Why Won’t America Go Metric?
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I would argue that being limited to a single unit system is like being limited to a single language. In principle, no one needs more than one but in practice the differences in expressiveness for different purposes are interesting and useful. These differences in expressiveness are connected to the continued existence of different systems.
America is big enough and is sufficiently independent of trade in its economy (most of its stupendous production is also internally consumed) that the cost of not transitioning to metric is marginal. I understand why metric is a good system but simultaneously understand why the benefit of metric is dubious for the average American. Remember, American units are defined in terms of metric units; it is a preference, an American can precisely convert to metric at any time if they deem it useful. But they don't because it serves little purpose.
Basically, like their language, Americans occupy a big enough economic sphere that they get to define their standards. An enormous number of global standards are American in origin as it is. I don't sweat the lack of metric even though I use it routinely. Once you become familiar with enough unit and arithmetic systems, you quickly learn that they all suck in some context.
It is pointless to turn these things into religions.
After considerable reflection, I have come to the view that in fact the differences are not interesing and not useful. What is useful though is consistency and ease of application (which the metric system has) and familiarity (which just depends on the circumstances).
I work in the oil and gas industry, and I had to learn to think in terms of bizarre units like stcf/bbl, or pounds per gallon. In the end, the only driver was that once you digest enough information, you can compare things on a like-for-like basis... if you know the horsepower ratings of 10 car models, it is more immediately useful to be given the horsepower of the car you consider buying rather than its power output in kW.
But in the end I see no downsides, only upsides, if the entire industry switched to the metric system.
stcf/bbl (standard cubic feet per barrel) by the way is a customary measure of the amount of gas dissolved in the oil. After 25 years in the industry, I know for example that 1000 stcf/bbl represents a gassy oil that will take some effort to stabilise, and 100 stcf/bbl is a relatively dead crude... so inormation about new crudes is useful to me in this form. But - what a weird unit it is! The information could much better be provided as a dimensionless ratio, eg gas-to-oil ratio of 200 for gassy oil would be intuitive and better suited to use in further calculations, and once you've seen enough data expressed in this way, the familiarity issue is taken care of.
I invite you to provide counterexamples, where the customary unit has an inherent advantage (familiarity does not count). I can't think of any.
Typographic units are non-metric and metric units are inconvenient in typography, because millimeters are too big for character sizes and too small for page units and centimeters are both too big and too small at the same time.
French (?) shoe sizes are numbered like 38, 39, 40, 41, etc. and the difference between these sizes are 2/3 cm, because it's a practical difference to mass-produce different shoe sizes. It's not metric, obviously.
Parsecs are not metric. Heck, light years are not metric; and look at how rich the unit is, it tells you a lot about the distance. Try to express the distance to Alpha Centauri in metric units and comprehend it.
For example, since failure rates in safety engineering are usually pretty small and nobody wants to pronounce "something times ten to the minus eight" or similar, the term "fit" was invented to stand for 10^-9.
(Although I admit that "failure in time" is a stupid name for a dimensionless constant)
Similarly you could invent a "galactic length" or however you'd like to call it.
Meters, however, have a different story; the meter was invented by some French scientist about the time they were changing everything after the revolution, including month names; somehow month names reverted back to normal, but meters stayed. The meter was initially defined as 1/40,000,000 of the length of a meridian. Here only the length of the meridian is natural to some extent, although I fail to see how it is relevant to what is normally measured with meters, and the constant is completely artificial.
Next would be quintillion, sextillion, septillion, nonillion, decilion, undecilion, duodecillion, tredecillion...um...quaterdecillion(sp?)
Granted, I had to write it out to convert (or I could have sat and derived the rule--divide by three and subtract two to get the prefix). And I may be an exception, having spent a brief bit of my childhood interested in names for very large number. :-)
But it's pretty easy to know that 10^15 is bigger than 10^10. 10^5 times bigger. Ideally, we'd get sufficiently familiar with scientific notation to immediately understand that the difference between 9 lightyears and 9 000 lightyears is the same as between 10^12 meters and 10^15 meters.
