Death by Inches: The battle over the metric system in America | Hacker News Reader

Death by Inches: The battle over the metric system in America

slate.com

192 pointsrpm4321350 comments

I have some difficulties with the issues described in the piece.

"A yard is the distance from your sternum to the tip of your outstretched hand."

According to folk belief, it's the distance from the tip of Henry I's nose to the end of his thumb. According to an early definition, "It is ordained that 3 grains of barley dry and round do make an inch, 12 inches make 1 foot, 3 feet make 1 yard."

Who here has an idea of the size of a grain of barley dry and round?

At 39.3 inches, a meter is just slightly longer than a yard, and for "traditional purposes" where the sternum/fingertip approximation is good enough, a meter and a yard can be used almost interchangeably.

Somehow all those people using metric in their daily lives don't feel like they are missing something special by having "ancient, organic" units. (BTW, at what point does something become "ancient"?)

"Or don’t bother, because the definition completely changed in 1960"

The yard definition 'completely changed' in 1959, when it defined as exactly 0.9144 meters. Before then it was different in different countries.

Since the yard is pegged to the meter, this means that the yard is now legally defined as the time light travels in 1/274130223.5952 seconds.

"The first third of the 20th century, for instance, saw some quite serious efforts to rationalize our systems for dates and times."

As well as the 1700s, when France ran under a rationalized calendar, which provided the name for the Thermidorian Reaction. This is part of the same movement that brought us the metric system, so I think it's odd to exclude that very serious effort.

UK: we work in Imperial but things are officially priced in metric, except for beer. Petrol is in pence/litre. So you get price per lb and per kg. Lengths are in millimetres on builders plans (to avoid mistakes with decimal points) but road signs are in miles. Makes teaching basic maths to adults a bit more fun...

http://sohcahtoa.org.uk/pages/maths_market-metric-proportion...

You would be surprised how many people have issues with decimal place notation still. The low denominator fractions make a lot of sense for a lot of people. French speaking African students of mine will naturally price food in half and quarter kilos.

The UK is a very odd place when it comes to metrication.

My experience in Sweden is that things sold in the 1/2 and 1/4 kg sizes are often measured in grams or sometimes hectograms rather than kg. Meat, for example, is usually given in values which are a multiple of 25 g, even when there's more than 1kg.

This bypasses the need to use low denominator fractions.

  > Meat, for example, is usually given in values which are a multiple of 25 g

Those used to be 28g, and called ‘ounces’.

Point taken, though "usually" also means "not always." For example, http://www.mathem.se/varor/fransyska-o-notstek/fransyska-nat... is 1220 grams and https://www.handla24.se/hovslatt/pc-60-288-flskfil-frsk.aspx is "about 570 grams".

That's 43.6 and 20.4 oz, respectively.

Ounces are also anything from 27.4g, up to 100g, depending on which ounce is being used. There are loads of different ounces.

UK calling here.

My Fiat doesn't have mph on the speedo as it was replaced (like most things ln the car it broke). I've been doing conversions for years from miles to km, gallons to litres etc. It's annoying but kmh is easy.

I want to drive 200 miles. How much will it cost at 44.9mpg and 135.9ppl?

200 / 44.9 x 4.456 x 1.359 - yep random unit conversion in the middle.

Beer is metric as well until they sell it to you.

Whilst I understand all the problems I can only assume its an issue with education as doing decimal math is no more difficult than any other. Sometimes its easier especially when comparing or scaling magnitudes.

It depends a huge amount on age. Younger people in the UK use metric except where imperial is already the de-facto standard (pints, MpH, etc).

It is really just older generations who continue to use imperial and to push it all over the place (often inappropriately).

At least all food labeling has been standardised on metric (which honestly for cooking and monitoring food intake is a huge improvement). I can like with other areas remaining oddly imperial for now.

I just hope as the older generation disappear we start moving closer and closer to true metrification (I'd even want to see km/h so it is consistent with continental europe).

"Younger people in the UK use metric except where imperial is already the de-facto standard (pints, MpH, etc)."

News to me. I teach a few hundred 17-19 year olds each year. They are very hazy about any form of actual measurement.

(I'd even want to see km/h so it is consistent with continental europe).

Or even, consistent with the country the UK has a land border with.

I think for "work" the UK has switched to metric as Imperial is just such a PITA for anything technical.

For social/general use it still pretty much Imperial

Anyone into walking/climbing is probably used to metric for heights and distances as OS maps have been metric for ages.

> The low denominator fractions make a lot of sense for a lot of people.

There's a funny story about fractions and innumerate Americans. The McDonald's hamburger chain had a successful product in their 1/3-pound hamburger, such that they decided to upgrade to 1/2 pound. But the marketing campaign failed and they couldn't figure out why, so they interviewed their customers. They discovered that people thought 1/2 pound was smaller than 1/3 pound, on the basis that 2 < 3. True story.

Small correction: distance light travels in...

As you've illustrated, we've come to value precision over intuition. The reason people using metric don't feel like they're missing something without organic units is because people who use the relics of those organic units don't use them in the fuzzy organic sense either anymore. When someone tells me "1 foot long" I expect exactly 12 standardized inches- not something roughly as big as my foot (even though, in my case, my foot is almost exactly 12 inches).

In modern times when we want a more organic measure we find ourselves dropping standard units (whether metric or imperial) and using random analogous items instead- like number of empire-state-buildings or 10-paces then turn left, or (more often perhaps but slightly different)- about 3 blocks away.

The moment people started caring about whether it was Henry I's nose-to-thumb length or some multiple of grains of barley dry it stopped mattering. I'm very average sized and my pace is almost exactly one yard per step (or, as you pointed out, more or less a meter as well). I would be fine using the term 'yard' in the intuitive or organic sense- but when you're using it to tell me exactly where my property line is I suddenly need precision, agreed on standards, and at that point the question of inches vs centimeters is strictly a question of familiarity (or I suppose, as the article mentions, politics).

Also because using the metric system you simply take shorthands. 1 inch? About 2.4 cm as far as anyone cares in a casual sense. A meter is about the length of your shoulder to your hand, or a slightly stretch stride. It's actually easier for me to eyeball a centimeter then an inch because I see and use the centimeter all the time.

The idea that the units themselves matter is absurd - when you're eyeballing it, you're eyeballing it.

It seems more logical to me to go with 2.5 cm. It is closer to the truth (2.54 cm) and easier to calculate with.

Don't know why I wrote 2.4 - I was reading a bunch of other things up the page, but you're right.

But - that was actually a great (though perhaps unintentional) example of the dangers of having two systems and switching back and forth between them.

Metric users generally do not use organic units to describe extraordinarily large objects. That's it stuff like xx Olympic swimming pools or xx football fields (american nontheless) doesn't sound natural at all. It's all in meters/kilometers, etc.

Nah, "soccer fields" is a very common way to reference size/length in various European cultures.

Which ones? I've never heard it.

Mine. I'm French. We often use soccer fields as a unit of surface.

The British press regularly measure things in football (soccer) pitches, London double-decker buses, Eiffel towers, blue whales and Wales.

The Register regularly does piss-take articles about this and even provides a handy conversion calculator.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/Design/page/reg-standards-conve...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/24/vulture_central_stan...

I was under the impression El Reg does it as a joke to the US.

Nah, it is a common habit the world over, no matter what the local official system of measurement happens to be.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2010/may...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_units_of_measur...

I like the one suggested in the book Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, of measuring faith in Alps.

also in Eastern Europe...

Isn't this akin to the reddit meme of showing everything next to a banana "for scale" comparing body parts?

I.e. non-deterministic and from a scientific perspective, total horse shit.

Totally. "Science" requires precision because science in many ways is the mechanism by which we learn truths with greater and greater precision. That doesn't mean though that science naturally abhors imprecise "for-scale" measurements though- they just reserve them for illustration and avoid using them for the actual science. (e.g., http://imgur.com/gallery/ESp2j - marianas trench scale)

Yep can understand that. Its important to visualise values and comparing to reference points is fine.

This comes to mind for unit conversions: http://www.weirdconverter.com

That was an Imgur meme first. One of the original Imgur memes at that.

"Who here has an idea of the size of a grain of barley dry and round?"

It's about a third of an inch.

> Since the yard is pegged to the meter, this means that the yard is now legally defined as the time light travels in 1/274130223.5952 seconds.

s/time/distance/ ?

I am not anti-metric by any means, but having done carpentry a lot in the past it always strikes me when this comes up that one of the central arguments for (a limited use-case of) the imperial system is usually glossed over: the fact that in many crafts (especially historically), using base-12 makes certain things much easier. It divides into 3rds far more easily, divides into 4ths slightly more easily, and still divides into 5ths with only one digit after the decimal.

Just like computer programmers have no problem immediately recognizing that 256 is 2^8, it became intuitive when working with the Imperial system (at limited scales) that 48 inches is the same as 4-feet but that it is also 3-stud-distances long (studs in walls are often placed 16 inches apart).

Even if you don't work in crafts where dividing things by 3 is more frequent than dividing by 5 it is easy to imagine how certain things might be more difficult if we used base-10 for time (as, it has been pointed out, has been attempted)- and thereby using the ability to easily divide an hour into 3 parts (for example).

Consistent base-10 and international standardization has advantages that far outweigh these minor things- but I think it's important to recognize that there is, surprise, a rational practical reason for sticking in some cases to Imperial units- it's not purely tradition or politics or their "organic-ness" (anymore).

>a rational practical reason for sticking in some cases to Imperial units

That to me is the worst of both worlds. The optimal solution is to use one consistent system and the winner is pretty clear.

>carpentry

Certainly. The future is full of 3D printers though.

Wood is an easily workable, relatively inexpensive, and, importantly, renewable resource. We'll be seeing more of 3D printing for sure, but you're kidding yourself if you think it'll replace carpentry.

I want a 3d printer / wood router hybrid. All I've managed to do so far is a 3d printer / laser cutter hybrid, but it takes forever for it to cut wood.

Also, wood is beautiful.

>more of 3D printing for sure, but you're kidding yourself if you think it'll replace carpentry.

I wasn't suggesting that 3d printing will replace carpentry...

I would love to hear from someone who does carpentry (or some craft-like equivalent) with the metric system- specifically what kind of ruler/tape they use and whether it has a special 1/3 and 2/3 mark on it (since you don't want to have to eyeball 0.33333....) or if they just avoid dividing things by three altogether.

Because the truth is, your perspective is a political one more than a practical one. The whole idea of "officially" adopting either system is somewhat misleading- regardless of politicians or zealots decide, most craftspeople would use rules that easily divide into three, most programmers would often reference things in terms of base-2, and most people would still prefer 24 hours in a day. There is no general-case optimal winner that applies to all measurement and work-flow situations.

In the case of base-2, international bodies have already found a nice dual-system ( http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html ). A simple solution for (for example) carpentry that would give the best of both worlds would be to define a unit that is exactly 1/60th of a meter. Let's call it a "sixer." Now someone crafting things can have all the convenience and easy division they need (here- cut this at 1/5 of 1/3 of a meter- no problem!) and still have it unified with the meter at some scale. There would be issues- but it's situational, which is my point.

> I would love to hear from someone who does carpentry (or some craft-like equivalent) with the metric system- specifically what kind of ruler/tape they use and whether it has a special 1/3 and 2/3 mark on it (since you don't want to have to eyeball 0.33333....) or if they just avoid dividing things by three altogether.

I would love to hear from someone that uses the imperial system how they determine exactly 1/3 of 10 inches and how they eyeball 1/3 of 5/6 of an inch.... My point is it is easy to find measurement scenarios that would make life a little harder for either system. 12cm (metric) for example is trivial to divide into 1/3, 2/3, 1/2, 1/4, 1/6 etc etc. 4.72 inches (imperial equivalent of 12cm) would be harder to do.

Besides there are very easy geometric methods to divide a line exactly into any number of equal parts, even if you do not know its actual length precisely.

You know, there's about 25 millimeters to the inch, and I've never seen anyone measure anything with more than 16th-inch precision for any construction job - maybe for very high-end cabinetmaking people use 32nds, but generally millimeters will give you more precision than you need, certainly if you're using a carpenter's pencil, which makes marks thicker than the smallest scale on a ruler.

I have no problem dividing things by 3 in metric. Rounding up to the next millimeter is going to result in an error equivalent to a couple of human hairs. If I'm working with wood and I need a perfect fit I'm going to be using sandpaper long before that.

Seriously, do you imagine that construction workers and craftsmen in Europe, Japan and the rest of the world spend their days ina state of helpless anxiety because of their inability to divide things with sufficient precision, or do you think they just get on with it and make buildings and furniture as good as any you can find in the US? The construction industry didn't collapse in the UK, Ireland, or Australia when they adopted the metric system.

No, I assumed they had a very good way of doing it, which is why I asked about it :-) It was a sincere request for comment but it obviously came off as a cynical challenge, which wasn't my intention.

I've done a bit of carpentry around my house. Since I live in Sweden I always use the metric system.

For me the focus on division by three is a bit strange. Sure I sometimes need to divide by three, but I also need to divide by five, or two or seven. I guess the thing is that our building standards are expressed in the metric system, so it makes sense thinking about them in terms of meters or centimeters. US building standards are expressed in the imperial system, so it makes sense to think about them in feet and inches.

