How Pirates Of The Caribbean Hijacked America's Metric System (npr.org) 440
If the United States were more like the rest of the world, a McDonald's Quarter Pounder might be known as the McDonald's 113-Grammer, John Henry's 9-pound hammer would be 4.08 kilograms, and any 800-pound gorillas in the room would likely weigh 362 kilos. NPR explores: One reason this country never adopted the metric system might be pirates. Here's what happened: In 1793, the brand new United States of America needed a standard measuring system because the states were using a hodgepodge of systems. "For example, in New York, they were using Dutch systems, and in New England, they were using English systems," says Keith Martin, of the research library at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. This made interstate commerce difficult. The secretary of state at the time was Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson knew about a new French system and thought it was just what America needed. He wrote to his pals in France, and the French sent a scientist named Joseph Dombey off to Jefferson carrying a small copper cylinder with a little handle on top. It was about 3 inches tall and about the same wide. This object was intended to be a standard for weighing things, part of a weights and measure system being developed in France, now known as the metric system. The object's weight was 1 kilogram. Crossing the Atlantic, Dombey ran into a giant storm. "It blew his ship quite far south into the Caribbean Sea," says Martin. And you know who was lurking in Caribbean waters in the late 1700s? Pirates.
Obligatory (Score:2)
Arrrrgh!
Since nobody bothered to say it yet.
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Arrrrgh!
Is that a cry of dismay over how you're on the crazy imperial system still, or did you misspell "arrrrrr!"?
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he's recursively dismayed at misspelling "arrrrr!"
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Funny)
Might as well, I saw something about Pirates of the Caribbean, and "America's Metric System" and then something about McDonalds.
Now, as an American I know that America does not have a metric system. There is such a thing as The metric system, but there is not an American Metric System. The metric system is a form of torture that is used on children, children who know darn well that outside of the schoolhouse adults will refuse to speak to them in Metric, and if they try it they'll be looked at with suspicion, and birtherism.
And if it is supposed to have units from McDonalds, I'm gonna call it right there and say that it is actually a European conspiracy to slander our good nation, and we should probably invade and pillage all their cheese as punishment.
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The one good thing about the nation's drug problem is that it has introduced metric weights and volumes to our young people, especially in the inner city.
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I'm not saying it's pirates...but it's pirates.
Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Insightful)
For colloquial measurements, no one would do conversions with 3 digits of precision. It might be a Hecto-Burger, or a 4 kilo hammer, or a 400 kilo gorilla. (does anyone say "kilogram" instead of "kilo" when the context makes it obvious that the reference is to weight [or mass, for the truly pedantic]?) Trying to play the 3 digit conversion game indicates an agenda designed to make it seem the SI system is more complicated than imperial units. Hint: it's not.
what if they adopted British system for currency:D (Score:3)
Re:what if they adopted British system for currenc (Score:5, Interesting)
The reason a foot is divided into 12 inches is because it lets you divide a foot evenly in half, thirds, quarters, sixths, or twelfths (eights are also possible with only a half inch). So dividing a foot into 12 inches lets you hit 3 of the most common subdivisions (half, third, quarter), and 4 of the 5 smallest subdivisions (sixth, missing fifth) using only integers.
Dividing units into 10 only gives you 1 of the 3 most common subdivisions (half), and only 2 of the 5 smallest subdivisions (half, fifth) using only integers.
English unit subdivions weren't picked at random. They were selected because they're more practical. A foot is 12 inches for easy subdivision. The English units of volume are based on halving (easy to do if you don't have standardized containers but you do have a scale) - a gallon is 2 quarts, a quart is 2 pints, a pint is 2 cups. An acre is about how much land a peasant could work in a day, and the furlong is defined based on an acre (1 furlong x 1 furlong = 10 acres). Likewise, a mile has 5280 feet because that's 8 furlongs. You'll also note the mile subdivides as integer feet into 10 of the smallest 12 subdivisions (only a 7th and 9th of a mile is not integer feet).
