Why the US and UK can’t stop fighting the metric system
theverge.com
theverge.com
What enrages me about the American system is more the lack of consistency. Take something like mayonnaise. One brand will be sold with a price quoted in dollars per ounce, another in pounds, and yet another in x$/yoz for some y other than 1. And one will have calories per 2oz portion, one calories per 7oz portion, and the other calories per tablespoon (0.76oz) on the label. Obviously I made the numbers up, but this phenomenon is pure insanity. And it's blatant that the obfuscation is to enable exploitation of the consumer who has to perform arduous arithmetic to compare products. At least in the (pre-Brexit) UK the yoghurt had to have calories and price per 100g on the label, whether it was a 454g (vestiges of 1lb) pot, 500g, or some other size. I prefer consistency in some unit that I can learn to chaos.
As for recipes: why insist on measuring things of totally unknown density in cups? Mass is the appropriate way to measure strawberries or lettuce leaves, not volume.
Basically you made the case for the metric system! Yes, sure, technically it's not that hard to convert between units, when all you're doing is focusing kn converting units. But in real life you're supposed to use your brain to do other stuff and if you have to stop and suddenly perform a contortion to compare the price per weigh unit of one item with another item that uses another base weigh unit, well, that's now an extra step that you didn't ask for.
With the metric system it can happen that some products use grams, and some kilograms (some countries use hectograms while others prefer decagrams, for some uses like food) and you have the same potential for inconsistency, however since there are only factors of ten at play, it doesn't take many brain cycles to quickly compare the numbers in your head.
I would say doing some forced arithmetic might do a little good.
My post is slight sarcasm but it's quite egregious to compare working out simple arithmetic to a contortion of the mind. Have more faith in humanity.
The inherent superiority of metric is small enough that people are going to be angry about this stuff, and yet it's dwarfed by inherent idiocy of inconsistent labelling which is solvable without a prolonged culture siege.
This is huge. In a way it doesn't matter whether the units are horsepower-seconds and farthings per cubic barleycorn or whatever, as long as they're consistent. But conversions are so much easier in metric that it ends up being a win for that alone. "recipe says 250g flour... I'll buy a 1kg bag" whereas the imperial equivalent requires you to know a long list of conversions between random units. As well as sometimes density, other times the "normal density" or something. That way you can buy a 1lb bag of flour to get 2 1/2 cups (or whatever, I have no idea how many cups of flour there are in a pound).
That said, traditional recipes tend not use ultra-precise units like '200ml'... Rather practical units like "a glass of wine".
I have a copy of an old famous French recipes book (French edition) and I don't think 'ml' is mentioned once and most quantities are explicitly qualified as being approximate.
Again, this is about being practical by using measurement unit readily available and acknowledging that everything will need to be adapted, anyway. This is a kitchen, not a lab!
A cup of chopped carrots does not seem odd to me. Again, it stems from practicality. You get a cup, you fill it with chopped carrots, that's how much carrots you need. Simple.
That being said, I met only a handful of people who classed themselves as pro-brexit and look how that turned out.
I look forward to adding fractions of 16ths while shopping for plums
The original impetus in the 1970s was that it was costing a lot of money to maintain multiple systems in manufacturing.
CAD systems and automation make a lot of the issues moot. Everybody mostly converged to metric and let the CAD system put things in English for where you touch the legacy systems. CNC machines don't care whether you feed them metric or imperial units.
So, we're left with "imperial" in the US in things like highway signage, consumer recipes (businesses needing recipes already run by weight for consistency so the switchover isn't that relevant--scales easily do both), and housing construction. Note that there is expense in updating these to metric with no particular advantage accruing from doing so.
I note that one of the areas I never thought would become metric, consumer groceries, seems to be starting to change. Once this occurs, I suspect cookbooks will also start to change.
Only sort of. Threads are probably the easiest counter-example, because single point cutting is much the same on CNC or manual lathe and while the CNC one can easily swap from 60 threads per inch to 5 per mm or whatever, cutting a 60° thread using a cutting tool that doesn't have a 60° point on it means another pass on every thread. Meanwhile the "imperial standard" is a loose collection of every thread ever and good luck to you.
