It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system In 1793, French scientist Joseph Dombey sailed for the newly formed United States at the request of Thomas Jefferson carrying two objects that could have changed America. He never made it, and now the US is stuck with a retro version of measurement that is unique in the modern world. The first, a metal cylinder, was exactly …
"Whatever his weight in pounds, shillings and ounces
he always seems bigger because of his bounces"
— A.A. Milne
12 inches to the foot, three feet to the yard, 1,760 yards to the mile. Sixteen ounces to the pound, fourteen pounds to the stone, eight stone to the hundredweight, twenty hundredweight to the ton. Twenty fluid ounces to the pint (none of your New World 26 floz. cheapskates here), eight pints to the gallon. Twelve pence to the shilling, twenty pence to the pound.
What could be easier? And I mean that in the practical sense. We Brits still call the standard building timber a "two-by-four". So much easier than "hand me a couple of one-hundred-by-two-hundreds, there's a good chap". As George Orwell wrote in his dystopian 1984, half a litre of beer is not enough, a full litre is too much. A pint of real ale is spot on and no free publican in the UK would dare challenge that. Ever tried to hump a neatly-numbered metric sack of animal feed? I could go on ... and on ...
At one time it was made illegal under EU rules to sell a pound of bananas in the UK. and a market trader got prosecuted for it. This article is a great example of history being written by the winners.
Of course, scientists need something a bit more geared to their needs. How about weights and measures based on Planck units? No no no! Something utterly arbitrary, like an inaccurate estimate of the Earth's diameter, is a far more scientific idea.
> A 2x4 would be a "fifty-by-one-hundred", just so we're clear.
I had a conversation along these lines with a German colleague not so long ago. His father is a carpenter and I'm assured that they still refer to timber as four by two, amusingly can you pass me 2m of 4x2.
At least the system of measurement for surveying in the US is decimal feet. As I slowly converted an architectural drawing from feet/inches to decimal feet to do a building layout, my crusty old boss groused that “the only people who deal in inches are whores and carpenters”.
I won't admit I know anything about whores and inches, and I won't deny that I can at times exaggerate, but I will agree about the carpenters or should one say carpenting use of inches.
The inches do remain around Europe in some use and nobody is on the brink of suicide because of that.
And while I am sure, in advance, that car tires will have been mentioned before, I will mention them too, without any feeling that the metric system did not win.
I suppose one of the reasons for this was the amount of timber exported to Britain from the continent.
We exported a lot of "props" from Finland and it took me some time to understand why they were called props.
Here in Finland, in the norther parts, we have this world leading and unique measurement called "Poronkusema".
It has also fallen for the metrication and is now defined in the metric system as 7.5 km.
It's defined like this, using the Wikipedia and Google translate.
"Poronkusema is an old unit of length used when moving reindeer. Reindeer urine is the distance a reindeer can drive between (the reindeer's) urination breaks. Reindeer cannot urinate while running, and running for too long can cause paralysis. At its maximum, the reindeer's furrow can be up to 7.5 kilometers".
Nothing is perfect, not GT either, and where that "furrow" came from I don't know.
The opposition towards the metric system in Britain was due to the Empire nostalgia, like also Brexit, and costly for not only Britain.
And now I hope that same lunacity will be costly for Russia.
"Most imperial measurements were based on agricultural standards and were around long before the empire"
Not necessarily agricultural, but generally practical. In days when precision was not the fetish it has become (witness the modern definition of the metre) units of measurement were related to everyday things that ordinary people could relate to directly, such as typical body dimensions. The inch was the notional length of a man's top thumb from the joint to the nail, the yard was the longest arrow an archer could shoot (the distance from the left fist to the right ear) and so on. Interestingly, right up to the late 1800s in maritime practice the picul was "the weight a man can carry" at around 120 lb (c. 55 kilos) which is just over twice the maximum the UK health and safety rules allow.
What we've gained in calculation simplicity and standardisation, we've lost in real world practicality. Measuring a wardrobe in millimetres is a bit pointless as (particularly in the case of self assembly flat packs) individual specimens will vary by quite a bit more than that. Plus, I've dealt with tradesmen who could understand millimetres but not understand centimetres, so bang goes the "simplicity" of the decimal base. And of course the metre was defined on an entirely arbitrary (and indeed quite parochial) basis anyway, not related to anything in practical day-to day terms. I find it necessary to use both systems according to relevance to the job in hand.
The inch was the notional length of a man's top thumb from the joint to the nail
Even before that (in pre-CE times) the cubit was defined as the distance of the rulers forearm between the elbow and the tip of the fingers (although in practice was often standardised within a kingdom and didn't change once the ruler died). And a palm was the width of the rulers hand..
Even the Romans were at it - the milum was (at one point) defined as the distance a marching legion could cover with 1000 steps (because having up to 8500 people marching in step would tend to smooth out the disparity in stride lengths) - the eventually started measuring it with distance wheels thhat dropped a pebble with every turn of the wheel (and the wheel being a specific width across).
A Roman mile was a good bit shorter than an a British mile.
(I'm in my late 50's - while my instinct is to think in miles (especially MPH) I'm perfectly happy using KM, KPH, KG, grammes, metres/CM/mm etc etc. At 2ndary school in the early 80's they had pretty much switched over to using SI units although the woodwork teacher still used feet and inches. But he was old - at least 30!)
> the distance a marching legion could cover with 1000 steps
Almost, but not quite: it's 1,000 paces, i.e. left foot to left foot. I verified this some years ago, when walking along a nice straight stretch of the Fosse Way. At marching speed, 1,000 paces took me almost exactly one statute mile as measured by GPS. I guess I must have roughly the dimensions of a legionary soldier!
The mile across Europe was was derived the Mille Passus or 1000 paces which is 2000 steps for a "mile". https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mille_passus: mīlle passūs n a Roman mile of 8 stadia (“stades”); 1,000 passūs (“paces”); or 5,000 pedēs (“feet”), approximately 4,854 English feet. It varied from town to town and country to country, hence a country mile.
In days of yore, maps were topological - places were one day's travel on foot apart (minimise threat levels) and a day's travel was a journée corrupted over time to journey.
To throw in a quick French lesson, counter - duration: jour - journée, soir soirée et cetera FWIW
Reindeer length is an old unit of measurement of length used when moving reindeer. Reindeer length is the distance a reindeer can travel between (reindeer) urination breaks. Reindeer cannot urinate while running, and running too long can cause them to become paralysed. The maximum distance a reindeer can run is up to 7.5 kilometres.
In that same vein, I would like to bring your attention to the following: Twin City Christmas, specifically the track entitled "There Ain't Enough Papers for the Reindeer". (Years later, when that link has probably crumbled away to dust, hopefully your favorite search engine can still find this gem.)
The backstory, in the unlikely event anyone cares: the album in question was produced by a city near my part of the world in the mid-1990s as a fundraiser. It consists entirely of local talent. I have no affiliation with it, and might not even know of it, were it not for the fact that my father was one of the few people who bought a copy on CD.
Resistance was because the skinflints didn't want to replace imperial machinery with metric, the electrical installation industry metricated in 1974, but British Leyland were still making engines with imperial sizes long into the 1980's. A Metro bodyshell was metric, the A series engine imperial, just needed two sets of spanners - and still do today....
There is rationale to the imperial system, 12 divides by 1,2,3,4,6, 10 divides by 1,2, and 5.
I still don't understand why the USA uses CUPS for measurement, I thought that was for printing with Unix.
Preferring the older (better) measurements is nothing to do with nostalgia. New does NOT mean better.
Sometimes today people think that the Imperial system was an 'oddity', only used by Great Britain and all her many territories. Not so very similar sets of measures were used all over Europe, To my certain knowledge France, Holland, Prussia, Austria and many other German states used them. [oddity the old English foot (pre 1295-1300) was the Saxon/North German/Belgic foot which at 335mm is a third of a metre (I know 1005mm) This Belgic metre was still used in some German states until the 19th Century]
Anyway It is liked because it is practical. Each of the measures evolved to suit a given task or set of tasks as such they work well for those tasks. They are easy to use and very flexible. Metric was designed from the start to be one, all encompassing system and if the available measurement unit wasn't particularly good for any given task, tough that's what you'll use like it or not. A simple proof of this is that at first even time and the calendar were subjected to this decimal madness and not in some thought experiment. The French people suffered this decimal nonsense for many years.
In the traditional system if a task required a new measurement someone invented it and if it was useful it spread. (the Imperial reformation of some traditional measurements tidied up the centuries / millennia old measurements a little but the US strangely did not adopt them which is why they still use the older versions.)
Example: an Acre was defined as the area one Ox team could plough in one day, This is normally quoted as 660 feet by 66 feet not a square like the artificial Hectare, The Acre suits its task. That in another country the Acre might be fractionally bigger or smaller was, and is irreverent as farmers don't have fields in more than one country. Only now with very common world wide trade is a common system advantageous and even now only for international trade and science. The author of this article badly mis-reported the incident of the failed space mission. There is nothing wrong with using Imperial / traditional systems in space travel. After all the US moon landings were accomplished with them. The problem - the insanity - was that one team used Imperial measurements and another Metric measurements. Given the immence distances involved it is not surprising that there was a problem but that problem could, just as wrongly, have been said to have been caused by using the metric system.
Bicycle wheels are measured in inches in Germany. Floppy disks were sold in inches - first, floppy disk drives are not square. Second, nobody cares how big they are - all we care about is that 3.5” disks are the right size to fit into 3.5” drives.
"Floppy disks were sold in inches - first,"
The writing on the package was in inches. The generally used term was in inches. The standard for how to make them was in metric; the 3.5 inch disk is in a case that measures 90 by 94 mm. 3.5 inches would have been 88.9 mm, but that's not how wide the disk is, either the rectangular case or the circular media inside it.
And the 3" disk as used by the Amstrad CPC and PCW computers was even more oblong; the drive and disks I have are currently in a box in the attic so I can't give the actual dimensions, but here's an image of one.
But AFAIK the medium itself was indeed 3".
Same mismash in both: My bike has 28" rim and 19mm width.
But car tyres were sold in millimeters too, TRX-rim. I've a set of 225/60-415 and 215/65-390 rims and tyres and in 80s so many high end cars used those, from BMW to Maserati.
You still can buy those tyres, but they are very expensive.
But car tyres were sold in millimeters too, TRX-rim. I've a set of 225/60-415 and 215/65-390 rims and tyres and in 80s so many high end cars used those, from BMW to Maserati.
You still can buy those tyres, but they are very expensive.
Even Jaguar went through a phase of fitting these metric wheels although I believe it is now rare to find Jags which still have them as you say they're expensive and also hard to find.
Back in The Day, the tire's width was measured in inches. My first car, a Hillman Imp, had 5.50x12 cross-ply tires. I suspect that tread-width-in-millimeters came along (at least in West Pondia) about the same time as the switch to radial tires.
My road bike has 700x25mm tyres, and my mountainbike 28x1.5''.
And I'm selling winter-tyres 185/65R15, where 185 is the width in mm, R15 is the rim size in inches, and 65 is the height above the rims in ... what exactly ?
And my laptop has an 14'' screen.
"And I'm selling winter-tyres 185/65R15, where 185 is the width in mm, R15 is the rim size in inches, and 65 is the height above the rims in ... what exactly ?"
The 65 is the profile and is the percentage of the width, so for those tyres it's 65% of 185 mm = 120 mm.
"first, floppy disk drives are not square."
Only the 3.5" variation. Which is not floppy either, that name came from 8" ones which actually were floppy. And square. When 5 1/4" floppy was the main stream, someone noticed that people manage to put them into drive the wrong way, so next generation wasn't square.
Also: 3,5" variation is called 'a cracker' here in North as it doesn't flop.
Only the 3.5" variation.
I think you mean "all but the actual floppy ones, so the 8", 5.25" and 3.25" versions". The stiffies/crackers are all oblong to some extent, some more than others, while the IBM 4" floppy would be a square stiffie if it didn't have half of one edge slightly angled inwards.
Close, it's normally 45x95mm or 47x97mm and comes in 2.4, 3.2, 3.6, 4.8, or 5.4M lengths.
Plasterboard and most sheet materials come in 1200x2400mm, but plywood is 1220x2440 as most plywood is made to American 8x4ft dimensions. This is changing, but means yards may sell imperial, metric, or both sizes and can cause some issues.
Indeed! I took a course in industrial processes that required us to learn to use lathes, milling machines, shapers, and to make gears among other metal things. The instructor caught me attempting to shave the metal to fit, and accused me of carpentry. It seems he considered that to be a Bad Thing.
My Uncle, who taught me to use a mill (and then a CNC mill) told me it was all OK, as long as I didn't have to put more metal on the piece.
The same guy, who also taught me to weld, said "There are two kinds of people in the world ... welders and grinders. As long as the parts stay together, you're good.". Almost 60 years later, and I almost consider myself a welder.
It used to 4x2 as it comes off the saw mill- rough sawn, if its PAR, Planed All Round, the rule of thumb was take 1/8 inch [3.175mm] off each dimension. But by shrinking the real size down they get more lengths off the tree. So its always better to buy your wood from a sawmill, where the unit of measure is a cubic foot :-).
Conversion is easy if you know that an inch is 25.4mm EXACTLY. I had a One Inch micrometer that I used for years until I bought a metric one [as well]. Handily, vernier calipers are sometimes dual scale.
Or in the civilized metric world, a five by ten. That’s is the beauty of a decimal system being used by people that use a base 10 number system. You can go up or down in the scale of units to the one that makes sense by easily dividing or multiplying by 10 . Not weird divisions and multiplication nonsense that you have to do with American units.
Inches are far more practical than mm. Carpenters frequently need to find the center line. What's half of 4 3/4 inches? 2 3/8. What's half of 123mm? .... hold on, I can do this....
One isn't better than the other, they both have their place and I use the one most appropriate to the task in hand.
Absolutely. It's far easier to find half of 3.937 inches than to find half of 100mm - you can do the first in your head, but you need a calculator for the metric system.
Similar if you're looking at a 15.0 cm piece - it's *much* simpler to find half of 5.906 inches than to work out what half of 15.0 might be.
That one's easy. Half of 3.937 inches is 1 and 31/32 inches ... at least near enough for human use (welding, nailing, cooking, etc). (You'd be surprised how often 15/16 shows up on my Bridgeport.)
Why would you have a 15cm piece if you were working in Imperial units? And why would you approximate 29/32 as .509? Glutton for punishment?
It can be anything really, as long as the units use powers of 10.
Whenever I'm confused I turn to the interview with the guy who decides imperial measurements. You may notice he's drunk. Some people maintain this is why imperial measurements originated in the UK.
We Brits still call the standard building timber a "two-by-four"
Except they're not actually 2 inches by 4 inches...they're just called that for historical reasons.
Ever tried to hump a neatly-numbered metric sack of animal feed?
Yes. That's why the likes of potatoes are 23kg. Because it's almost exactly 50 pounds.
I could go on ... and on ...
Please don't.
At one time it was made illegal under EU rules to sell a pound of bananas in the UK
No, it wasn't.
and a market trader got prosecuted for it
No, he didn't.
Something utterly arbitrary, like an inaccurate estimate of the Earth's diameter, is a far more scientific idea.
That's not what a metre is and hasn't been for decades. Did you actually read the article?
Actually, the standard building timber IS a "two by four" when it's rough sawn. But it's normally "dressed" so it doesn't have saw marks on the surface. That knocks it down to about 1-5/8 inches by 3-3/8 inches.
I once pulled a 70 year old rough sawn 2x4 out of a wall in a basement of a house built in 1919 and measured it with vernier calipers. It was exactly 2" by 4" to within a 1/10th of an inch.
At one time it was made illegal under EU rules to sell a pound of bananas in the UK
No, it wasn't.
and a market trader got prosecuted for it
No, he didn't.
Such wishful thinking passes for argument nowadays if you want to be "on the right side of history".
Tell you what, why not read the actual report from the courts? https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Admin/2002/195.html
Thornton was prosecuted for not using the correct scales for weighing.
Hunt was prosecuted for not displaying the price in KG and that when items were bought, the quantity delivered in each case was less in weight than the amount which would have corresponded with the price.
I.e. He was done for providing less product than he was claiming to sell. Nowhere was he banned for selling in pounds.
> Such wishful thinking passes for argument nowadays if you want to be "on the right side of history".
**cough**
If you're going to link to Government websites to "prove" your false claims, you might want to read them before doing so, as neither of those links justify your fabrications.
It's not a case of "wishful thinking" or "argument" when one side is totally devoid of facts.
At one time it was made illegal under EU rules to sell a pound of bananas in the UK
If you actually look at the link you gave, "pound" is NOT on the list of proscribed measurements. In addition, the preamble clearly states that any of them can be used as "Supplementary Indications". In other words, they're all allowed as long as they're not the SOLE measurement used.
and a market trader got prosecuted for it
That Grauniad article doesn't actually say WHAT law the judge accused him of violating, but the devil is in the details. It mentions that sets of scales were seized. That's because he was using measuring equipment which couldn't/didn't display metric. THAT is what he was prosecuted for. But "convicted of selling fruit in imperial measurements" is punchier and more appealing to the type of reader who get red faced at the mere prospect.
"What could be easier?" - a metric system....
"We Brits still call the standard building timber a "two-by-four". So much easier than "hand me a couple of one-hundred-by-two-hundreds, there's a good chap"." - You don't base a measurement system on which one's easiest to say. You can still call it a 2x4, as it's pretty close, I'm sure the person passing it to you won't get confused if you're a few mm out with your description.
I don't think we'd suffer any major issues if a pint of beer was 13% smaller, the US version is under half a litre, and that's the point really... a system where values differ between common countries has no place in a modern society. The only people that argue against this are those that grew up with said archaic system.
Spirits used to be in fractions of a Gill. (Pronounced Jill. No, me neither)
In Scotland it was commonly as 1/4 Gills and England 1/5 Gills.
That turned into 35ml vs 25ml - a difference I find much easier to visualise - but difficult to stomach at the same price.
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"At one time it was made illegal under EU rules to sell a pound of bananas in the UK. and a market trader got prosecuted for it. This article is a great example of history being written by the winners."
Incorrect. What was made illegal was selling items *only* by pounds/ounces. Shops have always been allowed to sell by pounds and ounces if they want to, but they must also sell by grams/kilograms as well. The trader was fined because he refused to provide pricing for metric quantities.
And... let me blow your mind here. It's ALSO illegal here in the US.
Every packaged quantity of everything is sold either as US units and metric units, or just metric units. The 2 liter bottle of Coke is common. Wine bottles are 750ml. Wine boxes are 3 liters. A 12 ounce can of fizzy water is also marked 355ml, and would be illegal to sell if it wasn't. Medication is measured in mg.