Until standardized measuring instruments became cheap and commonplace, English units were simply superior. Metric is only superior today because the biggest difficulty in modern usage is doing the math by hand (or in your head), not obtaining tools to measure things accurately. Even on computers, if you're doing sequential calculations without using infinite precision, English units are superior to metric - they accrue less roundoff error. Computers store numbers in base 2, and many English unit conversions will resolve down to at least base 4 before hitting a fraction and thus losing precision in binary representation. Except for a half, metric unit conversions don't fit at all into base 2, so lose precision with almost every calculation.
Re:what if they adopted British system for currenc (Score:4, Interesting)
British currency went decimal in 1971 (100 pence to the pound.) Before that, there were 12 pence to a shilling, and 20 shillings to a pound.
And there were other quirky amounts [tvtropes.org]:
2 farthings = 1 ha'penny
2 ha'pennies = 1 penny
3 pennies = 1 thrupenny bit (or thrupence)
2 thrupences = 1 sixpence
2 sixpences = 1 shilling (or bob)
2 bob = 1 florin
1 florin + 1 sixpence = half a crown
4 half crowns = 1 ten-bob note
2 ten-bob notes = 1 pound (or 240 pennies)
1 pound + 1 shilling = 1 guinea
I find it strangely ironic (Score:2)
that there were only two other articles between this one and the one on people evolving out of conspiratorial thought patterns [slashdot.org].
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I can explain all the conspiracies right now! Sit down, Dear Child, listen and wake.
They want you to click on it. All of the conspiracies, they're all secretly the same conspiracy! All of them, from the beginning of time to the end of time, all the conspiracies are to get you to click on it. Whatever it is. As long as you still don't know, they haven't gotten to you yet.
Never click on it. Never.
It is just like in Snow Crash.
Huh? (Score:5, Funny)
Uh, not all that much - in the UK, where the metric system is a required thing by law, the McDonalds Quarter Pounder is *still* called the Quarter Pounder, because thats its product name. Its pre-cooked weight may be given in metric, but that doesn't alter the product name. In France its the Royal for the same reason, thats its product name.
In the UK, you can still buy a 64Oz Club Hammer or a 16Oz Rubber Mallet, and a 800-pound gorilla is still a 800-pound gorilla - again, the requirement for metric doesn't change these things.
The speech from Pulp Fiction is cool and all, its just not so much based in reality.
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In the UK, you can still buy a 64Oz Club Hammer or a 16Oz Rubber Mallet, and a 800-pound gorilla is still a 800-pound gorilla
Not sure I've seen hammers sold by the Oz here. And the 800lb gorilla is an adopted American phrase: when we condescend to do imperial, we don't half-arse it so we measure body weight in stone.
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In the UK, you can still buy a 64Oz Club Hammer or a 16Oz Rubber Mallet, and a 800-pound gorilla is still a 800-pound gorilla
Not sure I've seen hammers sold by the Oz here.
Here you go, B&Q - http://www.diy.com/departments... [diy.com]
And Wickes as well - http://www.wickes.co.uk/Produc... [wickes.co.uk]
And the 800lb gorilla is an adopted American phrase: when we condescend to do imperial, we don't half-arse it so we measure body weight in stone.
Its still the same, regardless of the reason.
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Here you go,
Interesting. I got mine from RS who sell them by the gram. There seems to be a split between engineering and trades on this one.
Its still the same, regardless of the reason
It's not a common phrase. I've never heard someone use it in conversation (as opposed to on the internet).
Britain is mostly metric (Score:4, Funny)
Britain is metric. We still order a pint of beer and our road signs and speed limits uses miles... but we are metric. My pants are still measured in inches, and most people would order construction materials by the inch and foot, even if the plans were drawn up in millimeters. I could tell you my tyre pressure in psi, but wouldn't be sure about the Kpa. Apart from that though, we are definitely metric.
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and most people would order construction materials by the inch and foot,
The timber yards seem to sell by metric measurements round here. Large boards are 2400x1200mm. Look up Jewson, Gibbs&Dandy and etc.
