile
1 mm * 1 hectare = 0.001 m * 100 m * 100 m = 10 m^3 = 10 000 dm^3 = 10 000 l(It's also the whole article?)
My point is that even in contemporary times there's sometimes significant inertia against finally fixing other objectively bonkers measurement systems in outlier communities.
Integer factors have a hard practicality about them that eludes the elegant abstraction of SI.
That handiness is why the usage of the dozen and the foot persists.
You can easily express any content (0.1, 0.2, 0.3...) Move to the lower unit (move the coma). A quarter of an egg in egg packs? 0.025 Want to move in the egg unit? 0.25
Please prove me wrong but i fail to see how it's easier in 12th, when using a decimal number system.
In contrast, cutting a 10cm thing in thirds or quarters requires estimating the point 0.33 or 0.25 of the way between marks, which is perceptually harder.
You're just taking arbitrary numbers that are easier to operate with using the imperial system. The metric system is superior because most numbers are easier to operate and measures in fractions of ten.
Note that machinists, who do want that sort of precision and can achieve it, mostly work in metric or metric-lite ('mils'=1/1000s of an inch).
It's not. You have to have a base 12 "decimal" system (dozenal or duodecimal). A half is 0.6, third is 0.4, quarter is 0.3, a sixth is 0.2, an eighth is 0.15, and a twelveth is 0.1.
Eight eggs is 0.8 of a dozen, 0.08 of a gross, or 8 "pg", per-gross, akin to per-centum.
The mistake was adopting decimal, not dozenal.
Your instinct is to immediately convert into decimal point numbers, but the strength of the base 12 system is in fractions.
Its very easy to visualize and measure one half, one third, one quarter of something. Humans in their daily life don't come across a situation where they need 0.2 of something. It is much more natural to think of halves and thirds.
Milk (as an example of imperial liquid measure) is another good example. Nobody looks at a gallon of milk and says "boy I wish I could only buy 0.7 of that". The brain is just wired to think of halving and doubling, so we have quarts which are 1/4 gallons, and pints which are 1/2 quarts.
For another example, You never hear about people "0.7x" a recipe. People halve or double a recipe, and imperial measures make that easy to do.
I like the phrase: Imperial units are for humans, SI units are for scientists. This is why I prefer the Fahrenheit temperature scale. The Celsius scale is much more "concrete" in that it has a physical basis for degree 0 and 100, but that doesn't matter for humans. I never have to relate temperature in terms of boiling and freezing water.
In Fahrenheit, 0 is "really cold" and 100 is "really hot". It's arbitrary, but more human friendly.
If the SI people could have broken with the idea that everything must be a strict power of 10, they could have used 200 degrees instead of 100 and had much more human-friendly units.
Both the fact that imperial uses base 12 for some units and the fact that Fahrenheit is centered around the human experience of temperature support my larger point that imperial units are more ergonomic.
I don't relate at all to the Farenheit scale. You can give whatever number, it just doesn't talk to me at all. The Celsius one does though. This is not a matter of a unit being better than another, but what we're used to.
Plywood is sold in 8 foot long sheets, or 240cm in metric countries. 200cm would be a more natural metric size, but it is too short to be useful (because plywood is used for things that need to be human height), and so being compatible with the US standard is the compromise construction uses.
Metric is nice in math when you can choose to your values to make things easy. As you get to engineering things get messy just because the nice sizes are not normally even values. Of course all systems suffer from this, 5000 feet in a mile would be a nicer measure but it doesn't fit in with the other things that you want in a system so you compromise. Metric compromised differently and is equally annoying to use for everything.
We should still go metric in the US, consistency is useful.
Engineering is math. You start from your constraints, and finish with an acceptable level of imprecision based on your requirements, your tools and your materials. Whatever you do it's never precision work, exactitude only exists on paper.
AKA, a dozen eggs is purely a convention.
Eggs are also sold in boxes of 6 or 10 in Denmark.
In 2015, Cadbury stopped selling its creme eggs in packs of six in the U.K. and now sells them in packs of five. Ironically, a subsidiary of a U.S. conglomerate (Cadbury having been taken over in 2010) metricated creme egg packaging.
Oh, and also packs of six. :D
Where this is really important is when you are making standard rulers. Your standard measure is approximately the size of a yard or meter; making a ruler that measures inches or centimeters requires dividing that length by 100 or 36.
The metric system isn't really possible until we developed machines that can precisely and accurately divide lengths by arbitrary divisors, which happens only in the late 18th century.
But why don't I know?
No skin in the game. If I owned land then I suspect that I would know exactly how big a hectare or an acre was. If acres were the discussed measurement unit then those would be the units I would use for my understanding, much like how that in the fairly metric UK we still use feet and inches for comparing height.
In the UK people know their height in feet and inches. If you are a guy that is all to do with 6 ft. If you are 5ft something tall you are not 'tall', if you are over 6 foot tall then you are 'tall'. Nobody has the foggiest what that means in centimetres or metres.
There are also practicalities. I am okay measuring things in the garden with a stick. Then measuring that against paving slabs which are two foot or 60cm across. For me the paving slab is the unit. None of this metre nonsense.
Miles are also variable. Due to weather, traffic and foliage you can walk one mile between markers and it be different each time. But that doesn't make the measurement any less useful.
With all these legacy measurements they work great for casual use. Horses height? That will be hands, please. Building height? Storeys. Mountain height? Feet. 100 metres? Well that is 100 yards.
None of it is logical, we are not comparing apples and oranges with these vernacular units, the trick is to use them up to the point where proper SI units are needed.
See them as like the words we use for temperature. It is going to be hot/cold/warm/freezing today is fine, 'today could get to 23.2 degrees!' is just confusing even if well meaning.
That's not exact though. 1ft = 30.48cm. If you are working in your own garden that's probably close enough, but for anything else the errors will quickly add up. Tiles are often made to have sides that are 30cm or 60cm, if you try and tile a bathroom that is 12ft across assuming tiles are 1ft each, you'll get to the other side and end up with an odd piece.
I was born and raised in the UK, and honestly I think we have it worse than the US. At least the US consistently uses the same units (although the wet vs dry weights are confusing). When I learnt to drive I suddendly had to learn what feet mean, even though I'd never used them before in my life.
As a matter of fact in a 12 feet scenario 12 x 30.48 cm = 365.76 cm it is actually likely that you will be able to fit 12 x 30 cm tiles without cuts (but not 6 x 60 cm ones, unless you put them with very wide joints).
Try being in Canada.
Your weight and height are in feet-inches and pounds. When driving though you use kilometres and litres to fill up a tank, but often use miles-per-gallon for measuring car efficiency (though L/100km is popular too).
Most construction is done with US as well (1x6', 2x4'--with the dimensions usually being 'nominal' and not actually those lengths):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumber#North_American_softwood...
Of course no one in the US has a kitchen scale, so most cooking recipes are done via volumetric cups, but baking is done by weight/mass. Of course there are two types of ounces: fluid and non-fluid as well. Preheat your oven to 350F or 400F....
Which ones? An imperial cup is 1.20095 US cups. (Of course it doesn't matter if everything is in cups; you just get end up with 20% more food.)
The distance components were created (arguably) about a hundred years before bits of Europe adopted it.
When I was in Greenwich (the real one) years ago, our guide told the story, which may be apocryphal, that the Brits negotiated with the French way back about the meridian.
The Brits got to keep the prime meridian by agreeing to adopt metric.
Which they then failed do to do for a couple of centuries (and even then ...).
Unfortunately I can't find anything to substantiate this story just now.
It was at the instigation of the USA and it was partly to do with the establishment of the time zone system, and partly to do with marine navigation charts. Britain had the best charts at the time so there was a significant practical reason to bless Greenwich (with 180° being the second choice).
The French obviously did not like the result, but there wasn’t any quid pro quo about adopting the metric system.
I don't think you should choose your units basing on ethics, but even if you do it's not a great choice :)
BTW Napoleon is to this day a hero in some countries (for example in Poland). We even have him in our national anthem :) He temporarily recreated Polish state and freed us from another military dictatorship (Tzar Russia).
I find it funny how he's viewed in English-speaking countries as "almost the Hitler" while Catherine the Great for example is perfectly fine. It's the exact opposite in Poland :)
That whole region is chock-full of fascinating counter-factual / alternative-histories based on the tiniest 'what ifs' (someone lived an extra year, didn't die of smallpox, didn't choose to build the wrong church in that town that year, didn't stupidly assume an entire foe nation could be defeated in 6 weeks, etc).
From here (Australia, with a generally pro-British syllabus at school) Napoleon is taught as a generally successful, but ultimately bad, force.
This resonated with me, because my grandfather had sheep. Sheep were weighed in kgs. People were weighed in stones. Feed in pounds. Sheep were sold in dozen and half-dozen dividable lots. Land in acres. In his region, one acre could feed one cow and one sheep so they had an intuitive serendipity. 100 acres made a viable farm.
Measurement systems tend to leave even more vestiges than other elements of language. Most of the world uses metrics, but almost no one advocates for metric time or angular units. Square kms never became an agricultural measure of land because one is bigger than most farms. Instead, metric hectares and metric dunams were adapted to be metric. They were close enough. Acres weren't, so there is no metric acre.
There are sixty minutes in an hour and 360 degrees in a circle because sumerians used a base 60 numerical system 5 thousand years ago. I have never even heard of a metric angular unit.
I totally accept the fact that metric systems are better. Engineering anything in inches seems impossible. OTOH, the richness and embedded history of language is valuable too. There's a reason esperanto never caught on, even though it's arguably the right tool for the job.
Esperanto would probably have to be 10X better than existing languages in some sense to be a viable replacement.
Esperanto is very easy to learn, compared to a natural language. English is the right one to compare with, since that became the international lingua franca esperanto wanted to be.
There are even some studies suggesting that the quickest way to teach english is to teach esperanto first, and the language learning skills acquired shorten the path to fluency enough to be worth it.