Why would I want a unit that's 1/60th of a meter when I have a perfect 1/100th of a meter? A third of a meter is 33.3cm, working with wood you don't need more precision than that, if the decimal sign makes it difficult to do calculations, just step it up to 333mm.

I'm not a carpenter by trade but I guess that a professional carpenter here learns quite well how to divide by three even in metric. I see this argument popup every time there's a discussion about using the metric system in the US and I find it weak. For me this argument only sounds like "but it's hard to learn something new".

I'm sure there are pros and cons with both the metric and the imperial system, but in the globalized world we live in, the fact that The Rest Of The World uses the metric system should be a pretty convincing argument to use it in the US as well. I mean after all, The Rest Of The World has accepted English (in one form or the other) as the Lingua Franca in order to make communication across borders easier. You don't see us whine about stuff like "but in Swedish I can much more succinctly express that it's my paternal or maternal grandparent I'm talking about, so I don't want to use English".

Point taken, and I acknowledged in my first comment that it was a weak reason compared to the reasons for adopting. It wasn't meant as advocacy :-)

I would point out however that no one (that I know of) claims that English is the most popular because it is intrinsically the most efficient for all situations- i.e., on its merits as an efficient language rather than geopolitical factors. I definitely think that there are certain situations where communicating using non-English would be (locally) optimal- even if the parties communicating were fluent in English. Even as a native English speaker I truly wish English had the equivalent of the Tagalog particle "daw/raw," for example ( http://tagaloglang.com/Tagalog-English-Dictionary/English-Tr... ), or the fact that Cantonese can often communicate the same information as English using far fewer syllables...

In other words, I'm perfectly fine saying that using English is globally optimal (and convenient for me) because of its adoption, while still being perfectly happy knowing that some languages have attributes that make them more efficient, if you know them, in certain circumstances. I don't pretend ex-facto that English got this way because it is a truly superior solution in all circumstances if only everyone knew it. Nor do I feel like English's status as a (quasi)-standard is threatened by someone pointing out that Swedish would be more efficient in some settings (say, family history) even if everyone did know English. I would say "cool."

Defining units in terms of other units via something other than base-10 scaling in order to have more integer factors than 2 and 5- in some cases trading the 5 for 3 and 4- can be advantageous. That's all I'm saying, nothing more or less :-)

When i was building stuff out of timber i would typically only work in mm (or metres for longer lengths (timber is sold in full lenths of 6 metres or shorter bits at various lengths (at least in .au)) and don't need any further precision.

a 334 mm length will quite happily go in a 333mm gap. though again i'm not a professional carpenter i just worked with my father a lot.

I strongly disagree. Using the right tool for the right job is worth far more than enforcing arbitrary universal consistency. In a math course, you'd measure angles in radians so you're dealing with nice small multiples of pi. I think it'd be downright dangerous to use radians in a fighter jet, say, when the precision you need is much better provided by degrees.

Imagine if we enforced only one programming paradigm, since they're all equivalent. Or if we demanded that logicians and cs professors only prove things using turing machines, instead of picking the model of computation that best suits the problem. If there's a case where the english measurement system is more convenient, people should use it.

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

>Using the right tool for the right job is worth far more than enforcing arbitrary universal consistency.

Except units of measure are not "tools"...they are ways of communicating information. And when each person feels the need to enforce their own version of "right tool for right job" then things like the mars orbiter incident happen.

>Imagine if we enforced only one programming paradigm, since they're all equivalent.

Hardly. A better analogy would be to enforce identical calling parameters for DLLs libraries across all languages. That would benefit all languages and improve interoperability.

>units of measure are not "tools"...they are ways of communicating information.

How you communicate information is important and has real impacts. Given a graph, you could choose to encode it as an adjacency matrix or as a collection of adjacency lists. Both convey the same information, but nobody would say we should pick one and only one. I disagree with the assertion that measurement units aren't tools or that they are exempt from similar consideration.

Sure, the Mars incident is a call for consistency, but it's a call for consistency inside NASA. That shouldn't affect carpenters who need divisibility by 2, 3 and 4 more than they need 5. Or those who like to use inches because theyre significantly larger than centimeters and consequently easier to approximate by eye.

>Sure, the Mars incident is a call for consistency, but it's a call for consistency inside NASA.

No its not. Realistically space travel is going to be a humanity as a whole deal, not "inside NASA". Remember that the USA is like 4% of the world population. Even if the US contributes 10x more than everyone else per person that still puts the US in the minority. Consistency here is not a "nice to have"...its mission critical.

>That shouldn't affect carpenters

So you propose teaching your future carpenters and space engineers different units of measure?

>approximate by eye.

Approximate by eye? Seriously? Intel is aiming at 10 nanometers. Nobody is eyeballing anything in the modern world. Note...nanometers not nanofeet...this from an American company.

Wow, I would not have believed someone would make the argument that everyone needs to use metric because some day we'll all be in space until I read it. Thanks for broadening my horizons.

> No its not. Realistically space travel is going to be a humanity as a whole deal, not "inside NASA".

I think it's a fair bet that when spaceflight becomes widespread and commonplace, we're going to have many discrete groups of people developing, producing, operating, and maintaining their own particular spacecraft independently of each other, and not "humanity as a whole", as a singular undifferentiated mass, working on a single uniform spaceflight project.

Consistency within a specific project is clearly necessary; uniformity among distinct projects is, speaking at the macro level, a liability. Variation is an evolutionary advantage; artificial uniformity slows progress.

> So you propose teaching your future carpenters and space engineers different units of measure?

Why would this even be a question? Should programmers only be familiar with one single programming language? Should people in general only ever learn to speak a single verbal language? Is there ever an advantage to only being familiar with a single set of tools, and ignorant of all others?

> Nobody is eyeballing anything in the modern world.

Most people are eyeballing most things in the modern world. It's only in the case of activities on the scale of building spaceships and 10-nm-process integrated circuits that people require the level of precision that you're talking about. The vast majority of human activity remains outside of these domains.

The original article was about American resistance to adopting metric units as a default practice in day-to-day life, and not about the use of the metric system by people engaged in highly specialized disciplines. It'd be a bit absurd to suggest that the measuring units selected for high-precision work by the small set of people currently working on microprocessor design are necessarily the optimal ones for e.g. baking a cake or tiling your bathroom. In the latter use cases, one could make a very compelling case that units optimized for alignment with intuition are vastly more useful than ones optimized for micro-scale precision.

>Consistency within a specific project is clearly necessary

I'll concede that it only matters within a project...but projects invariably consist of many people and each of them "think" in their unit of measure. Sure you can mix them and hope they remember to "think" in metric at 1AM when pushing for a deadline, but really...

>Is there ever an advantage to only being familiar with a single set of tools

Thats the thing. These are not tools. They are units of measure. Aside from the odd instance where its easier to divide by X all you're gaining from using many units of measure is chaos.

>Most people are eyeballing most things in the modern world.

Definitely. Eyeballing happens regardless of unit of measure. And usually when someone is eyeballing it its not life/death.

>It'd be a bit absurd to suggest that the measuring units selected for high-precision work by the small set of people currently working on microprocessor design are necessarily the optimal ones for

Absurd indeed, but not what I was getting at. Units of measure is something thats internalized from a high-school age. So unless you have a way of splitting the kids between space engineers and carpenters at that age then why tech imperial? And even if you could split them, the mix of units of measures employed nationally would be much worse than randomly picking one.

I get that Americans are attached to imperial...its just very difficult for everyone else to under why given this: http://i.imgur.com/YJzhkZl.jpg

> but projects invariably consist of many people and each of them "think" in their unit of measure.

Obviously, you'd assemble project teams who are familiar with the tools, techniques, and conventions that you intend to use with your project.

> Sure you can mix them and hope they remember to "think" in metric at 1AM when pushing for a deadline, but really...

And the Chinese engineer who's working on a project where all of the documentation is in English might slip up when he's punchy at 1 AM and accidentally complete some of his work in Chinese.

This is a good argument for making sure that team members are well-rested and alert while doing their work. It's also a good argument for scheduling work reviews, proofreading, and time for correcting errors in the project plan. It's not at all an argument for abolishing the Chinese language.

> Thats the thing. These are not tools. They are units of measure.

Units of measures are tools. Tools are devices, whether physical or conceptual, that we use to extend our capacities for interacting with the world. In this case, since human beings do not natively have the capacity to quantify continuities, we apply the tool of measuring units to break continuities down into discretely countable chunks.

And, like all tools, how well they work depends on what goals you're trying to accomplish, and in what order of priority, in a given set of circumstances. Metric units are great in a limited set of contexts in which uniformity of post-hoc representation is more important than practicality in the activity of measurement itself; but this means that they are, for the same reason, less effective than customary units for the vast majority of situations that involve measurement.

> Definitely. Eyeballing happens regardless of unit of measure. And usually when someone is eyeballing it its not life/death.

Very few situations are matters of life and death, and in those rare circumstances that are, people will naturally be cautious and rigorous in their methods: I'd expect people to use precise measuring instruments, and to perform measurements multiple times, so in such a situation, questions of familiarity with particular units are scarcely relevant. When you're relying on the precision of instruments, the actual measuring units you're using are less important: metric, imperial, or otherwise, they'll all work just as well.

> Units of measure is something thats internalized from a high-school age

I don't know how much anyone "internalizes" any measuring units, but to the extent that they familiarize themselves with theDefinitely. Eyeballing happens regardless of unit of measure. And usually when someone is eyeballing it its not life/death.m, there's certainly no cause to familiarize oneself with only one set, at the exclusion of another.

> So unless you have a way of splitting the kids between space engineers and carpenters at that age then why tech imperial?

How about we keep doing things the way we are - teaching everyone both sets of units - and letting them determine for themselves which ones are most useful to them for each particular application?

> I get that Americans are attached to imperial...its just very difficult for everyone else to under why given this: http://i.imgur.com/YJzhkZl.jpg

All that graphic demonstrates to me is that while, with imperial/customary measures, there are a variety of separate base units to choose from, each appropriate to a particular scale of operation, the metric system only offers one base unit, and pretends that applying a 10^x coefficient to that single base unit somehow makes it a different unit.

That's what you're not getting: feet, yards, inches, etc. are fundamentally distinct units that have been tweaked to relate to each other, where necessary, by factors that are often much more convenient than 10. But you're just as capable with customary units as with metric of sticking with a single unit and applying scaling factors: I can just as easily say e.g. 24.2 x 10^4 feet as 45.83 miles.

I can even use metric prefixes if I'm so inclined, and say 24.2 kilofeet! Or 2.9 megainches! All the same value. But using these prefixes is just a bizarre re-implementation of scientific notation: in what way does it make sense to encode quantitative information as a verbal prefix appended to the name of the thing you're counting, instead of just using numbers?

Degrees are no more precise than radians. If you're a human you use a certain number of digits and they both work. If you're a computer using integers you're far too imprecise either way. If you're a computer using floats they are equally precise. If you're a computer using fixed point you're better off with something like 2^32ths of a circle.

You just get used to whatever units you're working in. If you'd been trained in radians when learning how to fly, everything would be fine. It would be funny though to hear ATC clear someone to land on runway pi/2. That's probably not as succinct as runway 9, but people would be used to it if they learned it in their primary training.

The real problem though is switching costs. There are tens of thousands of planes out there and more than a million pilots. To switch all of the compasses, GPSs, flight computers, heading indicators, etc. as well as retrain a metric pantload of pilots would be ludicrous for no appreciable gain.

Canada suffered through a problem similar to this when it went metric, and ended up with the Gimli Glider. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider

Don't get me wrong though. I love the metric system and think it's great, however first and foremost we are creatures of practicality. If US dominance in the world slips over the next few generations, I would imagine it will at some point join the rest of the world and abandon imperial measurements.

The present is full of CNC machines, and yet cars are not milled out of billet aluminum.

It's rarely worthwhile to fabricate something, when you can readily produce it from bulk forms like lumber or bar stock.

With the awesome exception of the Pagani Huayra:

http://www.pagani.com/huayra/partners/aspa.aspx

"Even the car's name tag positioned on the rear bumper, is carved in a 24 hour process from a solid block of aluminium. It is the Pagani way of reassuring its customers that their cars are built to their own standards exceeding the highest in the industry."

Great example really. Basically highlighting my message; it can be done (and can be awesome- machined parts are top-quality) but the Huayra costs $1.3M.

Here's a page featuring more examples like you mentioned.

http://www.dozenalsociety.org.uk/metrix/pontius

It's hardly "glossed over". It's brought up every time metric/imperial is discussed and it never makes any sense.

Standard lengths for timber are things like 240cm or 360cm. There is no difficulty dividing them into thirds, or quarters, or fifths, or sixths.

You think that working in hundreds of centimeters is easier??

I guess the system one first learns is the system that feels easiest.

It makes no difference to me. If I described $2.40 as 240 cents, would you suddenly be incapable of dividing it up evenly?

Of course, but it would be a little harder, a little more to keep track of. More precision than necessary.

People prefer to use dollars and not cents, don't they?

They're usually referred to as 2.4m and 3.6m if that makes it easier for you to track. I converted them to cm as I thought that would be simpler for people.

Now THAT makes sense to me. I can picture being on a team using those units to build a house.

(replying to the wish for a name for 2.4m; edited out): Why for the 2.4m, but not the 1.8m or the 3.6m? Surely it makes just as much sense to refer to it as the "two point four" as anything else?

Oops, I'm sorry for the edit. You & I had the same thought: singling out 2.4 was just muddying things.