The trader, Steve Thoburn, was actually fined for using scales that did not bear the required stamp by a Weights and Measures inspector.
The stamp couldn't be obtained because they only showed imperial measures, but that wasn't the actual offence.
-A.
Exactly. The point is proven. You can't have legal-for-trade scales that only measure pounds and ounces. You are obliged to have them marked in metric units too.
Without that restriction, you would be able to have properly-calibrated imperial scales.
....We Brits still call the standard building timber a "two-by-four"..
Last time I tried to build something using "two by fours", I found that these were not two inches by four inches. Rather they had started out as such, and after being planed, they were significantly smaller.
Exactly correct. 2x4s started as 2 inches by 4 inches as rough cut timber, but it shrinks as a result of seasoning/drying and planing.
Popular Science: Two-by-fours are not actually 2-by-4—here’s why. We measure wood in a weird way.
a market trader got prosecuted for it
No, he got prosecuted because he refused to give up his old scales, which were no longer authorised for trading use because they only measured in imperial units. Under EU rules it was still legal to have "supplementary units" on display, as long as the metric ones were at least as prominent. That was supposed to be phased out eventually, but back around 2007 the EU parliament finally abandoned plans to force countries to drop old units, as long as they use metric as primary ones.
> As George Orwell wrote in his dystopian 1984, half a litre of beer is not enough, a full litre is too much.
Visions of real-alesters in the US ordering "one pint and four and a bit fluid ounces of your most baby-sick flavored IPA, please".
> At one time it was made illegal under EU rules to sell a pound of bananas in the UK.
No it wasn't.
https://fullfact.org/europe/metric-eu-brexit-pints-metres-pounds/
> and a market trader got prosecuted for it.
No he wasn't. https://ukma.org.uk/why-metric/myths/consumer-protection/#sunderland
> This article is a great example of history being written by the winners.
*cough*
"As George Orwell wrote in his dystopian 1984, half a litre of beer is not enough, a full litre is too much. A pint of real ale is spot on and no free publican in the UK would dare challenge that."
And you've missed the point of the line. The person who was complaining about the units used was an elderly man that the protagonist, Winston Smith, was attempting to question about the past. Smith has lived almost his entire life in a place where whatever the government says is accepted and he can't tell whether it's true or not, and he wants to learn what life before that was like. He finds an old person who isn't a party member and hopes that this guy can provide him that knowledge, but all this man can do is complain or babble about small and unimportant details, such as whether top hats are in fashion, the details of a fight he got into in the 1920s, or the units in which alcohol is sold. The person arguing about units wasn't Orwell saying that metric units are bad or the sign of despotism; it was a man failing to care about important details while being consumed by trivialities.
Elsewhere in his writings, Orwell argued for both systems. I don't know that his opinions on these matters are much more important than the average person, but you can consider those as his true beliefs if you want.
Interestingly, the mile is already based on a rational number: a mile is simply 1000 (double) paces (in my old age I find that I need about 35 more paces to go the full mile).
As to the lumber: next time you are in the lumber yard, do check if a 2x4 is actually a full 4x2 in. In Sweden I simply purchase a 95x45 (nominally 100x50 before drying), and I suspect yours is about the same no matter what they call it.
As to temperature: a scale based on a poor estimate of body temperature...
What could be easier? And I mean that in the practical sense
Let's make a comparison:
You calculate the volume of a cube with a side of 4 feet and 2 inches, I calculate the same volume for a cube of 127 cm. Let's see who makes the fewest calculations.
What's your point? If I ask you to calculate the volume of a cube 39 11/32 inches, it will be a damn sight easier for me to tell you it's one cubic metre because I've chosen the value in my unit of preference.
Converting across measurements becomes inherently easier when units are directly correlated. Tell me how wide and deep an Olympic swimming pool is and I'll tell you how much water you need to fill it in about five seconds. Try doing that in mediaeval units.
"fourteen pounds to the stone"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_(unit)
In England you could have 'stones' of 8, 12, 12.5, 14, 15, 22lb depending on what you were measuring.
In County Clare of a stone of potatoes was 16lb in the summer and 18lb in the winter
Most of Europe had their own version
"t one time it was made illegal under EU rules to sell a pound of bananas in the UK. and a market trader got prosecuted for it. "
Nope. This is an example of history being rewritten by known liars, like Boris Johnson. You can sell any quantity of bananas you like under EU rules, including a pound. After all, you can still buy milk by the pint in most supermarkets.
What you *can't* do, is use a system other than metric as the measurement on which you base your prices and tariffs. So you can sell a pound of bananas, providing you also label clearly that what the customer is getting is .454 Kg of bananas. And this is to stop monkey business and chicanery with weights, a favoured method for wide boys to cheat customer since time immemorial.
"Oddly, here in the Leader of the Free World (tm), a '2 by 4' is actually 1.75 inches by 3.75 inches."
Nope.Here in the USofA, 2x4s are uniformly 1.5x3.5 inches, in many standard lengths. These days. I rarely reference Wiki, but see their article on "Lumber" for a fairly decent, if rough & minimal, overview. It's not a strange measurement system, it's legacy.
"At one time it was made illegal under EU rules to sell a pound of bananas in the UK. and a market trader got prosecuted for it. "
No it wasn't, and he didn't.
And good luck finding a bunch of bananas which is exactly 453.592g in mass.
Auvoirdepois has nothing to do with pounds, shillings and pence. Precious metals are measure using the Troy system that has 20 ounces to the pound. That is why a pound of gold weighs more than a pound of feathers. 1GBP was originally worth a pound of gold hence 20 shillings to the pound.
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I could live with 12. Like you said, nice round integer division when dividing between 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6. Not impossible and done in 1 generation. But for now, basing things off 10 will do just fine.
The main selling point of metric is its consistency. And for that "SI until I die".
Let's not change course now.
Dividing 12 in half or quarters is fine but what about doubling, tripling etc... What happens when you need 7 12s? Dividing 10 in half is as easy as dividing 12 in half. Multiplying 10 by *anything* is easier that multiplying 12. So, the entire basis of this argument is the scenario of dividing into quarters...
You would give up easier math literally in every other scenario just to gain the ability to divide by 4? What is so important that needs to be divided by 4? Besides pizza if you only have three friends.
As for your reasons someone wouldn't accept this system, they are the same reasons that you won't accept a logical, easy system redirected at people who already have.
I am afraid you are overlooking the minor fact that there would be twelve digits in a duodecimal system, so the number twelve would be written as 10, making multiplying by twelve just as easy.
There are only 10 types of people, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Yes, 12 is a great base, which is why the imperial system of length makes so much sense: 12 inches to the foot, 12 feet to the yard, 12 yards to the rod, and 12 rods to the mile which as we all know is 1728 feet. 16 is also a nice base, hence why the weight system of 16 ounces to the pound, 16 pounds to the stone, 16 stone to the ton (256 pounds) is so logical.
Oh, wait a minute. I think I made a typo somewhere.
We use decimal numbers. Maybe things would have been more logical if we used a different base, but we did not. Unless you want to switch to using base 12 for everything, get used to using base 10. We don't say that something weighs 13A pounds, so while we're using decimal numbers to express the number of the units we're using, we should also use decimal to divide the units.
Except it’s not. You learned to count in decimal then applied the 12, 16 and 20 times tables.
Obviously, this is doable and means more practice of things not particularly needed; which can have fringe benefits.
Crashing spacecraft into mars because unit conversions are bit sucky and inconsistent however, is ample enough evidence to avoid them in any important work.
As units of utility inches and feet still have their uses. Other than that, get rid.
I was born 2 months before the Apollo 11 mission and only ever learned metric at school. I can estimate feet and inches as I know an inch is about 2.5cm and 1 foot is the same as a 30cm ruler. Ask me about pounds and ounces though and you will get a blank look and I will ask, "what is that in kilograms"?
My dad knows both systems, but greatly prefers metric.
So unless my school was an outlier, nobody born in the UK since man set foot on the moon was educated in any other system than metric. This makes going back to the old system more than stupid. Why would we burden our kids with having to learn another system that is of absolutely no use outside of the UK?
For learning in schools, I think the cutoff was those who started after the 1972-3 year, so anyone born after that world cup win will only have learned "Imperial" units at school for fun. I dare say this was more likely at Eton than elsewhere.
Another change around the same time was adopting Monday as the first day of the week. In my second year at primary school we had a regular exercise of writing what you did at the weekend ... but you weren't allowed to report anything you did on the Sunday because the teacher was an anal retentive twat fighting a rearguard action against Change and taking it out on her class of 6-year-olds. Fortunately for my karma, I have forgotten her name and so I'm not tempted to speak ill of the probably-dead-by-now on this public forum. But looking back ... what a twat!
I've found exactly what I want on the internet only to be presented with measuements in American and I just leave the site. You guys must be losing a fortune in sales if I'm typical.
At least , after having read the article, I now have a rough idea of what weight they are banging on about on Gold Rush when they're going on about something weighing 50,000 lbs.
Yes, two pounds = 1kg (approx).
One yard = one metre (approx(*)).
One ton - one tonne (approx).
But the one that continues to confound me is temperature. I like watching Frozen and Naked and Afraid (the latter not being as naughty as it sounds if you've never watched it) but both give temperatures in F and the only clue I have whether or not it's snowing :(
I don't know if it astonishes or saddens me most that TV companies who clearly intend to market their product globally see no reason to give temperatures in C (even if only alongside). I mean for those two shows in particular the audience benefits from knowing what the outside temperature is.
(*)There's a golf course near me where the fairway markers are in metres because it once hosted a round of the Europro series. That's when I learnt that one yard isn't really one metre. Amusingly the distances given on the tee box are in yards so I assume more than a few golfers have been caught out when hitting their fairway shots.
> Yes, two pounds = 1kg (approx).
About 10% out.
> One yard = one metre (approx(*)).
About 10% out.
> One ton - one tonne (approx).
You have to qualify that with which ton you're talking about. Still, short ton: about 10% out; long ton: about 10% out; guantanamera: no idea.
> But the one that continues to confound me is temperature.
Hmm. Neither Fahrenheit nor Celsius is intrinsically more "decimal" and, while I'm no expert, I believe that SI calls for Kelvin.
In everyday life I can do either. Still, Fahrenheit does seem better adapted to the human scale of experience, or at least it was before global warming totally buggered up our weather.
> I don't know if it astonishes or saddens me most that TV companies who clearly intend to market their product globally see no reason to give temperatures in C (even if only alongside). I mean for those two shows in particular the audience benefits from knowing what the outside temperature is.
The relevant fact is that advertising spend in the US is greater than that of the rest of the world put together.
This is why el Reg has latterly started pretending to be American.
-A.
"Fahrenheit does seem better adapted to the human scale of experience".
That was funny. Zero degrees is where water is about to freeze but hasn't, and -1 is when its frozen and 100 is when it's boiling. No way to beat that logic.
One could perhaps add that Celsius was a Swede and not French.
Hmmm, 100C is where the vapor pressure of pure water is the standard atmospheric pressure at sea level. At 1 to 1.5km of elevation, the drop in temperature at where the vapor pressure of water is equal to the ambient pressure is enough to require adjustments to recipes when baking. The more natural point for 0C would be the triple point in water. Fahrenheit's scale was 0F being the coldest achievable temperature with water ice and NaCl, with 100F being core body temperature. A real SI scale fr temperature would be eV...
For doing thermodynamic calculations, the appropriate scales are Kelvin and Rankine, and there really isn't much difference in usability between K and R as all sorts of conversions need to be done to get answers in Joules or MWHr. Another "fun" problem is dealing with speed involves Joules being watt-seconds, while vehicle speeds are usually given in statute miles, nautical miles or kilometers per hour. A fun factoid is that 1 pound of force at one statute mile per hour is equal to 2.0W (1.99W is a closer approximation).
As for feet, a fair approximation is that light travels 1 ft/nsec, too bad the foot wasn't ~1.6% shorter as a light nano-second would be the ultimate SI unit of length. The current definition of an inch, 25.4mm, was chosen in the 1920's to allow machine tools to handle inches by having a 127 tooth gear instead of a 100 tooth gear.
FWIW, Jefferson wanted to base his unit of length on a "second's" rod, i.e. e pendulum whose length would have exactly one second period when measured at seal level and 45º latitude.
Don't get me started on kilograms of thrust.
A useful "feature" of Fahrenheit for people in snowy climates is that zero Fahrenheit is the temperature where salt on icy roads ceases to help melt the ice on the road to make it less slippery. So if the temperature is less than zero Fahrenheit, you know to be very careful when driving.
In Celsius, you have to remember that the critical temperature for salted roads is about "-18C", which is not as intuitive.
Most people don't know that either. They just associate a number to a feeling, nothing more making it even more rediculous to use Fahrenheit. It's super easy to step into the modern world when it comes to temperature. Arguably not as beneficial though as switching to SI units for measuring distance and volume.
Temperature is more about intuition than most (all?) other measurements because it's the one that's hardest to measure without a suitable device and also the only one that's at least somewhat subjective.
A metre is a metre and a yard is a yard. Okay so a gallon can vary (all part of how the imperial system is unsuited to the modern global economy) but my living room is currently 19.5c according to the thermostat. It's 18.7c according to my weather station. The old analogue thermometer I inherited from my parents appears to think it's a bit less than 20c.
But really the only thing that matters is that it's the right temperature for me. And even then I'm sure those of you who don't live alone can have a nice argument about whether your room temperature is correct or not :)
"A useful "feature" of Fahrenheit for people in snowy climates is that zero Fahrenheit is the temperature where salt on icy roads ceases to help melt the ice on the road to make it less slippery. So if the temperature is less than zero Fahrenheit, you know to be very careful when driving.
In Celsius, you have to remember that the critical temperature for salted roads is about "-18C", which is not as intuitive."
And what - having to remember 32F for unsalted roads is more intuitive . .
@IvyKing
Standards for the exact length of an inch have varied in the past, but since the adoption of the international yard during the 1950s and 1960s the inch has been based on the metric system and defined as exactly 25.4 mm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inch
From somewhere in the later half of the 19th century to ~1920, the US inch was defined as 39.37 inches equals 1m. According a ca 1920 issue of Railway Mechanical Engineer, the machine tool industry was making a push to defining the inch 25.4mm so that by using a 127 tooth gear to replace a 100 tooth gear a lathe could be set up to produce metric and imperial threads.
One problem with converting the US to pure metric is that almost all land titles use feet, not meters. The US legal definition of a foot was 1/66 of a chain, a mile was 80 chains (66x80=5280), a section of land under the Northwest Ordnance of 1787 (passed under the Articles of Confederation, NOT the Constitution), which was 6400 square chains and the acre being 10 square chains (640 acres per square mile). The surveys for the Townships (36 sections) didn't really start until ca 1796, so if the arrival of the metric standards had not been delayed by the storm and the English, the US might have re-written the 1787 law to use metric measurements.
Another problem with the US converting to metric was Herbert Hoover's success as Secretary of Commerce in setting national standards for pipes and other hardware.
One final note about metric versus imperial is that a nautical mile is defined as 1 minute of longitude at the equator, so works well with the degrees, minutes and seconds customarily used for angles. Metric navigation would favor a decimal system for expressing angles, i.e. the gradians.
"Fahrenheit's scale was 0F being the coldest achievable temperature with water ice and NaCl, with 100F being core body temperature."
Wrong on both counts. On Fahrenheit's original scale, 0 was the freezing point of a solution of ammonium chloride (NH4Cl), not table salt (NaCl). As neither compound is used directly on roads, the point at which it is not useful depends on which specific salt is being used in the area, and more importantly on where the compound has been applied and whether it has been moved or not. The temperature of the human body was not 100. It was 96. Of course, neither value is considered average for body temperature (and body temperature is incredibly variable in any case, whereas boiling points of things at a specific fixed pressure is stable). This is because the modern scale abandoned both limits by instead fixing 32 and 212 as the values for water freezing and boiling, moving both of the original bounds slightly and making use of the original scale inaccurate to modern users.
In 1700 it was much easier for a scientist to calibrate a home made thermometer using ammonium chloride cooling bath and a docile dog. The temperature of boiling water required a barometer at higher altitudes and calibration tables. The human armpit temperature of about 96 allows hand drawn hash marks in repeated halves. Many very early Fahrenheit thermometer are often marked every 3 degrees.
You don't have to calibrate a thermometer based on the water temperatures alone. You can use whatever points you like if you know where on the scale they are. That means that if the ammonium chloride mixture is a point you can achieve more easily than freezing water (it isn't because you have to get significantly colder which is a bit tricky if it's not winter and you don't have refrigeration) you can use that and remember to label it -17. Using a dog for a temperature source is ridiculous as their average temperature is different from humans, but as there's so much variation with a human, it wouldn't allow much accuracy even if you used them.
You might. I don't. The only F values I understand are 32F - 0c. And -40F which is also -40C.
I know enough to perform the calculation if I sit down and think about it but I never bother. A hot day is anything above 25c. 30c is where I start to reconsider outdoor activities (although last year I did play a round of golf at 32c, teeing off at 1pm, lol). 40c is the 'oh-shit-end-of-the-world' point. At least in the UK.
32F for freezing point? 212F for boiling? Much rather the Rankine scale. 671.69 for boiling, and 461.67 for freezing.
Perhaps we should consider the Delisle scale, where colder measurements have higher values. 0 as boiling point, and 150 as freezing point. Said scale was apparently used in Russia for quite some time.
I never did while living in the UK. I can vaguely remember they would give F as well as C in weather forecasts many years ago when I was a kid, before just dropping F.
Now, living in the tropics, it is just bloody hot all the time. We have 2 seasons. Hot & dry and even hotter & wet.
"Fahrenheit does seem better adapted to the human scale of experience".
Really? Someone from the US tells me it's 60, and I have no idea if i need to wear a jumper or turn on the air con. Mum and Dad tell me it's forty with a hot northerly, then I know they are on the look out for bushfires.
So, depends upon what you learnt. From that perspective, neither one is better than the other.
But for any scientific or engineering use, then (as others have pointed out), Kelvin is the way to do.
@Fred Daggy
A bit about the background to Kelvin.
"Historically, the Kelvin scale was developed by shifting the starting point of the much-older Celsius scale down from the melting point of ice to absolute zero, and its increments still closely approximate the historic definition of a degree Celsius, ...."
More importantly, for Fahrenheit the reference temperatures aren't 0 and 212; they're 32 and 96. 96 minus 32 is 64. And 32 and 64 are ... stay with me here ... powers of 2.
Fahrenheit based his scale on powers of 2 so that thermometers could be graduated by successive bisection (and then reflected to extrapolate outside that range, on the assumption that the mechanism was sufficiently linear within the desired range). That's an actual engineering reason, unlike "duh humans like powers of 10". There really isn't much reason to favor Celsius.