I think 10X is true in certain situations, but displacing incumbents can be more about path dependence than degrees of improvement.
The job was to be an easily learnable lingua franca, a common second language. Esperanto (also the forks) is a better tool for that job than english. All else equal, it's much quicker to learn.
Returning to the metric analogy, I think it's interesting to see the whys.
Ultimately, the quality of a language system is not the only or main thing leading to its adoption. There's a massive cultural element. The metric system was ideologically compatible with the French revolution and enlightenment/scientific/modern cultural ideals generally.
It was also useful individually, often by influential individuals (eg scientists). Even if everyone uses another system, it's still worth learning metric so you can do math, engineering or land surveyance more easily. You can always convert units for communication purposes.. I assume it's still like this in the states. If you need to calculate volume, you use metric and then convert to square feet or gallons.
This gave metric systems a bootstrap that esperanto didn't have. This has a parallel to network-effect products. You can't displace Twitter or facebook just by making a better alternative. That only matters once you have millions of users. You must have a bootstrap... a reason for individuals or small groups to use it regardless of overall usage.
The literal "killer app" for Esperanto :D https://www.amazon.com/Aggressor-Maneuver-Esperanto-Language...
To that question, I found this YouTube polyglot explaining why he doesn't think esperanto is a language to learn raises some very good points: (https://youtu.be/n4AklOtfhMo - in french) The one I found compelling is that, in the absence of an economic motivator, you really need to fall in love with a language to remain motivated to learn it well. Where esperanto doesn't really have much of a cultural history or literary tradition, it just doesn't offer most people a lot to love.
I would say that esperanto does offer some inherent reasons to learn it. It's very easy to learn, relative to natural languages. That's what it was invented for. It's fun to make fast progress, and I think this is the biggest motivator for people to learn it.
It's also useful to learn a second language, because learning a language makes it easier to learn languages. There are some school programs teaching esperanto for this reason. It's part of their path to learning english.
Besides that, there's linguistic interest & idealistic interest.
You're right though, that it's all about the inherent reasons. There are no books to read or people to talk to. That's one hell of a downside.
I think klingon and dothraki are good reference points. People learn those for no practical reason.
It's definitely different if you really like the ideal of a language that doesn't belong to any one group of people. But I'm guessing that, nowadays, that's a compelling motivating factor for fewer people than, "I really like Star Trek," is. Klingon's rich cultural history may be a constructed patchwork, but at least it exists.
https://dvd.ikso.net/pagxo/en/libro.html
Note that these are merely the books where the copyright has already expired, so they can be freely put online. There is much more of the fresher content.
Nowadays there's couchsurfing.com, which simply has a larger subculture, and as such the pasporta servo is not that useful any more. But it was a clever way to address that challenge!
Ares (and therefore hectares) aren't part of the SI system, but they are original metric units -- an are is 10m×10m, hect- is the prefix meaning 100×.
The metric angular unit is a gradian. I've heard of it, as I read the whole manual when I first had a scientific calculator, age 11-ish, but I've never worked in a field where it's used.
[1] https://www.bipm.org/utils/common/pdf/si_brochure_8_en.pdf
In the medieval world of that novel, people didn't count much. Most people didn't use money much, and everyday language didn't place much demand on counting systems. The domains where numbering systems were used beyond simple basics were pretty isolated. Shepards count sheep. It's probably the only thing they ever count past 10, so a counting system for sheep is what evolved. They didn't interface with warlords counting troops, so there was no reason for these numbering systems to converge.
It seems obvious to us that counting systems should be universal, but standards don't tend to appear in advance. They appear when needed.
The industrial revolution changed how measurement systems were used. It became important that a 13mm fitting measured in Paris was 13mm in Milan. Also, that age had novelty everywhere. Cobblers & weavers were separate worlds in medieval times. It didn't matter if they used different units of measurement. Novel industrialism required it.
On the cultural side, there was the French revolution. They wanted to throw out everything old and irrational. Old measurement units got the same guillotine treatment as old rulers. Tradition must die. This was the political and cultural environment that yielded the metric system. The political element also explains why the British Empire didn't adopt it.
The BE also needed rational units, ultimately. But, instead of adopting the radically rational metric system... they tweaked their medieval system into standard "imperial units." Why?
First, they weren't going to adopt their enemy's stupid system. Second, their philosophy was conservative. Tradition must live.
It's interesting how the ideals of the era (republican vs parliamentary monarchy) were mirrored in these decisions.
After the French revolution, some attempts were made to rationalize existing systems of time, the republican calendar [1] being probably the most famous, but hours and minutes were adjusted too [2]. Usage lasted slightly over a decade at the end of the 18th century.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time
But, since alpha brainwaves (the most dominant) are almost exactly 10hz, regular seconds have a naturalness to them. Then again, maybe with decimal seconds, our brainwaves would adjust :)
What would metric time look like? And angular units?
I've heard milliradians being described as 'metric' (compared to MOA).
A kg is now tied to the Planck constant so - basically now involves a unit measure of time (/second) to calculate.
Gradians? It turns out that a gradian is defined to be 1/400th of a circle so right angles are 100 gradians instead of 90. They were defined during the French revolution (when else?) and are apparently still used in some European applications such as surveying. But given the importance of measurements such as 30° and 60° in mathematics (π/6, π/3 in radians) that end up being the rather ugly 33⅓ᵍ and 66⅔ᵍ in gradians, the measurement has not met broader acceptance.
People would love to but there are some nasty fractions left over if you try to impose a base 10 unit of time at any level above a day.
Any metric time system stumbles on the fact that 1) Days do not even divide into years by 10 and there's not even a whole number of days in a year and 2) calendars should sync with the seasons to provide any real use.
Also 10 days to a week is pretty long unless you include a break in the middle.
Only because a "year" is a measurement of how long it currently takes a specific planet to orbit its star. On larger scales such specifics don't matter. There is no daylight savings time in space.
Metric time is a realworld thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time
"In computing, at least internally, metric time gained widespread use for ease of computation. Unix time gives date and time as the number of seconds since January 1, 1970, and Microsoft's FILETIME as multiples of 100ns since January 1, 1601.[7] VAX/VMS uses the number of 100ns since November 17, 1858 and RISC OS the number of centiseconds since January 1, 1900."
DST is kind of meaningless here. It's not an inherent feature of the calendar and it's a dumb hack that wasn't even great when it was implemented, I'm all for getting rid of it.
Sure yes when we become a multiplanet species maybe metric time will make sense for use at a human level calendar. What I was really talking about was a metric calendar system today and for use on Earth. Even off planet mapping day night to the diurnal cycle will make sense and assuming it's a planet with seasons and a breathable atmosphere the calendar will be more useful if it can match the local seasons. If that becomes an issue we'll probably have a calendar for each planet and then a universal date system used as a translation layer between different calendars and by people living in space where seasons don't screw things up.
As for the variability and year that's just as bad for a metric calendar as our current Gregorian. None of that really matters though because today the calendar needs to work for people living on Earth today. If we make it to mulit-planet/solar system we can figure out Stardates then.
> Metric time is a realworld thing
Only at the level where humans don't really interact with it directly. No one (well I'm sure someone out there does but to a reasonable approximations no one) uses epoch time directly in their daily interactions with people. It's communication layer for machines not for people.
Right now a typical work day is 1/3 of the day. This might be a good opportunity to drop it down to 3/10 of the day. Then you have the work day neatly dividing into thirds for a morning break and an afternoon lunch or vice versa.
Most human level scheduling currently works at a 15 minute resolution anyways so hundredths of a day would be the perfect unit for a lot of things I'd think. Instead of meeting someone at 3:45pm, you'd just meet at today.66 or something like that.
The fun problems happen because most of the prefixes between kilosecond and megasecond (nearly a fortnight at 11.6 days) and between megasecond and gigasecond (a whopping 31.7 years) are either deprecated or non-standard to begin with. For instance myriaseconds (10^4 or nearly three hours) might be useful, but myria- was dropped from the metric prefix list for good reasons.
Maybe we can't rationalize it all, but what's to stop us from dividing a day into 10 hours with 100 minutes each? Fuck seconds.
Same reason you can't just change the official language of your country overnight. It requires widespread consensus both in terms of users ability to use it and their systems' ability to understand it.
[0] Minus societal inertia and that the current calendar works well enough for all it's aesthetic messiness.
If we're going to do radian measures why not just skip the extra tau and just say we're .75 through the year?
In its evolved form as SI, the metric system very much does have a unit of time. It is the second, and one can apply metric prefixes to it. So to those wondering what it would look like: It would look like, and does look like, kilosecond, megasecond, gigasecond, and so forth. I'm sure if you think about it you will recall having come across milliseconds, microseconds, or nanoseconds, somewhere in your lifetimes. (-:
(It helped a bit to remember Adm. Grace Hopper's rule of thumb that "pi seconds is a nanocentury".)
Anyway, astronomy does use "Julian Dates" which are timezone agnostic (which means era and location agnostic), rational number time markers 0-based on the "beginning of history".
The problems of seasonality and divisibility remain when you start caring about human life patterns more, as you suggest.
In physics it is not rare to see seconds used, with scientific notation, for measuring periods much longer than an hour. But for practical purposes it is very nice to have units which are easily divided into thirds and quarters, which is possible in base-60 but not base-10. This is equally true for angles, which also tolerate eighths (45 deg) and ninths (40) of a circle.
The impractical division of liters to 1000 milliliters has after all given us a couple of incompatible reifications of metric measuring cups and ugly numbers in recipes. 960 = 64 * 5 * 3 might have been nice if we were willing to tolerate a "metric quart" which differs from the liter (alternatively, a "baker's milliliter"), and recovers the teaspoon, tablespoon, ounce, cup, and pint in round numbers.
The reason you can get away with this for so long is because you -- historically, especially -- almost never need to convert between "mass of feed" and "mass of sheep" and "mass of people". Even for the most common case where it would matter (transporting each of the above) it almost doesn't, because you typically use different vehicles for each purpose.