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Re:Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
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Technically the US uses its own customary units [wikipedia.org], which like the British Imperial units are derived from the older English units but not exactly the same.
Well, I'm impressed (Score:2)
Frankly, on the modern Slashdot I expected to see something about the Russians interfering with our adoption of the metric system at the behest of Donald Trump.
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I thought that the US was afraid to have metric in general use* because the population feared it was one step closer to having universal health care thrust upon them.
* - The metric system is in use by the scientific community so it's unfair to say that it's not used there at all. Some people aren't afraid to step into the 1700's.
No. It wont be. (Score:5, Insightful)
If the United States were more like the rest of the world, a McDonald's Quarter Pounder might be known as the McDonald's 113-Grammer, John Henry's 9-pound hammer would be 4.08 kilograms, and any 800-pound gorillas in the room would likely weigh 362 kilos.
It would be a 100 gram patty, 5 kilo hammer, or half a ton gorilla. There is no need for precise conversion, and a good easy number is what marketing people and idiom pioneers would choose/use.
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But does iambic pentameter become half an iambic decameter, or 5 iambic meters? And instead of pounding sand, should one half kilogram sand, or just gram it a bunch of times? How many liters go into a Spanish galleon? Getting thrashed within a centimeter of your life sounds way too close for comfort, but is being thrashed within a meter close enough to get the point across? And don't get me started on the kiloseconds.
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***sighs***
"Pounding sand" does NOT refer to weight, but to hitting sand with a mallet to compact it....
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When's the last time you checked the actual weight of the patty in your US Quarter Pounder?
Yes, pirates but not the Caribbean. (Score:2)
The rolling mills produce the basic raw materials used in our manufacturing. There are two kinds, the long products (wires and rods) and the wide products (sheets and plates). All of them come in standard sizes, "gauges" or fractions of inch. 12 gauge is 1/12th of an inch, for example. All the nuts, bolts etc derived from the long products, were in SAE. It is a significant monumental change to change all the tooling of all the f
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Could we have done it? Sure we could have. But it would have cost us some serious money, and the corporate offices were not willing to pay for it, even if the engineers and scientists on the floor were ready for or even begging for it.
Engineers and scientists fixed that. We draw our plans up in metric. Then we ship them overseas for manufacturing. Financing comes from the offshore money parked in Ireland or the Channel Islands. American corporate offices are increasingly meaningless. They can just sell each other paper.
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Don't be daft. Switching to metric does not mean having to retool most things. We did it i n Canada about 50 years back. Lumber mills still make 2x4's and 4x8 sheets of plywood, SAE tools are still sold. My Dad, a machinist, still used thous. Most factories have now changed over as equipment was replaced.
The only things forced to change were things like commercial scales, gas pumps and new stuff like cars having speedometers in metric. Things like meat are advertised by the pound but sold by the kilo so peo
Talk like a Pirate day! (Score:5, Funny)
Pirates, in the Atlantic, in late 18th century? (Score:2)
Was this like 50+ years after the very short period of actual piracy in the Caribbean and most of the Atlantic fizzle out?
Have they be doing their pirate research with Disney movies?
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You're not doing your research with current news, there is piracy in the Caribbean now, it's a 400+ year old problem
The metric system is the tool of the devil! (Score:3)
My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it.
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Most electric vehicle manufacturers specify the battery capacity in kWh. For some reason BMW uses Ah, which is dumb because it's only half the information you need to compare it. Maybe that's the point.
If course none of them tell you the usable capacity. A 30kWh battery has maybe 28kWh usable in a typical EV.
Nixon introduced Metrics in the 70's (Score:3, Interesting)
I was in the first grade in California when they started teaching us the metric system. That went on for a couple of years, but we returned to "English Measure" after Nixon left office. I didn't see Metrics again until I took trig.
Here's a paragraph from Nixon's letter to Congress:
5) An important step which could be of great significance in fostering technological innovations and enhancing our position in world trade is that of changing to the metric system of measurement. The Secretary of Commerce has submitted to the Congress legislation which would allow us to begin to develop a carefully coordinated national plan to bring about this change. The proposed legislation would bring together a broadly representative board of private citizens who would work with all sectors of our society in planning for such a transition. Should such a change be decided on, it would be implemented on a cooperative, voluntary basis.