Kelvin, of course, is the one that matters. (Yes, Rankine works too, but for some SI operations Kelvin is more convenient.)
Celsius is today as much flavor-of-the-month as Fahrenheit is. The original justifications for them are no longer relevant; they're just a matter of taste.
In a former career in gas instrumentation, Rankine was quite common in long-used software. For commonality of trade; Kelvin and Celsius of course, rule.
Slight complications still arise in assigning energy values to combustion processes, for the temperature of fuel and oxidiser has bearing on the useful output. Burn the same unit of natural gas in northern Norway, gain less energy than if you burn it in Dubai. The reason being the energy to break bonds is partially contributed by ambient temperature.
I wrote various papers on the subject for various government bodies. Measuring stuff well is hard; and when there’s money involved the scum of the universe will always try on their scam.
My rules of thumb for measures of convenience:
4 inches is about 100 mm.
1 ft is about 30 cm.
10 ft is about 3 meters.
10 meters is about 16 ft.
50 miles is about 80 km.
20 C is 68 F. Adjust from there: 5 degrees difference (C) is 9 degrees F.
300 megahertz has a wavelength of 1 meter.
"I don't know if it astonishes or saddens me most that TV companies who clearly intend to market their product globally see no reason to give temperatures in C (even if only alongside). I mean for those two shows in particular the audience benefits from knowing what the outside temperature is."
Don't forget that a certain red top rag that no one should buy, will gleefully tell you it'll be -15c in the winter, but 110f in the summer.
c to f is perhaps easier to do in your head as "double it, take off 10% ( 1 tenth) and add 32"
e.g. 20 doubled is 40 minus 4 makes 36. add 32 gets to 68
It works backwards with a touch of inaccuracy because it's is a bit of a pig to do exactly. Because you have to add back 11 tenths. Good enough for every day use though.And not too hard to adjust the error margin a tad.
Surely, as learned scholars reading Reg.com, we have the capacity to learn two standards? It's easy, I learned the metric system when I was in 12 going to school in the US! Yes, there was a big push to go metric! I still have the binder we made in school in 1976! The contents are long gone. In the end, all that became metric was soft drinks in large quantities. 3 liters of Pepsi anyone??
As someone who lived in Western Europe for nearly 25 years, knowing both has been a life saver. I worked for an American flavored company with many local hires. As we often received some products and equipment from the US, my knowledge of both standards was extremely useful, and saved the day a couple of times.
Now let's go watch the Maltese Falcon, and the comedy remake The Black Bird....
When I first got to the UK, school kids were still being taught both metric and imperial (just before sixpence became 2.5p, a whole 'nuther kettle o'worms). I still think in either, or both, depending on the situation. It's not exactly difficult. Strangely, at least for an American, I think of my own weight in stone ...
Nobody should ever have a need for even 1 liter of carbonated sugar water. Disgusting stuff.
Born in '72. It's weird, depending on what I am thinking off I can only visualise certain things one way easily. Like people's height, my wife is 149.8 cm but I don't know how short that is until I go oh four foot eleven. Meanwhile if wanting to measure a doorway I need metres to get the idea.
I often see the arguement Celsius doesn't make sense as a temp measurement from Americans because they know that 32F is cold whereas 0 degrees makes no sense they don't know if they need a coat.
The mind is an odd thing.
Centigrade isn't granular enough for ambient temperatures without using decimals. Zero to 100 F are temperatures you're likely to encounter in daily life. Zero C is common, 100 C and you're dead.
I keep my house at 63 (17.22) in the winter, if the temp drops to 62 (16.66) inside I notice and I'm cold. I put up with 67 (19.44) inside in the summer, if it gets up to 68 (20) I'm too hot and can't sleep well. C is just not granular enough.
Is Fahrenheit perfect? No. Is it better than centigrade for daily use? Oh fuck yes.
I'm all in favor of the rest of the metric system. But leave our American temperatures alone.
> I keep my house at 63 (17.22) in the winter, if the temp drops to 62 (16.66) inside I notice and I'm cold.
Are you Inuit so you can take such low temperatures? Do you live in an old castle from the 12th century which is impossible to heat? I'd pack myself with three+ layers if it would be this cold here...
Those are pretty much the same temperatures I live with (though I'm able to do it in Celsius without losing granularity - decimal points ain't confusing! -- despite the fact that a nice round 16C is an annoying 60.8F!), and that's wearing shorts n' t'shirt.
I also have 3 air-con units (it can get hot in sunny South Wales!)
> Centigrade isn't granular enough for ambient temperatures without using decimals.
Now buy a thermometer and measure said ambient temperature, and you'll discover it's a range of several degrees in either system.
For outdoor temperatures, take your pick of a few different forecasters and you'll commonly get a range of ten Fahrenshite degrees in their predictions.
If anything, they're both too granular for customary usage.
The American insistence on using AM and PM. The 24hr clock like the metric system is used by their military but talk 14:25 in civvy street and you get blank looks.
It will only get worse if the Republicans get control of The House, The Senate and The White House in 2024. They are isolationists.
Unfortunately the US also have far to many hardcore historical revisionists who want to "return to the grand old times", entirely neglecting that the "grand old times" included even more misery, persecution and, effectively, slavery. However those that want this are the only ones who benefit - as in the top 0.0001%. While the UK doesn't have quite so many literalistic theistic (I suspect most just use their "religion" as an excuse for their behaviour rather than have any actual belief) woman and non-hetero haters as the US elected, the UK is unfortunately following along nicely and this includes isolationism - Brexit, for example.
12:00 AM and 12:00 PM categorically cannot exist.
12:00 is the middle and as AM is "before midday", midday cannot ever be described as before itself. Likewise, PM is "after midday" and therefore midday cannot ever be described as after itself. It's like deciding that 4 is a larger number than 4, except when it's a smaller number than 4 of course.
Midnight is the same amount of time both before and after midday therefore it is simultaneously both before and after it at the same time.
Those who are too clueless to understand the problem claim that there are "accepted standards" where 12:00 am is always midnight.. except when it's not, and vice-versa. With localised context, it's usually possible to make an educated guess as to whether or not some muppet writing 12:00pm is referring to midday or midnight, but not always. To work around this, established standards were created and these are called "the 24 hour clock".
As for claims of 12:00pm being midday or midnight, consider this sequence... 10am, 11am, 12am... or 10pm, 11pm, 12pm. Now as soon as one goes past this time then the am/pm switched, for example: 11:00am, 11:55am, 12:00am, 12:05pm. There: perfect sense and absolute nonsense in the same sequence.
12:00 AM and 12:00 PM categorically cannot exist.
Bull-fucking-shit!
Those who are too clueless to understand that clock times such as minutes are a period of time rather than an instant (hint: could be someone you know).
12.00AM = 00:00:00 to 00:00:00.999999'... therefore is AM (Ante Meridiem)
12.00PM = 12:00:00 to 12:00:00.999999'... therefore is PM (Post Meridiem)
This is, of course, assuming 1 second granularity with a day starting at 00:00:00 and ending at 23:59:59.99999' - with the middle being the start of the period 12:00:00-12:00:01. If you want to argue the instant of AM to PM to AM please declare the granularity of your clock! (BTW, it really gets up my nose when I see a clock with "24" at the top!)
However, I fully agree: If you want to talk with less ambiguity then don't use AM/PM.
As a departing lightener: I was once talking to a copper. He wanted me to remember his badge number and to appear clever. "2430" he said "Half past midnight, easy to remember!" Boy, was he pissed off with me! Nob! I guess he was partly right though, I do remember his number. And that he was a nob!
Midnight and noon aren't actual times, they are just markers between the old Roman notion of ante meridiem (before midday) and post meridiem (after midday). They both have zero duration, and as such are logical constructs, not actual times.
Thus "midnight" marks the time when the prior day stops the new day starts. As it is time of zero length, it doesn't actually belong in either day.
Put another way, there is no "midnight on Monday", but there is a "midnight between Sunday and Monday" and a "midnight between Monday and Tuesday".
It follows that the time 24:00:00 doesn't actually exist, and is an illogical construct.
G'day jake. I'm not sure if you intended to respond to my post, or gnasher729's post above. Either way, I agree with your point.
It follows that the time 24:00:00 doesn't actually exist, and is an illogical construct.
Yep. The standard for Earth Days is a measure of a 24 hour period, it's base 24. It "ticks over" (oh dear!) before 24 is reached, 24 doesn't exist "in that column". In the same way base 10 doesn't include 10, in the units column.
Not that I'm enthusiastic about it, but if we extend to use the phrase "the hour of midnight (between Sunday and Monday)" then it would be a period during Monday. So midnight precedes midday for any given day.
In short, times specified are usually actually a period of time, defined by the start if that period and for the duration of that period. The period is implied and has been overlooked as insignificant in day to day life. In sciencey life we can better nail down definitions.
It'll depend on which day you are measuring as to whether 24:00:00 exists.
The mean (in other words, average) solar day is pretty much 24 hours. That's the time it takes for the Earth to rotate so that the Sun crosses the same 'longitude' in the sky (meridian), or the shadow cast by a gnomon on a sundial to cross the same fixed mark. It's an average because the Earth's orbit is not circular, so a result of the Earth's motion on the non-circular orbit is a variation in the length of the day as measured by those means. That variation can mean that the day can be 30 seconds longer, or 20 seconds shorter than the average. So a time of 24:00:30 is entirely possible if you are measuring apparent solar time. (Wikipedia: Mean Solar Time)
If you use a different star as your reference - one that the Earth is not orbiting around, you get different length of the day. If the star is far enough away, it appears fixed to a celestial reference frame, and the time it takes for the earth to rotate so that the star crosses the same meridian is 23 hours 56 minutes 4 seconds and some change - the length of the sidereal day. (Wikipedia: Sidereal time)
It turns out that the Earth does not rotate uniformly: the trend is that it is gradually slowing down, but it does occasionally speed up. This means that defining time as dependent on the Earth's rotation is less accurate than using atomic clocks, which beat more consistently. Given that clocks tick SI seconds, which vary less than mean solar seconds, we need to adjust things to keep them synchronised, which is done by adding 'leap' seconds to compensate for the Earth slowing down. If the Earth speeds up enough, we might need to subtract a second. Leap seconds are added at 23:59:59 UTC, so the time will beat 23:59:59 - 23:59:60 - 00:00:00.
There is a difference between "time", the dimension, and "what time is it?", clock/calendar time.
I run on three major clocks, and one minor one.
The first is TheWife's monthly cycle. If you are married to a woman, you'll grok.
The second is the seasonal clock handily provided by the Solar Year & the Earth's axial tilt with respect to its orbit. It is totally out of my control, but I plant my fields & breed my critters by it, as humans have since time immemorial. Trying to change this is a fool's errand.
The third is the clock provided by the Master clock on my network, which syncs up to an atomic clock once per day (ntp.org works for most purposes ... I use something else), which all of my machines adhere to. This is for computer record keeping more than anything else.
Context is key. There is no "SingleTimeStandard[tm]", and never will be. With the exception of The Wife's, of course.
The minor fourth clock is my dive watch. I wear it when appropriate. It's kinda important ... but it could be completely out of sync with the three major clocks in my life and it wouldn't matter at all.
As a side-note, I don't wear a wristwatch day-to-day ... and haven't in nearly half a century (since my HP-01, back in 1977). In my mind, they are completely pointless. Everywhere you look these days you can see something giving you a pretty good approximation of "local time". Humans living life to the second or minute (or even ten minutes!) is counter productive. Even when baking bread ten minutes either way won't kill you, or the loaf ... Relax, be patient, learn to make cheese, cure meat and brew beer.
It's been 21 days since Jake posted this and he'll probably never see it (unless there's some way that you can be notified of responses on El Reg, and if there is, I'd love to know how), but I do love the assumption that the person reading his comment might not be straight, but they're definitely a bloke.
So hello, you intrepid post explorer. Please share in my amusement.
"I do love the assumption that the person reading his comment might not be straight, but they're definitely a bloke."
I'm pretty sure I didn't make that assumption at all. Women married[0] to women notice the same things[1].
"(unless there's some way that you can be notified of responses on El Reg, and if there is, I'd love to know how)"
Nearest that I am aware of would be to visit https://forums.theregister.com/my/forums/ ... any changes to commentardary in forums you've commented in will automagically mark that link unread, and move it to the top of the list. It'll be up to you to figure out if anyone is talking to you, though. Use the "sort comments" option "newest" to bring new comments to the top. Etc. Fiddle about with it and use what works for you.
Edit: That's not my downvote ... have an upvote to negate it.
[0] Or in a long-term, committed relationship, if you prefer not to use the "m" word.
[1] What "things" means will vary between individuals, obviously.
If you use 24h time style in the US, you have to word it the way the US military does.
Your 14:25 example gets fourteen-twentyfive-hours, and then they will get it. Every US knows this style of time telling, at least when they watch movies.
Important detail for Britain: fourteen-twentyfive-hours-zulu means Greenwich time. That letter addendum is used when an operation crosses several time zones or when it matters to tell the time zone. Current local time here is twentythree-thirtyone-alfa-hours (why alfa and not alpha? Well... ). Confession: I don't know whether the letter comes before or after "hours", someone from the US should be able to tell. Google-fu is unclear.
You leftists and your anonymous comments. Republicans are what makes up most of our military, and none of us have a problem with the 24 hour clock. I spend 40 hours a week working off UTC because it's the easiest way to work across time zones. If you want to point politics, I've yet to come an American leftist* that even has any idea other time zones exist, much less be able to think in terms of other time zones.
*Not true, of course, but everyone can demonize the other party and for no good reason.
I’ve generally found that when demons are invoked (along with witchcraft, devil worship, etc, etc) it’s generally by the right, more specifically the religious right. The left generally have difficulty *actually* demonising anybody because we tend to have no truck with such superstitious nonsense… :-)
12h clock is used often in speech here in North dispite using officially 24h system.
Like "'it's 2 o'clock' when someone asks what time it is (instead of 14), because the context is 'now' and am/pm isn't really relevant. When you write time down, it's always 24h time, as you've no idea when it will be read.
Also avoids totally 12AM/PM confusion by using 00 or 24 for midnight: "12" is always noon.
After over two-decades living outside the US I have to say, that I still am not used to how the dates are written in the rest of the world. When sorting columns I generally want things broken down by month and having the day first means that I have to do extra steps to get things in the order I need. I'd be interested to hear why the day should be in the first position and not the month and why the US does it one way and everyone else does it differently. If I were to hazard a guess, I'd think it has something to do with ledger books and sorting.
The ISO standard is Year-month-day which I think makes sense so if we're voting, I'd go for that.
Aesthetically I'm not a fan of ISO but won't deny it's usefulness so it's my preference for filenames and anything else that would benefit from being sorted. Visually I still like the VMS-style d-Mmm-yyyy format but obvs. it's more awkward for stuff like sorting and internationalised applications.
The worst has to be nn/nn/nn which is so ambiguous it could be any of several things. Even when storage was expensive and green-screens were the norm, 2-digit years were a terrible idea.
I think your proving my point really it's just the scale you're used to that let's you perceive what is hot or cold.
I would have had no clue what 63 was if you hadn't put it in C, also by my experience I doubt many people notice the granularity of a half degree C difference that much when it come to too hot or too cold for temp settings.
Now you're just making scenarios up. So you keep your house right around 17 and in the summer you can go up to 19. So keep it at 17 in the winter and 18 in the summer. This really isn't that difficult if you just purge the rediculous system from your mind. What you're doing wrong is finding the temperature you've become accustomed to and then converting that into a fractional celcius unit. What you need to do is stop thinking in F and use C. 7 billion people are able to set their climate control using SI units without worry, I'm sure you can too
I'm quite similar and often mix and match units; I've been just fine with 25.4mm to the inch since forever.
The main exception (I mean apart from now rather quaint-looking measures like furlongs etc) is °C: Fahrenheit has always seemed a bit alien to me. I presume people around me used it but I never became familiar with it. About the biggest controversy for me was trying to get used to Celsius rather than centigrade.
Also to the downvoters, not sure what I said that was controversial: I started school in Feb '73 and we were taught metric. *shrug*
"About the biggest controversy for me was trying to get used to Celsius rather than centigrade."
Wonder why as it's the same.
"The degree Celsius is the unit of temperature on the Celsius scale[1] (originally known as the centigrade scale outside Sweden),[2] one of two temperature scales used in the International System of Units (SI), the other being the Kelvin scale. The degree Celsius (symbol: °C) can refer to a specific temperature on the Celsius scale or a unit to indicate a difference or range between two temperatures. It is named after the Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius (1701–1744), who developed a similar temperature scale in 1742. Before being renamed in 1948 to honour Anders Celsius, the unit was called centigrade, from the Latin centum, which means 100, and gradus, which means steps. Most major countries use this scale; the other major scale, Fahrenheit, is still used in the United States, some island territories, and Liberia.".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celsius
Wonder why as it's [Celsius/centigrade] the same. True for the layman, not by strict definition (the triple point thing). To make it even easier, they pulled the old name switcheroo!
...one of two temperature scales used in the International System of Units... True, but K is a base unit, °C is derived. I reckon they included °C just because it happened to fit in easily! (JK!)
It's just a question of utility. Small quantities are easy to work with.
6'6" is something you can visualise. 1.98m is awkward. Is that above average or what? Unless you use those units and record height on a regular basis in this fashion. The reference of 5'9" as the (western) human average is very well understood. Plus or minus a couple of inches people automatically know what that means, even if not educated in imperial units.
K and C have the same issue. Weather forecast of 263? or 303? A working range of -10 to +30 around a zero is just easier for most purposes to read and understand.
But for any serious work whatsoever, finance, engineering, science, the SI system is king. Eliminate any possible ambiguity (is it a ton, tonne, long ton, US Gallon, Imperial Gallon, etc.). SI happens to be, I dare say, elegant in a make-your-maths tidy way too.
The Inch is of course formally defined in metric units in todays era, so whether you like it or not you're using SI.
>>"About the biggest controversy for me was trying to get used to Celsius rather than centigrade."
Celcius is the name of the temperatire scale (well the name of the bloke wot dun it innit?) which happens to be a centigrade (a scale with 100 gradations) - the point being that you can have a centigrade for any arbitary interval (of anything) but only one (?) corresponds to the Celcius scale which goes between freezing point and boiling point of water under standard conditions.
On temps, there is more granularization with F than C. C users have 0 to 49 for freezing to damn it's hot, whereas F has 32 to 120. And, there is a noticeable difference between 72 and 73 degrees on a thermostat. No idea if C thermostats have decimals, like 30.1 as an option, but if it doesn't then C would not be granular enough.