I don't hold any illusions that people do have that fully internalized, of course. I don't.
What I'm trying to say is that every sufficiently different field of human interest has some kind of units natural to this field. The metric system claims to be universal, but it's like one size fits all, but nobody looks their best. I can measure a backyard in millimeters, but why would I need it? I don't need this kind of precision there. A yard is a more natural scale because it's about the size of a step and this is about the right unit for what I do in the backyard. And inside the house I usually need a finer resolution, so I use feet instead of yards. If I build something on a smaller scale, I switch to inches; and so on. Every field has its best unit and the relationship between them is organic and is not always the fixed 1:10 as with metric.
No they are not. Measuring everything on the scale to a gram yields much better and consistent results than wondering if your dish will fail because some inexpedient was more tightly packed or if your spoons are the same spoons that someone else had.
And while a person could argue that ounce vs gram is moot, it is total nightmare for volume given stuff on dry ingredients.
Yet for part-time cooks as most of us are weighting is impractical: we don't have scales, and even if we do the amounts are usually too small. And stability is not necessary the goal :) For home cooks the usual task is to scale a recipe up or down and with cooking units the math is much simpler. Another thing about cooking units is that the number of different units helps to convey that engineering tolerance I've mentioned; the smaller the unit, the less the tolerance. When everything is expressed in one unit, you need to specify the tolerance explicitly.
Of course, nowadays the scales are very smart and a pleasure to use. But here's the thing: with smart equipment we don't need to bother about being metric. It's not a problem for smart scales to display the weight in any unit imaginable. I think there must be culinary apps that convert between weight- and volume-based units to suit everyone's tastes and they're either free or cost less than $5. The proponents of metric system claim it's simple. Maybe, but it's a simplicity of a typewriter compared with a modern typesetting program. Why would anyone with a smartphone care about this kind of simplicity?
For example, there's ISO 216 standard for paper sizes: A0, A1, A2, etc. The sizes form an interesting progression: each size is exactly 1/2 of the larger size. But how did they select the 1st size in the row, the A0? It's pretty interesting: the A0 size is exactly 1 square meter. I bet the designers of the standard though it would be be a feature, because the users (e.g. printers) will be able to use this fact to simplify their calculations; e.g. you need to print 1000 A4, you know it's 1/16 of A0 and the paper is 100g/sq.m., and you go from there. But I don't believe anyone does this kind of math nowadays; everyone has computers and printer jobs have much more variations in paper sizes and densities for this "simple" rule to be of practical use.
It really depends on the recipe. Some cookbooks, for example, recommend that measurements be as accurate as possible for baking. However, I doubt the majority of the worlds population use scales to measure ingredients when they cook. In fact, great cuisines from around the world have developed perfectly well without the use of scales for measuring ingredients. Can you honestly say 250g of chopped carrots is preferable to two medium-sized carrots, chopped?
The distance to Alpha Centauri is so mind-bogglingly huge that the human mind can not comprehend it. This has to do with the scale of things, and has absolutely nothing to do with the unit.
I can define the distance to Alpha Centauri to be 1 Alce. 1 is a really nice number that you can grasp, but it still helps you no further in understanding that distance.
The only one I can think of is the nautical mile.
The nominal value of metric is that it is easy for back-of-the-envelope arithmetic. That is only true for abstract math because humans learn base-10 counting. There are many kinds of engineering systems, like chemical reaction kinetics or computer science, where base-10 counting systems have minimal relevance to back-of-the-envelope computation.
I actually have designed a lot of physics-based representation software. It does not operate on metric models of reality even though it is translatable to metric units and presented that way to the end user for both input and output. In fact, a lot of sophisticated implementations represent all values as infinite intervals over the domain of integers with a strong preference for binary treatment because it is efficient. The presentation unit is almost irrelevant. Same with chemistry, which has its own archaic unit systems.
