White House response to the petition requesting a switch to metric
petitions.whitehouse.gov
petitions.whitehouse.gov
That captures about all you need to know regarding the whitehouse petition feature. I'm not sure why it exists at this point.
Aren't they forcing people not to use the metric system in the US?
Responding to petitions by telling the petitioners to petition harder is kind of pointless.
There are other ways to make things happen, but truth be the important things almost always involve a lot of energy, time, and money.
I suppose you've got a better way to get the Obama administration to state their position on any issue you can wrangle 100k signatures for. It's not direct democracy exactly. It's a good system for allocating administrative time to speak to issues that are not politically expedient or important.
Well they've been doing a terrible job at it then, because I'm a European guy living in the US and my US friends never get a sense of what I'm talking about if I use metric units.
Additionally, I TA'd 2nd year level mechanical engineering courses at a very large state university when I was in grad school, and most of the students would get stumped on problems that involved things such as converting a result in centimeters to millimeters, etc, requiring me to explicitly write "1 cm = 10 mm" on the board/assignment papers.
All Japanese schools teach English, too. Try speaking English in downtown Osaka and marvel at the puzzled looks.
People who are taught a thing and then don't practice it tend to get rusty.
If what the schools do is just have a 1 hour class which can be boiled down to "Ok, 1 meter is 100 cm, 1000 g is 1 kg", then I wouldn't call that 'teaching'.
(Additionally, I think teaching a secondary language is a project of a completely different scope than teaching a unit system)
No one teaches chemistry or physics using slugs and ounces.
(Funny story: I failed a 9th grade math quiz because I didn't know how many inches were in a foot. We never covered the US customary system! It really didn't come up often.)
That said, I still don't have an intuitive sense for converting miles to kilometers, or Fahrenheit to Celsius, simply because it never came up outside of the classroom.
However, the second part is inexcusable and I'm curious to know which University it is that would accept students that hadn't been through at least one advanced science class in High School where metric would be used extensively and it would be very basic knowledge that 1 cm = 10mm...
Conversions for the metric system seemed much more intuitive for me in math. However english units seemed much more noticeable since they are mostly unique (didn't miss a 0 in a conversion).
Lastly, I agree with a comment below that this is largely a problem of getting rusty. After living both in Europe and the US for significant portions of time, I still have trouble between Celsius and Fahrenheit.
Ummm... not really. I can't choose to have speed limits posted in kph. I can't choose to buy my gas in liters instead of gallons. I can't choose for highway signs to tell me how many km away the exit is.
I'm pretty sure that's the kind of thing people are talking about when they ask for metric.
I remember in the 1970s, when highway signs were getting converted to show both miles and kilometers; I think that got stopped because of the costs (the signs have to be bigger, they may confuse people, etc.).
I-19 from Tucson, AZ to Nogales in Mexico has distances posted in kph, so you can choose to drive on that freeway to tell you how many km away the exit is.
You may not be able to buy gas in liters instead of gallons, but you may be able to sell them in liters if you own a gas station and are willing to purchase the equipment and make that choice.
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_19
Interstate 19 is unique among US Interstates, because signed distances are given in meters (hundreds or thousands as distance-to-exit indications) or kilometers (as distance-to-destination indications), and not miles. However, the speed limit signs give speeds in miles per hour. According to the Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT), metric signs were originally placed because of the push toward the metric system in the United States at the time of the original construction of the highway.
I suspect that for the vast majority of people, this particular problem is not much of a roadblock toward personal adoption of the metric system, because I suspect most people buy their gas in one of two ways:
1. they buy whatever it takes to fill up their tank, or
2. they buy whatever it takes to cost a specific dollar amount.
Some years ago, one very smart american coworker told me why the US chose the non-metric system. Back in the days people had to divide things - land, materials, lots of things equally between people. If your system is "12" based, then you can divide by 2, 3, 4 and 6 (well 4 and 6 are obvious), but if it's metric then it's only by 2 and 5.
Not that you can't divide by 2 and 5, but you'll get rational numbers, not integer.
Not sure how true this story is, but even if it's not, it's still amazing :)
(Another story I've heard from him was why cities around Los Angeles were named after saints - San Diego, Santa Monica, etc. - All of them were connected by a day run with a monkey - this way creating a support for the established christian missionary settlements - something like it).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_missions_in_California [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Camino_Real_(California)
Not all the Sans and Santas in California are missions; there are 21 missions -- not all of which are in cities named "San" or "Santa" (e.g., Mission San Francisco de Solano is in Sonoma, CA) -- and 33 cities that are "San" or "Santa"-something.
Er, I'm pretty sure it's not that important for a career in math, unless he's talking about "metric spaces" or something like that.
I'm guessing it's only there because if you mention science, technology, and engineering, you have to round out the STEM.
The imperial system is quite flawed. Measuring using yards, feet etc is childish and it's in my mind not logical anywhere.