I think in the UK there's a cohort born around 1960 that went through school learning both and are probably still OK with both. In junior school (age 8-12) I did lots of arithmetic with oz, lb, stones, CWT, tons, inches, feet, yards, chains, furlongs, miles, pints, gallons and can still remember the conversions. Ditto pounds, shillings, pence (or LSD as we knew them) and guineas, but we went decimal while I was at junior school, so spent a lot of time on decimal arithmetic. In In later years everything was metric. I'm perfectly happy working in both but I default to feet, yards, miles, pints, gallons if I'm not talking technical. I'm ok cooking with imperial or metric but not cups.
Similar age and similar experience. Except I have ( now grown up )kids. The AC doesn't mention if they have any. But with kids going through the school system metric was the one we had to use. ( Though clinical thermometer was an exception 98.4 all the way).
Mostly I use a mixture too, now. I weigh myself in stones and lbs. Recipes in metric, fuel in gallons, distance in Km, speed in mpg, wood in centimetres, height (my) in feet and inches, And so on.
And sometimes there's a combination as in how many gallons will take us so many Km.
I got all of those (born early 60) as well as physics in CGS as well as FPS and MKS. Fortunately MKS won by the time I was doing A-levels.
I recall only too well those who never considered that they were working base 10, 12, and 20 for money (not even looking at farthings!) and base 12, 14, and 8 for weights - but thought that decimalisation was 'too hard'.
Your point about the metric system in CGS is well taken! Most people don't realize that there are more than one "metric system".
The CGS and MKS system may seem to be similar, but trying to convert between the two systems in the equations in "Classical Electrodynamics" by Jackson will bend your mind. (Note: The third edition of this book partially changed to SI units, but the first two editions were Gaussian/CGS.)
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_units
Morning brain workout: I weigh myself (in kilograms) immediately before having a shower in the morning and spend the time in the shower mentally converting the reading to stones and pounds. Not every day, though. I prefer to sing and do other vocal exercises.
Easy to begin with: Pounds = Kilograms x 2 then add 10%. However, since 1kg = 2.204 lbs, I have to add an extra 0.3 lb for the 0.004. Then divide the answer by 14.
I can make your calculations a bit easier if you promise not to sing at me!
You've truncated at 3dp rather than rounded:
1Kg = ~2.2046 lbs so, 2.205 lbs rounded. I'm sorry that you've gained so much imperial mass! However.... good news! If I'm reading you correctly[1] "an extra 0.3 lb for the 0.004" is weigh over the top! So you lose quite a bit here.
So, (Kg x 2 + 10%) + ((Kg / 100) / 2) [ie. half 1% of Kg] Then all over 14.
Upvote, because it's good to work the grey matter. (And a hidden upvote for not singing at me!)
[1] Query: you're adding 4.8 (5) ounces per kilo? I'm a bit confused.
Metric is certainly more convenient for calculations, but in many situations it's more a question of familiarity than of which is "best".
Tell someone in the US or UK that a location is 20 miles away and they don't visualise that as a linear distance, rather they will think "too far to walk", or "half an hour's drive". 32km is meaningless to them in that context. The reverse would be true for people who grew up with metric units. I grew up in that period when we learned both, and have lived in places with miles and places with km, it is useful to know both.
Much the same is true of ºC/ºF, in daily life the number doesn't matter, what's important is "shirtsleeves or coat?".
I bought a motorcycle when I was visiting Vancouver, and promptly headed off through the mountain back roads of Washington state. I was quite impressed by the speed people like to take corners, judging by the corner speed signs.
Shortly after reaching the Columbia river highway, I got stopped by a cop for speeding, and realised that my speedo may have been labelled in km/h, but it certainly was calibrated in mph.
> Tell someone in the US or UK that a location is 20 miles away and they don't visualise that as a linear distance, rather they will think "too far to walk", or "half an hour's drive". 32km is meaningless to them in that context.
It's your comment that's meaningless.
The UK being right next door to the mainland means that people are in fact familiar with km. For a distance of 32 km it would be casually mentioned as "a bit more than 30". Really easy to visualize.
Likewise in the US, children are taught the metric system, and have been for decades. Plus there's plenty of us immigrants and neighbors who bring with them an understanding of metric. In fact, there's an interstate highway which starts not far from here that is marked out in km.
The US and the UK could switch overnight without any hassle. There'd be your moaners and such, but when they stop being funny the telly has an off button.
There is also a advantage to fractions beyond how people naturally think (like no one things that glass is 0.5 full, it's half full). Anyway a fraction is more precise then a fraction that's not using the lowest common denominator. As a example, write exactly 1/3 in a base 10 system. You can't.
"As a example, write exactly 1/3 in a base 10 system. You can't.".
True and it makes me sleepless and I start to see 0.33 and then 0.3333 and 0.333333333 it gets worse and worse.
But I am metrificationed and I can only learn and dream of a better and older system, but to be honest I am not .5 full but half full.
"Much the same is true of ºC/ºF, in daily life the number doesn't matter, what's important is "shirtsleeves or coat?".
Or on Tyneside, "big coat or not?" which reminds me of my maths teacher where that was the only noticeable difference between a warm summer's day and winter's freezing North Sea gales; the latter of which would see her doing schoolyard duty in The Big Coat but still with bare legs and strappy sandals poking out the bottom. Five foot nothing but the yobs were terrified of her because what she lacked in stature she made up for in withering sarcasm. Also "her Jarrow accent is so strong I can't understand a word she's saying" according to my dad, from South Shields.
Hey as a dedicated El Reg Commentard, I already have learnt two official Standards - Metric and the El Reg Soviet Standards! I have no problem switching between metres and london buses or linguine, or m³ and bulgarian airbags.
But that imperial guff, show it the door. It's utterly useless!
Or, as most Germans, convert to the size of Fußballfelder, Schwimmbäder, Tennisplätze, Acker, Anker, atü, ... Wait, you have to distinguish between FIFA, Bundesliga, Kreisliga and various other variants of Fußballfelder.
Though I am among those who never gets the Fußballfelder measurement, I have no feeling for this "standard German size".
"Football fields" is also very misleading.
Football rules specify length of 90 to 130 m and width of 45 to 90 metres*. So the area could be anywhere between 4050 and 11700 sqm, a difference factor of almost 3x
* Although official FIFA, UEFA and national competition matches have much tighter limits, there is still not one standard size.
Even Wolframalpha fails there! How many km² is one Rhode Island, officially?
I worked for an American flavored company with many local hires. As we often received some products and equipment from the US, my knowledge of both standards was extremely useful, and saved the day a couple of times.
Rather risky of UKians and USAians to assume they know the measurements used on the other side if the pond.
Comparison of the imperial and US customary measurement systems
@Dan 55
Interesting, perhaps we should blame the Germans and the Italians for that ridiculous system.
Might make a Brit feel less embarrassed about it too.
Not surprised the French decided to make something better of it.
"Both the British Imperial and United States customary systems of measurement derive from earlier English systems used in the Middle Ages, that were the result of a combination of the local Anglo-Saxon units inherited from Germanic tribes and Roman units brought by William the Conqueror after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_imperial_and_US_customary_measurement_systems
Rumour has it (from my nonagenarian retired architect of a mother-in-law) that the streets running south through Commissioner St in Johannesburg are not aligned due to one developer using the metric system and another using imperial measures. Not sure if that is true but what is true is on some streets crossing Commissioner street, such an Von Wielligh St, requires diagonal travel.
Go careful in Belgium mate! There a pint means a draught beer, like Stella or Jupiler (rather than a proper Westmalle Tripel or something). You'll get 250ml-330ml, if they don't treat you like you're a guzzling Brit! A pint or "pincha" (dunno how they spell that) = a small non-strong (5%) beer.
In Dutch the colloquial term for a glass of lager ("pils", Pilzener), also known as a "pint" (in Dutch) is a "pintje", literally: a small glass of lager, and indeed pronounced as 'pin-cha. As already stated, this glass can be either 25 or 33 cl. In the Netherlands the usual glass of lager is a "fluitje" (in Dutch), but that holds only 20 or 22 cl of lager.
In the south of Germany, they laugh at these quantities: you'll usually get a 50 cl glass of beer when ordering one. During the Oktoberfest in Munich you'll probably get a 1 l glass or stone jug.
At least, as of three weeks ago, the US has deprecated the Survey Foot. Before 1959, the US defined the foot as 0.304 metres, rather than the exact value of 0.3048.
The 1959 redefinition of the foot was legally binding and intended for the entire United States. But a single exception temporarily allowed continued use of the previous definition of the foot, exclusively for geodetic surveying. To distinguish between these two versions of the foot, the new one was named the “international foot” and the old one the “U.S. survey foot.” It was furthermore mandated that the U.S. survey foot be replaced by the international foot upon readjustment of the geodetic control networks of the United States. Although such a readjustment was completed in 1986, use of the U.S. survey foot persisted. This situation has led to confusion and errors that continue to this day, and it is at odds with the intent of uniform standards.
"Although such a readjustment was completed in 1986, use of the U.S. survey foot persisted."
What did they expect? That's what all the tools in the wild were (are) calibrated for. I know I'm not planning on replacing my kit any time soon.
Not that I ever have to file anything official ...
Which is why they should have gone metric in one step.
Changing the definition of an existing measure always causes confusion. Particularly when it's a relatively small change, as the numbers look plausible and you can't tell the difference without having both old and new sticks beside each other.
If they'd just changed to metres, then the old kit could still be used with a conversion factor, and it's reasonably obvious if the conversion has not been done.
I was reading Beyond Measure recently, an excellent book that discusses all this issues in this article in much greater detail. There is a whole large section of the book on the US Survey, the survey foot and the chain. Most of the US is defined in terms of the Gunter's chain. If you change the definition of the survey foot you've either got to change every land deed in the country or you somehow need to modify the size of the planet. Persuading people to change the "size of their plot or even state" to fit with some new definition is unlikely to be popular and so changing the size of the planet might well turn out to be easier. That at least is only a technical challenge and doesn't involve persuading people to change their minds.
"The 1959 redefinition of the foot was legally binding and intended for the entire United States."
Thank goodness I was born after that. When they redefined the foot, did they change the inch as well? Or perhaps they changed the number of inches in a foot. I think the second way would be preferable, otherwise the machinists would have had to relabel all their screws....
I was part of a due-diligence team assessing a European company for a US private equity firm that was looking to buy it. Part of the justification for the deal was that they would transfer some of the products to their US factory. I did the engineering/manufuacturing assessment; it was was mostly a fabricated product - metal bashing, welding, assembly, etc. no multi-axis CNC, exotic materials, EDM, - the IP and novelty was in the SW and performance. The deal collapsed because the costs of converting the drawing packs to metric which the US factory proposed were astronomical - and because they were so high the PE guys saw it as a very risky proposition. Even though they'd have had access to the European design team they'd assumed that they'd have to just about re-design and qualify the whole thing and wouldn't back down. They just seemed to be terrified by the very concept of metric.
Did the change involve converting screw threads?
Sometimes these are much more involved that just finding the nearest equivalent size.
This was an issue during WW2 where the British were desperate to get a US manufacturer to help with the production of the Merlin engine. Initially the plan was that Packard built Merlins would use US screw standards rather than the British built one's Whitworth screws. This was until one of the Packard engineers pointed out that Whitworth threads are stronger for a given size in the materials in use so they'd have to re-engineer the whole engine to switch thread standards to ensure it didn't just fall apart. At that point Packard decided it was easier to setup the manufacture of Whitworth threaded tools, nut & bolts in the US.
Don't forget how the Tory government only last year was cheering a 'benefit' of Brexit of being able to go back to shops selling goods in pounds and ounces since the UK left the EU, despite every one for the last 40 or so years only having been taught metric at school. And also ignoring the fact even when we were in the EU it was legal to sell in pounds and ounces that as long as they also gave the weight in Kilos / grams.
Legal, yes, but it meant that market traders and greengrocers had to replace all their scales with ones that showed metric measurements as well as imperial. They could not legally use imperial-only ones, even for a customer who requested "half a stone of potatoes". Petty bureaucracy at it's worst.
They could not legally use imperial-only ones, even for a customer who requested "half a stone of potatoes". Petty bureaucracy at it's worst.
Yes, they could. But they had to advertise metric and put that first. A customer was still entitled to order in imperial and the trader could convert. If somebody asked for "a pound" of something you're perfectly allowed to sell them 454g.
Those are two different issues. The customer can request an imperial quantity, and the trader can sell it, but to be legal the measuring equipment used has to have metric units. It may also have imperial ones, but imperial-only is illegal. The weights and measures act requires that scales be officially certified, and ones that have only imperial measures cannot now be.
> Petty bureaucracy at it's worst.
Westminster (and I think it was the Tories as well), could not be bothered when given the opportunity to make Imperial measurements an official measurement system of the UK.
As Westminister did not officially ratify Imperial measurements, nor did they object to the parts of the legislation that would consign imperial measurements to history.
Just another example of the UK shooting itself in the foot and blaming “the EU”…
That's irrelevant, it has nothing to do with quoted prices, which by law must be metric but can optionally also be imperial.
The point is that if a customer wants imperial, and the trader is willing to serve imperial, it's still illegal for a trader to use a scale which doesn't have metric. That's what upset the "metric martyrs", Trading Standards tried to confiscate their existing scales and require them to buy new ones, even on occasions when both trader & customer were happy to use imperial.
You say that hoping people won't look it up. The very old scales were no longer accurate, and needed to be replaced (as would happen every few years anyway). The fact that the new scales were also metric is a smokescreen.
You know this, but you obviously have some kind of anti-European agenda.
Scales rarely need to be replaced, but they occasionally need to be recertified, and get an official stamp.
In this case trading standards saw that the scales had no metric readout, and so removed the official stamp because they no longer complied with UK law. The trader was told that the scales could not be recertified, went to court, and lost. He threatened to go to the EU courts, but died of a heart attack before he could.
Yep, It was the start of my second year at junior school (so 1968) that the classrooms were festooned in posters about metric units and we were issued new rulers and textbooks, to start learning metric there and then. (God, I'm old).
So anyone in the UK who doesn't understand metric is either a bit of a dunce, left school before then and learned nothing since, or is being deliberately ridiculous (*cough* Rees-Mogg *cough*).
It's a crying shame the UK didn't go 100% metric by the late 70s. We could have had ten years for people to get used to it, and to go replacing road signs and pub glasses etc, then phased out the last remnants of the ridiculously baroque imperial measure before the end of the 70s.
At any French market, people cheerfully buy and sell vegetables and other produce in 'livres' (500g), ditto Germany and pfunde. And French TVs and monitors are sized in pouces (inches, literally 'a thumb'). You can buy a 5x10cm length of wood, but measure it carefully and you'll find it's a 2x4".
Livre and Pfund are at least exact definitions, a half kilogram. That one is actually easy to convert, compared to the US-A variants...
"And also ignoring the fact even when we were in the EU it was legal to sell in pounds and ounces that as long as they also gave the weight in Kilos / grams."
And even now, you still come across some products in weird numbers of grammes or millilitres because they are approximations of imperial measurements.
"Meanwhile, buy a pint in the UK and you'll get 20oz of beer, do the same in America and pints are only 16oz – a fact that still shocks British drinkers."
Sort of. Yes, the standard American unit of measure called "the pint" contains 16oz, However, almost all bars that serve pints of beer serve it in standard, British made (or reasonable facsimiles thereof), 20oz pint glasses. At least the bars that I've been in over the last several decades. I have also noticed in the last ten or so years that many bars are keeping 22oz glasses on hand to decant the 22oz bottles which many/most micro/craft breweries ship at least some of their brews in.
This might be a West Coast thing; I haven't been in a bar East of the Rockies in decades.
A US quart is sufficiently close to a litre that a switch would be pretty unproblematic.
What I object to is recipes like these (came with an air frier):
- 5 small gold potatoes, cut into 6.35mm pieces
- 28 grams unsalted butter, melted
- 1.42 grams salt, plus more to taste
- 1.42 grams pepper, plus more to taste
- 32 grams plus 17 grams all-purpose flour, divided
- 1 large egg
- 5.69 grams prepared horseradish
- 1.42 grams paprika
... etc
Now, where did I put my apothecary scales!
It's pretty obvious what that is - an American recipe converted to metric - and done quite badly. 6.35mm means it wants about 1/4 inch pieces of potato. 1.42 grams of salt is about 1/4 teaspoon, 49 grams of flour is about 1/3 cup of all-purpose flour (because American recipes don't use weights for salt, pepper, spices, or flour).
The problem with the jars climate orbiter wasn't that it was using customary units; the moon landings used customary units throughout and went off without a hitch. The problem was that units were being converted between two teams and someone made a mistake in the conversion. It's a perfect demonstration of the need to standardise units across a project, rather than proof that any particular system is superior to any other.
We should all be using duodecimal, anyway. 12 mm to the douximetre, 120 doux to the metre, and so on. More factors.
> IT
Decimal, EBCDIC, ASCII, octal, Byte-width(s), Hex.... Wait, what are the witch hunters doing here? What do you mean demonic phrases? But I don't use them, I use base64, requires less characters to display a number and is still readable! Why are you all running towards me?
Since this is an IT forum, it should be promoting the adoption of the hexadecimal system.
Hardly. Given the simplest representation of numbers in a Universal Turing Machine is Unary, we should use that (or Church Encoding, which is somewhat more flexible). You could argue for binary.
One of the disbenefits of any rational system, like decimal, is the ease by which order-of-magnitude errors are made by humans - our built-in shift operators are not good at keeping track of the number of times they have executed.
"More factors."
I've heard that as an argument for retaining feet and inches from Americans before. "What if you need a 1/4 ft or 1/3rd of an inch? My ruler has those marking". Well duh! You can divide a ruler into any weird fractions you want to. Or you can just use decimal in the first place :-)
2.4 isn't really all that exciting.
The reason why more factors are a good thing is because you end up with fewer cases of infinitely repeating decimals. 10/3 is 3.33333... whereas 12/3 is 4. Duodecimal offers a good balance between factors and mathematical simplicity. It only gets weird a bit silly once you're dividing by 7 or 9, but 10 doesn't divide well into those either.
Now I just need to find an article that lets me ramble about replacing Pi with Tau...
Now I just need to find an article that lets me ramble about replacing Pi with Tau...
I think somebody already has written that ramble. Unless the author was you.
When I first came across that idea, tau was half-pi, being a one legged letter that was half of a two legged letter. Whatever you choose, there are going to be some cases where your change makes for an easier formula and other cases where it doesn't. Like base ten, it's almost certainly too late to change now.
I've spent years ranting about non-metric measurements.
But I've got to admit the American usage of cups in certain recipes is by far easier than using spoons, weigh scales & measurers.
Some recipes are actually more dependent on ratios, not volumes / weights.
e.g. my morning porridge (for two) is one cup of porridge (oatmeal) & two cups of semi-skimmed milk. No scales, etc & washing up simpler.