This means most people who deal with non-metric units almost never run into the friction of mixed units -- if you're doing carpentry, for instance, everything is inches, from lumber to doors to room dimensions, so you almost never actually have to deal with multiplying or dividing by 12 to convert to feet.
Likewise with there being 5280 feet in a mile. Sure, if you actually have to convert from feet to miles, it's a pain and a potential source of error. But why the heck are you converting from feet to miles? Pick whichever unit makes sense for the task and hand and stick with it.
Secondly, the answer is: a wagon-full. Sheep are not particularly more dense than grain. You are not going to be able to cram a higher mass of sheep in a wagon than you can cram grain; the exact number you could transport in a particular wagon will be determined more by geometry than mass.
This does tend towards a common mass-unit for anything that is shipped by mass; in archaic American/English units this is typically the hundredweight and ton, depending on whether you are shipping a little or a lot.
A more likely example would be shipping grain or coke one way and shipping iron stock back; you might transport 15 hundredweight each way, although more likely you'd be light one way or the other.
He had a trailer. I'm not that old. :) I'm not aware of any sheep transporting that involved precise weights. AFAIK, he never mailed sheep.
In any case... we could convert between weights when necessary.
Well, the radian measurement of a plane angle can be defined as a ratio of the length of a circular arc divided by the length of the arc's radius, so the "metre per metre" (a.k.a. "1") is a legitimate (derived) metric angular unit.
Yet it exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradian I'll be the first to acknowledge that it doesn't seem add value over, say, using 1.0 for 360º or just plain ol' raidans (2π)
It's not just different occupations that use different counting systems. Apparently in Japanese you count liquid using one set of names, grain another, and countable things with a third, people with yet another. Or something like that.
In English we do something similar. Small units of people are 'single', 'a couple', 'menage a trois' etc. Not to mention the myriad names for groups of things (herd, flock etc).
And yet that is how the Wright brothers invented flight … and a few decades later we made it to the moon!
I hate the use of the term because nobody has really "invented" anything in the last century or so. We are always building on the shoulders of giants enabling us to apply existing knowledge in new directions. Heck, Gallileo did not invent a telescope, but he did point a scope at the stars and planets.
We could arguably say things like Leibnitz "invented" integrals, but he actually gave them a nomenclature and written language, whereas many contemporaries worked on infinity calculus at the same time (including Newton).
I think I have a problem with the use of the term because it is so overloaded and can mean a number of things (I've heard people say things like "he invented gravity" which just boggles my mind, just like your use of "inventing a flight" where there were birds flying forever and people strived to fly for just as long).
I am guessing it is just me who is weird, but I wonder if it is so? :)
Perhaps 'implemented' would be better.
But to claim imperial measurements were key to implementing a very short powered heavier-than-air flight (lots of qualifiers, given myriad successful flights had occurred prior) is a stretch.
Frequency — hertz (SI) is turns per second, engines RPM is revolutions per minute. Integral would produce turn with fractions.
Turn, half turn, quarter turn, used in common language. Centiturn (0.01 turn) or milliturns (0.001 turn) could serve degree role. No need to force a change, degrees already replaced with pi in a middle school, though tau reflects turn better.
Time does not follow angle subdivisions (1/24/60/60 vs 1/60/60), second is SI measure, people can't even abolish DST, no change in foreseeable future.
That said we use spoons and cups on a kitchen, floors to describe building height, inches for plumbing and displays.
We already have this measure, we just spell "turn" as "2π" :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radian
Minute of angle is also still common.
Scopes are sold with both. It sort of depends on the discipline. For example service rifle scopes are almost universally in minutes of angle, while in the Precision Rifle Series the overwhelming majority use scopes in mils.
Super confusing is when a scope uses mils for the reticle but minutes of angle for the adjustment. That's just terrible, but they exist.
I suspect you want the US to switch to metric because it’s what you use, not because it’s actually better.
When doing math? Yes please, sign me up.
For measurements around the room? Inches is a pretty good unit. CM is too small, DM is too big. There is a reason 90% of tabletop wargames (even those made in the UK by Games Workshop) still use inches for movement. It doesn't matter in a wargame how many inches are in a foot, or how many feet in a mile. You stay 100% in inches, and it just works.
Another interesting place is in carpentry. You can divide 12 by 2, 3, 4, 6... it just works well. There is a reason the bootstrap CSS framework uses 12 divisions and not 10. Again, the number of feet in a mile don't matter when framing a house. Are the studs 18" on center, or 24"?
If you use decimal with metric, the units and prefixes play along with you very well (huge advantage). If you use other fractions with metric, you get no special bonus or burden (neutral).
If you use decimal with US customary ("imperial"), you get no special bonus or burden (netural). If you use other fractions with US customary, you get no special bonus or burden (neutral).
In summary, there is absolutely no rational reason to stick with US customary, besides legacy compatibility (technical debt).
I'm pretty sure that dividing 12 by 2, 3, 4, 6... works in metric countries, too. :-)
But seriously, take something like the spacing of things like studs, which is commonly 16" or 24" in the US.
24" would indeed be a pain to divide by 2, 3, 4, or 6 if we were instead working with the same spacing but in metric, where it would be 60.96 cm [1].
But in Norway, the first metric country I happened to find information for, they don't use 60.96 cm stud spacing. The use 60 cm spacing for studs, joists, and rafters (23.622"). Dividing by 2, 3, 4, or 6 for them is as easy as dividing by 2, 3, 4, or 6 in a place using 24" spacing--and they also get easy divide by 5.
If you've got some random physical thing to measure that was not build by humans, like say how tall a tree is, you are probably going to get some length that isn't exactly 2, 3, 4, or 6 times an integral multiple of the smallest division on your ruler, regardless of what system your ruler uses.
For things that are built for humans and for which we will commonly want to divide them by 2, 3, 4, or 6 (or other small integers that we might anticipate), we will tend to pick their sizes to facilitate that using the units we expect the users to be using.
[1] That one does actually come out as an integral number of mm when divided by 2, 3, 4, or 6 so it is not too much of pain. It's just having to deal with more digits and a decimal point as opposed to also having to deal with something that falls between the marks on your ruler.
AFAIK, IKEA uses millimeters, for example.
Bootstrap CSS doesn't seem all that relevant to the metric vs standard debate either, since it's neither of them. Time and angles are also divisible by twelve, for example.
That said, I do a lot of carpentry and woodworking, and have switched entirely to metric. I find it a lot easier to do addition and subtraction, as you say, but mostly it's more calculator-friendly. Adding ((273mm / 2) + 60.5mm + 546mm) is a lot easier to punch into a calculator than ((10 and 3/4 inches) / 2) + (2 and 7/8 inches) + (1 foot and 9 and 1/2 inches).
Here is an expanded manual on working with fractions:
http://h20331.www2.hp.com/Hpsub/downloads/35_15_Working_with...
If you want to play with the HP family of calculators that are RPN check out Free42 (Android, Mac, and Windows emulator for a classic HP calculator. Note, it doesn't do fractions like the 35s)
Carpentry, both the house-building and furniture making kinds, have adapted by emphasizing tricks to measure lumber without rulers. That means starting with more wood than needed, and cutting down to make pieces fit.
Can you perhaps elucidate further on which 'Measurements around the room' require multiples of 2.5cm units to describe, and that fail with 1cm units.
> There is a reason 90% of tabletop wargames ...
So:
a) tabletop wargames are not the way we evaluate the convenience of our measurement systems, and
b) you just said 90%.
90%
90 / 100
How wonderful is it to use a ratio that world+dog totally, immediately, nay intuitively understands -- a ratio of a given number to the fixed value of 100.
For people genuinely committed to factors of 8, 12, 16, 60 etc -- how can they be comfortable with percentages? It's a betrayal!
Surely fractions of, I don't know, let's say, a gross (144) would be more natural.
144 = 12 x 12 -- so you instantly have all the benefits of 12, multiplied by another 12. What's not to love?
Rather than saying 90%, you could more naturally say 130/144 (okay, that's only approximately 90% -- it's actually 90.27777...%) but as you say, base 10 numbers are difficult to properly convey your true intent, so you can come up with a better number there.
The SI units are rarely, if ever, more convenient than whatever legacy standard they replaced, but the path dependent development of naturally defined measurement systems meant different results in every country. Shipbuilding, lumber, textiles, printing presses would also end up with varying degrees of compatibility or difficulty in working with materials sized in another domain.
As an aside, the same people extolling the value of the metric system's base ten nature have little problem explaining why the dimensions of A4 paper are not round numbers. The legacy systems in their countries didn't come from users being unaware of a base number system, they just used to prioritize other conveniences that a measurement system can provide, such as how A0 through A8 paper sizes can be simultaneously cut from one sheet of paper.
I can comment on this bit though:
> As an aside, the same people extolling the value of the metric system's base ten nature have little problem explaining why the dimensions of A4 paper are not round numbers.
Metric isn't about round numbers -- this seems to be a common misunderstanding.
Metric users are happy to dive into sub-unit numbers (6.35mm is a number we see an awful lot).
Metric, I think, is mostly about being aligned with most of the world. A common language, as it were.
Secondly, it's about some pleasant relationships between different units (length, mass, velocity, volume, energy, etc.
Probably equal second, it's about making calculations easier.
Round numbers are irrelevant for this, of course. But base-10 is a massive boon.
Earth doesn't have a 40,000km circumference, but it doesn't matter because anyone who needs a precise measurement will use some sort of aid. Similarly the mass of water in 1 mm of rain over a hectare isn't actually 10,000kg, but you'll use some aid if you need a more precise number taking temperature and actual contents of rainwater into account. Of course using nautical miles or acre-feet with high precision required aids of some kind, too.
However, legacy systems of measurements were developed to minimize the number of instances where people like machinists on a factory floor need an aid such as pen and paper to do a calculation. Big problems like Fermi estimates are much easier with the metric system, but day to day problems within a specialized profession probably are not.