Source: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu... [ucsb.edu]
This hypothesis ... (Score:2)
US metric system already here (Score:2)
Well not really but thankfully physics and chemistry courses were in metric, subject matter still difficult and US units would make it worse (at least for me).
Interesting article, unfortunately most slashdotters here left corny remarks. In 1970s it seemed very serious, the mention about The Metric Conversion Act of 1975, reminded me of that time. Other day I came across a 1970s paperback in my junque collection about "get ready for the metric system!" I also remember seeing an article about a group, "Stop
Came here looking for FSM posts... (Score:5, Interesting)
We're over 200 comments in, and still no mention of The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster's revelation that the cause of global warming is the decline in the number of pirates. [wikipedia.org]
And there we have it my friends. Not only did pirates cause the adoption of the imperial system in the USA, but the metric system causes global warming! Think of the children!!!eleven
[Poe's Law disclaimer: yes, I'm kidding.]
It's not so bad. (Score:5, Funny)
America is inching its way towards the metric system.
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You made it worse by skipping 22 yards to a chain, 10 chains to a furlong (metric!), and 8 furlongs to a mile...
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I might be wrong but I thought it was 22 yards to a rod, 10 rods to a chain (220 yards), and an acre is a rod by a chain.
I wasn't sure about furlong, other than yours 'looked' wrong, but someone below has used 40 rods (880 yards) as a furlong.
Complicated, not so much. Esoteric, perhaps, but at least it's on a human scale, or rather at one we can visualise / comprehend.
Since the metric 'system' stays the same regardless of the scale of measurement it's easier to use across multiple scales, but social history
Re: Like someone else illustrated (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a reason these are called "customary" units. They were contrived to be convenient for highly specialized and closely related tasks.
For example a rod was the typical length of a medieval ox-goad. If you laid out a line 40 rods long, you've got a furlong, which is about the length of furrow a man with a single ox could plow without giving his animal a rest. If you lay out a rectangle 1 furlong by four rods, you have an acre, which is about what he could plow in a day.
Customary units are far more convenient for the tasks they're optimized for. But it's the modern need to do more complex calculations relating things across problem domains that makes them awkward.
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But at what error margin? The age of that ox alone would probably the difference if it could be 3 or 5 furlongs per day. So yes, these make sense as units of comparisons like an whale weighing something like x-hunderd small cars or how many Libraries of Congress a USB Stick can hold. But not as actual measurement.
Re: Like someone else illustrated (Score:4, Informative)
Customary units are far more convenient for the tasks they're optimized for. But it's the modern need to do more complex calculations relating things across problem domains that makes them awkward.
Which is why, in the US, scientists use metric and everyone else, for normal everyday life, continues to use the convenient units they always have.
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Customary are far more convenient for the tasks they're optimized for.
The Farenhiet scale is another example, where the definitions make the scale a strong mnemonic for certain situations:
* 100 was set as a best guess at the time for the human body's internal temperature. (They got within a fraction of a degree.) When temperatures approach or exceed 100 F, it isn't enough to just relax when you're getting overheated. You must stay hydrated or suffer heat stroke and risk death.
* zero was s
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Roller coasters are fun, and make life enjoyable. Driving across Kansas? Not so much...
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Roller coasters are fun, and make life enjoyable. Driving across Kansas? Not so much...
No doubt. Footlong hotdogs couldn't exist in the metric system. That alone is enough reason.
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We're metric in Canada and you can still buy a foot long hotdog, as well as quarter pounders etc. Just the receipts (if measured and not just sold as an unit) have to show metric. So if you buy 10 feet of rope, it'll actually be rung up as 3 meters or so of rope.
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Sure they can, they just have to be as long as someones foot.
Now who wants a hectogram with cheese?
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But the American system sucks even for comparing similar units.
