I'm all for metric or SI. But let's not overstate the value please.
F*ck :D
Wish we could all start understanding the difference between kilo and kibi, mega and mebu and so on for bits and bytes.
After many years and different widths the smallest common unit of exchange evolved to be a power of two: 8 bits are a byte, not 9, 10, 27, 30, etc; though Unicode might have been better off if 32 bits were the base character. However then older systems would have been at least 75% less useful.
Physical addressing units are also binary, because literal address lines (or their virtually latched equivalents on a serial bit-shift register) are used.
ROM, RAM, and correspondingly non-volatile writable storage inherit this basic premise.
So a non-sales computer person speaking 'kilo' or 'mega' or any other SI unit in relation to a computer part means it will hold or be able to transfer at least that many SI units in the quoted units. Everything gets rounded to the nearest useful neighbor. A digital kilo is not 1000, it is 2^10. A digital mega is correspondingly also 2^20. This is very similar to the exponents in SI units.
For that matter, humans have 8 fingers and 2 thumbs. Wouldn't an octal numbering system make more sense? Though for that we'd have to come up with new unit names near 2^3, 2^6, 2^9, etc that don't sound silly.
Each of the 4 long fingers has 3 phalanges, so an interesting possibility is to use each thumb to count up to 12 on each hand. Given that many ancient units of measurement where base-12, I wonder why we didn't develop base-12 languages.
>Two common definitions used today are the mechanical horsepower (or imperial horsepower), which is about 745.7 watts and the metric horsepower, which is approximately 735.5 watts.
I guess speaking as a Brit the foreigners just didn't have proper horses.
The advantage is not having to remember all those funny constants and being able to do math in your head that actually makes sense?
Or more important, to be able to write an article that the entire planet can just read without 95% of them (everybody outside the US, UK and Myanmar) having to resort to Google to find out if those numbers are impressive or not?
Just laugh at the joke.
For the last years I’ve mostly seen watts being used in NL, but it’s been ages since I saw a fast and furious movie or a top gear show. The car sellers use kW and often also, I assume metric, horsepower.
This, very much! I've done a ton of physical simulation code in my life. Whenever some newb or student comes to me for the first time with their simulation code that mysteriously doesn't work, in 90% of cases they stupidly didn't stick to SI and forked up some unit conversion, or mutiple. I tell the to keep it in SI and never let me see them make that mistake again. (Only exception is simple 1-to-1 unit conversions of parameters and results, when some stupid interface definition demands it that can't easily be changed.)
1. Everything uses a common base, so you don't get a base change on a scale change (or indeed, two different bases for different parts of the same measurement), and dimensional consistency becomes trivial.
2. The base is base-10, which is the same as our common counting system.
1. Temperature. It’s useful to elongate units over the range normally experienced by humans, which Fahrenheit does and Celsius does not, because it avoids tenths of a degree, for example, in room temperature selection.
2. Woodworking and similar: it’s useful to use powers of two because it’s very common to be marking/cutting/etc. 1/2 or 2x a value, which is easier to do in inverse power of two English measurements.
Outside of these weird exceptions, it's SI all the way. And this doesn't really vary with age. The web site whrere you buy wheels and TVs doesn't know your age so it will say the rims or screens are 20" regardless of who you are.
This is all as it should, however a large number of people have a really hard time groking the difference between kW and kWh.
So much so that I wonder if we should start specifying battery capacity in MJ to help people clarify things in their heads.
Beaufort is a dimensionless label as far as I'm aware and grit is used as such too (i.e. it never says anything else than "240" i.e. it doesn't "240 grit" or "240 something per inch").
My list wasn't close to exhaustive. We use all kinds of weird units.
Besides bar I sometimes see mmHg for pressure. Shoe sizes. I've never seen acceleration in m/s2 outside a physics problem, otherwise it's either G or seconds to 100 km/hr.
I'm aware. But I'd say its mostly used as a dimensionless. When I argue "we use metric except for these few" I mean in the cases where the unit (a length, mass, pressure etc) is actually uttered or written.
In some cases as you note there are labels which have non-metric definitions underneath, such as sand paper particles having a never-pronounced inch definition. The same goes for some weapon calibers where you might say a ".303 cartrige" for rifle ammunition but you'd never say a ".303 inch cartidge". A lot of people probably use these labels without knowing they are using an imperial definition. And that (I'm guessing) is also part of why it survived the metrification.
> I've never seen acceleration in m/s2 outside a physics problem, otherwise it's either G or seconds to 100 km/hr.
"10s to 100km/h" is as metric as m/s2 though (But again not pure SI). g being a constant obviously has no explicit unit, it's as metric as you want it to be :) I hear "5g" as 5x9.82m/s2 but an american probably hears something else.
It's even more pronounced with camera sensors, the size given in fractions of an inch is some kind of "equivalent to", whereas the size in mm is the actual size. Apparently the image sensor inch is 16mm or something like that.
It is the mixture of both that ends up being very confusing.