I do think the benefits of a more universal system vastly outweigh the costs to convenience for everyday users of measurements, but I am skeptical of many of the rationales used for advocacy. Perhaps if an international system of measurements was designed today it would be even better designed for binary computers as computational aids rather than decimals and paper, though that would be an even more difficult transition.
Another reason is probably the difficulty in actually getting accurate enough measurements in the first place. When you're measurements come from a group of people walking across a plan measuring paces or carrying a metal chain there's enough slop in any measurement and if you're measuring large areas of land you'll be using furlong so you'll convert to furlong-miles. If everyone is doing that the inconsistency doesn't pop up.
This has consequences that, at a base level, could mean more or less material utilization and at higher levels of analysis affect how structures are designed.
If designing objects with small features, how far apart will an engineer place features when working with each system?
If you are designing bridge, in imperial, do you place diagonal truss elements in, say, 1 foot increments in imperial and 25 cm pitch in metric? Does metric allow for easier optimization in this regard?
Then there's the question of construction standards for buildings. In home building quite a bit of the hardware used is based in the 16 inch stud pitch in standard wall construction, etc.
Not sure if anyone has ever studied and compared standards from the perspective of common design practices for engineers, architects, civil engineers, etc. making design decisions in the context of the standard they are familiar with or decisions imposed by systems of standardization based on these standards.
My solar panels are 2 m x 1 m, which means we had to design a ground mount structure based on that pitch and space rafters on a metric pitch rather than imperial. I can tell you this confused our local building permit office. The plans called for rafters spaced 19.685 inches apart, which, of course, is half a meter. It took a while to make them understand we could not go for 20 inches (which would have allowed them to use standard tables to estimate loads, span, etc.). Measuring half a meter in the context of construction, is, of course, easy, you just buy a metric tape measure and you are done. Using metric dimensions translated to imperial on a plan that requires governmental approval in a place where imperial is all they speak was in a range between comedy and tragedy.
Here's a simple look at how much more or less material one would use when making decisions in metric vs. imperial. For example, an engineer working in metric would choose a 1.5 mm thickness, not 1.59 mm. Her imperial-standard counterpart would reach for 1/16 of an inch. When you compare these two decisions, the metric decision results in utilizing 5.5% less material. This translates into mass, costs, fuel used in transportation, etc.
1/64 = 0.01563 in = 0.40 mm ≈ 0.50 mm 126.0% 26.0%
1/32 = 0.03125 in = 0.79 mm ≈ 0.75 mm 94.5% -5.5%
1/16 = 0.06250 in = 1.59 mm ≈ 1.50 mm 94.5% -5.5%
1/8 = 0.12500 in = 3.18 mm ≈ 3.00 mm 94.5% -5.5%
3/16 = 0.18750 in = 4.76 mm ≈ 5.00 mm 105.0% 5.0%
1/4 = 0.25000 in = 6.35 mm ≈ 6.00 mm 94.5% -5.5%
5/16 = 0.31250 in = 7.94 mm ≈ 8.00 mm 100.8% 0.8%
3/8 = 0.37500 in = 9.53 mm ≈ 10.00 mm 105.0% 5.0%
7/16 = 0.43750 in = 11.11 mm ≈ 10.00 mm 90.0% -10.0%
1/2 = 0.50000 in = 12.70 mm ≈ 12.00 mm 94.5% -5.5%
9/16 = 0.56250 in = 14.29 mm ≈ 14.00 mm 98.0% -2.0%
5/8 = 0.62500 in = 15.88 mm ≈ 16.00 mm 100.8% 0.8%
11/16 = 0.68750 in = 17.46 mm ≈ 18.00 mm 103.1% 3.1%
3/4 = 0.75000 in = 19.05 mm ≈ 20.00 mm 105.0% 5.0%
13/16 = 0.81250 in = 20.64 mm ≈ 20.00 mm 96.9% -3.1%
7/8 = 0.87500 in = 22.23 mm ≈ 22.00 mm 99.0% -1.0%
15/16 = 0.93750 in = 23.81 mm ≈ 24.00 mm 100.8% 0.8%
1 = 1.00000 in = 25.40 mm ≈ 25.00 mm 98.4% -1.6%
1 = 1.00000 in = 25.40 mm ≈ 26.00 mm 102.4% 2.4%
You have to machine a part out of Aluminum.
The part is 0.375 inches thick.
You would think you can just buy 0.375 in bar stock and go for it. You can't. Bar stock isn't flat. You have to be able to take off some material in order to make it flat. You go to Online Metals (no association at all) and see that the next size up is 0.5 inches thick. You are going to have to remove 0.125 inches in order to arrive at your desired thickness. That means you throw away a minimum of 25% of the metal every time you machine this part.
0.375 in is 9.525 mm. An engineer working in metric is likely to reach for 9 mm for this part at this scale. We are not talking about a situation where we tell someone to design a part that is 0.275 inches. The scenarios is one where two engineers are designing parts with similar functionality and each of them reaches for a size based on customary units in each system. This means the part will be made from 10 mm nominal stock and 1 mm (10 %) will be discarded in order to make a flat 9 mm thick starting blank.
Sometimes the thinking goes the other way, with experience you might start with the available material sizes and design parts that fit within the available volume with consideration for manufacturing requirements.
Once you get into large scale manufacturing the differences might not be as significant because with volume comes the opportunity to optimize raw materials, design, etc. My question or hypothesis is more about everything outside of corner cases.
It's an interesting piece of news, but due to its horrible title, it'll probably never be voted to the homepage (a better title to me would be "The United States finally adopts International Foot, abolishes survey foot").
* America Has Two Feet. It’s About to Lose One of Them
I've been scraping my county assessor's GIS database for property outlines and I noticed that the coordinates are huge, as you mentioned. I assumed it was just some fanciful origin but I'd love to know the story.
Typically designed to have similar error across the whole area and things like that.
Why isn't the origin at (0, 0)? It's like saying your ground is at 1,532 volts: You're defining the coordinate system, why make work for yourself?
Also because nobody wants to use negative numbers or have the possibility of a negative number showing up.
It’s hard to understand these priorities. An unholy mix of base-12 and base-16 is fine, but negative numbers are too difficult to work with?
Incorrect, it was in fact voted to the homepage 7 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22203919
> It helps to understand the antique finances of the Witchfinder Army if you know the original British monetary system: Two farthings = One Ha'penny. Two ha'pennies = One Penny. Three pennies = A Thrupenny Bit. Two Thrupences = A Sixpence. Two Sixpences = One Shilling, or Bob. Two Bob = A Florin. One Florin and One Sixpence = Half a Crown. Four Half Crowns = Ten Bob Note. Two Ten Bob Notes = One Pound (or 240 pennies). One Pound and One Shilling = One Guinea. The British resisted decimalized currency for a long time because they thought it was too complicated.
1km = 1000m = 100000cm
1m = 5280ft = 63360in
Yup, math by 10s is definitely harder
> 1m = 5280ft = 63360in
How many times have you ever needed to know how many centimeters in a kilometer? Is that something you do a lot?
On the other hand, suppose you have 1x1 km of land three children, and you want to divide the inheritance equally. What do you do? Give two of them 1km x 333.33m of land, and the oldest one 1km x 333.34m?
If you were using miles and you had 1 x 1 mile of land, you could give each one exactly 1m x 1760ft of land.
This is a silly example. You're going to give them all about a third of the land. But the precise measures are going to depend on the land. Perhaps one of them got the steep hill and a bit more to compensate. Or the creek serves as a division between child 2 and child 3 but that just so happens to mean that child 3 gets a wee bit more than half the remainder.
In any case, you aren't going to give them 1 km x 333.33 m unless the law of your state really stangely provides a maximum precision of 10 cm. The system is infinitely divisible and the survey happens once with a fair degree of precision.
There are good arguments for the convenience of non-metric systems. This one is just a terrible one.
Nit: That's 1cm precision, which I chose because that's about where it should be clear to everyone that it really doesn't matter. A slightly unreasonable person might be miffed about 1m; a very unreasonable person might be miffed about 10cm; but if you're miffed about your older brother getting 1cm more than you, I think you're going into mental illness territory.
A division to 333.3+333.3+333.4 works to the satisfaction of all parties involved. You can also write 333⅓m, no-one prevents you from using fractions with the metric system.
You have the same assumption implicit in your square mile of land, as you assume everyone is satisfied with measuring to the nearest inch (or half-foot, or whatever is realistic with the measuring device).
...except that nobody does. And that would pretty much void the entire point of the metric system, which is to "make the math easier" by making everything a power of 10.
> A division to 333.3+333.3+333.4 works to the satisfaction of all parties involved.
Sure, you can, but it's less satisfying.
Remember how we got here in the discussion:
A: "Miles are easier because you can divide by 3 evenly."
B: "How is the math easier? <Does math converting km to cm, miles to inches>"
Me: "How often do you convert miles to inches or km to cm, compared to how often do people have to divide distances by 3?"
I'm not saying that I think we should all stick with / switch back to using furlongs. On the whole I think having a simple universal system like the metric system is better. But there is a trade-off involved.
If your children are going to fight over 1cm of land, I think you've got bigger personal problems than mathematical division.
Items were, and often still are, sold by the dozen precisely because 12 is evenly divisible by 2 and 3. One may split a dozen into 6 of 2, 4 of 3, 3 of 4, or 2 of 6. Quantities of 10, however, may be split into 5 of 2 or 2 of 5. Not as many options for subdivision. Had we evolved 6 fingers on each hand, this wouldn't be an issue.
Likewise, the original article is about harmonising the length of a mile with the sides of an acre, again for convenient subdivision.
The advantages of the old systems exist but they have largely been superseded by modern technology and small currency subdivisions. (Remember that a new penny is worth a lot less than an old penny was, even though a new penny is nominally worth a bit under "tuppence ha'penny".)
Not advocating the old system. I'm 100% metric.