Calling the unit the "2.4" sounds great. But that doesn't sound very metric to me...

Perhaps not to you, but most folk I know (in the UK) aren't quite so hung up about it. I'll sometimes refer to a half-liter as a pint, or a liter as a "couple of pints", or a meter as a yard.

Though the pint is by far the stupidest unit. Why on earth wasn't it standardised at 500ml? It would have fixed pints, quarts and gallons all in one go!

I know, you can think up immediate objections, but having 568ml to the pint and 4.546 litres to the gallon, is just wrong!

> Why on earth wasn't it standardised at 500ml?

Because you'd have a revolution on your hand when people realized they were being served less beer.

Nah, I just couldn't picture anyone doing woodwork in hundreds or thousands of units (now, where did I get that idea...?), or dividing base 10 units. Since it sounds like wood is sold and worked in base 12, I'd use metric no problem. But that makes the difference between imperial and metric pretty arbitrary, doesn't it?

I've actually worked in the construction industry in New Zealand, which was thoroughly metric when I was building houses ~10 years ago.

And we did everything in mm, standardised timber was "100x50" - mm was assumed, which was close to 2x4 Inches. (Actually, I think the finished standardised timber is smaller than 100mmx50mm, but for some reason was still called 100x50) sheets of Gib plaster (Drywall?) were 1200x3600,(possibly 1600x.. I don't remember) sometimes bigger. rooms had 2400mm or 3600mm stud heights. 90mm nails were used to assemble the house frames, and 50mm nails were used when the 90mm nails would have been excessive.

We only really used Meters when we were being vague - "Go about a meter further out!" and usually converted to mm when we were actually cutting or fastening something. I never poured any concrete myself, but I'm pretty sure the foundation boxing would have been measured out to the mm, even over 10s of meters of distance.

If I ever gave someone a measurement in cm I'd get told "Only Dressmakers user centimeters!" I don't think I ever used feet, and I only ever used inches when discussing lumber, and would always be told to use metric.

Dressmakers have it really bad in the UK, as when you buy fabric, the widths are in inches and length is in meters.

A piece of 2" x 4" timber is still referred to as "2 by 4" in the UK, except it now measures 50mm x 100mm (actual conversion is 50.8mm x 101.6mm, the difference being moot when building scale is taken into account)

> More precision than necessary.

What? The precision of $2.40 and 240 cent is exactly the same. Two significant digits.

It's kinda funny, every time this debate comes around, I see that the people advocating imperial are always confused by the concept of precision, which is handled very naturally in the metric system, but people advocating metric are confused about the way the imperial system uses subdivision.

For a metric person, a measurement such as 13/64" looks weird, and for an imperial person, a measurement such as 5.2mm looks weird, when in reality they are very close, and of the same precision.

I think this is his argument. It would actually be harder for him to handle more digits, even thought they mean the same thing.

You miss the base-10 point: you can switch in zero time from 240cm to 2.4m and vice-versa, as you can switch in zero time from $2,40 to ¢240 when you expect ¢60 in return. And you can totally ignore the "2", and focus on the "40" part, if you care about the precision, in zero time, and switch back to a global view.

The real problem then is our counting system. If base-12 is the most convenient, then we could count in base 12 too. That, however, is clearly never going to happen, so we are stuck with the less efficient base 10 system.

The other thing is that if everything is in powers of 10, then complex calculations are done that require multiple units, it's much easier to calculate. You don't need to keep a dictionary of 'conversion factors' to have these complex calculations make sense.

Would be nice if one of the many downvoters would explain how working in the hundreds of centimeters is easier...?

Not one of the downvoters, but working in (hundreds of) centimetres (240cm) as opposed to meters (2.4m) is not as crazy as it sounds. Tape measures or carpenter's rulers will have centimetres on them all the way.

Also, people consider it a matter of precision. If I ask for a piece of wood that's 2.4m long, I am probably less concerned with the precise length than if I ask for one that's 2400mm long.

I am implementing imperial system on our currency.

12 cents = a dime. 12 dimes = a dollar, 12 dollars = a thousand dollar. 12 thousand dollars = a million dollar. 12 million dollars = a billion dollar.

can you tell me how much is a billion dollar in a dollar unit now?

Give 240cm or 360cm a name (like STL for "standard-timber-length", 1 stl = 240 cm) and you're effectively doing the exact same thing as the imperial system. Then it's just a popularity contest (which is fine and appropriate and metric wins except for wrt time) but at least conceding the fact that base-10 scaling of units is not intrinsically superior for all units & situations.

Edit: If the argument is that metric is more intuitive (less memorization because of consistent scales) then I think that's a great argument. If the argument is that it's more standardized and more widely adopted, I think that's also a great argument. But I think that the argument that the metric-system is somehow superior intrinsically because only scales of powers of 10 are worth naming (as the name implies) is a poor argument, as you've helped illustrate.

I'm afraid your argument is circular.

You're claiming that the ability to divide evenly is an intrinsic quality of Imperial, and then when I point out that actually it can be done in any measurement system (including metric), you claim that this makes metric like Imperial, because...well, because dividing evenly is a property of Imperial.

Unless you're suggesting that timber should only be available by 1 inch, 1 foot and 1 yard measurements in the US and by 1 cm, 1 meter, ermm...I kilometer(?) in other countries?

Edit: I didn't claim metric was better at all (it is, but I didn't claim it!). You claimed that Imperial was better for dividing up lengths of timber. I explained why it wasn't.

I guess the real issue is which units get names. Yes, you can do with 12cm exactly what you can do with 12in- but the latter gets its own named unit. The Imperial system has a preference for scaling its units by some slightly more practical number of sub-units- 12, 60, etc. I can imagine someone saying, for example, "why name 1000 centimeters as another unit? Can't I say 'thousands' using the same number of syllables? What's worth naming a different unit is 240cm since that's used a lot with timber..."

Someone strictly advocating the metric system would say "that's the point, kilo is another way of saying 1000 no matter where you live in the world or what you're measuring. Feel free to call 240cm a 'frob' if you like, but please, only do so in private- don't order 14 frobs of lumber, order 33.6 meters." (edit: which is a perfectly valid point. It's the slow accumulation of frobs that made the imperial system untenable. We trade a little bit of efficiency at a local level for greater global efficiency when we adopt metric.)

There's really only one unit for length: the meter. Centimeters aren't a different unit, they're "hundredths of a meter".

You can call your lengths of timber "frobs" if you want, even in public! You could have people order them that way and sell them that way. The only requirement most places have is that you also specify what that is in meters so that people who don't know what a frob is, know what they're buying.

It just makes sense that your frobs should be a useful number of meters so that they can be divided or handled easily and don't require 15 decimal places to express.

Edit: I have a question for you: would you support changing your currency away from 100 cents to the Dollar to something like the old Pound with 240 pennies to the Pound?

After all, if you're talking about measurements everyone uses and need to divide up, it's far more commonly required for cash in people's everyday lives than length or volume or anything else!

You mean similar to how stock prices used to be demarcated or how foreign exchanges use 'pip' values? ;-) (http://www.cringely.com/2012/09/05/ticked-off-how-stock-mark...)

Seriously though good question. First though it made me realize that you never see prices in thirds of a dollar- as if everyone avoids it and have simply gotten used to avoiding it. I can't imagine a situation where ease of dividing by three for money actually adds any efficiency. Similarly, while I do see the value in dividing the day into 24 hours, I certainly wouldn't advocate a unit that's defined as one 60th of a second (even though it has even more prime factors than 12 ;)

I concede that the use-cases where having more prime factors and therefore easy non-decimal division are few and far between. I guess what surprised me when doing construction was that there was a very rational reason for a foot being 12 inches rather than 10- that it's not simply a relic of the fact that a human foot seems to be about 12 thumbs long- some arbitrary number accidentally ingrained in some cultures. And as illustrated by the fact that stocks were eventually decimalized and then made to trade at penny-granularity, computers and the fact that we don't do a lot of division in our heads or on paper anymore will probably eventually erase most remaining efficiencies.

> I certainly wouldn't advocate a unit that's defined as one 60th of a second

Veering sharply offtopic, seconds are actually called seconds because they're "second order minutes". So, just as a minute is 1/60 of an hour, a second-order minute is 1/60 of 1/60 of an hour.

In the past, people have indeed used "thirds" (1/60 of a second) and in the 13th century, Roger Bacon went as far as using "fourths" (1/3600 of a second)!

Forex uses pips which are 1/10000 for EUR/USD, GBP/USD and the like or 1/1000 for USD/JPY. There are "sub-pips" that are 1/10 of a pip.

Pips are decimal, similar to millimeter that's 1/1000 of a meter. The point doesn't stand, imo.

I actually would support changing the divisions of the dollar to a non-base-ten standard. Specifically I would make it dollars and quarters and dispense with anything smaller. We used to have a half-penny coin. We got rid of it when a penny was the same value as a quarter today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-2-5_series#1-2-5_series and start at 10c or 20c.

Actually, arguments advanced to support the American penny are interestingly similar to those advanced to support the American customary measures.

Actually, I can remember at least one commonly used alternative name from my time in a German-speaking country. The term "Pfund" (literally, pound) was frequently used to refer to a half-kilogram. I remember it being particularly used in reference to a loaf of bread, by both bakers and customers. (That was a long time ago, don't know if it's still common.)

Still common in Germany.

My house is 100 years old, and having some construction experience myself I take care of small maintenance issues. I'm European but I grew up with both imperial and metric systems side-by-side, so it was easy for me to pick up American standards on things like stud distances and so on. It is convenient to have some things like that standardized, although the particular standardized measures themselves are highly arbitrary.

However, because my house is old nothing is perfectly standard any more - all the angles are off by a degree or two, different parts of the house have slightly stretched or compressed over the course of a century, and so on. So whenever I measure something I end up noting both metric and imperial - imperial because I am going to be forced to deal with it at the store/supply depot, metric because I want to get the numbers right and I would way rather work in base 10 that mirrors my 10 fingers than juggling fractions of an inch (a unit which is divided into 16ths instead of 12ths because...er...um...).

Unfortunately, I don't expect this change any time soon.

> 48 inches is the same as 4-feet but that it is also 3-stud-distances long (studs in walls are often placed 16 inches apart).

To some extent that's an artifact of the units we use. We could just as easily put studs 40cm apart, which is approximately the same distance, or 50cm (0.5m) apart, which would be particularly convenient.

From Wikipedia: "In the United States [...] typically placed 16 inches (406 mm) from each other's center, but sometimes also at 12 inches (305 mm) or 24 inches (610 mm)." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_stud)

A quick search suggests that 400mm is common in metric-using countries.

Carpentry is a bad example... 1/4 inch vs 6mm or 7mm doesn't make any difference in this low precision craft... it is far from being precise to the millimeter... Even if you were doing higher precision wood working, you could make your box-joint 6mm wide instead of 1/4" and it would still be a perfect fit.... Also, try dividing an inch into tenths using a ruler?

In fields where precision does matter - such as machining or PCB design - decimal inches are used. Calipers work in decimal inches and steel rules are often marked in tenths. PCB layout programs typically allow you to use either millimeters or mils.

Ten has three factors: 1, 2, 5.

Twelve has five factors: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6.

When dealing with fractions, twelve is more efficient. I agree imperial units still aren't worth the trouble of being different than the rest of the world.

You shall count only the prime ones, both have only 2 prime divisors. Then 60 would be of real use (and it has been used in the past[1]... and still is in angular measurements with the famous 360 degrees) but it contains only 5 as extra prime divisor.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal

I lived through the change in ZN a long time ago - really only two comments to make:

- for most things a saw cut is ~1mm wide - measuring in mm is good enough for most things, it's a great unit for carpentry

- a 2x4 (or 4x2 anywhere other than the US) isn't really 2x4, but then neither is a 5x10 (the exact same thing after you go metric)

It was 50x100 when I was building in Chch ~10 years ago.

It was explained to me that the rough cut timber was closer to the stated size, and that the finished timber we used for framing was named after the unfinished dimensions. Of course, I don't know how true that actually is. Certainly the unfinished 75x50 we used for roofing purlins (spelling?) was noticeably thicker than the finished structural 100x50s

> Well, to be fair, those anti-metric folks had at least one point in their favor: Customary measures make a lot more sense to us.

The author is full of it. Whichever system you grew up with will seem natural to you. This misconception comes up time and time again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7821501

The article seems like fluff; the author isn't even making novel mistakes.

He even says that the metric system "died". Hah. That's true only in a very limited parochial sense; it's the most popular system of measurement on planet earth even if it's isn't used for day-to-day things in the USA.

> The author is full of it. Whichever system you grew up with will seem natural to you

This is true to at least my case: grew up under the metric system and after 15 years living in the US, still have to mentally convert dimensions to metric in order to make sense of them:

- If you point at something and ask me how far it is, the first number that comes to my mind is in meters, then I say that number and add "yards" or mentally multiply it by 3 and add "feets"

- If you ask me to grab something and give you the weight, the number comes in Kg and I mentally multiply it by 2.2 to give and approximate weight in pounds.

Just FYI, "feets" isn't a word. The plural of feet is feet :)

Similarly, "softwares" isn't a word either, but I hear it a lot. There's only software.

I say this because it's a common mistake among people who speak well, otherwise.

And "codes" !!