Metric has a lot of practical advantages and disadvantages, depending on the use case. They are all trivial in real engineering scenarios.
[Disclosure: US citizen here] While this is true, I don't think it's helpful to attach American economic/cultural dominance to the metric debate (at least wrt advocacy), because US and Imperial measurements and standards are almost identical. But that "almost" is an important qualifier. The root system they both share derives from the Middle Ages. Here's a helpful explanation of the differences:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_imperial_and_...
In languages, it is both a way of communication and also a way of thinking, to say the least. Mandarin Chinese is my native language. My English is just ok, but it already gives me a new way of thinking, much more than a different perspective.
Also, there are many words and phrases in one language that you can't find a matched translation in another language, even between languages that are closely related, like English and German.
Different unit systems, on the other hand, can be converted to and from each other without losing anything. There could be some affinity attached to a system one grew up with. It is incomparable to languages, though.
This really depends what you’re trying to do. Learning electrodynamics is a lot easier if you use cgs–Gaussian units instead of SI units, cf. http://bohr.physics.berkeley.edu/classes/221/1112/notes/emun...
It only affects all its neighbors and trade partners.
It has a very real cost, but it's something you pass to others, just an externality with no lines in your own ledger.
Instead, it's all about unit conversion. One liter of water weighs one kilogram and is a one decimeter cubmore room degrees is where water freezes, and 100 degrees is where it boils. This makes water the universal conversion constant, which makes it easy to compare different units (eg weights and volumes).
Also, it's trivial to convert meters to millimeters and kilometers. But this happens surprisingly seldom in practice compared to converting volumes to weights or lenghts.
I've seen that several times in the thread, but it's like asking what is the most intuitive size of "a piece" of string: Depends where you're born and which unit system you've used.
> and 100 degrees where it boils
I once thought that 0 and 100 degrees C were defined as the temperature of water freezing and boiling, and 1Pa would be defined accordingly, but nope. Boiling can happen at 98.5 degrees under ncpt.
Before the metric system was created, the US, which had recently won independence, was put in the position of selecting a standard system of weights and measures. Jefferson suggested a decimal system based off the seconds pendulum at 45° latitude. He did this in coordination with scientists in France with the direct goal of achieving a universal standard. Before congress could adopt this system, the French modified their standard:
Although French scientists working on a decimal system had originally supported using the seconds pendulum as a scientific basis, and Jefferson had deliberately matched his seconds pendulum proposal to the French one, based on a measurement at the latitude of Paris, the French decided to use the length of a meridian of the Earth instead of a seconds pendulum. This and other developments changed what had promised to be an internationally developed system into a strictly French project. Jefferson wrote, "The element of measure adopted by the National Assembly excludes, ipso facto, every nation on earth from a communion of measurement with them."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_for_Establishing_Uniformit...
As a result the US wound up passing on Jefferson's system and eventually settling on US "customary" units.
The real benefit of adopting the metric system is to have a consistent, widespread system of units. The United States has had this for over 200 years and most sectors of the economy have been isolated enough from Europe and the rest of the world where adopting metric has not been worth it. Industries that are increasingly global (automotive, electronics, etc) have already effectively adopted metric.
I wish that the French had gone all of the way to a duodecimal system, and a base 12 measurement system. Most of the arguments for the Imperial system surround the fact that in convenient places you can divide things in half or thirds. And a base 12 time system could have been compelling enough to replace the Babylonian base 60 system that we are stuck with. The one that, even in the metric system makes it hard to convert from meters/second to km/hour.
Or maybe Kodak’s 4 x 7 x 13 + {1 or 2} system would be fine, since we don’t too often need to do complicated artithmetic computations in terms of numbers of days.
Our ancestors were not idiots.