It's not that base 10 "math" is harder. It's specific "math" of everyday life and commerce that was easier using those systems. You could pay using fewer coins, for example. You buy butter in in ppunds, half pounds, etc.. These corresponded to money denominations.
The whole foundation of this "10 isn't divisible by 3" and "it only has prime factors 2 and 5" argument is fundamentally flawed, undermined by the fact that (as the headlined article quite clearly pointed out) several old units used vigesimal, which also is only evenly divisible by two prime factors: 2 and 5.
Indeed, reading the headlined article reveals the important point that there are eight furlongs to a mile, which is only evenly divisible by one prime factor, putting the lie even more to the "it's because they're also divisible by 3" arguments. There's a multiple of 4 in the headlined article. And other units elsewhere were subdivided into 16ths.
Some were sometimes subdivided into 14ths, for reasons that this article touches upon but doesn't actually go into in enough depth: namely that standards in different places were so out of synch in Mediaeval Europe that multiplying by 16 in one town sometimes gave the same length/weight/whatever as multiplying by 14 in another town, and people formalized that to try to make things work.
The idea that the pre-cursors to the metric system were some wonderfully Babylonian system composed purely of 12s and 60s is nonsense.
(The Imperial system was another half-hearted move towards decimalisation: the biggest changes were to define the gallon as the volume of 10 lb water, and change the number of fl.oz in a pint from 16 to 20 so that a fl.oz weighs exactly an ounce - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_units)
That doesn't sound right, since in the system we still use in America a pint is 16 oz and a fluid ounce of water still weighs (very close to) one ounce.
It’s common for people to refer to all British units as “Imperial” but that name doesn’t apply to the pre-1825 units used in the US. Some of the confusion is that the Imperial reform only made significant changes to volume measures: the yard and avoirdupois weights remained basically the same.
There is a mnemonic rhyme for the imperial system: “a pint of water weighs a pound and a quarter”. This is exactly precise, due to the way the imperial gallon was defined.
There is a mnemonic rhyme for US customary units: “a pint is a pound the world around”. This is wrong because the first part has a measurement error of 4%, and the second part is wrong because the error is 25% outside the USA.
The stp for the metric system was initially freezing point but was changed to the point of maximum density of water because that was easier to practically implement - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_metric_system#T...
The Wikipedia article I linked above says, “The 1824 Act defined as the volume of a gallon to be that of 10 pounds (4.54 kg) of distilled water weighed in air with brass weights with the barometer standing at 30 inches of mercury (102 kPa) at a temperature of 62 °F (17 °C).”
"In 1592, Parliament set about determining the length of the mile and decided that each one should be made up of eight furlongs. Since a furlong was 660 feet, we ended up with a 5,280-foot mile." [1]
Still seems right. Is there a nuance I'm missing that makes this more complicated?
[1] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/25108/why-are-there-5280....
Edit: Please note I'm not trying to be snarky. It just seems straightforward to me, so I'm trying to understand the long rant.
As the post mentions, math and geometry had seen a literal renaissance during the Renaissance (eh), and this development had likely made its way into England. So the problem of reconciling measures for area and length had finally become clear.
How can math and geometry see a literal renaissance? Surely they cannot enter into their mother's womb a second time and be born again? What is their mother's womb in any case?
A furlong is the distance that they could pull the plough without resting. As turning an ox-drawn plough is difficult, they would plough the maximum straight distance before turning around, resulting in long, narrow fields a furlong in length.
An acre of ploughed land, which was standardised in the late 13th century at 40 rods (a furlong) long and 4 rods (a chain) wide, would contain about 80 furrows- so the oxen would have pulled the plough 10 miles in a day.
As for the chain, it's actually a slightly newer unit, equal to 4 rods or a tenth of a furlong (or 66 feet, the length of a cricket pitch)- so an acre is 10 square chains. It was introduced in the early 17th century, when iron was cheap enough that surveyors could measure land with iron chains rather than wooden rods. It's still used in distance markers on British railways.
The author provides this information and then never details what was meant by ‘summer hours’. Romans had twelve hours of daylight and twelve hours of darkness. That is to say, the daytime was simply divided into 12 hours, which made ‘summer hours’ significantly longer than winter hours (and longer than 60 minute hours.) Which also seems to make the quote more believable.
Metric is also a historical thing. The US basically came along and mandated it for most other countries that had recently been destroyed in WW2. It was a good time to 'reset' and get things changed over. The US planned on doing it too but found other uses for the money allocated to do it.
This sort of argument is the same as with CO2 emissions. When it is cheaper to switch over the US will do it. You will have to justify switching out billions of dollars worth of signage, inconveniencing millions of people to do it, millions of man hours to switch out docs and change one number from something to another, other than some notion of 'its better'. It can be done however, this is not a cheap thing people are asking for.
While we do use Imperial for stuff here, I would still say the conversion was successful in that everyone in my cohort and later knows/remembers/understands the metric unit alternatives to the Imperial units that we still use.
Obviously we still use a lot of Imperial units due to our proximity to the US, but if the US were to completely convert to metric, there wouldn't need to be much (if any) re-education for Canadians younger than 50.
From the Wiki article, it sounds as though this is not universally the case any longer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_Canada#Educatio...
Anyway, my point is I don't think its fair to call a nation converted when it still has both officially-recognized non-metric units and official uses for them (such as in aviation). I also disagree that these are driven entirely by the US, as Canada still uses a few non-metric units, like the Avery bushel, that the US does not.
New York to San Francisco in about 90 seconds.
Sometimes you need precision, sometimes you need accuracy, and sometimes you need both. For completeness I'll say that sometimes you need neither, perhaps politicians know more about this last part. Using Imperial measures makes this clear - do you really need to know how big your field is to the millimetre? To the centimetre? A foot will do.
My foot is, strangely (there's that British sarcasm again), a foot long. I can go into a field without tools and measure using my feet and be quite accurate.
I programmed Ruby for years and it was always said that it was designed to work for the human over the computer, Imperial is much the same, as were the things like pre-decimal currency (I don't want 12 eggs, can you sell me one? Easy when I've 240d to divide into, not so easy with 100 pence).
Use what's appropriate, don't wed yourself to decimal.
And by the way, all imperial units are now defined in metric, which makes the conversion doubly insane.
But in the same way that we can't switch to driving on the other side of the road over the space of a week, the UK can't spend a half century or so half-arsedly failing to commit to the metric system, and then complain that things don't make as much sense as they seem to in 95% of the world.
Btw, is your foot precisely 12 inches, or is your shoe? I wonder, because it sounds dreadfully inconvenient to have to take your shoes and socks off when you want to measure a field. (I measure large distance by paces, which for me are roughly a metre.)
I know that my hand span is 22cm, which has occasionally been quite handy when I'm without a tape or rule, and want to roughly measure something -- but that's not a compelling reason for me to advocate a base-11 measuring system. : )
1 hand has a thumb and four other fingers, each consisting of 3 parts. So you point with your thumb to one of these 3 times 4=12 parts.
If you run out of numbers, you take your other hand an put up a finger, then start counting from 1 with the other hand again. 5 fingers give you 5 times 12=60 possible combinations.
No idea why they didn't do the thumb + 12 positions stuff with the other hand, which would have given 12 times 12=144 possibilities. Speculation: Maybe there was no need as such high numbers didn't appear in practice?.
The numbers 12, 60 and 360 that occur in our time and angle calculations are interestingly factorials divided by 2. (4! = 24, 5! = 120, 6! = 720).
Since larger factorials have both 2 and 4 as factors, they have 2^3 as part of their factorisation, and by the time you get to 6! you introduce another factor of 2, so it's not a big loss dropping one of those power of 2, you still have a huge range of factors and hence ease when working with fractions with these numbers.
Attempts to replace degrees with base 10 (gradians) appears to be slow on the uptake, with radians being a more natural measurement (but who wants irrational angles in everyday life) so I think we're stuck with degrees.
Babylonians inherited base-60 from sumerians. AFAIK, there is no real consensus why exactly it was base-60 with sumerians. One hypothesis is exactly what hyperman1 is telling us. Also, don't quote me on that, but I seem to remember hearing that 360° might have been introduced not because of divisibility specifically, but because of the size of the sun. Not sure how plausible is that, but, notably, angular diameter of the sun is ≈0.5°. So I might believe it is related, but if I'm not mistaken 5/12/60-numeric systems seem to be much older than 360°.
When we travelled to China years ago we were advised to learn the one-handed 1-10 gestures[1] which we were assured was in common use there, and solves one of the basic problems of asking for specific quantities of things without language.
I guess that if you had an agreed endian (LSH / MSH?) you could represent all integers from 0-110 in a single two-handed gesture.
Obviously, with 10 fingers, you could also represent 0-1023 by holding up various digits - and that's needing only two states per finger. How quickly or easily others would be able to read that representation is a different question. Plus most of us would need some training exercises to recover finger independence of pinky and ring.
Some numbers would be outright banned, e.g. 132
I wonder if he'd lived, he'd have changed his opinion from 4 years ago, given the dogs breakfast that is the current transition process, run by a non-representative collection of opportunists.
They're not mutually exclusive.
> I wonder if he'd lived, he'd have changed his opinion
He did appear to be making his decision based on principle, not process, so I doubt it.
With ~45 years or EEC/EC/EU membership to refer to, there were zero examples offered where this ostensible move away from common law had actually manifested, let alone in a negative way.
Actually, I thought his position seemed to be the standard nebulously nostalgic nationalism.
I don't recall common law being a talking point in any of the leave / remain discussions and marketing. Cameron originally couched the question purely around economics -- which unfortunately made the public debate, such as it was, vulnerable to grossly influential outright lies around money. The famous '£350m a week’ lie, f.e.
This then seemed to morph (or was manufactured) into some kind of national identity existential crisis.
Perhaps I read it all wrong though.
It doesn't matter because I'm not looking for a high level of precision when I do that kind of measuring, I'm looking for good enough not perfect. If physicists can handle this notion[1] even when they're the ones tasked with producing SI units I'm not sure why it's not applicable for the rest of us.