Actually, the use of "code" as a count noun is quite old and well entrenched in the numerical modelling community. I can recall back in the early 1970s hearing Fortran programs routinely referred to as "codes".

Code is a weird one because there are times when it's correct (e.g. "encryption codes"). But when it's used to mean "software" it should never be "codes", IMHO, though I guess there's a minority in disagreement.

I understand why you would think so, as I haven't heard the usage anywhere else in the software world that I've been, but it is a standard usage in that community; it's not hard to find examples [0] [1] [2] [3].

[0] http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/f_src/f_src.html

[1] http://www.unige.ch/~hairer/software.html

[2] http://www.mcs.anl.gov/project/openadf-automatic-differentia...

[3] http://math.berkeley.edu/~strain/Codes/

I most often hear it from programmers who are not native speakers of English, so it always sounds wrong to me.

Yep "codes" just makes you sound amateur and third rate.

same for "data"

Seeing as I started as a Fortran programmer in the 70's I have never heard this usage.

Oh and this was on campus at CIT for a world leading RnD organisation in their math modelling section.

Interestingly, and to my big surprise, "fishes" is quite correct!

"fishes" refers to multiple species of fish, while "fish" is the correct plural form of a school of a single species.

That distinction is likely to die out, given that lots of other English words that used to predominantly or only use the same form in singular and plural are steadily moving towards separate plural form.

Awesome!Though, which one should you use if both are correct?

"... plenty of fish(es) in the sea." for instance?

Actually feet is the plural of foot :)

you know, i rewrote that post several times, rephrasing and correcting it yet I failed to spot "feets".

> Whichever system you grew up with will seem natural to you

Yeah. I live in Italy, but grew up in the US. I'm happy with the metric system and wished we had it in the US too, but for certain kinds of measurements, it still doesn't feel quite as natural to me. It depends entirely on how much I use something - temperatures in metric are second nature, because you feel that on your skin every day. Things like people's heights or weights, not so much. How many atmospheres to pump up my road bike tires? I have no idea, I use the pounds per square inch scale on the pump!

I don't try and justify any of this, it's just what I grew up with.

Oddly enough the SI unit is Pascal (Pa) or N/m2, not atmosphere. The technical atmosphere is: around 98KPa, it's not really metric.

kPa. Otherwise it'd be Kelvinpascals. And while pressure is often said to be x atmospheres, they usually use bar, which is an SI-derived unit (equal to 10⁵ Pa), which is close enough to the old usage of atmospheres.

There seem to have been two different atmospheres that were pretty close anyway. One being defined as air pressure at sea level, the other being defined as the pressure of 10 meters of water.

>>kPa. Otherwise it'd be Kelvinpascals.

Great observation! I guess I am way too used to KB and in that very case KPa would be 1024Pa which is even worse. Have an upvote.

That'd be KiPa, then (kibipascals) ;)

Standardised since 1999, I think. But no one really uses it. Kilobytes would technically be kB as well.

The most used unit for pressure used in Germany is bar (= 100 kPa) so that you don't have to deal with really big numbers all the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_(unit)

> The author is full of it. Whichever system you grew up with will seem natural to you.

This seems to be a reinforcement of the point you quoted, and not a refutation of it.

That would depend on who he's calling "us". It doesn't include me! I read "us" as "people, all people in general" and disagreed.

The statement "Customary measures make a lot more sense to us people who prefer Customary measures" is true but only as an uninteresting tautology. Do you think he meant "Customary measures make a lot more sense to us Americans" ? That is, "Americans excluding Canadians, immigrants and scientifically literate".

The statement read as "Customary measures make a lot more sense to us people who were raised on them" is true. But by not being explicit about that he is misleading.

> That is, "Americans excluding Canadians, immigrants and scientifically literate".

Well, I think it would include Canadians in most circumstances - metric adoption in Canada is only marginally more pervasive than in the US - and would also include most "scientifically literate" Americans outside the context of formal scientific research (it would seem a bit absurd to suggest that because a microbiologist measures his research subjects in nanometers, he'll somehow find it optimal to use the same unit to measure his furniture).

But, yes, as a tautology, it isn't much of an argument for or against anything, apart from being a very strong argument against artificial imposition of unnecessary changes.

Sure. Though I wouldn't categorise the USA (and to some extent Canada and UK) finally getting on board the same metric bus as the rest of the planet as entirely "unnecessary".

I don't understand why it's necessary to implement methods in your own situation just because someone else is using them in theirs. That seems to be a cargo-cult mentality. If there's no endogenous case for using the metric system, why do so?

By the same reasoning, you could argue that people should all adopt e.g. Esperanto in place of their own languages for use in all circumstances without distinction.

I love the metric system for no better reasons that it's the one I always used as a french, it just seems as natural for me as my ten fingers, I never really thought about it. Yet, I can understand why some would not change their “English customary measures”, they must feel it the same way, thinking it's as natural as their feet. For instance, our screens size (TV, computer, phones) are expressed in inches for whatever good reasons ... I don't have a clue at all about the size it represents, I just know 13 is smaller than 15, 11 is too small for me for a computer screen, and that 42 is a pretty good decent size for a TV. My surfboard is a 6.2, and for all I know, it's taller than me ...

If I were told, we were going to change our measure system, I would be kind of scared, could it be better or worse ! After all, the hardest part is not the real use but the idea of the switch.

Now, if you could just use the international ISO 216 paper size, I wouldn't have to mess with my PDF export settings and just push some A4.

Inches to cm and back are actually an easy conversion so thinking in both isn't hard - 2.5cm/in, 30cm/ft. 1.6km/mi and 2.2 lbs/kg are a bit more annoying, and Fahrenheit are a freaking abomination.

C is roughly (F - 30)/2, not too bad. To make my life easier I also measure lb as 1/2 kg and driving distances as time.

I still remember the formula by heart C=5/9*(F-32), learned it a kid while reading books on electronics. Mentally I still use it to convert while watching a movie for example. However I still don't know how people prefer it over Celsius, the latter feels a lot more natural.

Pound to Kg is rather easy as it has to be multiplies by 2.2, adding 1/10 after multiplying by 2.

> C is roughly (F - 30)/2, not too bad.

A few months ago, I was concerned about the inaccuracy of this rough conversion. It's actually accurate to within ±3°F for all temperatures -5°C to 25°C (23°F to 77°F). If you're OK with ±5°F, it works for -15°C to 35°C (5°F to 95°F).

So the conversion works pretty well for the vast majority of environmental conditions. C = (F - 30) / 2 and F = C * 2 + 30 are great approximations.

Screen size is measured as screen's diagonal.

It comes from the times when the screen were cathode-ray tubes. Late CRTs, as in old TV screens, were rectangular. But early CRTs were made circular for technological reasons, even if the device used a CRT as a rectangular screen. For a circular CRT, the diagonal of the rectangular "screen" part was just the diameter.

Since CRTs were invented long ago, and the first scanned video signal image was transmitted in 1907, the industry had time to develop a tradition which is not going to go now.

My screen to paper size conversion:

15 inches is almost exactly A4 landscape 17 inches has a 2cm gap around the edges 19 inches has a 5cm gap around the edge 24 inches is A3 landscape or 2.5xA4 in portrait mode.

For such a conversion, you may need however to specify a screen aspect ratio, because even if the diagonal remain the same size, the height or with will vary regarding a 4:3, 16:9 or 16:10 screen.

I completely agree with you (even though you're French and I'm Italian ;)). I am used to metric system, but for some thing it's normal to use other measure we are used to. The example is exactly the one you're making, screen size for me it's normal to think about it in inches because it was always like this, and when sometimes I see TV screen sizes expressed in centimeters here in Luxembourg/Germany, I have to look for the conversion (or guess it sometimes from the model name) because I was thinking "42 is not enough, 50 is ok, 55 could be the right size for me, 60 is probably too much).

At the end it's mainly a matter of being used to, and being afraid of changing too

Everyone seems to be missing the most obvious reason to convert.

http://gizmodo.com/5786004/these-are-the-three-countries-who...

We're a global economy. By the ends of the century, India and China will have pushed us down to at least #3.

Some countries aren't known for knowledge outside of the borders.

It would be interesting to add up which costs more: Keeping English measurement for some products and engineering (i.e. construction), or having a mixed CDMA/GSM (not to mention iDEN) mobile infrastructure.

Having a global economy doesn't seem to have much impact or those English-sized wrenches made in China should cost more.

The U.S. uses the metric system and the customary system.

Even many countries that are primarily metric use non-metric units like stones for body weight or feet for airplane elevation.

I agree that metric would be a better system, but your implication that we can't compete in the global economy with our mixed unit system seems hyperbolic since we have already been competing just fine.

Haha what? No one using the metric system uses "stone" for body weight. They use kilos.

Even the US doesn't use "stone" - you use pounds, which is your stand-in for the kilogram.

EDIT: Seriously, I cannot think of a single country which uses "stone" for bodyweight. Maybe the British? But doctors don't, definitely not in Australia, and I've never heard anyone from any other places use it either.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. Where I'm from, nobody uses stones, a few people use catty (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catty), some people use pounds, most people use kilos.

My comment was about the bad map. The map makes it seem like metric is a binary condition: you use it or you don't. That is not true, even though metric is the primary measurement system in most of the world. Many non metric units are in common use in primarily metric countries, just like the U.S. doesn't only use customary units.

The UK should also be highlighted on the map since they use stone and pints, as well as Canada and apparently Singapore and other countries in southeast Asia that use other units like catty and pounds. That Singapore or Australia don't use stone doesn't disprove my point in the slightest. I am just listing examples of non metric units in active use, in countries that the map claims use metric.

who uses stones for body weight?

It is still widely used in the UK.

The UK converted to Metric recent-ish-ly. Once the people who grew up with the old measurements die out it'll get a bit saner, I guess.

From 1965 to 1975 was the intended program.

In practice there are still some throw backs (pints of milk or beer) except that EU directives mean that the 4 pint milk container has to be labelled 2.27 litres, etc..

Switching my mental model of pricing of fruit was quite hard but it's really annoying now that supermarkets still list imperial prices alongside (and occasionally in breech of regulations, alone). Metric prices are larger numbers and they want to convince us they're not overcharging. Unfortunately my regular supermarket have taken to pricing by the item or bag for fruit - causes no end of problems, all the bags are different weights. More expensive items in 800g bags (or 750g), less expensive in 900g or 1kg. Good for keeping my mental arithmetic going though - which is cheaper those apples for £1.20 a bag on 3-for-2 or these for 40p each with a coupon for 10% off ...! /rant

The UK and Ireland notably use stones as a measure of body weight.

UK use of stones and pounds for weight is informal and declining. Feet and inches for height is also informal but is perhaps more popular.

The #3 what, economy? That's a stretch. And before that Japan was supposed to become the world's largest economy too. History is littered with terrible economic extrapolations. It's far more likely any given country will stagnate, fall into strife, have a civil war or three, have a revolution, make mistakes and lose decades, etc., than boom for a century. Take for example the fact that few saw China accumulating such immense debt in such a short amount of time, they're now arguably the world's most indebted nation.

And India doesn't look primed to take over any leadership mantle economically. They're an economic disaster still. First they'd have to get their house in order. Having a billion people is anything but a guarantee of inherent economic scale, just ask Africa.

For me this is too much rationalization for a single fact: people hate to change, even if it is for the better.

So simple. I study Chinese and I am 100% certain than the reason Chinese did not develop like the West was the printing press and the superior method it is to have to print 25-30 symbols instead of 30.000.

Just look at Chinese and even Japanese delay in getting to use computers as ASCII was so simple compared to their language. Japanese use kanji(chinese symbols) for lots of things.

The Chinese writing came first, the Indian copied the Chinese language and basically improved over them, then the Greeks copied that via Persia, and then the Romans copied the Greeks.

Romans started copying Greek culture because they were so ignorant compared with the Greeks, let alone Chinese at the time.

But at the same time, they started anew.The language was so refined, and it took the best thing of each iteration(better than Greek, better than Indian Scripts, better than Chinese).

I worked with someone doing programming and the fact that I used Vim instead of a visual text editor really infuriated him.

So one day I explained it to him and expended 30 to 40 min teaching him why it was so good for me. He looked confused. One month later he only used vim.

The reason most people don't use programs like vim or emacs is because it takes some effort to learn before you get the benefits.

The same happens with metric or any other measurement system.

> The Chinese writing came first, the Indian copied the Chinese language and basically improved over them, then the Greeks copied that via Persia, and then the Romans copied the Greeks.

Latin script's origins are in Egypt and Sumer, not in China. Writing was invented in the Near East about 3200BCE and about 1200BCE in China.

When I say the Chinese came first I did not want to say that they invented writing.

I am talking about sophistication in language,not just script. Most of the early Egyptian and Sumer writings are very simple accountings, mostly numbers. Very little to do with what we consider writing today.

latin is called an Indo-European language becomes it comes from India. Not just the language, but the race.

> I am talking about sophistication in language,not just script. Most of the early Egyptian and Sumer writings are very simple accountings, mostly numbers. Very little to do with what we consider writing today.

I guess sophistication is subjective, but a lot of Chinese writing was just record keeping too, and there was literature in Egypt and Sumer, e.g. the Epic of Gilgamesh.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_literature

> latin is called an Indo-European language becomes it comes from India. Not just the language, but the race.

The most popular theory is that the Proto-Indo-European language had its origins in Eastern Europe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_origins

> Customary measures make a lot more sense to us.

