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Comment by vaksel | Hacker News Reader

precisely, its pretty asinine, everyone else in the world uses the metric system, and USA is stuck using obsolete weights and measures

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Not at all. There's nothing obsolete about it. There's a social aspect to switching because others have done so but that's all. Except for that it's change for change's sake. An inch, a foot, a yard are all very intuitive measures that have good rough ways of being measured without any tools. I'm not sure what I get from metric that beats this. It's just convention. If anything metric is more arbitrary. Metric is design by committee, as hacker's we should consider that a mark against it.

You know that if you started off with metric, metric would feel intuitive too right? (Aza Raskin has a video where he basically says that what most people call intuitive they really mean "familiar".)

Right. I grew up with the metric system. (Just like anyone else outside Britain or their old colonies.) To me gallons and feet are not intuitive. But a meter and a liter and a kg is familiar, so I can roughly tell how much that is without a measuring instrument.

The fact that a foot is supposed to be the length as a foot doesn't seem like any useful advantage to me. My foot is not precisely 30.48 cm anyway.

Some imperial units are still in use outside of the British world. Inches for TVs and computer monitors and car wheels. Feet is used for boat lengths although meters is also used sometimes. Knots and nautical miles in sailing. Feet is also used in aviation.

Metric is design by committee, as hacker's we should consider that a mark against it.

Just like http really. We should all be rolling our own protocols.

>Metric is design by committee, as hacker's we should consider that a mark against it.

Sorry but this is a sign of ignorance. Read the biography of Condorcet. Coming up with the metric system was extremely smart. In hacker terms, think of it as a beautiful, elegant fully rescursive and reentrant function that replaces mountains of ugly legacy code.

It's amazing that at the time (1790), each profession used their own measurement system. An ounce for one trade was different from an ounce for another trade. You are somewhat aware of that of course because the difference between the US and British gallon carried to this day.

Finding a way to universally cover all measurements (weight, distance, speed, etc.) so that everything is self-consistent is not committee design. It's extremely smart engineering. It removed the need for conversion constants and factors.

In hacker terms, it was a major code cleanup effort.

You've convinced me. I say we renew a push for the decimal time unit as well. Apparently we're just waiting our time with degrees and such. The cleaned up, decimalised version (gon?) is available.

Tell us how much a cubic mile of water weighs in ounces. Then get back to us re: the "arbitrary" Metric system.

What's the temperature/pressure of the water?

This is exactly the issue. Making it easier to solve some problems that are very rare in the day to day lives of most of the world is not a good reason to force people to switch measurement systems.

Converting between differently sized units of measurement is an everyday problem if anything is. I enjoy being able to do so by shifting a decimal point.

What about Canada, we officially use the metric system. Kids are taught metric, roads signs are in kilometers, temperature in Celsius, but almost no Canadian can tell your their own weight in kilograms or their height in meters!

If the US ever went all the way metric, I think they'd still end up using all their legacy measurements for decades. Certainly the US letter paper size isn't going anywhere -- everything is designed for it. The chicken and the egg are both well established.

Most definitely. Even in the UK, where they switched to metric some time ago, imperial measurements can still be seen all over, and many papers still provide both Celsius and Fahrenheit measurements.

While it would be nice if we Americans were exposed more to SI (rather than just in science classes), I don't really think it's important that imperial measurements be abandoned. They still serve their purpose in everyday life, so there's no real reason to switch.

Especially when it comes to science. Drove me nuts when I first moved here

I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say. As a US-trained scientist, I never used anything but the metric system except when standing inside a machine shop.

Scientists are among the US citizens most likely to relate to the metric system. Although I have to confess that my personal temperature meter is still calibrated in degrees Fahrenheit. ("Uh, it's 25 degrees in Rome today. Is that really hot? I can't remember.") For some reason temperature is my brain's last holdout: I'm pretty well used to meters and liters and even kilos. Perhaps that's because a liter is like a quart, a meter is like a yard (and a kilometer is close to a half mile) and a kilo is about two pounds, but Fahrenheit is completely nuts because there's an offset as well as a ratio in the conversion.

I googled without luck, but I remember reading a study awhile ago that demonstrated that Imperial is easier for a human to estimate. Of the the experiments was asking for people familiar in each to guess the length of some objects. The people who gave an answer in feet and inches were more accurate than people using centimeters.

They postulated that it was because the values in the Imperial system "evolved", and are they way they are because of their convenience for measuring objects in a human scale. Eg, when eyeballing something hand-sized, its easier to pick out a few inches than it is dozens of centimeters.

I'll post a link to that article if I can find it.

Imperial units also tend towards being more division oriented, for instance a foot divides cleanly into halves, thirds or quarters.

A gallon divides into 4 quarts which divide into two pints, which divide into two cups.

That same series would be (starting from 4 liters), 4l, 1l, 0.5l, 125 ml, 62.5 ml.

In your volume example, imperial units only divide cleanly for certain factors (e.g. 2 in your example), from certain starting points (e.g. two pints) and within certain ranges (keep dividing a cup by 2 and it stops dividing cleanly).

Yep. But it stops at ... one ounce. So a gallon can be divided cleanly by two seven times. It's naturally no coincidence that a gallon is 2^7 ounces. :-)

I'm in favor of the US switching to metric (I'm American, but have lived in Europe for the last 7 years), but just trying to give some context on what I believe are some of the niceties of the Imperial system.

A "cup" is a much easier notion to get your head around than "about 50-70 ml".

A "cup" is a much easier notion to get your head around than "about 50-70 ml".

This opinion can only come from exposure. Whenever I see "one cup" in a recipe I'm 100% baffled. A big cup? A tea cup? One of those larger coffee mugs? Trying to judge what is actually meant here can leads to volumes differing about two to three times in scale.

Give me centiliters, desiliters and liters any day.

I still have no idea what a cup is. And 50-70 ml seems way too little to make sense, so I will just assume you pulled those numbers out of thin air.

1 cup = ~250 mL = ~1/4 Liter = 237 mL

Fortunately, all ingredients in a recipe are usually given in 'cups'. If you use the same cup for all ingredients, the proportions of the ingredients stay the same, which is the most important part of a recipe.

It does not matter if you use a big cup, a tea cup or a coffee mug. The meal will still taste good, as the proportions are kept.

While for a 'metrical' recipe you need something that can measure weight and volume, for a 'cup' recipe you just need a cup, no matter what kind of cup.

I realize this is totally derailing the original topic, but I'd just thought I'd correct one incorrect assumption you've made:

Fortunately, all ingredients in a recipe are usually given in 'cups'.

Not even remotely true. Especially with "cups" of water and "tablespoons" of chilli the results can be rather interesting ;)

Fast ballpark conversion that's easy to do in your head that works for most outdoor temperatures -- F -> C: subtract 30, divide by 2

Oh, that's really useful. I had my own mental approximation, but it was much mushier than this, and this is pretty darn accurate.

Much easier than multiplying by 5/9ths. Or 9/5ths. Whatver.

Seems like imperial is used http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric.02/

"and USA is stuck using obsolete weights and measures"

Read that again, and tell me how it makes any sense whatsoever.

  Obsolete: 1. no longer in general use;

Simple, No one but the USA (and Malaysia or somewhere) uses them. So, the USA uses them, and they're not in general use.

Pretty odd logic you have there.

Why not just go the whole hog and say Metric is obsolete. After all, the chances of aliens in other universes using it is small, so we're likely the only ones using Metric.

edit: The UK is also pretty non-metric.

I guess that is how most Americans see the world, the rest of us are aliens.

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