> APPROXIMATIONS
> Even though physicists usually try for a high degree of precision, there are times when only a close approximation is neeed. Physicists some times make rough estimates for making tentative decisions.
Sounds like a decent principle to me.
> then complain that things don't make as much sense as they seem to in 95% of the world
It's not Brits that are complaining as we get to choose the measure that suits the aims at the time. If centimetres are appropriate then use centimetres. If feet and inches are better, use that. Do you write all your software in C? Better hope WASM takes off or your competitor using that nasty Javascript will remain ahead.
No, it's the "95%" measuring their height in centimetres (why not millimetres?;) or buying litres of milk that inconvenience themselves while complaining about measures they don't understand because they blind themselves to the advantages. Good sold in Britain have both measures on everything, we're committed, just not dogmatic about it.
[1] http://webphysics.iupui.edu/NH/Projects/TEAMS[2]/err6.htm
However:
a) physicists are not 'tasked with producing SI units'
b) you can have a non-high level of precision with metric as easily as with imperial
c) corollary: metric is not perfect - no one is trying to assert that
d) 'we get to choose the measure that suits the aims at the time' - yes, that sounds like Britain. Let's see how that plays out over the next 5 years.
e) 'if feet and inches are better, use that'. Better?
f) actually, this needs fully quoting:
> No, it's the "95%" measuring their height in centimetres (why not millimetres?;) or buying litres of milk that inconvenience themselves while complaining about measures they don't understand because they blind themselves to the advantages. Good sold in Britain have both measures on everything, we're committed, just not dogmatic about it.
Let's recalibrate:
i) it's not "95%" -- it's 95%. 7.59b people on the planet and 320m in USA, 4m in Liberia, 50m in Burma -- you could throw in the recalcitrants in the UK, but we're still rounding to about 5% of the planet that isn't on metric.
ii) people that use metric are allowed to use centimetres and millimetres .. and metres, decimetres, kilometres. All is good, sensible, easy to transition between by shifting the decimal point. I'm 187cm / 1.87m / 1870mm tall. With shoes on, add 2cm (but no need to adjust the length of the field I'm stepping out).
iii) I don't get the inconvenience of buying a litre of milk ... ?
iv) committed but not dogmatic - what a wonderfully British phrasing. We kind of get it, but we demand to reserve our right to randomly claim exceptionalism, for reasons that can't be described, defined, or defended.
That kind of comment is beneath all of us yet sums up the tone of your entire comment - pedantic, snarky, and not a little xenophobic.
Try reminding yourself that this is Hacker News.
Whether a holder of a British passport could be called xenophobic about the British, especially when making a comment about the regrettable decision by the British to remove themselves from the EU - well, it seems a bold claim to make.
I genuinely am wildly fascinated to see what happens as the Brexit catastrophe unfolds.
I'll admit that I was mildly frustrated by your apparent unwillingness to engage on the much more interesting discussion to be had around the flaws in your argument.
Walking one foot in front of the other as so much slower than taking a stride.
Archers learn to measure by sight though, they have a few tricks since they aren't allowed any sort of help.
In addition, Nainsmith's rule (dating from 1892) is still used to this day - to estimate time to travel certain distances.
You should really read up on modern agriculture. A foot won't do nowadays, not if you want to receive any subsidies at least.
> My foot is a foot long
> I can go into a field without tools
Well, you can't say you don't have a tool while bringing a tool. My foot is a lot (!) bigger than yours, so that argument doesn't hold.
> Using Imperial measures makes this clear - do you really need to know how big your field is to the millimetre? To the centimetre? A foot will do.
Yes, also a meter will do.
> but ... but ... how exactly long is a meter?
Well, again, my foot is bigger than yours. Others are smaller. They'll do, too, right?
Point is, who cares if you are off by a couple of meters/foots/whatever if you are just looking for an estimate? But using foots, arms, pumpkins or cat tails for length seems way too ambiguous. A meter, while seemingly synthetic to people not familiar with the metric system, can be used just as good with all the advantages it brings. Yes, it requires to get an idea of its size. Well, but so does your foot or whatever randomly by nature generated object you use for measurement.
I like that but let's try to keep to the principle of charity and accept that we're using words in the normal way, so I can say that I don't have a tool because it's not normal to refer to your foot as a tool.
> My foot is a lot (!) bigger than yours, so that argument doesn't hold.
In what way does you knowing that your foot is not a foot long undermine an argument about accuracy vs precision?
> A meter, while seemingly synthetic to people not familiar with the metric system, can be used just as good with all the advantages it brings.
When did I argue against using metres? I must say it's a bit frustrating to have several responses that are so binary in nature. If I suggest Javascript for frontend website work does that invalidate using something else if appropriate? Am I arguing against strongly typed, pre-compiled languages in general? If you didn't know JS but did know Rust might you be justified in choosing WASM?
Imperial measures have their place, as do metric ones.
I know people whose feet are barely half as long as mine. So what exactly am I or others supposed to use as a foot unit? Something in between or rather towards the smaller feet? Tell a native Dutch person to use like two thirds only while telling some native Asian to use more like 1.3 foot as a foot? And on top of that not even their their own but the average of each, because you don't want to get it wrong by a factor of two? Yeah, who cares if it's 100 foot or 200 foot. Accuracy, right? A meter is easy to remember or to guess with a lot less variation. And if you are fancy enough, you could use a scale for example to get it accurate. A lot of other things actually, too. The magic of definition and derivation. But I am sure a foot can also be derived from Spanish tomatos or something.
> analogy to programming
How many foot is the circumference of the average straw man?
> Imperial measures have their place [...]
For example?
Historically, the way people measured things just wasn't very accurate until requirements for that became more precise around the 16th and 17th century and we figured out how to use precisely calibrated instruments rather than misc appendages. This is roughly when people figured out how to build clocks, Newton sat down and wrote up a thing or two about physics, and we started mapping the world in a bit more detail than "here be dragons", etc.
Precision engineering emerged during the industrial revolution. Once people started worrying about tolerances of less than a tenth of a millimeter, it kind of required consistency to get any kind of repeatable results. This required standardization. This happened late 18th century. Of course there were several competing standards.
The reason feet and miles are still around was the historical disagreement between the French and the British over lots of things (including territory). Particularly at that time when they were in each other's hair pretty much all the time. So the British came up with their own set of standards and Napoleon imposed the metric system on most of Europe. The US of course had its own set of disagreements with both the British and the French around that time and felt it needed its own standards. Hence it kind of matters whose miles, feet, gallons, pounds, pints, and what not we are talking about since there are some notable differences. Also, this changed over time. E.g. the US mile was last redefined in 1983, though not unanimously (from wikipedia):
"The United States redefined its yard in 1893, and this resulted in U.S. and Imperial measures of distance having very slightly different lengths.
The North American Datum of 1983 (NAD83), which replaced the NAD27, is defined in metres. State Plane Coordinate Systems were then updated, but the National Geodetic Survey left individual states to decide which (if any) definition of the foot they would use. All State Plane Coordinate Systems are defined in metres, and 42 of the 50 states only use the metre-based State Plane Coordinate Systems. However, eight states also have State Plane Coordinate Systems defined in feet, seven of them in U.S. Survey feet and one in international feet.[77] "
It seems the issue is highly political; which is weird for an engineering topic.
I studied physics, schools have taught metric since at least the 1980's as part of the standard curriculum, and all goods in Britain are sold with at least metric on them. It's got nothing to do with what I'm used to as I'm more used to metric. I simply have nothing against Imperial measures because the arguments used against them are mostly absurd and they're actually useful.
> It seems the issue is highly political; which is weird for an engineering topic.
I can't disagree with that at all.
Liquid egg is sold in 500mL containers.
https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/shop/fresh-food/milk-b...
Now quick, without googling, how many square feet (let alone inches) are there in a field that's a mile by a mile in size? If you manage that with some effort, how many acres? Protip: it's not even an integer number.
Also BTW, eggs are also sold in 10s in at least some metric countries.
I know because I have to buy them and it means I'm left with one left over every time. 12 eggs works for an individual, a couple, and a family of 3 or 4, and for more combinations of portion than 10 does.
> Want more accuracy? You can say it's 1.1551 kilometers or 1155.1 meters long, your accuracy is now better than a foot
That's precision, not accuracy.
> Now quick, without googling…
I already know it's a mile squared, why do I care about how many square feet there are? That's the point, you choose the measure that is appropriate, without knowing the aim how can you choose a measure?
“How big's that field?”
“A mile by a mile”
"Wow. Can I have some eggs, please?”
“Well, I've only got 10's. I hope you have exact change…”
That's only if your S.O. and kid eat the same number of eggs as you, which is not the case for me, I eat one more than they do, and 10 would work better. :-)
> That's precision, not accuracy.
That's pedantry. You understand what I meant: there's no difference between the systems in this regard.
> why do I care about how many square feet there are
Say you're applying fertilizer and its application rate is quoted in ounces per square foot (ewww).
So old money would have been briefly useful in the early 1990s, over 20 years after it was phased out? Because that's when a dozen eggs cost 1 pound.
In 1970, a dozen eggs cost 3s.4d. Quick, how much is one egg? (for comparison, I see Tesco have 10 eggs for £2.20. How much is one egg?
You liked the egg example until I pointed out how daft it was. Ah, the fickleness of youth!
It's also not going to matter only at the point a dozen eggs is a pound, but this is well off the original point and I'm not interested in a position that, strangely enough, means decimalisation has no impact. 240 pennies is 240 pennies, after all.
Try to think things out before hitting "reply". It would improve your posts immeasurably.
Damn! If we'd settled on ~11.8 modern inches instead of 12 (well, if 12 inches were ~11.8 instead), we could have hit the 1 nanolightsecond ~exactly.
Is anyone up for restandardizing on 1 nanolightsecond feet with decimalization and an informal 5000-foot mile that would line up very nicely with the Roman milles?
