Metrication timeline (2018)
ukma.org.uk
ukma.org.uk
Absolutely everything has officially been metric for many years of course but the real test is when there's a big news event and some random person tells their unprepared story on TV. From recent news events, it seems like even older people really do naturally think distances in meters now. I don't think that was quite true when I left NZ 22 years ago. I suspect GPS driving directions helped with that change.
Still occasionally hear baby weights in lbs.
Height is about the only one you still hear in feet and inches. I think the rubric that anything over six foot is quite tall and anything under five foot is really short is just too handy. Usually specified in metres or centimetres on official forms though.
1 L next to 1.13 L (2 pints)
2 L next to 2.27 L (4 pints)
Luckily the shelf price label always had price/liter.
Much of the produce is now displayed in plastic mixing bowls and sold as 'a pound (£) a bowl'. Or pumpkin by the slice.
Why isn't there imperial equivalents for Volt or Ampere? There is BTU, but others?
Out of curiosity, what was so great about the grave (besides the unfortunate connotations in English)?
In any case, you have the French to “thank” for the grave as well ;)
> Where you can multiply and divide things and get new units without any other actions. One great example where algebra is very useful.
Indeed! It is a wonderful sanity check; I cannot count the number of times I found a mistake after some straightforward dimensions analysis.
I drive in kph and buy gas in litres, but weigh ~180 pounds and am 5' 10" tall. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If you're going to convert systems, some useful things to keep in mind:
> Naughtin’s 1st Law: Dual-Scale Instruments are Evil […] Currently, this is a hard rule to apply consistently in the U.S., because well-designed purely metric measures are almost impossible to find. This is particularly the case in kitchen measures. One can find measuring spoons with metric markings, but these are usually smaller than the imperial markings, and the numbers make it clear that the metric markings are an afterthought. A tablespoon, for example, may carry the secondary legend of “15 mL,” or even “14.7 mL,” as though recipes regularly called for such awkward amounts.
> Naughtin’s 2nd Law: Prefer Measures Without Decimals […] One rather startling fact about the Australian metric conversion is that nearly all of their industries opted for the millimeter as their preferred unit of measure, including the construction industry. The plans for Australian houses are drawn up in millimeters. […] Because decimal numbers are eliminated from the blueprints. Which means that the guy on the job site running the radial arm saw never has to deal with anything but whole numbers. Which means that he makes fewer mistakes. Which means that waste is greatly reduced.
> Naughtin’s 3rd Law: Don’t Change Measures in Midstream […] The most common wine bottle today is 750 milliliters. What then should we call a bottle exactly twice that size? For a number of reasons, including the fact that it would make the columns in the shopkeeper’s inventory spreadsheet more readable, because it saves the customer from the mental effort of shifting a decimal, and because it precludes the need for a decimal at all (see 2nd Law, above), the Metric Maven strongly advocates 1500 milliliter wine bottles (and responsible consumption). Wine bottles in this size, however, are usually labeled 1.5 liters. Wine shop advertisements may flip-flop between liters and milliliters, decimals and whole numbers. This is not, for once, a matter of U.S. metric obstructionism, but a matter of worldwide metric obtuseness. Even metric countries could do metric better.
> Naughtin’s 4th Law: No Centimeters! Actually, no centi-anything. Also, no deci-anything, no deca-anything, and no hecto-anything. But the centimeter is far-and-away the most common violation of this rule, and the only one most of us ever hear much of, so it gives its name to the law. […] Drop these four prefixes, and there are only two remaining that non-technical people will ever have to deal with commonly: kilo for thousands, and milli for thousandths. Conversions between measurements become almost unnecessary, and on the rare occasions when they do crop up, there is one and only one conversion factor to remember: 1000.
Makes it easy to visualize.
Likewise 1 meter being roughly an arm span, or 3 feet.
MI often need to guestimate something and being able to use my body parts to do such is super useful!
Not bad to think of this as "10mm", though.
I've had multiple "cm or mm" shouting back and forth across the room conversations that have caused confusion. I've also had a few "vanishing decimal points" in drawings which are a bit more confusing in cgs than mmgs. I've grown to strongly prefer mm.
False precision is always a risk. But for most things I do, mm has the correct amount of precision. (Circuit boards like tenths of mm; most small mechanical assemblies like a mm or a tenth of a mm).
The centimeter comes is as the “metric inch” and is incredibly useful.
My main issue for me is fruit and veggies. They're always in lbs because the price seems lower. Although I measure meat in kg because my butcher is a French immigrant and yells at is of we use imperial units.
I'm in Toronto and use 24h wherever I can (especially as a sysadmin).
As this timeline points out, _under the hood_ everything is metric and has been so for a very long time (and this is true of the US too). I find it hard to get worked up about.
I always felt that we should have adopted the Canadian gallon, declaring it to be exactly 4 litres.
Is there actually a common alternative to hectare (outside US) for land area?
> 1215 Magna Carta requires “one measure” of wine, corn and cloth throughout the realm; and similarly for weights.
Corn is native to North America/Mexico. Was the term more general?
In Europe, including Britain, it's called glucose syrup. HFCS is called isoglucose, but isn't much used.
And of course, how convenient that people with first hand experience of the time period and able to offer comments that it wasn't all roses, are either dead or retired from public life.
But obviously, you're not going to bring back such a time by going back to imperial units. Effin' idiots.
Should've picked 12, or even 60 as the numerical base.