Otherwise, yup, systems other than metric are simply bonkers. (And far too error-prone).
Eggs is a bit of an issue though.
There are EU standards for the size of a small/medium/large hens egg, but I've no idea what they are or whether US standards match.
Of course, the Conservative Party just handed ministers carte blanche to accidentally delete those standards. Hopefully the Lords will save us from their idiocy.
My MP just quoted the first paragraph at me to justify his vote, so it's pretty obvious he's not bothered to read it.
Especially in cooking, you state the ingredients in grams or milliliters and that should be all.
Spoons, really. What size spoon do you ? And don't tell they're all the same size, that's simply not true. The spoons from our wedding tableware are bigger than the spoons of our daily tableware, so there is no standard there.
Measuring spoons for cooking are (supposed to be[0]) calibrated, while spoons intended for table use are, essentially, haberdashery that can and do vary with the whims of the host(ess).
A "tablespoon" measure isn't a spoon for the table, rather it is a spoon that holds half a US fluid ounce (just under 15ml). A measuring teaspoon holds a third of that.
Likewise a one cup measure has nothing to do with taking a tea break, rather it is a measure equal to half a US pint, or 8 fluid ounces. That's roughly 235ml.
[0] Not all are. Cheap imports are cheap. Caveat emptor.
The teaspoon and tablespoon are also official mandated size in the UK for cooking measures too. And as you say, actual tableware are not calibrated measures and come in variable sizes :-)
There are conversions between US and UK cups and spoon measure though because, as you would expect, they are different on each side of the pond. A bloody nightmare when buying some cooking equipment that comes with recipes from the US and they didn't bother to (or even understand!) that the measurements are different. I only really use cups for rice cooking and tea/table spoon for bread making.
Volume measurements are subject to the varying density of the measured product... let's not mention 'kosher salt' which after some confusion (surely Sodium Chloride is the same stuff, whether or not it's been exposed to religion or not?) I discovered to be a less dense form - because of its manufacturing method - than crystalised salt.
...spoons intended for table use are, essentially, haberdashery...
I don't think that word means what you think it means - at least, I don't wear my cutlery.
They might, but it whether they were correct would depend on where and when the pedant lived. If they lived in the US then they'd be correct. If they lived in the UK a long time ago then they'd be correct - my 1924 OED defines cutlery as "Knives, scissors, etc.". By today's OED they'd be on dodgy ground since it includes "forks and spoons for eating" in the definition and if they worked in a restaurant and were asked to polish the cutlery they'd probably get bollocked if they only polished the knives. Most importantly (IMO - obviously), if they were talking to my grandad (unlikely) then they'd have been quickly put right because he was a cutler in Rotherham and made knives, forks and spoons.
Yeah, same here. I use a metric pinch/some/bunch though....
(except for some bakery, and the first time I try a recipe).
The problem with volumetric measurements for dry ingredients is that e.g. flour can pack quite differently, just fill a vessel to the brim and give it a rap, the stuff rearranges and settles down. If you actively stomp it down it compresses even more. Weight is just more exact (though you often don't need the precision). And measuring a cup of cold butter is just a mess...
Ever watched Americas Test Kitchen? They bang on about "perfection" and then use these imprecise measurements like cups! They even did a section on *how* to fill a cup depending on the recipe/ingredient and then never really talk about it again, leaving you to guess. A little variation may not matter with large quantities, but could make a huge difference in smaller quantities such as 1 cup or 1/2 cup. Dip and scrape level? Pour in? Shake or not? Cup of chopped nuts? How small are the nuts chopped? Weird!
A stick of butter is 4oz, and you get 4 sticks of butter in a pound of butter. They fit together in the box quite well, stacked 2x2. When you pull a stick of butter out, they are wrapped in wax paper printed with various measurements commonly used in cooking on the paper.
Just like in the UK then, except the 1/2lb block was marked in ounces and now the 250g block is marked in grammes[*]
Interestingly, ATK did a segment on butter and concluded the European/UK[**] style of tending to uses paper backed foil was the superior packaging method as the butter was far less likely to take on the smells of other products in the fridge. I think they picked Lurpack as the best option :-)
*Usually, but it's not always the case and because of the foil backer wrapper, you fold it and use it more as a ruler rather than cutting through it.
** some of the cheapest butter uses waxed paper but most is paper backed foil)
@John Brown (no body)
It is now g vs ounces, but its usually 25g markings on butter, so slightly less than an ounce.
.. But when looking at old ounce based recipes and mentally converting to metric, the easy maths conversion is to massively simplify oz to g and treat an ounce as 25g (essentially 3 and a bit #g less, but that way no need for calculators, pen & paper etc just easy mental maths, & if doing large amounts of ounces and want to match volume to what it should be then add extra "ounce" for very 8 as further approximation) so the 25g markers on UK butter are useful as they are "easy maths" ounce equivalents.
.. On the topic of UK weighing & approximate weights, if any UK readers know why I used to have a few half pence coins (long after they went out of circulation) amongst my various imperial & metric weights that were occasionally used on my balance scale then you are a naughty boy (or girl)
As a cook, the biggest worry you should have about butter is the water content ... Here in the US, by law butter has to be at least 80% butterfat, leaving roughly 2% milk solids and 18% water. Most national name brands don't go over 81% or thereabouts, because water is free and fat is money.
However, yer Dear ol' Gran's cake and cookie recipes are from more enlightened times, when butterfat content was more like 86% and water content 12%. This sounds like a small difference, but in the chemistry of baked goods it is massive. If you think you can't cook because your grandmother's cookie recipe doesn't work for you, try again with a variety of butter that contains less water. Note that some unscrupulous companies advertise "less water!", but add more milk solids instead of fat. Caveat emptor.
Here in Northern California, I recommend Straus Family Creamery's butter (just under 86%). If you are lucky and have access to real Amish butter, try that. Or make your own and press the water out as you see fit; it's not exactly rocket surgery ... and you get to control the salt content, should you want salt in your butter.
You're already using lard/mantica for your pie crusts, American biscuits and the like, right? Right? RIGHT?
Depends. If I'm baking accurately I'll use the measuring spoon. & If I want half a table spoon I'd take 1 & 1/2 teaspoons. If I want a cup I get a 8 oz cup... If I want to know the ml it says on the handle. Or I'd grab my Pyrex that has increments in Cups & milliliters.
It's not so bad when the entire recipe is in "cups", but it is a problem when you come across some American recipes where half the stuff is in ounces (ie for things like butter which can't fit in a cup), and the rest in cups. Also, it becomes a problem for any recipe where you use eggs.
Knowing how big a cup is supposed to be matters quite a lot when the same recipe calls for 3 eggs and 6 ounces of butter.
Personally I much prefer recipes that say 100g of porridge and 200ml of milk. The ratio is still clear and if you want to pour them in via a cup, that's entirely your choice.
Only annoyance is that it's really difficult to distinguish 2mm, 2.5mm and 2.54mm spacings.
And bigger sizes.
Back in the 80s/90s there were some traffic accidents in the UK caused by towed caravans coming unhitched. The problem was that some people had older caravans which had 2" socket hitches (50.8mm), but the ball on the towbar of their modern Japanese and European cars was 50mm. They looked the same, but that 0.8mm difference, added to a bit of wear on the old socket, meant that one good bump in the road & the caravan could part company with the car...
In the "good old days", there were pressed steel hitches, hollow tow balls, and 1/4" steel sheet used for towbars. Combine that with the digger driver being happy to drop two cubes of gravel in a piss weak trailer if you were silly enough to ask him to.
A missing 0.8mm was the least of your worries.
Agreed, but they're not the only ones. How's about 22.01.2023 ? Or 2023-22-01 ?
And I have a few more that I found while importing CSV files from various customers - sometimes with different formats inside the same file.
I swear, it's a good thing firearms aren't easily availble 'round here because when I snap I'll be reduced to strangling the bastards instead of shooting them - that'll give someone more time to drag me off.
"I write 22/Jan/2023".
Yes, I have had to do with that and all those variations years ago in programming but the fact is today, that you actually don't write that shit today when dealing with the internet and computers.
You will infact today enter the date exactly as the system demands you to do it for so fucking obvious reasons.
What, no one linked to iso8601 on xkcd yet?
Even Windows 3 can be set to use it. Believe me, I've tested, and it works!
NT uses a 64 bit counter with 100 nanoseconds increments since 1601-01-01 or 1.1.1601 or 1/1/1601.
Interesting choice by Dave Cutler.
It makes duration calculations slightly more complicated at the changeover between the Julian and Gregorian calendar. For the U.S colonies at the time, that would officially be September 1752. "Section I of the Act corrects this divergence by providing that Wednesday, 2 September 1752 be followed by Thursday, 14 September 1752. when the calendar officially did not use the days between."
I'm assuming it's a proleptic date (in other words, 'New Style' extended backwards), as the date precedes the Julian to Gregorian change to the calendar for UK and colonies. That is, if the NT clock shows 13 September 1752, it is actually (officially) 02 September 1752, so the NT clock starts at (officially) 20 December 1600 (Old Style).
What, no one linked to iso8601 on xkcd yet?
Before ISO 8601 was published, in written correspondence in a multicultural environment, I tended to use the format <2 digit number of day in month with leading zero>-<month in Roman numerals with overline and underline>-<4 digit year> e.g. 06- ̲̅V̲̅I̲̅ -1984, as different countries used different abbreviations for the names of the months, and some places put the month in digits first. In all the time I used it, I think I got one query, everyone else interpreted it correctly.
> Some of us prefer 7.7mm, as used in the Very Best Battle Rifle Ever Made, the Short Magazine Lee Enfield III*! And in the Finest Light Machine Gun Of All Time, the Bren!
> Why, yes, I did carry those items around when I was in the Cadets, why do you ask?
You and me both, mate. Despite my love-affair with motorcycles, I still consider the Bren as my favourite internal-combustion engine! (And my Lee-Enfield .303 was actually Boer-War vintage...)
One of the tangible, retrograde, outcomes of Brexit, does seem to be that people feel free to use Imperial measurements - I hear it increasingly, everywhere.
I grew up with SI units, and I like the fact that the institute strives to create units from constants - I don't understand some of their reasoning... but clever people argue about things for a very long time before they come to a conclusion - and I think that that probably produces a more accurate measuring system than the Rule Of Thumb.
The only persuasive argument that I've heard from Mathematicians about the Imperial system, is one of easier division : 12 divides into thirds, quarters and halves, whereas 10 just has divisions of 2 and, oddly, 5.
Maybe there's an argument to be made that we've all got lazier (stupider) since we don't have to do mental gymnastics with money and measurement? idk.
12 inches = 1 foot (factors: 2, 2, 3)
3 feet = 1 yard (factors: 3)
22 yards = 1 chain (factors: 2, 11)
10 chains = 1 furlong (factors: 2, 5)
8 furlongs = 1 mile (factors: 2, 2, 2)
(UK)
16 ounces = 1 pound (2, 2, 2, 2)
14 pounds = 1 stone (2, 7)
8 stone = 1 hundredweight (2, 2, 2)
20 hundredweight = 1 [long] ton (2, 2, 5)
Yes, that's *really* convenient to work with for mental arithmetic. How much taller is someone who is 6 foot 4 inches than someone who is 5 foot 7 inches? How much heaver is 13 stone 5 pounds than 11 stone 10 pounds? How long is a quarter of a mile, in yards?
At least Americans just give the weight in pounds.
"One of the tangible, retrograde, outcomes of Brexit, does seem to be that people feel free to use Imperial measurements - I hear it increasingly, everywhere."
That;s a little surprising to me. Just some strongly Brexit people being contrary maybe? Anyone 60ish or younger was taught metric from early school days, like me, I was there when it all changed so learned both. By secondary school, pretty much all teaching was done in metric units.
Imperial never really went away - I learnt metric at primary school in the 60s and 70s alongside the old imperial system, and I am always surprised by the number of much younger people (young enough to have little or no exposure to imperial) who nonetheless revert to inches, feet and acres in particular, in preference to using the metric units they were brought up with.
Of course, in many applications where precision isn't needed, feet and inches are easier - an average persons foot is likely to be somewhere approximately a foot in length, a normal pace for the same person will be around a yard, where to stride a metre, you have to stretch your pace to more of a stride, and of course the distance from the end of an average thumb back to the knuckle is roughly an inch, all of which make such distances easy to relate to and make a rough measurement of.
Even though I was taught metric from very early on, I don't find most metric measurement easy to picture in my mind. Not that this is helped the reality that for many everyday things, all that was done to metricate them was to convert the existing imperial measurement to metric and carry on using the same sized packaging containing the same amount of product (which a couple of people have already mentioned).
However, using parts of the body for measurement is probably going to give you the same result as using Ray's Rules of Precision - 'Measure with a micrometer, mark with chalk, cut with an axe'.
@Nobody who matters
Thanks that was a nice comment.
Equally I know my height and weight in kilograms and meters and so forth. And I don't feel I have to know how many stones I am.
But non of that part of life has anything to do with this article really.
The metric system is about having a world wide standard, call it ISO or what ever, and that had to happen, and it had to be better than what was before.
The British felt, as always, it was all about them, of course, and that their Imperial standards, no matter how rotten, were superior and no change was needed, and certainly not by anybody else.
But in France the number of different measures was immense with more than 500 different, and they decided to do something about it.
The rest of Europe had similar problems, and also the Americans.
The great idiocy reading these comments is that there are some people still here who for some stupid reason feel that they have lost something or being robbed of something.
And some Brits are indeed experts in that field.
And may Mogg go in any system of measurements of his choice.
It's obvious there was a serious demand in the world to reach a common standard.
That could have started in Britain, but it did not due to the Empire and the English assumption they had already "invented" the superior system.
(100% of Britain's problems are today caused by those same assumptions).
"The Metre Convention, also known as the Treaty of the Metre,[1] is an international treaty that was signed in Paris on 20 May 1875 by representatives of 17 nations (Argentina, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Peru, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden and Norway, Switzerland, Ottoman Empire, United States of America, and Venezuela).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre_Convention
You're right, but I don't think it's just a British thing. If the British had managed to formalize imperial measures as a world standard then the French would be using metric today and a load of Jambons would be chucking their toys out the pram about having to buy groceries in pounds and ounces.
@katrinab
No it was not.
But I think I know how you have been fooled to think so, probably from this.
"James Clerk Maxwell played a major role in developing the concept of a coherent CGS system and in extending the metric system to include electrical units."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_system
"The metric system is a system of measurement that succeeded the decimalised system based on the metre that had been introduced in France in the 1790s.
The French Revolution (1789–99) provided an opportunity for the French to reform their unwieldy and archaic system of many local weights and measures. Charles Maurice de Talleyrand championed a new system based on natural units, proposing to the French National Assembly in 1790 that such a system be developed. Talleyrand had ambitions that a new natural and standardised system would be embraced worldwide, and was keen to involve other countries in its development. Great Britain ignored invitations to co-operate, so the French Academy of Sciences decided in 1791 to go it alone ".
It's an absolutely miniscule number of rabid idiots.
Sadly a few of them bought seats in the House of Commons so they could leave abusive notes for civil servants after taking a nap on the benches of the House.
The "consultation" was violently biased, yet fortunately 99.95% "stop wasting our money on this tripe".
"people feel free to use Imperial measurements - I hear it increasingly, everywhere."
Nope, not the slightest difference anywhere I've been - people still use the usual mash up of imperial and metric. The only people who are possibly "free" to use imperial are doing it deliberately, I suspect, to make brexit into a "victory"
...12 divides into thirds, quarters and halves...
When the only option was mental arithmetic or a slide rule if you were fancy then that was a reasonable argument. But now with every phone having a calculation app and for those without phones simple calculators are of negligible cost so almost nobody does mental arithmetic anymore the argument for a 12 factor is no longer applicable.
(Tongue in cheek)
It certainly makes sense to use a rational standard where things are going to be interchanged, but honestly the people frothing over the use of a pint as a measurement make no sense to me.
At no point do I need to know exactly how much my pint weighs (or its volume), so long as I know it's consistent - I have never once needed to order 1.35 pints of beer, and the smallest 'useable' fraction is a half. It functions quite reasonably as a unit of food delivery, so getting mightily offended by it not being defined by a number conveniently ending in a series of zeroes seems a bit of a waste of drinking time.
We happily accept a year being 365.25-ish days, a month being 30-ish days and so on because they conveniently divide a concept we hold - mildly obtuse units of measurement can be useful when they keep numbers within a particular range we are comfortable imagining.
<q>At no point do I need to know exactly how much my pint weighs (or its volume), so long as I know it's consistent - I have never once needed to order 1.35 pints of beer, and the smallest 'useable' fraction is a half. It functions quite reasonably as a unit of food delivery, so getting mightily offended by it not being defined by a number conveniently ending in a series of zeroes seems a bit of a waste of drinking time.</q>
Where I am a.t.m. beer is sold in 1/3 litre
At no point do I need to know exactly how much my pint weighs (or its volume), so long as I know it's consistent - I have never once needed to order 1.35 pints of beer, and the smallest 'useable' fraction is a half. It functions quite reasonably as a unit of food delivery, so getting mightily offended by it not being defined by a number conveniently ending in a series of zeroes seems a bit of a waste of drinking time.Where I am a.t.m. beer is sold in 1/3 litre
I don't know if they still do, as I have not attended one in a (too) long time, but at beer exhibitions/trade fairs (e.g. Great British Beer Festival at Earls Court (which tells you how long ago)), the beer would be served in 1/3 pint glasses.
@Andy 73
smallest useful division of a pint is 1/3 in many real ale pubs...
Plenty of pubs do a taster triple - a pint in total - 3 different beers, each in a 1/3 pint glass.
You can sample 3 beers you have not tried before (I know most pubs will serve you a tiny dribble to taste as a freebie, but really need a decent volume so its had a proper pour to get body & head developed)
A good way to try a few different beers without getting too merry - e.g. trying 6 beers is 2 pints in this way, but if doing that with 1/2 pints then its 3 pints.
1/3 pt is just enough to be able to adequately sample the beer, anything smaller (e.g. 1/4 pint) or less would be a struggle to get decent body & head (and you also need enough volume to have several tastes to properly sample a beer)
Frankly, I get along just great with hexadecimal, and always have. Then my boy comes home from some club they set up at school, affiliated with the “dozenal society,” and all of a sudden they want factor of 3 wedged in there: yeah, duodecimal. All of a sudden it’s all these stories coming home, like how come a minute is five-dozen seconds and a day is two-dozen hours, or a circle is 30-dozen degrees, and all this! Listen, I grew up when Swatch came out with Beat Time, where a whole day is 1000 .beats: that’s 10^3.
Also as a donut appreciator I prefer the “baker’s” dozen rather than a traditional dozen.