This, frankly, bothers me way more than why there is 5280 feet in a mile. Wikipedia is the most brilliant in the concept, yet the most aggravatingly frustrating in details thing I know.
I am not against all these "Star Wars timeline" articles, by the way (although, I wish fantasy worlds with big enough fandom would have their own "sub-wiki", just so they have their own "namespace" referenced from the "general" wikipedia, so that some magical beast wouldn't be squatting on the name that is actually shared with some creature from the actual folklore, several geographic objects and a dozen of music bands). It just makes me angry how some people are eager to "keep wikipedia tidy and organized" by deleting actually important real-world stuff (often justified by "storing data is expensive"), while they obsess over listing all possible Pokemons on wikipedia or some shit like that.
Now, this is only remotely related with the topic, which I agree is a serious and complicated issue, since we don't want to mix up random people fantasies with actually verified and established facts we could refer to. But the overall spirit of the issue I believe is the same, since in this particular case the subject seems to be explored by the author well enough, and people that protect wikipedia by keeping this kind of "original research" away may be right in some sense, but still are a problem I wish could be resolved somehow. (I don't know how, though.)
For me, these notability rules for music make sense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(music)#C...
As music evolves away from big album releases at major record labels, these rules will probably evolve with them. But even now, these 'music bands known to pretty much everyone listening to some "not too mainstream" genre' can be notable if there are non-trivial articles about them in the media, even if they have no traditional album releases and haven't won any awards.
You didn't really argue about the point of original research. The arguments here also make sense to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research
In any case, I think hate towards Wikipedia moderators is misdirected (I'm not a moderator, haven't even contributed anything but typo fixes).
My main quibble would be when the author goes into theological territory. There were attempts to translate the Bible into English and vernacular languages before Wycliffe, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_translations_into_Engl..., https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_translations_in_the_Mi....
Is this true? It reads like a dad joke.
Furthermore: A Troy ounce was 20 pennyweights. There are 20 Gebinde in a Strang. There were 20 maunds in a candy. 20 lyspond in a schippond. And so on.
Enjoy https://archive.org/details/dictionnaireuni00dourgoog .
5280 feet in mile = 10x11x12x13 - 9x10x11x12 feet
Radius of Earth = 11x360 miles
Radius of Moon = 3x360 miles
Radius of Earth + Radius of Moon = 1x2x3x4x5x6x7 = 7x8x9x10 miles
ALL COINCIDENCES, NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG :)
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Quadrivium-Classical-Liberal-Geometry...
The duodecimal system is unique to the fact that the number 12 has more divisible factors than anything else that's manageable to count.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal
Inches/Feet are based on Duodecimal system, but since we use Arabic numerals (base 10), it's obvious why inches/feet aren't the way to go and why Metric system wins.
There are still things that the rest of the world use Base 12 for - hours/minutes/seconds, 360 degrees, point font units, etc.
The reason why America hasn't adopted Metric system despite of it being the official system in the law is the same reason why the rest of the world hasn't gotten around to changing time/degrees into a decimal equivalent. It takes a tremendous amount of effort to turn the ship, the US being a giant ship to turn. America also leads in determining standards for Metric system around the world - NIST with collaboration from European counterparts work together to establish these standards. Universities in US, semiconductor industry, medical industry, etc. use metric units. Engineers in the US know and use the metric system.
If we didn't have Arabic numerals in Base 10, the American system is better :) *
But since we are all stuck with arabic numerals, the Metric system is better!
Edit: * I realized that its not that simple. Conceding this point, see responses. I was under the impression that most US units were consistent with base 12, but they're not - 1 lb = 16 oz (not 12) for example. A base 12 metric system would be ideal.
Smaller nations have no problem changing everything. The marginal benefit is too small for a giant to turn on a dime.
A lot of things in US are already both ANSI/Metric:
- Electronics and PCB manufacturing (accepts both, but its a bit messy). Headers are 0.1" but BGA pitch is 0.4mm for example.
- Hardware stores have both standard and metric sizes for fasteners
- Liquids (both oz/ml has to be printed by law)
- Car speed gauges (both mph/kph printed by law)
- Food items are all metric. A Coke can has 42 grams of sugar. There is no oz printed in nutrition labels.
It's kind of a hybrid system.
However, there are exceptions for the follow which are still stuck:
- Temperature, weather is always in Fahrenheit. Even in recipes.
- Paper sizes are not adopted to ISO standards.
- Pressure is almost always in psi
And some smaller nations (the UK, for example) have never changed "everything" and likely never will.
Probably some portion hope to revert completely when they do.
Probably some portion hope that they rejoin the EU with another vote; and in the process get dragged the rest of the way to the engineering age measurements in the process.
https://resources.realestate.co.jp/buy/guide-to-japanese-apa...
> The size of a Japanese-style room is measured by the number of tatami mats:
>> Four mat room = 6.12 square meters = 66 square feet
>> Six mat room = 9.18 square meters = 98.8 square feet
> Most Japanese-style rooms in modern apartments are four or six mats in size.
Even though today only a minority of apartment rooms are actually used with tatami it is still customary to give all rooms in mat units and usually in m^2 too.
BTW that's similar to how non SI units are still used in other countries nowadays, e.g. (metric) pounds and half-pounds are still used in context of groceries in colloquial German.
That would make trade deals with the EU impossible.
Per the law 21 CFR 101.9(b)(5)(viii) [0]:
> (viii) For nutrition labeling purposes, a teaspoon means 5 milliliters (mL), a tablespoon means 15 mL, a cup means 240 mL, 1 fl oz means 30 mL, and 1 oz in weight means 28 g.
In reality:
* 1 fl. oz. ≈ 29.57 mL [1] (the volume measurements all build off of one another so I won't bother converting more than one)
* 1 oz. ≈ 28.35 g
In other words, volume and mass measurements are legally required to be off by ~1.4% and ~1.3% respectively.
[0]: https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfr...
I don't think it is the size of the US that is the problem, I think the real problem is the US political culture.
The most successful approach to metrication is (a) do it in a big-bang, all at once, not gradually (b) make it apply uniformly nation-wide (c) make it apply across as many industries/sectors as possible, with as few exceptions as possible (d) take a predominantly mandatory rather than voluntary approach to metrication. If the US had followed that formula, it would very likely have succeeded, but it never had the political will to go down that path. Instead it opted for a piecemeal, voluntary approach, which was never likely to be a great success
In a parliamentary system such as the UK, Canada, Australia, etc, cabinet decides on a policy, and then the government usually has the numbers in the legislature to enact whatever policy cabinet decides. By contrast, in the US, the executive (President and cabinet) and the legislature (Congress) are two arms-length branches of government, with far less coordination, and it becomes much harder to push policies through unless strong interests are backing them.
Hence, in the US, it is basically impossible to get any controversial policy implemented unless either it has corporate lobbying behind it, or else it is some kind of emotional issue which attracts the attention of activist groups. Corporate lobbyists don't support mandatory metrication (it will cost business money, at least in the short term); metrication doesn't induce the kinds of emotions that issues like abortion or racism do, so there is little activist energy pushing it.
Also, the US historically has a much more hostile attitude to technocratic bureaucracy than most other Western countries do. In other countries, the scientific/technological elite consensus is "this way is better", and the government endorses it, and so the general public falls into line behind the government. In the US, there has always been much more resistance among the general public to those kind of elite proposals. (That said, I think in more recent years the rest of the English-speaking world is becoming more like the US in this regard; I think the Internet has helped export that US culture of distrusting technocratic elites to the rest of the English-speaking world.)
Every other nation seemed to manage it. It's just the usual American exceptionalism. There's nothing special about the USA that makes it harder to implement. There's just just a stubborn belief that there is, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. A bit like all the other policy issues which the rest of the world has solved but the US still argues about.
The stubbornness you speak of is actually more to do with not willing to accept the costs of the change. World’s largest economy can’t just change it all at once even though majority of the people support it.
No one in the US argues that the Metric system isn’t superior. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that multiples of 10 in a base 10 system of numbers makes everything easy.
In fact, the superiority complex comes from non-US folks thinking “look at those dumb Americans and their stupid units”.
Certain people think “Americans just don’t get it”.
Are you content that US and majority of the countries drive on the same side? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-_and_right-hand_traffic
The error has nothing to do with units of measurements chosen. You cannot measure exactly 1.(0) gallon [1.0000000000… gallon with infinite number of zeroes] of liquid with absolute accuracy either.
In engineering this would be resolved with something like 500 ± 10 mL.
In consumer goods there are either regulations or you get, say, 505 mL so you have nothing to complain about. And you would never be able to tell the difference.
By the way, ML is megaliter. Milliliter is mL.
[1] unfortunately https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tun_(unit) leaves me no wiser as to what volume the unit "shit tun" might measure.
I'm guessing that why they were sold in those amounts vs some other choice. It's just my experience though.
The US pint is 16 ounces, vs the Imperial pint of 20 ounces. That's because no one really wants that much American beer.
In Australia, standard beer glass size varies from state to state -- here in NSW we have a schooner (at 425ml) or if you're after something smaller, a middy (285ml).
Using metric does not mean you need to always and only drink 1 litre of beer, drive at 100km an hour, constantly stoop so you're 1m tall, etc.
Good for them.
> In Australia, standard beer glass size varies from state to state -- here in NSW we have a schooner (at 425ml) or if you're after something smaller, a middy (285ml).
I know. You can buy a yard of ale in the UK at participating outlets. None of that has any relevance to whether a pint is more convenient than a litre. A schooner is more convenient than a litre.
> Using metric does not mean you need to always and only drink 1 litre of beer, drive at 100km an hour, constantly stoop so you're 1m tall, etc.
I'm arguing against dogmatism, not for it.
But one pint versus one litre doesn't have relevance to anything, does it?
It seems you've heard the suggestion to adopt a sensible, integrated, and (much more) widely used measurement system -- and are choosing to argue against specific numbers / quantities of things.