How many fluid ounces in a cubic inch? Why 0.554113, of course.
How many pounds does a gallon of water weigh? 8.3454.
Now let's try metric:
How many cubic centimeters in a milliliter? 1.0000.
How many kg in a liter of water? 1.0000.
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A pint is a pound, the world around. There are 231 cubic inches in a gallon.
Now divide a yard neatly by 3.
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A pint is a pound, the world around.
One pint of water weighs 1.04375 pounds.
There are 231 cubic inches in a gallon.
Cool. That is handy when you need an 11th of a gallon, which is exactly 21 cubic inches.
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But note that the density of water is only 1 g/cc at 4 C. At any other temperature, it will be less.
For purposes of baking and most other things people actually do routinely, a pint is a pound.
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Nope.
There are 277.419 cubic inches to a gallon.
What's that you say? There are two different gallons in the World? How messed up is that?
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A pint is a pound, the world around.
You're going to get a surprise if you ever order a beer in England.
Your pint will be 20% larger than you think. It will also be lukewarm and slightly chewy, but that's another issue.
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Re:Like someone else illustrated (Score:4, Informative)
Oh, while I think of it, there's an old joke, one form of which goes "Which weighs more, a pound of gold or a pound of feathers?"
The feathers [wikipedia.org] weigh more than the gold [wikipedia.org].
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But the American system sucks even for comparing similar units.
How many fluid ounces in a cubic inch? Why 0.554113, of course.
How many pounds does a gallon of water weigh? 8.3454.
You want to know how often I want to convert fl oz to cubic inches? Or find the weight of a gallon of water? The answer to the first is "never", the second is "so rarely that I'll just Google it."
We'd probably be better off using the metric system, but it's debatable at best whether the advantages are worth the cost required to change. The strongest advantages are probably with standardization with other countries, rather than with ease of use.
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How many cubic centimeters in a milliliter? 1.0000.
How many kg in a liter of water? 1.0000.
How boring. Not even remotely interesting. Where are all the good metric jokes? .. How far would you go the meet her..... is that it?
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It's only half bad. The difference between celsius and kelvin is a scalar offset. Celsius also has the convenient feature of having the freezing point of water at zero. The one that's all bad is farenheit. You have to add AND multiply to get something sensible.
Re:Like someone else illustrated (Score:4, Insightful)
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IMO, America can easily move to liter for liquid measurements -- most Americans already are familiar with 1 and 2 liter beverage sizes.
A US liquid quart is 0.95 liters, close enough that most people probably wouldn't notice a difference in everyday use.
Celsius gets everything wrong. 0C is too high -- you have to deal with negative numbers a lot more often. 100C is way too high and also pointless -- you can see water boil. And the result is that temperatures you care about are in a narrow range.
I disagree. Celsius has plenty of precision for everyday use, the difference between 25C and 26C matters just the same to normal people as the difference between 77F and 78F. If you do actually need more precision, you use decimals like you would in Fahrenheit, because I sure as hell hope you don't use fractions for temperature.
0C also makes a lot more sense than 32F for the freezing point o
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They tend to be most convenient for measures most people need most of the time. Less so for things not often needed.
Simple measurements are fine in any system as are fractions thereof. It's the conversions where imperial starts to really suck. Imperial has multiple different unit schemes for various things, such as a FlOz based volumetric system and two cubic linear measurement (imperial foot and survey foot based).
Fun thing: my UNC taps have the required drill size stamped on the size in meric.
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Imperial is pretty simple, especially after switching to the 25.4 mm inch. A gallon has 10 lbs of water in it (at 50F or such) which of course translates to 160 fl oz, just like 10 lbs has 160 ounces in it.
The problem is America doesn't use Imperial, but rather the old English measures. At least you did switch inches back in the '50's, just keeping the American inch for surveying.
No soft metrics! (Score:5, Insightful)
If you really want to see the US move to the metric system, stop using soft metrics. People in the US think the metric system is complicated because they are always being told to convert from English to Metric measure, with the metric being non integral. No, a 9 lb hammer would not be 4.08 kilograms. it would be 4 kilograms. And a Quarter Pounder would be a 100 Grammer. If you want to think in metric, start with integer metric measures and don't worry about conversion.