The big win is communication. With metric it's rare to be working in metre-newtons per farad-volt-second but with imperial often the conversion from energy to power involves going from pound-feet to horsepower (etc). Much easier to say or write "1234 joules over 18 seconds is 89.2 watts". It's one less conversion as well as less to say, and that matters when you're stacking many of them then trying to use units to verify that it makes sense.
You also have the joy of "the hole for a 17/64ths Whitworth tap is 47.2 thou" or whatever other imperial nonsense machinists have to deal with. Meanwhile metric bunnies say "6mm tap therefore 5.1mm hole". Sure, you need a special drill bit in both cases, but honestly I'm just guessing at the imperial size and if I'm out by an order of magnitude I wouldn't know. But just guess... is 5.1 less than 6, yes or no?
It’s worse. The drill size for a 7/16” coarse tap is ‘U’.
Secondly, the world-wide conversion to metric is less thorough than claimed. In less developed countries, daily practice less often conforms to official documentation.
Curiously, the European Parliament building is based on Peter Bruegel's Tower of Babel [1].
[1] https://mattbell.org/why-is-the-strasbourg-parliament-based-...
1 pound = 20 shillings
1 shilling = 12 pennies
1 penny = 4 farthings
3 pence* = 1 thruppence
6 pence = 1 sixpence
2 shillings = 1 florin
5 shillings = 1 crown
(so 2 shillings + 2 thruppence = 1 half crown)
Bless.
*pence = plural of penny.
And it's good for practicing arithmetic. ;-)
[The Wizarding Currency of the Harry Potter series was presumably a parody of this but based on 1g = 17s*29k = 493k; 17 and 29 being somewhat less useful divisors, though in practice one could presumably divide physical quantities by 18 or 30 and price on the 17 or 29 scale. 29 does have the occasionally useful property of being the number of days in February in a leap year.]
After decades of the same old arguments, is there anything new to be said other than things that boil down to 'I prefer metric/imperial because that's what I grew up with so its more natural' ?
I'm guessing that is only some portion of the audience, whereas I would suspect the network effect is the dominant term. Trying to push uphill against the cookbooks, road signs, local weather reports, etc is like trying to maintain one language in your head while the rest of the _local_ world is another language. Certainly possible, but is questionable use of that glucose
I had never heard of "anti-metric vigilantes" like TFA discussed, but hopefully those are just some fringe jokers designed to get article clicks, and not a serious movement
Of course this is all in the kitchen, but IME most things that need to be measured precisely are already metric anyway. Except for fasteners and machining; the incongruity of my torque driver taking bits that are 3/8” square on the drive side and metric on the fastener side is amusing. What’s not amusing is finding the bits anywhere that’s not overpriced (and overseas)
Compare to how 1 metric minutes is 10 metric seconds, 1 metric hour is 10 metric minutes, one metric day is 10 metric hours, one week is 10 metric days. How many metric seconds are there in one metric week? Well 10000 metric seconds, or 10 kiloseconds, of course. See how the conversions are so much easier in the metric system?
But as we're engineers, lets do a back of the envelope trial:
You're mostly stuck with days, months and years because of astronomical facts.
Seconds are close to heartbeats which has some psychological nicities: People used to count short times in heartbeats. You might be able to redefine a second as 10 millidays.
Weeks tend give decent divisions between work and free days. I remember reading about the USSR messing with the week rythm to get more work time, and it severely backfired in productivity. So you'd need to find a way to give about 8 days in each month as new weekend. Numbers 30 and 8 are hard to decimalize. Maybe define a week as 10 days, with day 1 of the week a holy day, and 1 or 2 more day in the week that workers can choose themselves. I don't see weeks getting much better like that.
The french did give it a try in their revolution, but I don't know why only that part of metrification failed.
Ah yes, reminds me of the argument feet are better because it's a more human measure than meters (cf surely you're joking Mr Feynman)
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/32127/decimal-time-how-f...
The other thing is that bills feel sort of greasy or dirty. I'm not sure I can quite describe that, though.
We used to have paper bills where I live but now it's plastic ones. They took a while to get used to because they are stiff and hard to organize. Then again, I almost never use actual currency anymore. It's all payment by phone or card.
(Edit: spelling)
Celsius? No way! Fahrenheit is a great scale for people. Under 0 is way too cold and over 100 is way too hot. -20c and 50c just don’t capture the range people can tolerate as well.