10 mm = 1 cm, 100 cm = 1 meter. vs 12 inch = 1 fot, 3 fot = 1 yard? wut?
The metric system must be alot easier to learn as a child as well. Just my opinion.
Having said that I have to recognize that it is a matter of habit. I am pretty sure there are people for whom metric system looks stupid.
There is a logic behind imperial system. In it, units are duodecimal (base-12) as opposed to decimal units of metric system. The rationale for that is that 12 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6, whereas 10 is divisible only by 2 and 5. Apparently dividing things into 3 and 4 parts was very important when people were not educated enough to understand the concept of fractional numbers. Babylonian numerals were base-60, there are still special names for numbers 11 and 12 in many languages, and day is split into 24 (12*2) hours and hour is 60 minutes and minute is 60 seconds.
3 ft in a yard. 5280 ft in a mile. 16 oz in a pound/pint. 8 oz in a cup. 2 cups in a pint. 2 pints in a quart. 4 quarts in a gallon... and so on. The imperial system is very inconsistent in what can be divided by what. So if that was important... they failed.
It is also kind of strange that we don't really have a unit of measure between "yard" and "mile", do we? Something between 3 ft and 5280 ft would be nice. :)
Wrong.
> 5280 ft in a mile.
5280 is 12 * 440.
> 16 oz in a pound/pint.
12 troy oz. in a troy pound is also part of the system
> The imperial system is very inconsistent in what can be divided by what.
Inconsistent, yes, "12 only appears in inches in a foot", no.
But what the heck is 440? 440/12 is 36.666666666666667
8292 is 12 * 691 but those numbers are just as meaningless.
2 pints in a quart, 2 quarts in a pottle, 2 pottles in a gallon.
Specifically she said that her preemie parents that continue to talk in mls tend to over-obsess over slight swings in the daily numbers. I found it intriguing that we'd been jumped out of the metric system for this, but it occurred to me that I never hear anyone talk about centiliters (the closest metric equivalent to an ounce).
I guess my question is: what's on non-US baby bottles?
- 2L - large coke
- 1.5L - popular for large wate bottles and regular coke
- 1L - Large beer bottles, medium coke and co., most family sized juice or iced tee packs, pretty much all regular milk.
- 0.75 L - wine
- 75cl - common in wine and some water
- 50cl - mostly water and some larger beer cans
- 33cl - regular beer bottle and cans
- 25cl - I think I have seen beer and wine bottles of this size
- 22cl
- 20cl - "minis" are small beer bottles, lots of juice packs and chocolate milk
Smaller is probably what they give babies, wouldn't find it weird to see mls used.
I overhear my cousins talk about full doses or relative comparisons. e.g. "one flask", "more than yesterday", "he was hungry"
Note that I rarely refer to the quatities. Usually I ask for a certain sized bottle like this:
- "small bottle of water" - I expect 25-33cl but 50cl is not rare. Sometimes I get asked in reply, "half a liter"?
- "a beer please" - 33cl superbock
- "coke, plese" - .33 either can or bottle - sometimes a cup with too much ice and the total volume of 20cl but I know I'm getting fucked
- "food for babies" - whatever I get handed...
Last time i checked you were mandated to have Miles per hour readings in the dashboard to even be able to sell your car in the US. how is that choice as the article says?
Like QWERTY, imperial units work fine enough for most people despite advantages of other systems.
For cars, just use the same dials and displays they use in Canadian cars, metric is the primary unit with imperial also shown, again, on new cars only, no need to retrofit all old vehicles.
Also, schools may teach metric but I don't think many people even know the conversion from kilogram to pound.
This reads as if there are benefits to both and the US uses each for different purposes.
Is there a benefit of the standard system that I'm missing out on?
Yes, the benefit of not mandating the use of the metric system in the US is that about 300 million people can continue to go about their lives without needing to adapt to literally thousands of tedious changes.
I agree with you but that's the kind of logic that impedes progress.
Benefit of the metric system is easy conversion between units. Multiplication factor between cm,m,km is 100,1000. What's the multiplication factor between inches,yards,miles? I have no idea.
I don't know what the "official" definition is, but pounds are most often defined as 0.45359 kg. The problem is, pounds and kilograms are fundamentally different.
A pound is a measurement of weight (or the force that gravity exerts on an object), while kilograms are measures of mass. When you are measuring different things, we run into all kinds of issues of translation. You almost never hear of a pound being converted to "newtons" which would probably be more accurate.
The US needs to join the rest of the world. http://www.joetek.ca/the-list-of-countries-that-dont-use-the...
And finally, soccer would finally become properly known as football, and all hell would break loose among the more hardcore formerly-known-as-football fans.
:)
I should point out that we are not the only country in the world to sign their highways in miles, the UK does too.. still.
Americans are lousy at metric, because we dont use it regularly, even though the government does, and the country is technically a metric country.
great political response. And we pay this guy salary?!?