Did they make any less sense in UK where they originated? Yet UK pushed through with switching to metric and went way further than US did. So this excuse isn't really valid.

The real answer is, that in US politicians were too weak to push this through, because all kind of manufacturers and unions were pressuring them to stop the effort. In UK they just ignored the pressure. In US they budged.

I wish US would already push this through, but so far it doesn't look very promising.

About natural. Take for example Celsius and Fahrenheit. Celsius based his scale on water freezing and boiling points, which are quite intuitive borders. At 0°C weather changes significantly since water freezing / melting has a noticeable environmental impact. So if you see -1° or +1° you can expect quite a change. On the other hand what are 31° and 33°? Fahrenheit took his scale without any pragmatic or practical goals of common usage. He did it for his scientific purposes. People more naturally operate with two digit numbers, which in Celsius case covers most of the normal range temperatures. It's good that at least Kelvin's scale didn't become commonly used in some countries...

Like the other Imperial units, Fahrenheit is also one designed to be pragmatic -- it is scaled so that most temperatures are two digits. 100°F is approximately body temperature, and 0°F is a temperature about as low as one might expect the weather to naturally exhibit.

0°F is quite a pointless border. Brine freezing? Why would you care about that event to make the scale based on it? Water freezing on the other hand is way more relevant for common matters. So lower border of the 0-100 scale was chosen quite poorly from pragmatic standpoint. And natural temperatures can go above 100°F, so the upper border wasn't chosen conveniently as well. It's not as uncomfortable as Kelvin, but it's still way less pragmatical than Celsius.

>relevant for common matters

Put it this way: 0 degrees is really cold for a human and 100 is really hot for a human. Water doesn't care if it's cold.

And in Siberia you sometimes encounter -70°C and in Dubai you measure 50°C (Both of which would be off the 0-100F scale).

Internationally Celsius make more sense.

> The real answer is, that in US politicians were too weak to push this through, because all kind of manufacturers and unions were pressuring them to stop the effort.

No, the real answer is that US politicians were too weak to push this through, because the people wouldn't have it.

The people spoke.

The people optimitized for the short term (not having to learn a new system) over long term benefit (a simpler system).

Not people. Lobbying groups. I wouldn't equate the two. Don't tell me in UK people suddenly spoke the opposite. No, most were not comfortable with the change either, but it was a necessary change. The difference is that in UK unions and lobbying groups were less inclined to fight it, because they are more involved in global European market which uses the metric system. It wasn't about people, it was about politicians losing or not losing lobbying support.

>Yet UK pushed through with switching to metric and went way further than US did. So this excuse isn't really valid.

And yet they didn't switch over completely. People in the UK measure some things in metric and some things in the old Imperial units, which is the worst of both worlds. Pick up some random thing and its weight is measured in kg, but if you're weighing a person it's "stones". From here to the wall may be about two meters, but from here to London is 100 miles. I'd rather have what we have in the US, thanks all the same.

>The real answer is, that in US politicians were too weak to push this through, because all kind of manufacturers and unions were pressuring them to stop the effort. In UK they just ignored the pressure. In US they budged.

Politicians aren't supposed to be "strong". They're supposed to do what the voters want them to do. If politicians are forcing you to do something you don't want to do, your government is out of control. In the US the people didn't want to convert to metric because it's easier to estimate in whatever system you grew up with. Manufacturers were all for the metric system since it makes managing global supply chains easier.

> In the US the people didn't want to convert to metric

Manufacturers aren't all people. Overall acceptance of the change by the public wasn't the main driver in stopping this effort. Corporate lobbying was however, as usual.

In UK since they trade with the rest of Europe, lobbyists were not so eager to sabotage it. In US they are more isolated so they were more negative.

>Overall acceptance of the change by the public wasn't the main driver in stopping this effort. Corporate lobbying was however, as usual.

That simply isn't true. I remember those days - I was there.

I started grade school around when the big push for metric occurred in the US. Here's what I remember. Inches were taught as inches. Here's a ruler, measure some things.

Metric was taught as a bunch of math. Here's how you convert between different units.

Many years later I was talking to a machinist who told me: "My daughter is learning metric in school but I don't like it because of all the math."

Since our civilization seems to have moved to binary for actual computations I wonder if we will someday go back to thinking in terms of halves, quarters, eighths, etc. of some standard unit. Then people would mock the metric system for being implicitly based on the biological accident of ten fingers...

We should abandon base 10 and use base 16.

Base 12 is more useful. We should teach kids to count in binary (and convert it to base 12) then standardize all units around that.

And if some country refuses to go along with the plan, we should bomb them until they capitulate.

Why not base 8? It's closer to 10 and doesn't require 6 more numbers, but 2 fewer.

It's not as easily divisible by 3.

Indeed — you can't even represent 0.1 in IEEE floating point, so who in their right mind would try to build a measuring system on tenths?

> "you can't even represent 0.1 in IEEE floating point"

Not true, the IEEE 754-2008 standard provides a Decimal Floating Point specification in binary.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_floating_point#IEEE_754...

Ah, well, you're the best kind of correct. IBM even have instructions for it.

I'll counter with the Ferranti Orion (1959) which had mixed-base operations (primarily for £sd accounting).

Binary notion is too cumbersome - read long to use properly. As a matter of fact e-based system would be the most efficient [1]. There was an attempt to develop 3-based (ternary) computer by the Soviets[2], ternary in theory is slightly more efficient than binary (3 being close to e) but its engineering obstacles makes it quite impractical.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-integer_representation#Base... [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_computer

I was born and raised in Europe. I live in Canada that has (mostly) gone metric in the 1970's. Yet, I use inches. They are nicer!

I recently built a shelf and hanger rack in a weirdly-shaped closet. I used Sketchup to design it, and naturally made everything in inches.

Inches are "semi-metric" too, thanks to mils: thousandths of an inch. Mils are very nice units for fine work, like circuit boards. Millimeters are way too crude, and micrometers are outside of macroscopic human experience.

When doing PCB work, I use mils, which create a virtual metric system within the space of an inch. E.g. the pins of old-school DIPs are 100 mils apart, or 0.1" Through holes are in mils: 25 mils, 40 mils. Same for track widths: 8 mils, 10 mils, ... very nice numbers to work with at that scale: one, two or three digits, no decimals.

Canadian here as well, but I always thought that we had metric system all along!

I just assumed that everyone was using such standards when I was little and then came things like miles, pounds, yards, foot and I was like wtf, it's so complicated.

I know how long a cm is by pinching my index and thumb finger and measuring the distance between the nails. I know roughly how long is a meter based on my height. I know roughly how long is a km based on my running distance.

I see we're still perpetuating the "DVORAK is inherently better than QWERTY" myth, as well as "QWERTY was designed to prevent key-sticking" myth. And I don't want to know what it suggests about the author that he still has Tommy Lee's penis on the brain. That is your go-to inch example?

I had always intuited a higher opinion of Slate, just because I had friends I respected who read it, but the more I actually read it myself, the more it seems barely above the likes of BuzzFeed or HuffPo.

>> "when a foot is 12 inches... it gets tough to do quick mental calculations.'

Except, you know, when you want to easily divide by three or six. Or by two or four and end up with integer results. But why would anyone ever want to do that in normal, day to day living?

It doesn't say that Dvorak is better than QWERTY. It links to an article in The Atlantic titled "The Lies You've Been Told About the Origin of the QWERTY Keyboard". Quoting from it, which quotes from elsewhere:

> ... the QWERTY system emerged as a result of how the first typewriters were being used. Early adopters and beta-testers included telegraph operators who needed to quickly transcribe messages. However, the operators found the alphabetical arrangement to be confusing and inefficient for translating morse code. The Kyoto paper suggests that the typewriter keyboard evolved over several years as a direct result of input provided by these telegraph operators

That's why the Slate article says "the QWERTY keyboard was designed for a different age (to suit the quirks of telegraph operators)", and does not refer to the myth about key-sticking.

(Personally, I thought the same as you, and it required a closer reading to understand that my thought was incorrect.)

The discussion about mental arithmetic concerns conversions between different scales, like foot and mile, not in fractions of a foot. If you have a surveyor's wheel marked in feet or half-rods and want to measure 1/4 mile -- how long is that?

That said, see my other post for aspects about this article that I didn't like.

The article uses "Anyway, we have calculators now" as an argument for decimalization, but I see it as an argument against it. The less people do math on paper (or in their head), the less need we have to tie our system of measurement to the number of fingers the human hand happens to have; calculators divide by 12 as easily as 10.

The nice thing about the metric system is that the base is consistent - it's always some multiple of 10. With the imperial system, it gets tricky remembering whether you have to multiply by 12 or 16 or 5280 or whatnot.

That objection is growing obsolete, too: Nobody these days divides by 5280; they go to Google and type "1/4 mile in feet"

Don't you feel handicapped having to use a computer to express basic distances? In the metric system, you have to have some sort of low IQ not to be able to convert from meters to kilomethers on the fly. Hours to seconds is trickier, and would be much improved by decimal notation.

This whole article just feels like fluff. The very first "fact" about the origins of the qwerty keyboard are completely wrong. The Wikipedia page doesn't have a single mention of telegraph and has a complete history of its development. A history can be found in this 1996 article among others http://reason.com/archives/1996/06/01/typing-errors/.

Are the people who link to this libertarian propaganda every time qwerty or Dvorak gets mentioned underhanded libertarians hoping to spread their brand of economic religion or people who have been utterly taken in by the former to the point that they think this is an unbiased debunking?

Libertarianism is at least as rational and self consistent as any other ideology, so Reason seems as good a place to read articles as the Guardian or whatever. Are you sure that you aren't in the thrall of some other economic religion, and therefore overly eager to harrumph at the unbelievers?

The article points out that: "In April 1990, we published a more detailed version of this material in a Journal of Law and Economics article titled 'The Fable of the Keys.' This journal is well known and has published some of the most influential articles in economics. In the six years since we published that article there has been no attempt to refute any of our factual claims, to discredit the GSA study, or to resurrect the Navy study."

Pointing to Reason is not a valid reason for dismissing an argument that is well known from other sources that are, as a matter of fact, not libertarian.

It would be more interesting if you stopped smearing sources and actually provided -- or at least pointed to -- some rational articles that try to refute the factual case.

A yard is currently defined by the metric system.

Metrology is the discipline of measuring. It concerns itself with ensuring that everyone has the same definition of measuring units. For a long time, the yard was based on physical standards. i.e. Somewhere there sat a physical rod 1 yard long that all other rods were measured against to define the yard. The meter was defined this way until 1960 too. The unfortunate problem with physical standards is that they change. A physical rod is different lengths at different temperatures and will, of course, gradually get shorter as it's handled and wear occurs on its ends.

The meter is now defined in terms of how fast light can travel in a given period of time. That period of time is defined in terms of hyperfine ground state level transitions of a Cesium atom. Yes, it's complex. However, while a physical standard changes, these standards are built into the laws of the universe and are thus reproducible and fixed for all time. For this reason, the yard is currently defined as 0.9144 meters in the U.S.. No matter how the metric system defines the meter, a yard is 0.9144 meters.

So, the U.S. really has gone metric, at least where it counts. The average American is just ignorant of the fact.

P.S. Even the metric system is not completely free of physical definitions... yet. The kilogram is still based on a physical prototype. However, there are proposals to change that to something based on physical constants. Once this is done, the metric system will be defined entirely in terms of physics.

The thing about measurements is that they don't matter in your everyday life. I get that it makes physics calculations easier and international machining companies need to interface with the world, but measuring the speed of my car in miles per hour and knowing my couch is 7 1/2 feet long are perfectly fine, and there is absolutely no compelling reason to switch to metric for those kinds of things.

People don't want to switch because it's a huge burden to retrain yourself to think in those units. I remember growing up that the US tried to do it—roadsigns in California had both miles and kilometers on them and our speedometers had both readings for a while. But it didn't stick because there's absolutely no point—it doesn't improve anything, it's just churn.

I've got a very intuitive notion of how long a mile is, and Europeans have a very intuitive grasp on how long a kilometer is. It isn't because one system is intuitive and one isn't, it's just what you're used to—you know it because you use it every day.

The article is wrong. Imperial Units are not "better". But, the system you know and use every day is better than the weird foreign system.

As Abe Simpson once said, "The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!"

> But it didn't stick because there's absolutely no point—it doesn't improve anything, it's just churn.

This is pretty much it, though I'd throw on that Europeans acting like they're morally superior for using metric as their native measuring system (and that Americans are intellectually slovenly for not) certainly doesn't do many favors for the cause of metricization in the U.S.

Here's my proposal: America goes metric, and the rest of the world starts driving on the right hand side of the road.

Most of the world already drives on the right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-_and_left-hand_traffic

I'd be fine with that. You call Obama and I'll call Cameron and we'll get the ball rolling.

Can America also adapt Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals? Please.

"MUTCD specifies yellow lines between lanes of traffic moving in opposite directions and white lines between lanes moving in the same direction, whereas the Vienna Convention uses white for both." (Wikipedia)

No thanks.

No way. Driving on the left makes so much more sense than driving on the right.

If you're driving a manual transmission car on the left side of the road, you'd steer with your right hand and change gears with your left. This works out nicely for right-handed people, i.e. 90% of the population.

Right way. Driving on the right makes so much more sense than driving on the left.