> measurements and ratios, based on vernacular day-to-day objects
Maybe if there had been just one system everyone used we would've kept the varying conversion factors and names based on day to day objects
But the arbitrariness that warranted the introduction of a single system wasn't as much about unit conversions as it was about different areas (even within) the same country basing units on different vernaculars and day to day objects
Or even worse using the same word but with different values if you moved one town over
And once everyone has to learn a new system might as well make it so unit conversions just involves shifting a decimal separator rather than multiplying/dividing by 12
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_numeral_systems#By_cul...
For the last 2000 years it seems no major civilization used base 12 or 60, almost everyone has been using base 10 and even those who didn't had opted for 20 instead of 12
Moving from decimal to duodecimal would involve a complete break for no practical benefit and at the cost of making interactions with every non adopter hellish
Moving from whatever you had before to metric was a minor break with the past but it was adopted in the first place because the status quo was already hellish
And in the parts of the world that already had a standardized system which they shared with most of their partners this process was already too much and we're still talking about metrication 2½ centuries later
I doubt we could've switched to base 12
In fact when the same people pushing for metric tried to force a decimal calendar (something which was widely standardized and for which the shift added no benefits) it failed badly
I was contemplating this the other day. We coders often bang on about the joy of base 16 as pure 2s but what makes 60 so useful is it has so many factors: 2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15,20,30. It means you rarely need to split a minute when you’re dividing up time for everyday use.
You can also form a set of 12 symbols that is visible from farther away by doing shapes similar to ASL:
1-4: fingers held up
5-8: touching tip of finger with thumb
9-12: touching top of 2nd phalanx with thumb.
Holding down the pinky in isolation is tricky so this kinda favors starting with pinky out as 1, but you could make assorted variants of this system work.
Fractions would be so nice to work with in "dozenal metric".
But we did not, so it’s a moot point. The metric system succeeded because it fit easily with how people measured things and had some unarguable upsides (like replacing the ~20 different units of length all called “foot”). The metric system itself was not a great step into decimalisation, it was just the recognition that the number systems in used were decimal already. That’s why it was so easily adopted.
You can see it in the units that were not accepted and then all but disappeared: the time and angle units, for which the non-decimal units had practical advantages.
Sure, these things never happen instantly. Some units remained in the daily language, like livre, pinte, sou (respectively pound, pint, and shilling). There was no internet at that time, and France went through 3 revolutions and quite a few regime changes. It never was a priority after Napoleon, as the restored monarchs tried to leave as much of the revolution behind them. The people saw the advantages of a consistent decimal system.
> The systems it replaced were forgotten, but what cannot be doubted is that those "vernacular" systems were hyper-adapted to how ordinary people used measurements in daily life.
We can very much doubt that they were optimal, otherwise they wouldn’t have ended with hundreds of small variations of common units. They evolved in isolation at times when consistency was not very relevant at best, or a tool for price gouging at worst. You cannot have that in a modern, integrated nation state such as what France was turning into after 1789.
> It was the demands of state taxation and international trade, not the needs of common people, that promoted the creation and adoption of the metric system by legislative fiat.
That is quite far from reality. It was created as a scientific and technological toy, and the logical conclusion of some Enlightenment ideas that were brewing before the revolution.
There were some propaganda aspects when they got a bunch of funding from the Convention to do some actual measurements, and Napoleon realised how useful it could be for administrative purposes. But the metric system did not just appear one day, ready to be used by bureaucrats. It was not designed by bureaucrats either, at least before the metre convention.
The bureaucrats would have been perfectly happy with a unified system based on the old units just like in the UK.
Definitions of fundamental quantities based on things that aren't contant is simply incorrect.
How much yards is 523 miles?
And, how many metres is 523 kilometres?
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You might want to read up about SI base units [1]. That gives precise definitions of the fundamental quantities in terms of other constants, such that it wouldn't change ever.
Like, a metre has been defined as the distance light travels in a given amount of time (this constant amount of time is of course a very small fraction of a second). It's never going to change. If it had been defined as the length of a horse tail, then it would change depending on the horse you use.
(Of course, there's a lot more to it, but I'm omitting the details here).
Of course I know about the SI base units, which effectively remove the ability of ordinary people to tinker with, use, and reason about measurements by placing the system in the hands of ultra-experts. Just consider what a diversity of miles used to be enjoyed by the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mile#Historical.
It is impossible to return to the pre-standardization days, and I do not argue that we should. Many people enjoy savoring the differences that other cultures provide in terms of architecture, cuisine, language, etc. and decry the destruction of cultural differences wrought by things like tourism, globalism, capitalism, whatever. I mourn the loss of local measurements just like I do the loss of vernacular languages, architectural styles, styles of dress, foods, all that.
It’s the complete opposite, in fact. A simpler way of defining unit helps non-specialist understand them, and not only people who’ve memorised dozens of arbitrary conversion factors.
Given an average length of/distance between cars being so many yards/feet, how many cars are there in a two mile traffic jam?
But at least the metric system tries to be consistent -- different units can be related and convert in a systematic way.
If I want to drink until I’m buzzed, I’ll have 3 pints of beer, not 1.5L or (god forbid) 1500ml.
If I want to run a decent distance I’ll do 6 miles, not the gruelling sounding 10km.
If I want enough meat to make a stew, I’ll have 1 pound, not 500g or 0.5kg.
Try losing a 0 or a decimal point in base 12 as well.
It’s actually one of a few old mesures usuelles that were given a convenient, round equivalent in the metric system in a decree under Napoleon. The pint (or demi) is another one that is understood these days; the others are all but forgotten.
[0] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nederlands_metriek_stelsel