The duodecimal times table is actually easier to memorize than the decimal one because while it is 44% bigger, there are many easy patterns.
While we’re at it, we should probably replace the written numeral graphs with ones that are easy to write a bit more quickly and as difficult to confuse (either for one another, or for alphabet graphs) as we can manage, and change the pronunciation such that all of the basic numerals are one syllable, and regularize and simplify pronunciations of multi-digit numerals. The Chinese have a big leg up on English/Spanish/French/... speakers when it comes to basic arithmetic simply by virtue of their number pronunciation which is regular and fast.
- Is the metric system superior to the American (bastard) imperial system ?
- Is it worth the switch ?
There are a lot of other accidental situations out there that are (perceived to be) too costly to eradicate. For example, in Europe (not the UK) we drive on the right hand side while yielding the right of way to the right as well. For safety reasons, it would have been better to switch on of the two to the left. Will it happen? probably not.
Actually, cost might even be irrelevant: The Chinese still use chop-sticks while a fork is clearly more practical.
The counter argument to this is always: but 90% of Swedish people also speak English. Ok, so what's the point of maintaining Swedish then? It's like arguing it'd be ok for the US to keep / use / teach both metric and imperial - in reality there is no good reason for that, it would be backwards.
For some types of food and dining arrangements, ditching the silverware/individual plates and using a piece of flat bread or a handful of rice to pick up the food (as people do in South Asia, many parts of Africa, and parts of Latin America) is more effective.
Still other types of food is best eaten with hands alone (e.g. sushi, sandwiches, pizza [whatever Europeans might tell you]).
To call the fork “clearly more practical” betrays ignorance and lack of imagination about the broader world.
This goes well beyond the metric system. In many ways the US is extremely old-fashioned in the eyes of other Westerners, clinging to customs most of us have abandoned many decades ago. Unless there is a clear economic advantage in it, the US is strongly resistant to change for fear of diluting its still relatively young and shallow identity.
On typical form of American deflection is coming up with elaborate explanations why what works for other countries won't work for America. Sometimes these exceptionalist arguments are not entirely untrue (the US is an exceptional nation in many ways), but they become really transparent when they try to argue why other countries are different. (Most of those arguments just show a willful cultural ignorance, especially remarkable when coming from well-educated and well-traveled Americans.)
No, for the US there is no compelling economic reason to go metric. But that's not the reason why it doesn't, that's just the rationalization du jour. Any other country would not be afraid to adopt the simple convenience of joining the rest of world in a single standard.
For example Europe clings to one of the most absurd customs of all: large numbers of unnecessary languages. Instead of standardizing, countries in Europe go out of their way to preserve extreme inefficiency in communication. So there's Europe, not a young world, desperately clinging to languages to hold on to tradition and supposedly culture.
If it's important to standardize measurement, it must be dramatically more important to standardize on language.
Why does Europe have three dozen major languages in use? Half of Europe shares no common language, with only 50% of people there speaking English. The only thing that would make sense, is to standardize on English, Spanish or perhaps Mandarin (it doesn't make as much sense as the other two for Europe).
I see non-stop talk about how the US should adopt the metric system, and I completely agree because it makes logical sense. And Europe should abandon all of their languages and adopt English - let's see which happens first.
Also almost the entire world uses metric, it would really suck if everyone in the entire world spoke English except for the country you grew up in.
It'd be like arguing the US is standardizing on metric, while still commonly using imperial, keeping both would be extremely inefficient and pointless. I believe language standardization is more important than measurement standardization, and yet, again, half of Europe has no common language. Somehow language gets treated with special kid gloves, because it's supposedly an important tie to culture. I completely reject that claim as being any more valid than trying to claim imperial is an important tie to culture and thus should be preserved.
Only about 35% of people in France speak English; for Italy it's sub 30%; Spain is only 22% or so. And this isn't fluency, it's the % of people with any meaningful knowledge of English. The rate of moderate fluency would be far lower.