Originally you said 'a litre [of beer] is too big as you'll end up with a flat beer'.
Metric doesn't mean you must sell, buy, or drink beer in round numbers.
It makes more sense to YOU because you've used it since early life, so you have created an mental model for it. Countries with metric system, people have done the same.
As one example, In a recent after-work conversation, some one mentioned the stupidity of the "stone" measurement, upon the Italian, Canadian, Japanese, American, Swedish, Mexican, Chinese and the Russian all agreed it was the most non-intuitive stupid thing they have ever heard. Except the Brit at the place, who (in vain) tried to explain how it made sense and made "more sense to humans"
These "intuitiveness" arguments are silly. It's whatever you're used to. So with that realisation, we may as well choose the more universally self-consistent and useful system, which is indisputably metric.
Careful, that's a British pint. An American pint is closer to 400mL.
There was an xkcd comic with lists of ready-to-go mental models about metric units for people who grew up without them:
I do not disagree with the above, I can totally see that being done (hell, when we didn't have a measure out while hiking with my friends we used "5 iPhones long" as a temporary measurement)
Problem is of course, that I can't see how that measurement can ever scale well beyond one medieval towns market place as a measurement, let alone a country, kingdom or a territory without confusion. It is ambiguous. Just as the example you said, it is easy for a fraudster to pick up any rock and claim that one to resemble the standard rock unit and get some unfair trading advantage. It is too easy to trample with. The purpose of measurement is exactly to REMOVE ambiguity, and establish a STANDARDS just as we established common languages for communication.
And on a side note, usage of the "stone measurement" was officially prohibited for commercial use in 1985 in UK. It is apparently still used for body-weight, but I guess there ambiguity can be preferred ;)
Updating measurement unit according to societal needs is only natural, and the purpose of the Stone story in my comment was that, even among so many different national (with different culture, language, metric system) they thought the Stone measurement made no sense today. Except the Brit that had a mental model for it. Which was the point: sometime mental model can seem like an good argument, but as the Canadian and American also thought stone was dumb, (While everyone else in the room thought imperial units were dumb) they kind of proved that their argument for imperial units was also not found on good basis.
Using a conversion as a justification just isn't a fair comparison.
One desirable property with the SI system is how compatible they are: a cube with 10cm sides is a liter, so it’s easy to imagine the space requirements for a 40 liter tank. A gallon is 231 cubic inches, which is much less natural to work with.
And the litre isn't? Sorry, I fail to see your argument here.
Say, I walk into a bar. I order a beer. Here (in The Netherlands), since I didn't specify, I get a small beer of whatever's on tap. A small beer is 250ml-350ml, depending on the establishment. I could also order a half liter (500ml) or ask for a pitcher. So, just as in the US you don't order "can I have 128 fluid ounces of beer" you don't order "250ml of beer" in the rest of the world. Also, the fact that it 'sounds exotic' says more about you than about the system... and 'guaranteed not as exact'? Really? Let's say you have to measure a gallon of water, and I have to measure a liter. I just whip out a digital kitchen scale and measure 1000 grams. Which is EXACTLY the same amount as 1000 milliliters. Cause, you know, metric units are interchangeable. I double dare you to come up with a more exact measurement in Imperial units using simple kitchen tools.
Traveler beware: Just because it's true that a Dutch "vaasje" glass is 230-330ml[1] the actual volume of beer you get is at best 80% of that. The Dutch pouring practice of handing patrons a glass of beer with up to 1/4 receding foam on the top would cause a riot across the channel.
> [...]and measure 1000 grams. Which is EXACTLY the same amount as 1000 milliliters[...]
No, not exactly. Not even under standard conditions. It's one of the unfortunate warts of the modern metric system that the actual value drifted from exactly 1000, almost, but not exactly[2].
You order a quart when you want a quarter of a gallon in the US.
You order a "Viertelliter" (quarter of a Liter" when you want a quarter of a Liter in Germany.
How is one quarter less precise / more exotic than the other?
Most places, I think, most people don't talk in precise units at all. Give me a glass of water. Put in a pinch of salt. One scoop of coffee. Handful of peanuts. It is my personal experience that this tracks pretty well across any culture. In my opinion, having these oddball measuring units is an easier mental model. A couple tablespoons is human sounding. 30ml is not, even if you have a 15ml spoon. A cup of water sounds human, a quarterliter does not. I'm not trying to insult you or your system, I'm just expressing my own opinion, which as pointed out, probably comes from my own education and experience.
Juice is also bought by the liter, usually in 2L bottles for a family dinner, or 500mL bottles for one person alone.
In most countries you could go your whole life without having to know what a "gallon" is or even hearing the word.
I do understand that it is hard to adjust intuitions from one system to the other, but I can't imagine how someone can think that people have problems using the measurement system they learned in primary school.
Strange what you say about milk though - I've usually seen the 2l form factor anywhere westerners are common. Could be a local convention?
Different European countries produced different fruits (citrus, apples etc), but I've not noticed that e.g. apple juice is in larger containers in Britain, and orange juice in Spain. If anything, the trend is to smaller containers, for variety and health.
https://ec.europa.eu/growth/single-market/goods/building-blo...
Converting between the units is a pain: not because the conversion is hard (the conversion ratios are usually whole numbers), but rather because there's a lot of units and it's difficult to remember how they relate to each other (e.g. what's the relation between a pint and a gallon?).
A US gallon is 3.785 litres. A UK gallon is 4.546 litres.
Which if these is more human-sized?
The US gallon since they've got more people per capita.
Meaning, the phrase "gallon of milk" is ever so slightly easier to say/verbalize than "four liters of milk." Or alternatively, "half gallon of milk" vs "two liters of milk."
Likewise: "pint of beer" vs. "<half liter/5 deciliters> of beer", "1 cup of flour" vs. "<quarter liter/250 mL/25 centiliters/120 grams> of flour".
Most people in the world just buy their petrol per liter directly and it's priced at <currency amount> / liter, there is no conversion needed, the "gallon" is just an arbitrary measure.
Actually that is the "official" way of measurement (what you see on the car specifications or what the on board computer tells you), in speaking it is more common to say that you made 22 Km/liter (or 18, etc.) than to say you used 4.55 liters/100 Km (or 5.56 liters/100 Km).
So you had (say) 30 liters needed to refill and travelled for 450 Km, now is it easier to divide 30 by 450 and multiply by 100 ( or divide 30 by 4.5) or divide 450 by 30?
Besides the difference between (say) 18 and 19 Km/l is (IMHO) easier to visualize/appreciate than the difference between 5.56 and 5.26 l/100 km.
It depends.
Here (Italy) most petrol stations are self-service/with automated machine for payments.
If I buy in cash I buy gasoline "per money", i.e. 20 Euro or 50 Euro, you don't have any alternatives if not multiples of the bills.
If I buy paying with a card then I still try (roughly) to meet the amount.
I am not really aware that today 50 Euro will give me (say) 27.476 liters while last week (still say) it gave me 27.187 liters.
I'm pretty sure this is an attempt at humor. Or I'm not sure but I hope.
To take the example of the F150 there's a 26 gallon fuel tank, but then the engine size in in liters, transmission fluid is in quarts, windshield washer reservoir in liters etc.
Even on the most popular American-made car in the US you need to deal with an absolute mess of different measurement systems, on e.g. a German-made car all of these would be metric.
Thus e.g. a 245/45 R17 tire has a diameter of around 26 inches. As you can deduct from the "simple" formula of:
245/10*45/100/2.54*2+17 =~ 25.7
1. https://www.moderntiredealer.com/8644/understanding-tire-dim...
And by "pint of beer", do you mean an Imperial pint (568 mL) or a US liquid pint (473 mL)?
Only thing I hate about system is kilogram... The French... Couldn't do it properly. I really wish we would use grav instead...
While I'll agree that a base 12 system would be better, the American system would still be a bizarre hodgepodge.
Let's look at distance. First, a thou, or a thousandth of an inch. Breaking everything there. Then twelve inches to a foot, where things work. Then three feet to a yard? Twenty two yards to a chain, ten chains to a furlong and finally eight furlong to a mile.
And if you're wondering, yes I had to look up everything besides inch, foot, yard, and mile.
With C, sure 0C is cold, but tons of people experience colder on a regular basis; and I've had situations where 20C feels a bit too cold, but 21C feels a bit too warm. Most thermostats denominated in C trigger on half a degree difference, not a full degree.
You're pointing out how useful it is when doing science with water. Sure. And since science is important, and it doesn't make much sense to keep two systems around, then yeah, let's go with celsius as the standard. But let's not lose sight fo the fact that we actually are giving up a more human-focused system when we gain this scientifically-focused system.
(68 is a comfortable temperature for men wearing suits... a better more general temperature is probably 72.)
Zero F with no wind can feel like a nice day compared to zero C with tons of wind.
But contrast, a metric system in base 12 should still keep the niceties of the metric system - units of volume should correspond to units lengths of the side of a cube, units of weight should correspond to units of volume of water etc. And there should be a single rule for conversions, with standardized names for sub divisions.
These are the things that make the metric system superior, not its being in base 10. And these advantages far outweigh the advantage of being able to divide a sixth of a foot in a whole number of inches - particularly in the era where we carry arbitrary precision calculators in our pockets.
10/2 = 6
10/3 = 4
10/4 = 3
10/6 = 2
That's two more whole number fractions than 10 (decimal) which is only divisible by 2 and 5.
E.G.
The speed of light is 299,792,458 meters per second.
The speed of light is 299,792.458 KM per second.
The speed of light is about 300 M meters per second.
10/5 in Base 12 is 2.49724972497...
Or binary (Base 2)
1011/101 = 10.0011001100...
Duodecimal metric system would have the same features that you’re talking about (which have nothing to do with the base).
The reality is that metric is a standardizing measurement. There is one base unit, changes in scale merely involve a factor denoted by a prefix, it doesn't try to be smarter than absolutely necessary and just sticks to decimal.