(Although some enterprising grocers will sell you a hexadecimal dozen eggs, $12, which is a full 50% more vast than any mere dozen. Who says Easter eggs are only for Easter? I say, let’s move to “Easter Island” where every day is appropriate for egg salad sandwiches!)
What units you use doesn't matter, what does is that everyone working on a project uses the same ones......
Fun fact, building and plumbing supplies are still sold in Imperial sizes as is jam & milk........
Also, everyone should use Imperial Units (Freedom Units) as the UK has at one time or another invaded everyone apart from Portugal........
Fun fact, building and plumbing supplies are still sold in Imperial sizes
...because there are still an enormous number of "legacy" properties out there with 100+ year old plumbing.
as is jam & milk........
Not sure about jam, but milk still sometimes comes in 1 or 2 pint quantities, but not always. Mostly I buy it in 1 or 2 litre bottles. I just checked in the fridge where I keep a "1 pint" bottle to re-fill for my "coffee on the road". It's actually 500ml. So I can't say I've actually seen milk in imperial measures for some years now.
Fun fact, building and plumbing supplies are still sold in Imperial sizes
As a matter of fact, they aren't. All building supplies are metric.
A 2x2 is not 2", it's 45mm - prior to metrification, the size varied depending on the mill that planed it.
Lengths and sheet are all metric, though usually a multiple of 600mm.
UK plumbing is a very odd case. All the actual pipework is entirely metric, while screw fittings are a mix of metric and imperial threads. Eg single domestic taps are imperial, while mixer taps are metric at the monoblock.
They made a huge mistake when defining everything in terms of metric measurements by not making the inch 2.56mm rather than 2.54. You could go down to 1/256 of an inch without needing any more decimal places. The would have made things much easier, and easier to convert measurements means easier to convert people.
"You could go down to 1/256 of an inch without needing any more decimal places."
Yeah, 'cos working mental arithmetic with fractions is so much easier :-)
True, with practice, you "learn" certain fractions and calculations that are common and can just "know" the answer, but the moment you come across a less used fraction and have to add or subtract another less used fractional size, it gets more difficult. My mother was a comptometer operator when she first left school and for the rest of her life remember all the LSD-decimal conversion she had to memorise because even back in the 50's, big electric office calculators where working in decimal, not a bastardised mix of bases 12 and 20. Converting mixed 12ths and 20ths to decimal was second nature to her. But she only had to learn and do that because the mechanical calculators couldn't (or were more more complex and expensive)
> They made a huge mistake when defining everything in terms of metric measurements by not making the inch 2.56mm rather than 2.54. You could go down to 1/256 of an inch without needing any more decimal places. The would have made things much easier, and easier to convert measurements means easier to convert people.
OTOH, if they'd defined the inch as 2.5454...repeating, then the furlong/fortnight would be a metric measurement -- 1 cm/minute.
as a keen, if unskilled, cook my regret is that we didn't just metricate ounces at 25g as, at domestic quantities, grams are useless for anything except herbs and spices and kilos anything except potatoes or oranges. 25x isn't far off the logarithmic midpoint when you have a system based on powers of 10^3 - it would be nice to have a word for it.
This is why recipes in some of my older cookbooks have two sets of measurements, metric and imperial, and you're warned not to mix them, because the conversion involves both rounding and adjusting to make the recipe easier to use either way. For example the recommended dry-weight conversions in one book are 1 oz : 25 g; 2 oz : 50 g; 4 oz : 100 g; 8 oz : 225 g; 12 oz : 350 g; 1 lb : 450 g.
Ah. and there you have the one problem with metric units ( and UK decimal coinage) that I do think is a nuisance.
The lack of simply named intermediate units. I don't miss inches or yards, cm or m do me just fine for relatively small numbers of either. I do miss feet though, for when the cm is to small but the m is too large. Even more so g to Kg. The gram is so small you need a couple of dozen* of them to make up a single ounce.and the Kg so large.
With decimal currency, the shilling persisted till decimalisation because it was a useful sub unit. It doesn't matter whether there are 240 or 100 p in the pound, it's still easier to say 7 shillings (" 7 bob" even easier) than 35p (or pre decimal equivalent). Idiot politicians ruthlessly removed the concept of a shilling. They could just have left it there as a 5p unit called the shilling. If people wanted to use it no harm done and they'd have found the transition easier.
*Dozens don't serve any useful purpose- but saying "2 dozen (or a score even) of..." is just somehow easier to articulate than "2 tens of". It somehow sounds clumsy. Else saying "20" sounds over precise if you want a few of something. It lacks a kind of friendliness that people would want to use. Has too much of the white lab coat about it.
But they're never used in daily life. Probably because they don't have a friendly name. The technocrats who gave us rational systems like metric units and decimal currency aren't on the whole good people people, I'd hazard. Just as I'd argued previously that we should have retained the shilling ( as a handy, named, 5p unit) they needed to have encouraged useful names for things like decimetre. Names that ordinary people can get to use and like ( a maximum two syllables would be a good starting point). And if that developed into a different name, well and good.
"Idiot politicians ruthlessly removed the concept of a shilling."
You lot finally managed that, eh? That's sad, in the old meaning of the word.
I was in the UK just prior to, on, and immediately after Decimal Day. From what I recall, a pint was still two and a half bob on Feb 15th 1971 ... By 1980ish, it was 50p, but my favorite beertender was still asking ten bob ... his wife asked for "ten shillings please, luv". Likewise in all the local shops near where I lived.
And we all bitched about it ... imagine, half a quid for a fuckin' pint! What was the world comin' to?
Fahrenheit was originally designed so that 0 was the freezing point of brine, 30 was water, and 90 was normal body temperature. There were 180 degrees between water boiling and freezing, which has more factors than 100 to make maths without a calculator easier.
Just with it being the 1700s it just wasn't created that accurately!
The alternative centigrade system invented by Anders Celsius originally had 0 as boiling point and 100 as the freezing point of water. Both of these points are highly variable.
Daniel Fahrenheit chose to use his definition because his mixture of water, ice and ammonium chloride forms a stable temperature. The rest of the system seems pretty wacko though.
A Scottish pint, for example, was almost double the size of an English equivalent until 1824, which speaks volumes about the drinking culture north of the border.
I'd have added ”at the time" — Scotland's still got a problem, but they acknowledge it, are getting better, and are addressing it in ways that the rest of the UK should be but aren't.
That said, I'd like to applaud the pun.
A more down-to-earth example came in 1983 with the Air Canada "Gimli Glider" incident, where pilots of a Boeing 767 underestimated the amount of fuel they needed […] the aircraft took on less than half the fuel is needed and the engines failed at 41,000 feet (12,500m).
And this one.
Canada is officially metric but in practice we have adopted a hybrid system which could be the worst of both worlds.
My stove is set in Fahrenheit because that is how we set cooking temperatures, but my house thermostat uses Celsius as that is how we measure air temperature. Distance driven is always in kilometres but short measurements are typically in inches. Anything to do with lumber, carpentry or thread counts is in inches/feet. I could go on but there is a great flow chart here for "How to measure like a Canadian":
https://preview.redd.it/dsmht7np3gl31.png?width=681&format=png&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=387b6759319d5d51eccacdd74c3d3254158f5886
The OP seems to be confusing several different issues: rationality, simplicity, standardisation and convenience.
The metric/SI system is undoubtedly simpler than the Imperial system, and is more or less standard around the world. But even in France, the home of the metric system, bread was still sold in pounds when I last visited. They also have a measure of land which is the area you can walk round while smoking a pipe of tobacco. The British rod/pole/perch (the length of the left feet of the first sixteen men out of church on Sunday), or the yard (the distance from Henry VIII's nose to his thumb) are quite well-defined by comparison. And the inch/pouce/zoll is still widely used in Europe.
I was brought up on metric and had to learn Imperial units in a pre-computer age. For mental arithmetic the mixed units of the Imperial units are much more convenient: lots of factors, as opposed to merely 2 and 5 in the metric. There are still calculations for which I convert to Imperial, do the arithmetic, and convert back.
Problems only arise when you bring computers into the picture. The mixed radius arithmetic of Imperial units is a real PITA, though ICT did build a computer with 48-bit words which could be used as 12 4-bit digits, with each digit working in a different radix so as to enable direct calculation in £sd or ton/cwt/lb/oz.
But as for rationality, each system is rational, but (in-)convenient under different circumstances.
I occasionally come across USians and even the occasional twonk from here who insists on using units that would have been familiar to my great grandparents. The trouble for me is that I am only 63 and I have to use an app to convert pounds to kg, feet to metres or even acre-feet to litres.
I did my A levels in 1978 and one of the first lectures I got at college was "the imperial measurement system" because few of the students knew much about most of it. It gets the occasional boost from political Luddites who want to return to a system that I never used. I have a cheerier recollection of the lecture that included the film about the Tacoma Narrows!
I can convert farenheit to centigrade in my head except that I must call it celsius nowadays. Is it polite to laugh at people from the US who insist on using these bonkers units?
I know my weight in kilogrammes and my height in metres. I am not old enough to be a natural user of pounds, stone and feet for this.
I'm only 60 and can work with both. We changed over while I was about 7 or 8 but I still use feet/inches for mu height and St/lbs for weight because I can easily visualise both. I know my weight in kg and can work with that in a relative fashion, but still find it difficult to visualise what, eg 180cm tall is or 82Kg in weight is. Likewise distances, miles because that's what I do everyday on the roads, but can easily do metres for shorter distance from my competitive swimming days so visualising 25meters or 50meters is easy from pool lengths. Likewise, the pool I first learned in was 100' so can visualise that sort of distance in feet/yds easily too. My head is a weird mish mash of metric and imperial measurements and conversions making some things more difficult simply because I learned first imperial and later metric.
On the other hand, my SatNav British voice says things like turn left in 200 yds normally, but in December when my wife likes to switch to the America Elfred santas elf American voice, it says things like turn left in one quarter mile, which I find harder to visualise :-) (Yeah, I know it;s about 440yds, but still...)
" I am not old enough to be a natural user of pounds, stone and feet for this."
Really?
I grew up with lbs and stone for body weight, feet and inches for height, and they were still in use not too many years ago, certainly well into my adult life. I'm just a coupe of years older than you. Mrs 6 is slightly younger than you. Our friends are all around the same age. Most have degree level education or better. And we all grew up using Imperial measures. I had to sit in my primary school lessons memorising that there were 1760 feet in a mile, or 880 in a half mile and so forth. We switched to a greater or lesser extent over the years. But the body height and weight units never did until at least we had kids. And even then we were given their weight in Imperial even if it was written down in metric.
The US pint, gallon, FL Oz etc are actually derived from the old English queen Anne gallon, the standard used in the UK when the Americas were colonies. A queen Anne gallon (US Gallon) was defined by 8lbs of wine as oppose to 10lb of water at 60F in the imperial gallon. Since the density of wine and water are marginally different this of course alters the volume of the fluid ounce. In 1820 Britain modernized and redefined the imperial gallon but America kept into the old English standard.
Easy to extrapolate that to liter, kilogram, 10°C and so on.
If you ask an American, specifically USA, how much Foot-pound if required to heat 1 grain of water by 1 °F, and then ask to extrapolate that to ounce, pond, minim, teaspoon or gallon the usual answer would be "f* you" since those don't correlate well. Even US scientists would just smile and decline due to the amount of work and stick with the metric system they already use (hello NASA!).
I disagree! Unit conversions are ridiculously easy, once you know how to wield MathCad.
I find it perplexing, however, that in each worksheet I have to “declare” that
° := π/180
“If you ask an American, specifically USA, how much Foot-pound if required to heat 1 grain of water by 1 °F, and then ask to extrapolate that to ounce, pond, minim, teaspoon or gallon the usual answer would be "f* you" since those don't correlate well. Even US scientists would just smile and decline due to the amount of work and stick with the metric system they already use (hello NASA!).”
Yeah, that actually sound s a bit weird. "Souls" instead of people is usually reserved for those "lost", usually at sea, but has carried on to the air passenger industry. It might even be offensive to some who may not believe in "souls" :-)
And anyway, the Christian God at least is supposed to omniscient and omnipresent, so no "soul" can ever be "lost" since They[*] will know exactly where and when they died and arrange "collection" :-)
[*] Surely, by definition "God" is gender neutral and so must use the they/them pronouns, none of this He or She stuff :-))))
I think one of the oft-overlooked factors in the why-can't-we-all-just-get-along* argument is the fact that the word "centimetre" has four syllables, which can be a ballache to utter at times when working at scales of centimetres and inches. People want to use centimetres, but inches win because they're either 50% or 100% efficient when voiced. Add to that the fact that writing the word "inch" on a piece of paper at a reasonable size will result in a word that's just under an inch long, but for "centimetre" the word is about 3–4cm long, and ⟨er⟩/⟨re⟩ spelling differences, and you can see why it's hard to get people to use centimetres.
* any discussion on weights and measures is rife with puns, it seems
"The great value of 12 is that it readily splits by 2,3,4,6."
Why? 30cm splits nicely into 300mm, so you can spit things many more times without bothering with messy fractions and 30cm has 2, 3, 5, 6, 10 as factors. 12 doesn't have 5 as a factor and I come from a family of 5 so food portioning works better in metric :-p
I have some dealings with an American company which makes high quality kit, with American fasteners, which they also sell in Europe. They recently decided to use metric fasteners instead. But consistency is not one of their strong points - I recently dealt with a part where one fastener needed a 1/4" Allen key, and the other one a 6 mm Allen key. Almost the same, but not quite.
The more conspiratorially-minded might suggest that they're doing it on purpose to sell us more Allen keys — I say this in jest, but if you have the time and money I'd recommend reading Iain Banks's book on whisky, Raw Spirit, wherein he happily unfolds the tale of standardisation of casks and barrels, the union influences that go into their production, and the resultant batshittery that we think nothing of these days.
This conspiratorially minded poster might think that they just want to sell me more guitars, given that I fucked up the truss rod of my Strat by using a metric allen key that felt like it fitted the imperial head -- until it didn't. Then they tried to sell me a "gripper" key. It's imperial turtles all the way down.
I've found that drum equipment is surprisingly standardised, although you can still be bitten by the odd thing. One thing I went through hell with was trying to find a replacement tuning lug once — lengths and diameters and thread gauges are specified in all sorts of weird mixes, and you're lucky if you can find a manufacturer that specifies all of them at the same time, which doesn't help when you've apparently acquired a shell which requires something slightly nonstandard.
stupid.
New technical whizz starts in a factory i'm employed* at
Get handed a new die tool design, lovingly drawn out in metric by the customer, but our whizzo man has heard about some of the guys needing imperial measurements.... so he gets fresh paper and draws out the part in imperial, its checked and sent for manufacture...... to my department of high end computer controlled machining......where.... we work in metric............. and our measuring gear is in metric..... and the inspection recording sheet is in imperial because 'its an imperial drawing'
A brief meeting with the manager resulted where I explained the situation without shouting too much** and after a mangler meeting , we were told that the original metric drawing wasn't approved for production because it hadn't been checked.
*paid to have a nervous breakdown more like
**although the swearing was quite impressive
With a few others.
Miles, it is on road signs.
Pints in pubs, no where else, 0.5l will do.
Weight now 100% SI, My car is roughly 2250kg. No idea of my weight in pounds, only to nearest couple stone in stone.
BHP, not made full move to KW yet.
Motorway coutdown signs are in a weird length which is 0.9m roughly.
Feet on full sized railway things, multiply by 4 to get mm. BR Mark 1 doors are 8mm wide.
As to cups, what size cup, A cup, D cup, GG cup?
I have done an imperial conversion for our software, they moan that our data is in mm, tough, do all the conversion in display and edit, all maths in mm and m.
We are big cubit users. Use chains a bit. Both are quite handy a metric chain being 20m, and a metric cubit being 0.5m.
Now here's my trade secret: My nipple is exactly 1m from my right finger grip.
I can reel out 15m of cable +/- 1inch easily.
Won a few pints off juniors over the years.
Motorway coutdown signs are in a weird length which is 0.9m roughly.
100 yds per sign, 300 yds total, so about 91 meters between signs. or 0.17(ish) miles in total. Not sure where you confusion is with 0.9m since it doesn't seem to match either miles or metres in this case :-) At motorway speeds, just treat the signs as 100 metres each, it's close enough.
Boris was only saying that to please the Gammon's who voted him and Brexit in.
These are the same fuckwits who think Britain has an empire and is a country that matters.
Still waiting for one of them to show a benefit of Brexit. Even the Moggie who was put in charge of the department for Brexit (or whatever it is called), is no longer there and how many benefits did he show ?
"These are the same fuckwits who think Britain has an empire and is a country that matters."
There are very, very few people alive who experienced "empire"[*] these days. I doubt it's enough to swing an election.
* depending on who you ask. Personally I'd say 1947[**], not the hand over of Hong Kong. If we use Hong Kong as a measure, then Britain still has an "empire" with the likes of Gibraltar and other dependencies.
** Yes, 1947 is "only" 76 years ago, but anyone under 5 or 6 isn't going to have much if any memory of it so we're really only looking at people over about 82 who might have some active memories of Empire. The rest are just jingoistic wannabees.
*IF* the EU ever turns into a single federal state, that would make it as much an "empire" as the USA, Canada or Australia or is. No one is being forced or pressured into joining the EU. Countries ask to be allowed to join and are then given a range of conditions to satisfy before being allowed to join (and yes I accept there are controversies over the conditions). Maybe you meant Moscow, not Strasbourg?
And, of course, a country can leave the EU too if it choose to :-p
>There are very, very few people alive who experienced "empire"[*] these days. I doubt it's enough to swing an election.
That the actual empire no longer exists does not mean that ideas, ideologies and delusions based around "empire" cannot have an effect on politics or political culture in the here and now. You merely have to note the use of the "Empire 2.0" idea in the post-Brexit debates about the UK's position in the world to realise that.
"only from those opposed to Brexit, because they still don't understand it and so fall back on their own prejudices."
Understand what, exactly? That brexit has so far delivered roughly zero benefits while at the same time causing a 4-5% drop in GDP and creating a mountain of red tape if we want to trade with the single largest market in the world that we decided we could do better without? Oh, you'll say "sovereignty" next - that nebulous thing that we never lost.
What it also created is a massive rise in populist and nationalist attitudes, along with flag shagging, racism and a general rise in extreme right wing policies and attitudes in government and public alike. Unless you think that a few miserable refugees and asylum seekers are wrecking our country, and that there fore blocking a lifeboat setting out to rescue people is a valid activity?
Do let me know what "we" haven't understood, or what my predjudices are.