I remember when Jimmy Carter was trying to move the US to metric in 1977, I saw a giant sign that said 1 inch equals 2.54 cm. Think Metric! At that moment I knew metric was dead in the US.
Re:No soft metrics! (Score:4, Interesting)
r when Jimmy Carter was trying to move the US to metric in 1977, I saw a giant sign that said 1 inch equals 2.54 cm. Think Metric! At that moment I knew metric was dead in the US.
It is dead in that the centimetre is a deprecated unit in the SI system, which is what you should be adopting. The SI base length is a metre, and units derived from the base should be multiples of, or divisions by, 1000. Hence the next unit smaller than a meter should be a millimetre, and the next unit larger should be the kilometre. I work in an engineering design office and we never use centimeters, which is a unit for dressmakers if for anything.
Re:No soft metrics! (Score:5, Interesting)
In your field the centimetre might be dead but it's not a dead unit in the SI system. It's used all of the time in Canada. It's a perfect unit because people can visualize what 1 cm is. It's harder to visualize 10 mm or 0.01 m. And for people that are used to inches it's the closest unit.
And if the centimetre is dead then the centilitre would be dead for the same reasoning. While not in use in Canada (we use the millilitre) the centilitre is sometimes used for small volumes in Europe. I recently bought some bottles to store home made vinegar and they were made in Italy. The sticker said the volume was 50 cl, not 500 ml. You can see it used on some cans of pop.
Re:No soft metrics! (Score:5, Informative)
It is dead in that the centimetre is a deprecated unit in the SI system, which is what you should be adopting. The SI base length is a metre, and units derived from the base should be multiples of, or divisions by, 1000. Hence the next unit smaller than a meter should be a millimetre, and the next unit larger should be the kilometre. I work in an engineering design office and we never use centimeters, which is a unit for dressmakers if for anything.
Nonsense. There's nothing in SI that says prefixes like centi or deci should not be used; if they are a good match for what you're measuring, by all means use them.
Re:No soft metrics! (Score:4, Insightful)
I live in a SI country. The customary units for everything use whatever scale prefix makes the most sense.
Cans, bottles, and glasses are measured in millilitres (pronunced "mil" for short), and reservoirs are measured in megalitres. Road signs are in kilometres. Weather reports give air pressure in hectopascals. The energy content of food is measured in kilojoules.
We cope.
Re:No soft metrics! (Score:4, Insightful)
And here's the beauty of the metric system: Even if mm instead of cm should be used as a kind of "style guide" you still can use any other decimal fraction/multiple prefix (if you have a reason to do so) and converting is as easy as adding a 0 or slashing a decimal.
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Re:No soft metrics! (Score:5, Informative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Reagan was dead set on killing many of Carter's goals (energy conservation, the metric system) much like Trump is dead set against anything that Obama ever did.
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But the definition of an inch is 25.4 mm or 2.54 cm, even America switched over to the modern inch back in the fifties and only kept their old weird inch for surveying.
As for things like the quarter pounder. We've been metric in Canada since the mid '70's, McDonalds still sells the quarter pounder, hammers are still measured in ounces, we still buy lumber such as 2x4's or 4x8 sheets of plywood, the grocery stores advertise prices in pounds (with kg in small print) though the receipt does show the metric mea
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>If you really want to see the US move to the metric system, make using anything else illegal punishable by jail time and a big fine.
Or, for a less drastic start - the government could just stop using customary units. If all the highway signs were only labeled in terms of km, people would get used to using them. Municipal water and gas services could charge by the liter as well, though I'm not sure how many people actually pay attention to the details there. Or the biggest one - stop using customary u
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You've done 2 coast to coast trips and didn't see a single speed limit sign? Not a single '1 mile to next exit' sign? No 'Big City 43 miles' signs? No 'Deer crossing next 2 miles'? No 'Left lane ends 1000ft'? None? You must be the most unobservant person ever, I hope you weren't driving.