If you're driving a manual transmission car on the right side of the road, you'd steer with your left hand and change gears with your right. This works out nicely for right-handed people, i.e. 90% of the population.

Could you imagine Boeing/lockheed/GM/some some oil company or any other manufacturer going up to their stockholders and saying: "This next year, profits will be significantly reduced as we replace every piece of equipment we own, replace every 1/4-20 screw with an M5, and redesign every aircraft/automobile/widget to meet new metric specifications"

I suppose it'd be better than being Boeing and going in front of your stockholders to explain why your marketshare is radically down because you refused to conform to the measurement system 95% of your customers are using.

It's a non-question anyway. Boeing planes already report fuel load in litres. Funnily enough, flight levels are internationally represented in feet (well, 100-feet) so there's a "win" for you. Also, ground speed is measured in knots!

The knot isn't quite as arbitrary as most imperial measures.

1 knot = 1 nautical mile/hour

1 nautical mile ~= the distance travelled by someone at the equator in one minute due to the Earth's rotation

Since navigation at sea was strongly dependent on the position of the sun and stars, it makes sense to use a unit of speed that makes your calculations easier.

Even for modern navigation it makes sense to use a unit of measurement based on the circumference of the great circle surrounding the Earth.

> 1 nautical mile ~= the distance travelled by someone at the equator in one minute due to the Earth's rotation

No. It's approximately one minute of arc, that is, 1/60 of one degree.

In fact the speed of the earth's rotation at the equator is more like 15 nautical miles per minute.

Yes, you're right of course. The Earth rotates through 15 arcminutes in 1 minute.

As opposed to losing money BECAUSE they're using imperial as happened here: http://metricviews.org.uk/2007/11/boeing787-grounded/

It's not like the metric system was invented yesterday and will vanish tommorrow. Change doesn't have to be instantaneous, it can be gradual over the years (and, as the article pointed out, already is)

> Change doesn't have to be instantaneous, it can be gradual over the years

As an example, NASA is partially-metric, partially-imperial. Of course, they have that famous failure attributed to mixing units...

I did a bit of work at NASA a couple years back, they wanted everything in millimeters (possibly to deal with the aftermath of that incident). Everything. Even antenna lengths.

Also, switching to metric units for measurement doesn't mean you have to switch the physical size of parts: there is nothing in the metric system requiring that you use round numbers in manufacturing. Canadian engineering, for a mixture of historical reasons and ties to the U.S., measures in metric but often has parts with suspicious sizes like 101.6mm.

I agree that things won't change instantaneously, but I also don't think change will happen or even could happen as quickly as most of the talk on the internet thinks it should.

These articles make the rounds on the internet every few months, which gives the impression change should happen quickly. But, given the enormous costs that exist to switch over, I think it's more likely we'll see a gradual change over our lifetime.

Boeing has run into occasional problems by holding to imperial rather than moving to metric and these will only get worse, esp. with their model of using vendors around the globe. In aerospace it's ugly since imperial is so entrenched, but other industries have retooled, there are examples to learn from for efficient transitions.

GM already went metric.

Lockheed destroyed a half-billon dollar space mission by clinging to imperial.

> Lockheed destroyed a half-billon dollar space mission by clinging to imperial.

If anyone wants more details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter

Aerospace is the origin of the insanity which is modern pipe thread specifications. The metric version is still in inches, but whatever 1/8" means, the pipe it goes in no obvious dimension represents that size.

Like, I know there is a system and calculations behind it, but they are in no way friendly to any user.

Could you imagine Boeing/lockheed/GM/some some oil company or any other manufacturer going up to their stockholders and saying: "We're going to avoid the metric that most parts are manufactured in (economies of scale) and most of our outsourcing partners are familiar with (risk of errors) and instead stick to customary measures because a foot feels 'more natural'"

There are costs to sticking with the imperial system. Non-US buyers want metric products which fit with their existing tooling. The factories of the world want all-metric manufacturing, which reduces costs. Error from unit conversion is a real problem.

Designing new products in metric wouldn't require old products to be replaced with imperial. Each product line has it's own special repair kit, spare parts, already. It's not like the suppliers who actually make parts aren't equipped to do metric if they're selling parts worldwide.

The UK went metric in the 1960s and it managed just fine, so there's no reason why it can't be done. Some pragmatism can be involved, for example road signs in the UK are still in miles, and one can still buy a pint of milk or beer (though the latter are technically labelled and sold in millilitres).

A move to metric wouldn't dictate the internal practices of a company like Lockheed, they could still require their suppliers to build parts in inches (even if that means that formally they purchase 2.6234cm sized screws or similar) and they can continue to do everything in inches. Not that they'd want to.

Ireland also went metric. We switched road speed limits in 2006ish, so all the signs say "km/hr" so you don't forget (it's also helpful to tell when you cross the border unto hr uk). Beer is sold in 568ml (1 pint), but milk is sold in litres.

It's quite interesting in Australia that you buy a pint of beer if it's in a glass (or a pot, which is much smaller or schooner, pronounced 'skooner', which is a bit smaller), but bottles are never sold as imperial are generally 375mL.

In England cans of cider are 500 mL. Honestly I don't really think a pint is a unit (except for old people buying milk?), it's a descriptor like "a glass" or "a pitcher" that just happens to have a legally required size. I have an idea roughly how much a pint is but I wouldn't requisition three pints of hydrofluoric acid.

I work in manufacturing, and one thing I've noticed here in the U.S. is that metric hardware (nuts, bolts, etc.) is consistently more expensive than comparable-sized imperial hardware. I've never received a satisfactory explanation why.

If I visit Starbucks they sell something called a "Venti" it's part of Starbucks attempt to change the language of coffee so that their regular customers can't order elsewhere.

"Venti" is of course Italian for 20, let's ignore the fact that Starbucks appear to invalidly trademarked a number, when I find myself stuck with a Starbucks in an American airport I love to ask "that's Italian for twenty, twenty what?" the usual answer is "fluid ounces" .... but "that can't be true, Italy uses the metric system, it must be litres or millilitres ..." usually they choose "litres", it is a big cup

Of course the American fluid ounce is a weird thing, different from the Imperial fluid ounce (which is exactly 1oz of water at 62F)- a strange historical thing due more to British Kings monkeying with the tax system than anything else

>they sell something called a "Venti"

I just stick to small/medium/large and keep insisting on that. The employees inevitably cave (realistically they know exactly what I mean).

Occasionally people blurt out "venti" in a place that isn't a Starbucks. The staff always knows that means "biggest cup we've got". Conversely, if I order an "extra large" in Starbucks they always force me to pick one of their sizes and say it's freakin' nonsense name. Also, I'm in Canada (a country that uses metric) and they list their sizes in fluid ounces.

Is that a Canadian Starbucks thing? In English Starbucks I've never had a problem with asking for a "large" or "medium".

> ... it must be litres or millilitres...

Why would it have to be one of those? Obviously it's centilitres; at least here in Finland that's the size of a regular drinking glass (although usually it's called "2 desilitres").

There's a great video treating imperial measurement units. I instantly fell in love with it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7x-RGfd0Yk

I landed there after watching one on paper sizes on the same channel. Also pretty much worth it!

Relevant xkcd: http://xkcd.com/526/

+1 for “spit goes ‘clink’.”

What 26C cold to swim? 26C is absolutely warm, around 20C is cold and below 16 is when the balls :freeze:, still doable though.

Someone (a jogger/runner?) on reddit a few days ago made an interesting observation, maybe this was known. The Fibonacci sequence can be used as a rough guide to convert km to miles and vice versa.

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34

The first four don't work very well but:

3km is about 2 miles

5km is about 3 miles

8km is about 5 miles

13km is about 8 miles

21km is about 13 miles

34km is about 21 miles

and so on

Nothing mysterious there; in the Fibonacci sequence, the ratio of the number and the one before it converges to the golden ratio which is almost the same as the conversion rate between km and miles.

I think it is easier to multiply by 0.6. Or do the simpler approximation: n/2 + n/10 + ( n/100 )*2

You can drop the last term if you don't need an accurate result.

Divisions and multiplications by 2, 10 and 100 are really easy.

850km to miles:

425 + 85 + 17 = 527 miles , the correct result is 528.166 miles

258km to miles:

129 + 26 + 5 = 160 miles , correct result is 160.314 miles

Author wrongly presumes that people using the metric system are not visualizing the measures in almost the same way. We do. One step is about a meter, or the width of finger is about 1 cm. More often used 10 centimeters (1 decimeter) is approx. a distance from your thumb to the index finger. It's all about being used to certain system of measures, so that you can automatically relate the measure to something from the real life for comparison, e.g. my car is 5m long, also the wall in my room is around 5m, so if you ask me how big is 5m I can instantly visualize the distance very accurately (without even consciously thinking about cars or walls)

Whereas my foot is ... a foot. My pace is a yard. My thumb is about an inch. Works both ways.

absolutely... problem is that I have to think hard to figure out how much a yard is, and you have the same problem with meters. That's what standards are for.

How about "either is arbitrary so fighting over which is better is pointless, just choose the one with higher acceptance."

One of the biggest arguments for metric (other than the rest of the world uses it) has been that it is easy to convert from liters to kilometers. In your day to day life, how often do you need to convert from one thing to another? For most people, the answer is they don't. Occasionally in cooking you need to convert, other than that you rarely need to convert. So don't go and switch the system just because something people rarely do is easier. And yes there are lots of jobs that require doing conversions. Many of those jobs already use metric.

Converting liters to kilometers? I need to know how to do this! How many beers is a kilometer? Gonna get my jog on.

A liter of water weighs a kilogram and is 1000 cm^3 (.001 m^3). These units are easily related. That's what GP is referring to.

Assuming a 500ml beer... (500ml / 1 km) = 0.5 square millimeters.

For interpretation advice, see also: xkcd. https://what-if.xkcd.com/11/

This actually has the same physical interpretation, right? If you took 500ml volume of beer and stretched it out to 1 km long, the stretched form would be 0.5 mm^2 in cross-section.

Another advantage is that a metre is a metre everywhere, and a litre is a litre everywhere (spelling notwithstanding.)

A lot of the imperial units are regional. A tablespoon may be either three or four teaspoons. Who knows how much a fluid ounce is.

One very real PITA is reading cooking recipes and having to do some deduction to figure out how much the units actually are.

I think the "but it's easier to visualize" claim is BS.

I would argue that it's just as hard for a person who's is used to the metric system to visualize inches, feet and yards as it is for a person used to those units to visualize centimeters and meters.

It's all a matter of which units your brain is used to thinking in.

When I speak to my US friends and they say stuff like, "I'm 7 feet and 10 inches tall", I have no internal visual metal picture at all. But if I say, "I'm 193 cm tall" I would guess they don't have either.

You have some really tall friends: 7feet,10inches would be uber-tall - 239cm. To convert I use some baselines 5'7 is 170, 6' is 183, then adding/subtracting inches to fit.

I think this illustrates my point ;) But since when do I get down-votes for favouring the metric system??

Centimeter is about 2 grids in a school "checked" notebook. Everybody know after using these notebooks fot the whole education how long exactly that is. No problems with eyeballing. I have problems eyeballing an inch (only used in 5.25 or 3.14 disk sizes and in monitors' sizes).

Milimeter is close to smallest unit useful in human scale - when you try to draw 0.5 milimeter scale with a regular pen, for example, the lines will probably touch each other. You can't cut with regular tools with better than 1mm accuracy, too. Tools are commonly scaled in milimeters, and you can almost use 14 key for 13 screw etc, so no point in smaller units for regular mechanics work either.

Food stuff is bought in "dekos" (dekagrams). You say "10 deko of this meat, 40 deko of that cheese, and 1 kilo of these berries, please". Somehow hektagram haven't caught up.

Land is measured in ar (10x10 meters), hektar (100x100 meters) and squared kilometers for anything bigger. Flats are measured in squared meters (50-300 m2 for most flats).

1 kg of water (and most other common liquids, with precision good enough for cooking etc) is 1 liter, everybody know that and use them interchangeably. 1 glass is 250 ml is 250 g of most liquids and powders, people measure stuff with glasses when cooking assuming 1 glass = 250 g.

There's a joke about this 1 liter = 1kg assumption. When asked what's 10 times 100g everybody answered 1kg except Russian and Polish who answered 1 liter (because shot glasses of alcohol in pubs are sold as 100g).

1 meter is almost exactly 1 step, 1 km is how far you can walk in 10 minutes.

I don't think one system is better than another in everyday usage, except the much easier calculations in metric.

> Food stuff is bought in "dekos" (dekagrams).

Where? I've lived my whole life in a metric-using country and I'm fairly sure I have literally never heard of that unit until just now...

Our food here is all in grams (i.e. a 100g packet of chips, 300g steak) or kilograms (1.5 kilo bag of rice).

In Slovenia, for example, food is measured in decagrams.

ajuc's examples are for Poland

From the geek point of view we should really all switch to Planck units of course.

I agree the US should fully adopt the metric system, it makes logical sense.

And Europe should abolish about three dozen major languages that should no longer be in use and adopt English (or perhaps Spanish). Why does Bulgaria need its own language? Or Romania, or Sweden? Why does French still exist? We're talking about efficiencies here, right? What's less efficient than people not being able to easily communicate by sharing a common language.

I always get a kick out of bringing this up, because while it's extraordinarily logical to narrow down dozens of languages to one or a few, people lose their minds about it and regard it as a sacred cultural issue that is to never be touched. Whereas converting to the metric system... well but of course, that only makes sense!