I don't think 1947 is an accurate cut-off for this. I too wouldn't go as far as Hong Kong, but I would definitely extend it through the 1950s when independence movements in several African colonies were being repressed by the colonial administrations, at least into the 1960s when those places received independence. I'm making exceptions for places with small land areas or populations*, but with places like Nigeria (1961), Kenya (1963), or Botswana (1966), I think they should undoubtedly be included. It's not just Africa, either. Other colonies were granted independence only after struggles and around the same time. Some examples: Malaysia in 1957, Cyprus in 1960, Jamaica in 1962, Yemen in 1967.
* Not that the smaller colonies or countries aren't important as well, both to their residents and to history, but if we're talking about the strength of the empire as an idea in British politics then large numbers of people or chunks of the planet are more in the spirit of things.
Here in Scotland when buying timber the conversation include conversion: “Four 150 by 50 (mm) please”- “Is that 3.5 or 4.8 (m) lengths of four by two?”. Sheets of OSB/ply etc, can be 8 x 4 (feet) or 2.4 x 1.2 (metres) and there is a slight difference which builds up when laying sheets side by side.
Cooking is not an exact science so measurements and quantities in SI units can seem a bit of an overkill in the precision department. However, having been brought up with SI units, and weigh and measure ingredients in SI units, it is a bit jarring to come across a web site which has a recipe in a mish mash of systems and abbreviations, especially a) the elusive tbspn (half, whole or heaped), b) fluid oz (is that a mass or a volume?) and, c) the cup (where the cup size it not specified and when I ask my wife what size cups she has, the answer “A” does not help).
Got myself a cake cookbook from Amazon. Turned out to be imported from America. But... Cups of flour? Cups of sugar? Cups of butter? WTaF? Why are they using volume measurements for something that would be better weighed? And why aren't there any alternative weights (even if pounds and ounces) for people that own scales?
Seriously, half my cooking time was trying to turn the bizarre measurements into something halfway logical.
Cake was lovely, though, so it was worth the Googling and wading through the vastly contradictory opinions on how many grams a cup was supposed to be.
OK, i'll tell you secret reason behind it.
We use cups for flour and such because you can dip the measuring cup into the flour or sugar. No scale needed. And then, there's the other little thing - it's a bloody cake, not a complex chemical reaction where being a fraction off is the difference between a smooth reaction and an earth shattering kaboom. As long as you're close, it'll work fine. An extra gram or two here or there won't ruin it.
"An extra gram or two here or there won't ruin it."
Fair enough. But you do realise, I hope, that the volumetric difference between a cup shoved into a bag of flour, and a cup of sifted flour could indeed make a difference. And for a decent cake you'll want to be sifting the flour, and this is where the weight comes in. You can measure how much you need into the sieve prior to sifting, which is a lot simpler than farting around trying to get it into a cup afterwards...
"Most cars in the world drive on the left. It's just most countries drive on the right."
No that is not true and I doubt it ever was. India does not save the day as the Chinese drive on the right.
https://www.aceable.com/blog/countries-that-drive-on-the-left-side-of-the-road/
@Hol314
The Register doesn't spell check your comments.
And I doubt they spell check articles from people writing for them.
Could it be that you would like The Register to force Americans writing for them to use an English spell checker.
Ever felt you have to write proper American when writing on YouTube or Facebook.
As a Canadian/American dual-citizen, it has been basically my personal religion to steadfastly refuse to learn the Imperial system of measures, and I'm happy to report I've been largely successful. I do "know" Fahrenheit for baking I guess, but also my oven isn't exactly terribly accurate and consistent so those are just extra imaginary numbers anyways (and if I'm cooking a roast or something, you better believe my meat thermometer is set to Celsius).
There are two kinds of countries in the world...
1) those that use the metric system.
2) those that have landed on the moon.
It's not hard to know and use both. And there are valid reasons for each. Expand your mind and learn math and how to do conversions. I'm much less likely to make math errors because I have memorized so many conversions and understand what the units mean and how they were originally defined. Conversely, I've seen people that only know metric make math and logical errors because they have no clue how to do anything other than multiply by ten. It encourages laziness.
"1) those that use the metric system. 2) those that have landed on the moon."
I wasnt aware that the USSR and China used the american version of imperial measurements?
Furthermore, the Apollo Guidance Computer display readouts were in units of feet, feet per second, and nautical miles – units that the Apollo astronauts, who had mostly trained as jet pilots, would have been accustomed to using. Internally, however, the computer’s software used SI units for all powered-flight navigation and guidance calculations, and values such as altitude and altitude rate were only converted to imperial units when they needed to be shown on the computer’s display.
Apollo Guidance Computer – use of measurement units
Quantity Internal Displayed
distance metres feet, nautical miles
time centiseconds minutes, seconds
altitude metres feet
altitude rate metres per centisecond feet per second
acceleration metres per centisecond squared
mass kilograms
fuel burn rate kilograms per centisecond
thrust newtons
impulse newton centiseconds
momentum newton centiseconds
Aplogies for the slightly random display but its not easy to copy a table and paste here. Maybe expand your mind and read some facts?
Still having another system beside the metric system seems quite sane compared to every time you try to buy shoes and clothing.
Just taking a look at the tag will offer you a bunch of measurements you never have used and most likely never will. And unlike the American measurements which are standardized these are certainly not. The regular remark of a clerk about the size - "they usually come out bigger" - trying them out to see if it is actually fit. And if you found "your size" you go for a different brand, heck, even just a different design by the same brand and it doesn't apply anymore. And even with the same design and brand it might not longer by a fit down the road if they somehow change the production process. Especially with shoes.
In the past when I was still a kid, catalog shopping was big thing. And they let you order stuff and return it within like 30 days. And you didn't have to pay upfront so they wasn't something like a refund involved - you just paid for what you kept. So you usually order two or sometimes even three sizes to make sure any of them is actually a right fit since these sizes are just ballpark indications.
And even if you have the "standard" letters like M, L, XL - that might not be the same. I am usually an L and I have shirts which are a good fit at M but also encountered XL where a small child would have problems wearing it. So I am usually torn between L and XL since it want to have an okay fir and not a "tent".
And having worked for companies based in the States. When some T-Shirt giveaway came around they asked for your size, you answer L and they tell you the smallest is XL with going up to 4XL - that tells you something about some other American measurements...
I gotta say though that for pants the W(idth)/L(length) system has been working out mostly fine for me.
"they tell you the smallest is XL with going up to 4XL - that tells you something about some other American measurements"
I think that tells you the giveaway T-shirts were left over from some previous promotion. I wear either S or M depending, and here at work when they have a giveaway if I don't get there early, all they have left is XL or bigger.
Yup. I'm an L. Or a 44. Sometimes a 42. Maybe an M or an XL depending on who actually made the thing. Unless it's Italian in which case it's a larger number (46? 48?). Or maybe a 10 or a 12 if it's British, which I think is an American 8. And it's a size 3 for my work outfit.
Oh for fuck's sake..! I usually just hold it up and look.
Don't get me started on shoes. Oh my god. I'm everything between 41 and 44. The only standardisation I can work out is "larger than the average woman's shoe", but how much larger seems to be entirely random and not based on any sort of logic. Which means I always need to try shoes on.
The US pint, gallon, FL Oz etc are actually derived from the old English queen Anne gallon, the standard used in the UK when the Americas were colonies. A queen Anne gallon (US Gallon) was defined by 8lbs of wine as oppose to 10lb of water at 60F in the imperial gallon. Since the density of wine and water are marginally different this of course alters the volume of the fluid ounce. In 1820 Britain modernized and redefined the imperial gallon but America kept into the old English standard.
Such rubbish. Every country that had the metric system did so against the will of their citizens and at great costs. The US took a different approach and it works just fine, it let's individuals decide what to use.
When I cook, I often use the metric system, because its easier to weigh ingredients. I could also use ounces, both work just fine. But only for my own recipes, for everything else I use whatever system the recipe calls for. My scales and measuring cups have both systems so I'm free to decide. Almost everything I buy to eat has both metric and imperial units on the packaging.
When I build furniture or do diy projects, I almost always use the US imperial system because that is what most products are sold as and what many plans use. Many of my tools have both systems so I'm able to use whatever suits me.
When I drive, I use imperial because I have an old truck with an analog speedometer. But I could just as easily use metric since I use Google maps. Signs trends to be in imperial, but newer cars can easily be set to use either system. Converting between miles and kilometers is pretty darn easy. As is Celsius and Fahrenheit.
When I sail, I use nautical measurements like knots because the earth was 360 in it and they unit is based on that.
Americans are free to use whatever they want, no one has dictated to us what we have to use. Both imperial and metric are taught in school and measuring instruments for both systems are freely available.
For those unfamiliar, this is called freedom.
And since US schools teach both, it's obvious even a child can learn them. Not being able to use imperial or metric is a choice.
Or simple ignorance.
Really? Such grandiloquent, self-satisified rhetoric over weights and measures? You really don't have any unique freedom in the US.
I live in Europe. I can cook in any measures I want, set my car to miles or kilometres, or use an app on my phone which converts it to bloody furlongs if I want. Oh, the packaging in the shops doesn't have non-metric measurements? Because they haven't been widely used for a couple of centuries?
You have no unique or exceptional freedom in the "Land of the so-called Free". Maybe your schools should teach comparative history and politics as well as imperial and metric weights and measures.
Really. So scales that don't have metric measurements are legal? You can buy food that doesn't have a metric measurement on it? In the US, there is no legal requirement to have a metric measurement on anything, the only requirement is that whatever you claim is being sold is accurate. Sell a hogshead of mead that is more than a percent off, and it had better err on the high side. Manufacturers only put metric measurements on because it's cheaper to make one label than it is to make one for the US and one for export.
.
Point is, we're free to use the Metric system or not, with no government telling us we have to use one or else. And, we use both, we're comfortable using either, can switch back and forth easily, and in many cases convert between the two with barely a thought. Ask the typical forced-metric person to use a non-metric system though, and they panic because it takes more thought than moving a decimal around.
I'll get me coat, as I expect it'll take the metric cheerleaders a few hours to comprehend.
@M.V. Lipvig
I still suppose you know this about the USA.
"The U.S. military uses metric measurements extensively to ensure interoperability with allied forces, particularly NATO Standardization Agreements (STANAG). Ground forces have measured distances in "klicks", slang for kilometers, since 1918.".
"The U.S. is one of the few countries globally which still uses the Imperial system of measurement, where things are measured in feet, inches, pounds, ounces, etc.".
The "offending" post got a like from me, since the content is fine, just checked :D. But this one is the classical prejudices. If only TheRegister would show the TIME after five days, then you could check which part of the world it might have been. If it is the same as this post it cannot be European. Local time would be 05:30 on a Monday. But complaining after five days?
Well, looks like Americans are as bad as Europeans. (With a few exceptions from my point of view, US-A is right on track for the next civil war of US-A against US-A ...)
"If only TheRegister would show the TIME after five days, then you could check which part of the world it might have been."
ElReg uses UNIX time for comments, as you can see of you read the source. It's simple enough to display this in your browser, if you like ... not that it matters. You can't tell a person's location by the time of a post. I personally have noted people from all over the world contributing here at all hours of the day (and night, for you pedants).
Perhaps you think that people only post when skiving off at their 9-5 jobs?
"Such rubbish. Every country that had the metric system did so against the will of their citizens and at great costs."
Actually, the metric system has reduced costs for everyone involved, and part of that is its simplicity. It's simpler to state say a volume in litres which is exactly the same everywhere on Earth, than it is having to deal with regional different definitions of what constitutes a gallon or a pint. That's a notable cost factor in a lot of industrial and regulatory processes.
"The US took a different approach and it works just fine, it let's individuals decide what to use."
Well, looking at that the US has pretty much lost most of its manufacturing capacity (and jobs!) to other countries, all which have agreed on using the metric system, I'm not sure where you see the success in that. Because the reality is that, actually, the world is leaving the US behind, piece by piece.
"Americans are free to use whatever they want, no one has dictated to us what we have to use. Both imperial and metric are taught in school and measuring instruments for both systems are freely available.
For those unfamiliar, this is called freedom."
Seriously? That's the same "freedom" even people in mainland China or Russia enjoy, because there isn't really a place on Earth where people are prevented from using their measurement system of choice (although, to be fair, most schools in other countries teach imperial measures only in a way they teach non-decimal systems in maths). But yes, considering the US legal systems, prevalent gun violence and police brutality I can see how, to an American, this might look like "freedom" (although that's not exactly a high bar in itself).
What you call "freedom" actually looks much closer to the Stockholm syndrome of a country that was once ruled by the British.
"And since US schools teach both, it's obvious even a child can learn them. Not being able to use imperial or metric is a choice."
I can see how not *using* imperial or metric units is a choice, but I can't see how one would chose not being *able* to use either of them (that's more a mental capacity thing).
Are you suggesting ignorance is "freedom", too? And is this a homeschool thing?
Thanks for mentioning the most important difference, the one most comments and other articles miss most the time: the international system is DECIMAL, meaning 342 cm is 3.42m. Good luck doing the same conversion in imperial units.
Unless you're actually a scientist, all the other differences are just habits no matter how people try to rationalize them.
Let's stop calling it the "metric" system, the "decimal" system is a more relevant name.
Its one of these 'American Exceptionalism' things where open attempts to introduce metric measurements have met with push back. In real life, though, you're hard pressed to find a product that's not metric these days. We fight it all the way, of course -- we insist that a circuit board is sized as 4.724" square and that component pin spacing is some awarkward number of thousands of an inch but its here -- if you want to work on a vehicle then its a metric set of sockets and wrenches, for example.
The British units are still used (that's what they're called here) but at least we've finally purged them from our science textbooks.
Near where I live, half hidden by a bush, is a relic from the 1970s, a freeway distance sign that's in both miles and kilometers. I think its survived all these years because the metric bit isn't that easy to see.
do you reside in the Tucson area?
some roads are being constructed in arizona using the metric system versus a 10 based foot system, us 93 north of kingman was built using the metric system but signed milage with miles not kilometers, southern arizona on i-8,i believe is the only road in the usa that was built and signed using the metric system, the conversation of one to another is what screws things up, use one system and stick with it, dont do like NASA and try to convert back and forth because even common sense tells us things always gets lost in translation
Tucson is an outlier -- the freeway to the MX border is signed in Kilometers (and there are signs telling you this!). I live north west of Los Angeles. We've got a fair bit of science and technology around here so lots of people are used to metric units. The problem is that the 'merkans will push back -- often violently -- against anything they perceive as foreign (even as they brandish their NATO spec weaponry; its metric, of course, like everything else in the US military).
"if you want to work on a vehicle then its a metric set of sockets and wrenches, for example"
Really? I have an old (donated) ride on mower from the late 90s or early 00s with a Tecumseh engine, made in America (assembled in Mexico). Then shipped across the ocean because god forbid somebody assemble the things in Poland instead for the EU market.
Anyway, I had to get myself a set of Imperial sockets with weird arse sizes like 3/6 and 9/16 because the metric stuff just wasn't going to work.
I feel most Americans don't see Metric being used in the the U.S. because we don't need it.
In science though everything is metric & we embrace it.
They teach us metric in school. Plus centi, milli, etc. Just the basic unit headers that you see.
I only see metric used in machine shops & rarely. They usually use decimal inches. Things go Metric when it's in a lab & under a 1/32nd.
I also believe rough measurements are easier. I know my foot is 12 inches or a foot, I know my average lunge is a hard long.
Even when my foot was 11 inches I could rough the math out.
28 centimeters is a bit harder to multiply mentally (No calculator)
Plus I have four fingers & a thumb. My fingers each have 3 segments. 12 total.
Other things are multiples of 2.
What about our clocks!? That's base 12. It'll never change but it's fun. Here's a fun video on it: https://youtu.be/U6xJfP7-HCc
To each their own
"28 centimeters is a bit harder to multiply mentally (No calculator)"
Round it up to 30, them it's just your three times table with an extra 0 at the end. If it's rough, it's close enough.
"Plus I have four fingers & a thumb. My fingers each have 3 segments. 12 total."
Two hands, ten digits, metric wins.
"I know my average lunge is a hard long."
What's that in English? Google is no help whatsoever in deciphering "hard long".
[edit: oh, okay, it's a type of exercise and it's describing the style of lunge with no actual relevance to a system of measurement]
"What about our clocks!? That's base 12. It'll never change but it's fun."
Over here, if you say you finish work at five they'll think you're on night shift. You instead finish at seventeen hours. So the clocks might be marked 1-12 but the people count 0-23.
While my main home is the UK, I actually spend a large part of the year in the US (California, so things may well be different in other US States). And frankly, I see SI units almost everywhere. Pretty much every food item has a label showing both, imperial and metric units, as have other household items such as detergents or rolls of tape. Labels in larger stores also often show metric units in addition to imperial units, and most Americans I meet (even older ones) can handle both (probably because the US military has been metric for a long time, as have other parts of the government such as NASA).
Even American cars usually come with dual units speedos (MPH and KM/H), and have been doing so for decades.
In my view, the writing has been on the wall for imperial units in the US for a long time, and while their death is slow, it's inevitable.
I work in a multinational computer engineering company. While visiting the US I overheard engineers discussing mechanical properties of a laptop's ports and was surprised they used millimeters. It made sense though: how in the world would them talk to a multitude of suppliers from around the world?
I suspect science and engineering are already using metric in the US just because we live in a globalized world. Even for small talk before meetings US engineers will try to provide temperatures in Celsius for their current weather!
I was in high school in the US in the 1970s. For some reason I recall not, the metric system was being discussed. A math teacher was moaning that converting to the metric system would mean that "we'd have 10 'hours' in the day and 'a hundred' seconds in a minute..."
Not sure the exact numbers he used, but, the tirade was definitely around the fact that all of our existing clocks would need to be thrown away to switch to the metric system...
And, if you're wondering... it was a widely held opinion that the high school I attended was the district's employer of last resort for those who'd been 'encouraged' by every other school to find elsewhere to teach.
For the best mash up between imperial and metric look at the wheels on your car.
The wheels (rims) are measured in inches the rim will say something like 7Jx17 that is a 7 inch wide rim using a J pattern (what is needed for tubeless tyres) the 17 is the diameter of the rim.
Inside the rim is an offset which is referred to as ET number. This is the offset of the bolt face from the centre of the rim measured in mm. It is a positive number if the offset is towards the outside edge and a negative if the offset is towards the axle side.
So that is interesting….
The tyres are even worse.
Take a typical 205/50 R 17
This is a tyre which is 205mm wide where the height of the tyre sidewall is 50 percent of the width and it is a Radial tyre designed for a 17 inch diameter rim.
Metric tyres were tried in the 1980s but they were abandoned due to lack of support if you need metric tyres now they are almost impossible to find.
They are standard but use multiple measuring systems…..