Re: Executive Order 12770—Metric Usage in Fe (Score:3)
Re: No soft metrics! (Score:5, Insightful)
Neither can most us customary units. What's 1/6 of an inch? 1/3? Ditto cups or pounds.
The only time you get nice multiples of 3 is when converting feet to inches - and even then you need a nice even number for it to work out. Whats one third of 1'2"?
Meanwhile, if you're using metric to measure something on the same scale, 1 foot = 300mm (near enough - there's nothing magical about a foot), which is indeed easily divisible by 2,3,4,5,6,10,12,25, etc.
Most importantly - any math you need to do in metric is simple integer arithmetic, while in US customary you have to constantly juggle mixed fractions in your head to accomplish anything. You can't even fall back to simpler improper fractions because there's not a ruler on the planet with a 317/8ths label.
What's 1/4 of 37-1/2 inches? Versus 1/4 of 950mm? Or scaling up - you want 7 shelves 13-3/4" apart - what's the total distance? Now try the same thing with 350mm per shelf. If 1/4 inch accuracy is enough, then all your metric measurements can be rounded to multiples of 5. At 1/8th inch, they can all be even. Keeps the math easy. About the only claim I've heard where customary actually has an advantage is that you can specify the precision along with the measurement - but realistically you rarely hear people give measurements of 2-32/64ths or 37-0/16ths
And frankly, weight and volume are an even uglier mess in customary. Not to mention the endless confusion and headaches caused by the fact that we measure things by weight rather than mass, rather than letting the scale do the conversion into a far more general unit for us.
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Be that as it may, we hate the Metric system because freedom isn't divisible by 10!!
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First they want you to use easily converted units, the next thing you know they're checking if your thumb is on the scale, and reading their receipt!
It stifles creativity.
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A hunk of meat sold by the 16 oz pound -- who's prime factorization is 2^5 -- is much easier to divide into smaller bits than one sold a measure of 10 units, who's prime factorization is 2 and 5.
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Australia managed to switch to metric without that kind of upheaval. The two aren't necessarily tied together.
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Re:10 hour days.. (Score:5, Informative)
I'll consider metrics when the clock, day, and calendar are also 'neatly' divided by 10.
The first iteration of metric, right after the French revolution, included a ten-hour day of hundred-minute hours, with hundred-second minutes. The months were renamed from the antique Romanesque hodgepodge to be more logique: March became Germinal, the month when things grew, October became Brumaire, the foggy month, and November became Nivôse, the snowy month.
But people wanted quarter-hours and all the other integer divisible units they were used to, and the month-renamers were reminded that, malheureusement, the new month names only made sense in Paris. In places like Martinique and Réunion, the new names made no sense.
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Nobody says the metric system is difficult. What they say is that is different, and that there is no compelling reason to change. There is no denying that changing would have an enormous price tag, but nobody ever can list a single benefit that the average American would see from the change.
The only people that claim something is too hard are people such as yourself who can't seem to wrap their heads around anything that isn't a multiple of 10, and apparently also suck at fractions.
And nobody ever says 1
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All of that, and you still didn't answer the basic question: why do it? OK, the UK made the change. Exactly what impoved in anyone's life as a result of that change?
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>Fahrenheit makes much more sense than Celsius for weather, because Fahrenheit is scaled better for weather temperature.
This is exactly wrong. Celsius is perfect as it's based on water at standard pressure. If it's below zero, normal water will freeze. If it's 100, water boils. It's very intuitive.
>This means when you say the 20s in Celsius, it means a wide range of temperature.
Oh noes! A degree centigrade is about twice a degree Fahrenheit. This is not the end of the world. The swing on your t
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Funny, height is one of the arguments I'd use FOR metric (I live in Canada where we tend to use feet and inches for height, but I have lots of European friends who look at me like I'm stupid when I use them).
One-eighty is a perfectly good height in centimetres. What's weird is using two different units: 5'11". That's, um, 12*5+11 = 71 inches. Or 5.9 feet.