Please describe the sacred cultural issues around retaining imperial units of measure.

I'd be happy to, but it is difficult to understand. For some reason things like changing to metric, in some people's mind, means adapting 'European culture' and is anti-traditionalist. From what I can tell, the same group that holds onto the imperial system is the same group that is upset that cursive writing isn't a mandated subject in schools (how will kids read the constitution) and other such aversion to change.

I prefer Imperial but I'd be willing to switch, provided we also switch to a new spelling and time system.

It's funny the same people that make fun of the Imperial system also cling to bad standards because they are more familiar and have a high switching cost.

The biggest liability of the metric system to me is its system of unit prefixes: this is just a bizarre reimplementation of scientific notation that expresses the most significant quantitative information not as part of the actual quantitative component of its notation, but as an arcane verbal prefix attached to the name of the thing being counted.

What on earth is the advantage of a notation that makes it easy to scale a value by an order of magnitude without having to alter its numeric representation?

This seems to be a much more significant "WTF" of the metric system than the fact that its base units don't seem to have any meaningful anchor in any substantive context.

You get several related units of measurement that each have sane conversion factors. If something goes well beyond centimeters, meters and later kilometers are much nicer to handle. Inches to feet to yards to miles doesn't scale nearly as nicely because of conversion factors of 12, 3 and (I think) 1760 involved there.

And since this property is shared by every unit you have the same conversion factors everywhere. No need to memorise hundreds of units, just a dozen and a pattern. Also when combining units (e.g. N being kg⋅m/s²) the conversion factors stay sane.

It seems like you have only a single base unit of measurement; the rigid powers-of-ten scaling factors prevent any other useful base units from being applied, e.g. there's nothing that approximates a foot in the metric system. So it seems a bit disingenuous to treat a centimeter as a distinct unit when it's really just 1 x 10^-2 meters.

The whole "conversion factors" thing seems like a superfluous gimmick. Why would you start working with one unit, then spontaneously decide to start using a different unit in the same context? But in the unusual circumstance where you would need to switch units, perhaps due to a shift in the scale you're operating at, the metric system still prevents you from using a unit appropriate to the context, and limits you to only scaling a less appropriate unit up or down by a power of ten.

It really is just scientific notation re-implemented in a bizarre and arcane way. With customary units, you can still represent quantities with scientific notation, and use inches, feet, miles, etc. as your base unit as the context demands, but you've still got a variety of base units to choose from, each more optimal than the others when operating its appropriate context.

I remember listening to this podcast a while back: http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/why-isnt-the-u-s-...

I remember listening to that podcast and being quite annoyed by it. One of the protagonist's who was obviously in favour of sticking with imperial units kept smugly saying the US is already metricated. Comes across disingenuous as best.

The US rarely uses metric in it's popular culture. Weather reports are in Fahrenheit, movies almost always use miles and pounds. By any measure of cultural output that they export that I've seen (and Australia is a huge consumer of US popular culture) they do not use metric.

Temperature is a weird one, and shows the difference between 'metric' and 'SI unit'. Fahrenheit is neither, and for me is far from intuitive. Celsius is a metric unit, but it's not the SI unit, which is Kelvin.

Celsius certainly makes more sense on the human scale than the other two - the general public is familiar with 'water freezes' and 'water boils' - but it's a neat example of a metric unit not being the SI unit.

>> The Mars Climate Orbiter disintegrated due to an error introduced because its software used metric measures, while its ground crew used pound-force units.

There was an incident in 1983 where Air Canada Flight 143 ran out of fuel at 41,000 feet (12,500m) altitude [1] about half way through its flight. An investigation revealed that one of the cause was a conversion error between metric and non-metric units for the fuel loading calculation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider

The beauty of the old system was that it mapped onto the everyday experience of farmers. I am sure hundredweights and furlongs and so forth all made lots of sense. But units have to cross cultures and times — the only intuitive units left to boast about are the foot and the yard, which are 30cm and roughly a meter. Indeed, we are probably taller now than when the yard was defined to the extent that the meter is probably closer to an intuitive yard than the yard is.

Incidentally, the official definition of an inch is 2.54cm. Now that's intuitive.

Or by Wikipedia: 25.4 millimetres

The things that remain often get 10 ized. we have measuring tape with feet and tenths of feet. Inches are divided into mils (1000th of an inch). So we get base 10 with familiar units of measeure.

I wish the article had touched on temperature systems; I feel like Celsius is metric at its weakest. Farenheit has beautiful bands:

<0: So cold it's off the scales

0's: So cold you have trouble doing anything and just want to warm up immediately

10's: Wear a ski jacket with hat and scarf and gloves

20's: Wear a ski jacket and hat

30's: Wear a ski jacket but leave it open

40's: Wear a wool overcoat

50's: Wear a heavy jacket

60's: Wear a light jacket

70's: Leave the jacket home

80's: Wear shorts

90's: So hot you have trouble doing anything and just want to cool down immediately

100+: So hot it's off the scales

Anything feels right when you are used to it, for the rest of the world Celsius feels right, you could say it's because you know anything starting by "minus" is cold as well as any single integer (0-9). Some sort of familiarity-bias.

Well, to a non-American like myself the Fahrenheit scale feels weird and arbitrary (and yes, I understand the "human scale" argument, just don't buy it") while the Celsius scale makes sense.

Or is it just more familiar? We all like what we're accustomed to. Is there some reason Celsius 'makes sense'? Why does it make sense that 22 is comfortable but 40 is miserably hot? It doesn't make any more sense than 72 and 100.

Well its rather easy to make your own thermometer using the Celsius scale. Put quicksilver in a small glass tube and put it outside. When water starts to freeze mark the current position with 0. Drop it in boiling water and mark it with 100. Evenly distribute now 98 markings between the two existing ones and voila you have just made your own thermometer :)

Evenly distributing 98 markings is hard. Evenly distributing 64 is easy -- just halve the range six times. That's why the distance from freezing water to body temperature is 64 Fahrenheit degrees.

I don't think its advisable to use my self-made quicksilver thermometer for any kind of body temperature measurement.

Which makes no difference because you're eyeballing it to start with. You can just as easily divide the 0-100 range in half a bunch of times. Your thermometer is not achieving <1 degree accuracy.

Of course if you have a tool to accurately measure halves, then you can also measure any other division you care to use.

Except...

Freezing point of water: 32°F Average human body temperature (oral): 98.2°F

So that's 66.2°F, not 64°F.

Those two temperatures were the original reference points for the Fahrenheit scale, and body temperature was defined as 96°.

The current definition is relative to the melting point of ice (32°F), and the boiling point of water at standard atmospheric pressure (212°F, which is exactly 180°F higher than the freezing point). Except now body temperature is 98.2°F instead of 96°.

If you want a thermometer calibrated in Fahrenheit, you have exactly the same problem as you do with Celsius. You just have to put 178 markings between the two reference points, rather than 98.

0°C - water turns into ice 100°C - water boils and turns into steam

-30°C and below - very cold weather +30°C and above - very hot weather

But the freeze/boil numbers are arbitrary as well only being true at sea-level. Where I live in Colorado, we're 1 mile (cough, 1.6 km) above sea level meaning those formulas are meaningless.

They aren't meaningless. Water boils at 95 C at your altitude - effectively the same temperature for all "common" usages. E.g. you'd still better not stick your hand into boiling water.

A <5% error for the zone that >99% of humans inhabit seems pretty practical to me. The freezing point is effectively identical.

iirc, water boils at 95C is around 5000m altitude, no one lives normally there - even La Paz is less than 4000.

All depends what you are used to - I would say 15C or so is "comfortably warm", 22C is definitely "warm" and 40C is utterly miserable with no wind but really nice with a breeze and in the shade....

People generally start sunbathing, wearing T-shirts and flip-flops, when the temperature goes above 10C here...

The familiar part has changed for Canadians.

I grew up during the transition period I was too young to know Fahrenheit, I had just entered school when the switch was occurring.

My parents are pretty well used to Celsius now but still may occasionally use Fahrenheit such as some electronic device that allows F or C they choose F.

It's still a but messed up though since Canada borders the US. The old joke being weather reports that show the border with the US say Detroit shown as 90 and Windsor as 32 "See Marge as soon as you cross the border into Canada it goes dow to 32!"

But still you get people of all ages saying things like "300km/h wow that's nearly 200 mph" or "You weigh 70kg what's that like 150 pounds?". It's more due to history and the influence of the US on our culture, I bet more french speaking areas like Quebec, northern NB don't do that but who knows maybe they do.

I was born and raised in Florida. I now live in Sweden. Because of experience, I understand C pretty well between -15 and +10, and between +80 and +100 (Swedish sauna temperatures).

Between +20 and +50 I'm still more comfortable with 70F-120F. I also spent some time in Illinois, where I learned to understand the subzero range from -15F to 0F.

At LOX temperatures of 90K and below, I'm most comfortable in Kelvin. ;)

Could you say a bit more about why you feel it makes sense, perhaps with a chart like the one I wrote up?

I'll bite (and I grew up in one of the colder parts of Canada, so I'd call 0F a cold but not unreasonable winter day).

-30: Avoid going outside, if you do don't leave any exposed skin

-20: A cold winter day: toque, scarf, mittens, winter coat and boots are must have

-10: An average winter day: same load-out as above, but you'll be more comfortable

0: A mild winter day: snow possible, you may leave your winter jacket open, or skip the scarf

10: Early spring or late fall: you might be able to get away with a light jacket, but I'd leave that until 15

15: Long pants and light jacket

20: Leave the jacket home, maybe wear shorts or a t-shirt

25: Comfortable summer weather: shorts and t-shirt

30: Annoyingly hot summer weather, good for swimming

35 or higher: hole up somewhere with AC

Not bad.

LOL. I'm in Western Australia:

<10: Bloody cold, avoid going outside if possible. Rug up if you do.

15: Winter. Probably rain and wind.

20: Cool Autumn / Spring, you might need a jumper outside.

25: Vaguely warmish, t-shirt weather.

30: Getting warm, wear shorts and t-shirt.

35: Beach weather, avoid going outside for too long if you're in office attire and don't want sweat patches.

40+: Hot beach weather, stay out of the sun (or in the water) in the middle of the day.

Interesting...I'm in the UK, for me 24°C with a light breeze makes for a perfect Summer's day: warm enough to walk around without sweating buckets. 30°C is uncomfortably hot. I guess it's all relative to what you're used to (and what you're doing e.g. day at the beach or walking in the city).

Well, people don't for the most part look forward to 40 degree days - this is warmer than body temperature, so you have to engage in some form of cooling. Going to the beach is one form of cooling :) Avoid being outside, drink lots of fluids, AC if you can, anything, really. Construction workers generally stop work around 36, from memory. Conversely, people here will tell stories about the crazy British neighbour who is out doing the gardening in a singlet when it's only 10 degrees.

Here in Melbourne we'll have several 40-degree days each summer, and the only large city with more that I'm aware of is Phoenix. There are heaps of large cities that are warmer in general, but they don't peak quite as high. Record is 46.2, set a few years ago. Not a pleasant day, especially since it was after a few similar days...

Victoria, Australia here. About the same, except we can get three or four of those all in the one day. (The running joke is that if you don’t like the weather in Melbourne, wait.)

I’ve lived in both the low and highlands of Papua New Guinea and they have two types of weather: dry and wet. In the lowlands you do not go outside without wearing a hat as the sun will actively try and kill you. When a PNG friend visited us in Melbourne, it was a 30°C day, we were in shorts and t-shirts, he was in jeans and wearing a parka to keep warm.

Canadian here as well I see some people in shorts at 10C maybe even at 0C mostly "dudes" in their 20s and late teens. I even see bigger (fatter) guys in shorts in the middle of winter now it seems to be a thing.

After a cold winter 0C even -10C feels warm especially if there isn't any wind.

I don't know anyone who zips up their jacket unless it's -15C or -10C and windy.

It's the wind that gets you, -20C is nothing if there isn't any wind.

But really it also depends a lot on perspective since 10C in the spring feels very warm but 10C in the fall feels very cold. Maybe a lot of the descriptions depend on year round average temperatures, I can image people in southern California with a smaller temperature range would not feel as much of a difference as a Canadian would.

As a Brit:

-20: Inside a food freezer.

-10: Ski trousers weather. Doesn't happen where I live.

-5: There'll be snow, or at least frost. Hat & gloves weather. Happens one or two days a year.

0: Freezing, usefully. Full-length coat.

5: Pretty cold - not unusual for a winter day. Fridge temperature. Don't forget your jacket.

10: A warmer winter day, or typical early spring.

15: Spring/Autumn; temperature where I'd stop bothering with a jacket.

20: "room temperature" for science (though many actual rooms are a degree or two higher than this). Comfortable.

25: A sunny summer's day. Pleasantly warm.

30: Starting to get towards uncomfortably hot. Notwithstanding this year, I'd only expect a few days this warm in a year.

35: Doesn't happen where I live. You want to be in the pool or somewhere with AC when it's this hot.

40: On a person, serious fever.

60-70: Nice for a sauna. Warm drink (e.g. tea)

That's pretty much it, except 90C sauna is quite decent.

Hmm, I have the same intuitive feeling with Celsius. I guess it depend on which temperature system you grew up with.

As I suggested on a parallel reply, could you say a bit more about why you feel it makes sense, perhaps with a chart like the one I wrote up?