Why do we want a decimal system? The only reason for a base of 10 that I can see is that we have ten fingers. But binary systems map better to a lot of real-world problems.
If baking, are you more likely to take a recipe and halve it or cut it by a factor of ten? In construction, are you more likely to subdivide an area into two, or ten? If you split a stock, are you more likely to split two-to-one or ten-to-one?
The answer, in all those cases, is the former, which is favored by a binary system. Forcing decimal upon us is what leaves us with numbers like 0.125 rather than 1/8.
So rather than move to metric, let's come up with a more consistent base-two system, and then we can all use that. (Just saying that to make a point; not a serious proposal.)
Not sure I follow. We got : 1 yard = 3 feet = 36 inches how is that closer to binary, than say: 1m = 10dm = 100cm = 1000mm
My mathematician friends tell me that for a lot of reasons base twelve (like our clock) would be preferable, but changing makes no sense because the benefits don't come close to the costs...
In any event, like and system of measurement, decimal is ultimately founded on some arbitrary decisions. The argument in favor of decimal is that a common system of measurement has incredible advantages; nothing you mentioned in favor of the imperial system stands up to the benefits to being in lockstep with the rest of civilization.
You are more likely to halve it. How does the "American" system help, if you have to halve say 1 lb of butter and 1 quart of milk? It just means you need to retain in your head a bunch of definitions and inconsistent conversion factors.
In metric countries, however, you routinely see recipes like "140 g cornmeal" or hear people asking for "500 g meat" in a grocery store. Nobody really deals with these things in grams, but still somehow everybody uses grams here. The inventors of the metric system might think there would be decagrams or gectograms, but I've never heard of such units and even my spell checker just underlined them; somehow people using metric system ended up with kilograms and grams, units of 1:1000 ratio.
As a Canadian, I am forced to use some imperial units to this day because of my close proximity to the U.S.. This is in spite of the fact that the empire that created imperial units has now gone totally metric. Way to go U.S.A.. You crazy living anachronistic monarchists. I bet you even think sticking to Imperial units is patriotic somehow too! Freakin' hilarious.
Kinda hard to take seriously from the people that have a reigning monarch as a legacy from that same empire.
Huh? Not according to either of these two links.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_speed_limits_in_the_United...
http://www.ukma.org.uk/speed-limits
Edit: BTW in the USA when I grew up we called them "imperial units", but nowadays the schools are calling them "customary units". Just to add to the confusion. :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units
If I see a road sign that says it's 130 miles to Chicago, then I know how much time it's going to take me to get there. I don't have that "feel" for seeing 209km.
If I see it's 60° (F) out, I know how that feels, I know how to dress for it. I have a very different expectation if I see it's 15° (C).
I personally think that's the biggest barrier to conversion, the learned, in-grained expectation of time or sensation when seeing a measurement expressed.
> Is global uniformity a good thing? Not when it comes to cultural issues, and customary measures are certainly a part of our national culture.
because you can define everything as a part of culture. I don't even want to go into examples (think "ugly things countries did and do").
So, yes, ideally there is no need for anyone to adopt anything, but it's not because it's part of culture.
When you're such a large country, you can afford to do things your own way - others will accommodate you.
When you're such a large country, you can afford to do things your own way
Interestingly I never thought about it that way. I grew up and lived in Europe, and even after many years of living here, when I need more precision I always revert to millimeters instead of fractions of an inch.
Are you sure?? I thought it is based on 2 (pints in a quart), 3 (feet in a yard), 4, 12, 16 etc and there is no rhyme or reason for which is which...
Okay, yeah, there's a lot of messy units outside of this series, and some holes. We have the apothecaries' system, the avoirdupois system, the customary system. A hundredweight is 112 LBs because a Stone is 14 rather than 10. A mile is some number of feet I always have to look up.
[Edit] Disclaimer: I am from a country that went metric a century ago.