Well, I think it's just the same as you except 0 is the freezing point and not what seems like an an arbitrary 32 Farenheit for us.

All natural extremes fit within +100 and -100 beautifully.

110 - sauna is too hot

100 - water boils in one atmosphere

50 - desert hot (record is 56.7 °C (134.1 °F) Death Valley, California, U.S.A. 10 July 1913)

30 - hot (for a finn)

25 - nice hot

20 - use more clothes below this

0 - water freezes, ice forms on roads, lakes etc.

-10 - cold but OK with good clothes

-20 - this starts to be so cold were you need to prepare yourself well if you want to spend more than an hour outside. Temperature inside freezer.

-30 - extreme colds start. You don't enjoy this even when prepared and using good clothes.

-40 - Winter War conditions

-50 - record breaking extremes

−89.2 °C (−128.6 °F) Vostok Station 21 July 1983

-110 Kriotherapy room for treating joint inflammation

F was designed for humans, while C is apparently designed for water. Half of your list talks about what water does, or are fairly meaningless numbers to humans. While pretty much every number on the GPs list is relevant to humans. That is the big difference. In day to day life, the average human doesn't really need to know what temp water changes state. They want to know how comfortable they will be.

I take it that you never tasted a cucumber partly frozen because your fridge went a bit overzealous...

We (and most things we eat, and all that white shitty stuff that blocks your commute in a winter day) are made mostly of water. The difference between -1C and 1C can be pretty significant, unlike the difference between -1F (fucking cold) and 1F (duh, fucking cold).

* Well, of course all of this is silly pissing match between groups of people who grew up with their favorite measure system, but anyway...

Humans are 80% Water.

This pretty good. I'd put in 40, so hot you forget it gets this hot (for northern europeans).

i should move to northern europe :\

40 (as a max) was a not overly bad summer day

For the British:

100 - Boiling water, cuppa tea

50 - Lawrence of Arabia

25 - The Great British Summer! Won't last, anyway

12.5 - Wear a jumper

6.25 - Wear a parka

0 - water freezes

-6.25 - Heathrow shuts down

-12.5 - Daily Mail reports weather causes cancer

-25 - Coldest reported weather in the UK

-50 - "I am just going outside and may be some time"

Hmm, I just learned that below 10 degrees C it's cold, 20 is ok and 30 is hot. 0 is water freezing, 100 is water boiling.

Maybe I'm missing out on something but I never felt the need for a chart.

From where I live, in C:

50 Summer time

40 Average hot day

30 Average cool day

20 WTF is going on? Did hell freeze over?

It never goes below twenty.

50C summer time???

Where do you live? The sahara desert?

BTW you seem to have a greek name but you definitely don't live in Greece! We do have some hot weather here, but definitely not in the range you described.

You're obviously not from Minnesota. 50s is shorts and a t shirt weather.

Fahrenheit has a couple nice properties. One is that he picked two conveniently available reference points — melting ice and body temperature — and put them 2⁶ degrees apart, which made it practical to label thermometers by bisection.

The other is that (after a very slight adjustment) freezing and boiling water are 180° apart, which is a highly composite number.

Body temperature isn't constant. Even excluding abnormal cases (eg fever), normal body temperature not only is within a range, but even this range depends on the body part you use for your readings.

Instead with Celsius at 0°C water freezes, at 100°C water boils. Thus Celsius makes more sense because the main range (0-100) covers both very cold and very hot temperatures from a human perspective.

Furthemore it has a straightforward conversion to Kelvin.

Consider, in 1725, reliably dividing a measured distance into 100 segments. Repeated bisection is practical.

I thought the purpose of the OP was to justify using Fahrenheit in 2014, not in 1725. :)

But even in 1725 I think that people who could build a thermometer would probably be able to grade it properly.

As humans we built the Antikythera some 2500 years ago, and I'm supposed to believe dividing something in 100 parts in 1725 was hard?

I find that extremely difficult to believe without some sort of external verification. Consider that the Rømer scale from 1701 had 60 degrees between freezing brine and the boiling point of water.

Any technology which can find 60 divisions can find 100 divisions.

For that matter, Pierre Vernier invented his calipers nearly a century earlier, and William Gascoigne the micrometer in the mid-1600s, so I doubt that 100 divisions was a hard thing by 1725.

(To be certain, 64 divisions is easier than 100, but I believe it was reliably possible to do the latter in the early 1700s.)

Move to a different climate and your mapping may change a lot. 30 degrees centigrade below zero can feel cozier than 10 degrees above, if the latter comes with rain and wind gales, and 30 degrees above can feel hotter than 40 degrees above if the former comes with high humidity.

I know people who lived in Siberia, but complain about the cold weather in the Netherlands at times when it isn't even freezing.

Celsius...

0: Freezing point of water

100: Boiling point of water

A lot more precise than the rationale you proposed.

> 100: Boiling point of water

Nope! Boiling point of water at 760 Torr. In contrast, Fahrenheit uses a frigorific 1:1:1 mixture of water, ice and ammonium chloride as the second reference point, which does not depend on ambient pressure.

I stand corrected.

But which conversely no one in day to day life ever uses or is likely to come across, whereas the vast majority of the world's population still lives as close as it can to sealevel.

>1:1:1 mixture of water, ice and ammonium chloride

mmm, my proffered drink! I always keep one handy in the kitchen.

Celsius is metric at its weakest only in the sense that Fahrenheit is the imperial system at its not-worst. Everyday temperatures don't vary enough to create the need for multiple units, like what happened with distances, so there's not random conversion factors strewn around. You never care about millidegrees, and you never see kilodegrees.

Incidentally, the same "beautiful bands" appear in Celsius. They're just separated by 5s instead of 10s. It's actually kind of hard to make a temperature scale that's bad for everyday usage, assuming you put zero between or near freezing vs boiling.

Fahrenheit is absolutely bizarre outside US, scaling is so arbitrary it's not funny.

Could you explain what you mean? I think my comment does a pretty good job of demonstrating that the scalig is nicely suited to the temperatures a human being experiences over the course of each year.

If you had to use decimals in Celsius for everyday measurements then you might have a point, but since you generally don't it really doesn't make a difference.

There's easily enough precision in the Celsius scale for everyday measurements, so it all comes down to what you're used to.

The main problem comes with negative Celsius temperature (basically 32F) as freezing point is quite important traffic wise. Driving on ice/snow is quite a change and basically occurs around 33F-32F, in Celsius it that's zero, much easier to remember.

Then you have 100F which is supposed to be the normal body temperature, but actually it means having fever.

There is only one case you might wish to use a tenth of Celsius in every day life and that's reporting body temperature around 37C-39C.

Like I've said, scaling is weird, it doesn't make much sense when firstly introduced. I have a friend who graduated MIT (PhD in aerospace engineering), living in the US for over 10 years and he is comfortable doing calculations and every day estimations in imperial units, except for temperature.

It seems to me that the most common general use of these units is to describe ambient outdoor temperatures, and while I admit that I haven't traveled widely, I'd be astonished to discover that most countries outside the US have physical environments more reminiscent of, say, Mercury or Venus, than what we in the US parochially consider to be Earth's standard range of atmospheric temperatures.

I suppose that's why I consider Fahrenheit to be a very appropriate scale - since it centers nicely on the range of temperatures one might actually experience on Earth, naively assuming that America is representative of the rest of the planet - and isn't quite so arbitrary as one indexed to the temperature of boiling water, a phenomenon which a person in America - and, presumptuously, the rest of the Earth - isn't likely to encounter without having intentionally induced it.

But perhaps -15 and 40 really are more sensible positions for roughly opposite extremes, and we really are the odd ones for using 0 and 100.

As a guy with a chem degree, I prefer Metric in the lab, and Imperial (US) in the kitchen or workshop. It isn't really that hard to shift gears/units for your task.

Even better is when you learn to cook or build without measurement, just transferring sizes directly. See James Krenov on building a cabinet.

If we went metric on the interstates, exit 880 on Interstate 10 in Texas (at the Louisiana state line) would retain it's status as the highest numbered exit in North America. Only it'd be exit 1408.

(exits are generally numbered by their mile (err, kilometer..) marker in the US, not consecutively)

Not really true. In New England and most of the NE, exits are numbered consecutively, or at least started that way until ABCs got added in and others got removed.

So switching to metric would give the various DOTs in those states the opportunity to correct their numbering. They'd have fewer A,B,C exits as well, since kilometers are smaller and would increase the chance of the exit location falling nearer to a milepost.

880 looks like a trap to keep you in Texas :)

https://www.google.com/maps/@30.1199335,-93.7106707,1513m/da...

I've wanted the USA to finish going over to the metric system for about as long as I can remember. It annoys the heck out of me that I have to have two sets of tools at hand, have to determine if fasteners are one or the other (both in their threading and drive mechanism), etc.

Even worse for cities that are laid out on a mile by mile grid, like Phoenix. Yikes.

Sort of related: Discussion of the Time Zone article mentioned: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8138200

A recent issue of Nature featured a 100 years ago in Nature clip that showed the USA thought it would be too hard to switch to the Metric system in 1914. 100 years and counting.

In an age where everyone carries a computer in their pocket, the metric system's only advantage (that it makes converting units easier) is irrelevant.

Conversions being easier is nice, but the main advantage of the metric system is that it is a set of properly standardised units that the rest of the world uses...

Having a computer in your pocket is never going to change that.

We should all use the metric system and UTC time.

UTC time would make it convenient for internet sites and international travel but would suck for things like talking/writing about daily activities, schedules, times of the day. Now "a jog at 5:30am was pleasant experience because there was barely a soul on the streets" wouldn't allow you to imagine what the experience was (was it before sunrise or maybe late evening, or maybe middle of the night?).

It drives me crazy that people think base 10 systems are so great. The choice of base 10 is so deeply irritating to me. Divisions of 60 are fantastic, obviously, and we all benefit from being able to divide an hour in to 5ths, 6ths ... Meanwhile splitting a check three ways is likely to always be uneven.

Base 12 or 60 end up being more precise in every day life, and i wish whoever thought up the metric system had been smart enough to realize that.

As has been pointed out elsewhere, the 95% of the planet that uses metric systems (including dollars and cents - a decidedly metric-friendly currency) has not ended up starving due to an inability to split a food bill by the number of people at the table.

Of course, you're right that if you and 59 of your closest friends were out for dinner, it'd be easier if currencies were based upon divisions of 60, that certainly makes some sense.

Maybe whoever thought up the metric system was smart in ways that you don't yet fully appreciate?

When I read t he Tommy Lee dick joke I had to check to see how old this was. Who still makes Tommy Lee jokes?

Even though I'm an ex-physicist where nearly everything was done in metric, I'm decidedly anti-metric. Most of the metric system has no empathy for the everyday life of humans and is better suited for making scientific equations easier. It is roughly the equivalent of choosing esperanto for consistency.

I grew up in a metric country. The metric system is totally fine for everyday use. We know that 1.8m is tall, that anything below 5 celsius is cold, and that 100kg is heavy.

The only downside is that some stats are only published in imperial units - fuel efficiency being the worst offender.

Except when you're Dutch and male, then 1.8m is not so tall.

It really isn't the point that you can learn those things. People can also learn phone numbers and SSNs but we still use names. Wouldn't everything be much easier if we just referred to each other by our unique number? Addresses are also superfluous, just lat+lon with a unit # should be sufficient. Imperial measurements and their now American counterparts are based on human experience rather than something convenient with which to do calculations. Though the carpenters make a good case for 12in since it is so easily divided into 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/6ths which are used often in construction. Even 1/5ths and 1/8ths go to only 1 decimal place. Metric is convenient for calculation and computing and not much more. Otherwise it is just a tradeoff you are making for a measurement system that wasn't designed around everyday life.

Take it from someone who grew up in a metric country - it makes absolutely no difference in everyday use. You are used to imperial units, so they make more sense to you. I'm not, so they feel weird, complicated and completely arbitrary. Typically I have to mentally convert to a metric measurement to have any intuition of how big or heavy something is.

In everyday use, I don't care if something is one and 3/5ths of some part of somebody's finger - I'm used to metric so it looks about 4 centimetres...

I'm not a builder, but I've never once heard any hint from my friends in construction that using millimetres has ever been a problem for them in their work, as they are used to it and the construction industry in every other country except the US is geared towards metric...

In my country our fuel efficiency units are litres per 100 kilometres.

And also, where I live 5 celsius is flipping freezing. Under 15 is cold!

I am really glad that a second wasn't broken further into 72 pieces.

In some fields (cinematography) it gets broken into 29.9 pieces...

Sumerian base 60 and kumbaya y'all!

> Likewise, employer-provided health insurance was a historical accident

As an European, a stance like that is near to instant execution.

What are you talking about? In some places, health care is a matter between you and the government.

The US has an odd system of subsidized employer-provided health insurance. It covers most workers, except at the low end of jobs. The government, meanwhile, provides direct coverage of the very old and the very poor.

The people who really get screwed in the US system are the ones in crappy jobs, who aren't poor enough that the government steps in directly, but don't make enough that it's worthwhile for their employers to take advantage of the subsidies of employer-provided insurance.

Or anyone who is self-employed or own their own business.

As I understand it, employer-provided health insurance was first introduced by Ernst Abbe through his oversight of the Carl Zeiss company, in Germany.

Abbe is one of my favorite unsung tech heroes.

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