I can and quite happily do work using any damned measurement system available so long as I have a clear definition of the values and ideally a fairly accurate conversion factor. However, the problem with a great many people is that they simply cannot be arsed to do conversions so they want everything presented in their favourite standard. The standard used is therefore defined by the laziest people and they are fiercely resistant to change as it would mean that they would have to learn to THINK and calculate. The rest of us do the conversions needed and suffer the pointless mishmash of irrational measurement systems daily. Even in one of the most modern industries (the IT industry) we use Metric but because a lot of it was US/UK originated we have 19" racks for the servers, 2.5" hard-disks, etc. I guess what I am saying is that we can bitch and belly-ache about this until the cows come home but it will change NOTHING. Just learn to do the conversions.
I grew up in mainland Europe so I prefer and mostly think in Metric, but I live in the UK so handling the mess of "standards" here means I can deal with anything that comes at me, although the other day I had to explain a Gill to someone and I couldn't for the life of me remember if it was a quarter of a pint or eight cubic inches, or..... ahh thanks Google. <LOL>
Finally, when communicating with Americans I use the date format 23 Jan 2023 as it is unambiguous.
(This post was rejected - I think that must have been a mistake)
"color, center, aluminum and other new versions of old words"
That's an oversimplification. According to the OED, although "centre" was the form in which it came from Norman French, by Shakespeare's time "center" was prevalent in Britain, and was only replaced by "centre" as a result of Johnson's dictionary. "Aluminium" and "aluminum" were both common in the USA for much of the 19th century; the decline of "aluminium" was assured by a report by the American Chemical Society which recommended "aluminum" around 1890. It also recommended "sulfur"; but was less successful with "iodin".
"A US pound is 0.453592 kilograms, to six figures at least" - not "at least", that is how it is defined. US Customary Units are defined in metric.
Fun facts: The US has (or had until recently) two (2) different units for "foot" - survey and regular. The former used for mapping. Now imagine the fun calculating the length of a flight path or trajectory when the horizontal distances are from maps measured in survey feet, and the altitude is in regular feet.
"Most famously in recent memory was the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999. The $125 million space probe broke up in the Martian atmosphere after engineers at Lockheed Martin, who built the instrument, used the US Customary System of measurement rather than metric measurements used by others on the project. The probe descended too close to the surface and was lost."
Famously, the space program worked before NASA was gutted of experience under the maxim: "Too male, too pale, too stale."
No doubt written by someone who gives their weight as 11 stone 4, height as 5 foot 10, drives a car that does 40 to the gallon and enjoys nothing better than a pint down the pub. A typical Brit.
About someone who weighs 158 lbs, height is 5 foot 10, drives a car that gets 32 miles to the (Queen Anne) gallon and enjoys nothing better that a 16 oz brew at the local bar. A typical American.
About 30 or 40 years ago the US was still mostly Imperial but in the last 20 years its about as metric as the UK. Science, engineering and all relevant industry in the US is metric and has been for many decades. And go into any supermarket and both metric and Imperial measurement is on everything you buy. And has been for decades. In fact if the standard rounded metric volume / weight is close to an Imperial value that's the ones that's used. The metric one. You wont find a pint but 500ml. Not a pound but 500g.. etc etc.
The only big divergence is the weather forecast. Its still Fahrenheit not Centigrade. Thats about it. And a mid 70's to mid 80's day still sounds a lot more appealing that 25 to 30.
I never had a problem because I was the last generation who started school learning Imperial and ended school learning metric. For most day to day stuff traditional measurement systems like Imperial is just better. Feels more natural. Less clinical. But there again I am also of the generation (just) who can still calculate what change to expect back when you pay with three half crowns for something that costs 5/9.
Now that requires real mental arithmetic chops. And something your grand-parents or great-grandparents could do without missing a beat.
Ah, young 'uns. So not old enough to remember the change over from F to C back in the late 1970's / early 1980's in the UK in the daily weather forecast then ?
Ask you gran, she should be able to tell you what Centigrade is in "old money"..
Just like with Decimalization the weather in the UK was never quite the same after the change over from Fahrenheit. It became very "foreign". A bit like the BBC's recent obsession with using the 24 hour clock. To make them look more "sophisticated". The 12 hour clock not good enough for them. They be changing the month and day names next. So it will News at 22:00 on Tridi of Pluviôse or some such goings on.
Give us back our 11 stolen days, I say. Bloody Papist Calendar.
Ask you gran, she should be able to tell you what Centigrade is in "old money"..
My wife & I were driving in S. France a few years ago, with her Mum in the car. The A/C was on, so the car was comfortable, but the dashboard thermoment was showing 41C outside. Mum-in-law asked "what's that in old money?", so I hit the F/C swap button. There was a loud shriek from the back: "a hundred and six!!!")
Science, engineering and all relevant industry in the US is metric
so you don't use 3/16-th screws, and aluminium – that's aluminum for you – thickness is not given as 1/8-th inch ? When you stapple 1/16-th and 3/32-th thick sheets, what's the resulting dimension ?
Well thats mainly for construction, etc. Which is very much a huge domestic US industry. Go to you local Home Deport and no problem finding metric materials there.
Any US business that exports, or uses large amounts of imports, thats pretty much all metric. But if you are say updating a petro-chemical plant on the Gulf Coast would not be to surprised if its Imperial for all the old stuff and everything that connected to it. And metric for the new stuff.
Anyway, last time I was in B&Q if you had asked for anything but a 2 by 4 plank you would have got a blank look. And no problem finding Imperial measure screws, etc in the UK.
As for aluminum blame Scientific American. They had a typo the first time they reported on the new metal. A report from France. I remember the apology they printed 100 years later. It was pretty funny.
Yup, Americans have quarter inch pipes. I know this because we have them at work. For some bizzare and Byzantine reason, it's cheaper to get plumbing shipped over from the US than to get it brought in from a depot thirty miles fifty kilometres away. Though I suspect the recent changes to EU import duty might have put a small dent in that plan.
Of course, the size of "quarter inch pipe" varies a lot depending on whether we're talking copper pipe, or black iron, or galvanized, or PVC or PEX.
And don't even think about finding a piece of wood that's actually 2 inches by 4 inches. You'll have to make it yourself.
.... has highlighted an article about a decrease in chip manufacture — on 8 and 12 inch wafers. Of course, the wafer size could just as well be defined in cubits or furlongs, since no one ever converts the wafer measurement to anything, other than number of chips one can contain.
America still is in some ways a free country. We don't want the metric system. If we did, we would have adopted it long ago. A lot of Americans have gotten used to feet, inches, gallons, pints, and so on and don't see any need to change. Many Americans also resent what they see as elitist snobs telling them how they should live their lives. If you're in the U.S. and don't like our reluctance to go metric, either deal with it or move to a country where they use the metric system. If you're not in the U.S. and feel this way, stay where you are.
"America still is in some ways a free country. "
Or so you're told. As most freedoms appear to be limited to stuff such as dying of lead poisoning (which includes both gun shots and poisoning from leaded water pipes), getting beaten/shot by a cop, or die from a preventable disease or injury because of a lack of health care. And not to forget to include the freedom to force a 10yr old girl that has been raped and got pregnant to carry the baby to term.
Truly exceptional (not in a good way, though).
"We don't want the metric system."
Really? Is that why pretty much every part of the US government has been metric, and been so for more than a decade?
Is 'Americans not wanting the metric system' also the reason that, literally, most items sold come with metric measures in addition to the old British units? Something that, too, has been in place for more than a decade?
Isn't the reality that, in fact, Americans as a population actually *want* to join the modern world when it comes to measurement units, and it's in fact just a minority of people like you who can't deal with something that's "Not Invented Here(tm)" (as if the British units didn't come from America's former colonial masters)?
You're not from Wyoming[1] by chance? Or worse, South Dakota[2]?
[1] https://www.techtimes.com/articles/286295/20230115/wyoming-considers-phasing-out-new-electric-vehicle-sales-2035.htm
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LVcI-DQdYA
in temperature reading the farenheit system is more accurate than Celsius, (in measuring ambient air temps)
the SI system is better on some items example if trying to step off a distance instead of counting by three you count your steps and that how many meters it is,
now fractions suck but in carpentry the 1/16 and 12 inch foot is essential,
a 5 by 8 cm versus a 2 x 4 inch board just doesnt cut it,
the american inch being split down into 1/16 is much quicker and just if not more precise than cm or mm.
i think eventually the world will adopt a portion of each system, the part that works best for what is being measured
and not just coming up with new definitions of the same measurement like they have with the meter and second,
if they truly wanted a accurate time or distance measurement based on 10 it would be based on the distance of light traveled in x number of years, of which our calendars would then need changed,
but scientist currently use a different calendar than the masses anyway,
we use a gregorian and they use a modified julian, now a day is broke down into 1/24, 1/5, 1/12, 1/6, 1/60. only attorneys break it down into a decimal 10 based system.
funny how the world can agree that the standard height of guardrail is x high, we can all world wide agree there are 24 hours in a day. even though there are 26 time zones, we can all agree the sun rise is in the eastern sky, when it isnt always in the eastern sky, but we cant agree if a pound is a pound, a inch an inch, or the differance between a "b or c" cup.
humans will never figure it out. i guess that is what keeps it interesting.
40 c or 40 h
and explain why we in america count the day starting with 12
shouldnt the day start at 1 am this way people would know what day midnight was actually in,
we count crazy
12 am followed by 1 am ending at 11 pm 12 am. if using pm and am noon should be the ending of the a.m.'s thus 12 am, 1 pm would be the first full hour post meridium, not 12 pm.
10 am, 11am 12pm, 1 pm, confusing
10 pm, 11pm, 12am, 1 am. confusing
the clock on the wall is broke down into 5 min intervals or 1/12 of an hour, that is a standard world wide, why isn't it in 1/10's?
It's 12ths of an hour because an hour contains sixty minutes (we inherited that from the Babylonians) and using five minute intervals (which coincides with the positions of the hours) works.
There's no such thing as a metric clock, it would be utterly alien to the entire world.
However it's worth noting that smaller units of time measurement are metric/base 10. Centiseconds - 100ths of a second. Milliseconds - 1000th. Microseconds, Nanoseconds, and so on.
"A more down-to-earth example came in 1983 with the Air Canada "Gimli Glider" incident, where pilots of a Boeing 767 underestimated the amount of fuel they needed,,,"
The ground crew member was not aware that the fuel order was in kilograms on the new 767, as everything had been done in pounds from the very beginnings of aviation. He added the amount of fuel in pounds instead of the requested kg. Had Boeing not switched to metric measures for the 757 and 767s, the fuel order would have been in pounds like he was used to, and there would have been no issue. That seems to be an argument for sticking with what is familiar and established, because accidents happen when there is ambiguity in units. Can't disagree there <g>
FWIW, in aviation, altitudes are in feet, distances in nautical miles, and speeds in knots (nautical mph). This is the international standard.
The US didn't "lose" its manufacturing base because we use the imperial system. It's because we (like the rest of the first world) gave it up and outsourced everything to Asia, where it is much cheaper to make things. We are perfectly capable of using metric units if the customer wants that. American cars use metric fasteners these days, I am told. Our system of weights and measures is total non-factor there.
"With Celsius water freezes at 0 degrees and boils at 100 at ground level, compared to 32 and 212 for Fahrenheit. "
And?
Fahrenheit is not based on water. So what?
Once you know the constants, it doesn't matter if they are 212 or 100... the point is, you know them.
There are a lot more substances out there in the world than water. All of them will have boiling and melting points that do not line up evenly with lots of zeroes.
Kelvins don't line up so perfectly with water either. 273.15 K freezing, 373.15 K boiling.
The ground crew member was not aware that the fuel order was in kilograms on the new 767, as everything had been done in pounds from the very beginnings of aviation. He added the amount of fuel in pounds instead of the requested kg. Had Boeing not switched to metric measures for the 757 and 767s, the fuel order would have been in pounds like he was used to, and there would have been no issue.
Not quite.
The aircraft fuel guage was u/s, so they fell back to the (fully approved) method of dipping the wing tank and converting the depth on the dipstick to volume (cm -> litres) and then to mass. By error the conversion for pounds/litre was used instead of kg/litre, so they had less fuel than they thought & so didn't top up when they should have done.
US measurement does add some skill.
- Three is bigger than a Quarter.
- Seven is bigger than Three
- Half is bigger than Seven
- Nine is bigger than Half
- Five is bigger than Nine
- Eleven is bigger than Five
- Three quarters is bigger than Eleven.
(For everyone else, that is 3/8, 7/16, 1/2, 9/16, 5/8, 11/16, 3/4)
The annoying thing is the cars that mix styles. GM was notorious for years. Engines & drivetrain were standard sizes. Body was all metric.
In the UK, general aviation uses a mishmash of weights and measures so we pilots get pretty good at doing conversions on the fly (pun intended).
Runways distances and cloud-clearance are in metres
Altitudes are in feet
Distances are in nautical miles
Airspeed and wind speeds are in knots
Fuel quantity can be in either litres, US gallons, UK gallons, kilograms or pounds
Aircraft weight and balance can be calculated and/or listed in pounds or kilos
Temperatures are in centigrade
Atmospheric pressure is in hectopascals
Manifold pressure is in inches of mercury
I also fly in the US which is pretty consistent in their use of the Imperial system in aviation. About the only place you really see SI units in US general aviation are in Terminal Area Forecasts, which will display temperatures in C and pressures in hectopascals (alongside inches of mercury).
@macninja
There is a historic logic to that, and if you understand why pilots are dressed like naval officers you will understand it. They even used sextants then not all that long ago. As for fuel I would claim they use pound or kg, certainly not measured in volume when tanking fuel.
As a Brit living in the US, I've heard many people saying that using Fahrenheit for temperatures is better because humans don't usually encounter temperatures outside the range 0 to 100°f, so outside that range represents too hot or too cold.
I've also heard people saying the Fahrenheit scale is more accurate, somehow. Apparently by people ignorant of the invention of the decimal point.
Neither argument makes sense, and when I tell them that, the potential for them to shoot me is the next thing they try using to convince me otherwise.
Behind closed doors at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, every imperial measurement is calibrated against the globally agreed metric standards. So even if the US population still use imperial units, the calibration for all industry happens using metric units. So technically the US are part of the global metric system.
That URL should probably be https://www.nist.gov/pml/us-surveyfoot at a guess.
Just for fun, and in the interests of seeing how far you could push a retro platform, I tried to write a program to do PCB design ..... on a BBC Micro!
It uses a thoroughly unwholesome mix of units internally, in order to keep all the numbers storable. So the component placement grid is 0.127 by 0.127mm., allowing a 12-bit X and Y co-ordinate packed into 3 bytes to represent a total design space the best part of half a metre in each direction; but the copper pads within a component footprint exist on a 0.0254mm. grid, and silkscreen outlines are on a 0.0508 grid (because two bits are robbed to indicate a plot mode). All these variously-scaled 24-bit packed co-ordinates get multiplied appropriately during unpacking to 32 bits, so everything is on a 0.0254mm. grid (which then needs to be shifted and scaled again to get screen co-ordinates .....) Drill sizes, meanwhile, are specified in 0.1mm. steps.
I took exactly one terrible liberty in all of this: Auto-generation of vias is accomplished by adding the greater of the track widths on the two sides to the hole diameter to give the copper size. And when displaying such a via on screen, it effectively multiplies the hole size by 4, as opposed to the official 3.937, to convert it to design units.
Of course, there is none of this sloppiness in the photoplot file generation process ..... which makes heavy use of 4 * 41616 / 65536 being close enough to 2.54 over the range within which we are working.
>> 4 * 41616 / 65536 being close enough to 2.54
>Why not 2601/1024? Or 254/100 ? Or 127/50 ?
Wild guess - divide by 65536 is shift by two bytes or, if the precision is good enough, drop least two bytes to go from four byte intermediate value to two byte stored value without bothering with any actual arithmetic?
Or something else along those lines, choosing the maths that works best with the machinery being used.
One of the peculiar realities anyone who uses measures a good deal runs into is the AVP/Imp/Metric schism. From a US point of view the differences between AVD and Imperial are much more confusing. Canada for instance uses Imperial Gallons, the US uses an older version that is smaller in volume. A US gallon is 0.83267 British gallons, a bit more than 4/5 ths of a Gallon(Brit) as Glover's Pocket Ref would put it. [The Canadians also seem to get milk in bags, which seems - well - Canadian.] In Britain you often see Youtubers using inches and feet, and the reason is that for some activities such as building furniture, "old money" is actually easier. The numbers are all smaller for example, and the fractions are common fractions which are fairly easy to deal with in your head, while decimal fractions are more difficult. 16 1/5 inches for instance is 419.1 mm. You can round that to either 420 or 419, but finding that on a ruler when you're older and the eyes are showing a lot of mileage is a fussy and frustrating task. A 1/16 inch is 1.5875 mm, finding the right 1/16th can be fussy and irritating as well, but if you are using the right scale, there WILL be a graduation mark there. Obviously you can work to whole millimeters and the problem should go away. However . . . using "old money" drawings means that you convert every measure to meteric, and because of rounding, errors creep in. You have to define a tactic to prevent the random noise of rounding from turning your build into a cat' cradle of odd angles - not quite square, and non-Euclidian surfaces - not exactiy flat, and places where things join oddly. You must in short employ a different kind of approach to measuring. It doesn't look that way, but it is.
You hear a good deal of metric disparagement of the use of a human body part, e.g. a foot, as a standard measure. The trouble with this arrogance is that it assumes a lot. Furniture, even metrically laid out designs still work to standardized human proportions. You'll discover that measures such as 300 mm, and 600 mm occur frequently (one and two feet more or less). This is because humans really are more or less standardized. The traditional measures employ that in ways that guarantee than most furniture will fit most people (not all), and where you have volumes, people will tend to feel they are not being cheated. To habituate from a gallon down to a liter takes practice. (Though many "traditional" volumes and weights are outright weird, such as a pipe, a tun, or a quarter).
What is more of an actual issue is that the measuring is the different arithmetic. The "old money" system uses "12" with simpifies a lot of fractions, because you get nice common fractions. That harks back to Babylon and Summeria where a hexagismal (bas-60) system was employed. This offers many more common fraction solutions and whole number results than base-10. The Arabs, and their heirs who divised the metric system, stuck to counting on their fingers. Apparently the Summerian decided that teams of three (10 finger and ten toes person) worked better.
Just to keep the AVDP/Imperial divide stirred, the US standarized the inch to 25.4 mm exactly. This still has its drawbacks I had a bureaucrat who tried to insist that we had made a mistake. The standard form devised by bureaucrats and would-be desk jockeys wanted both AVDP and Metric figures for certain things recorded in the field. They apparently had assumed they needed to check field scientist's arithmetic, and had discovered our metric areas were wrong. Their area estimates however were achieved by trying converting a square meter area to square feet using a linear conversion factor. When this was pointed out, there was a deafening silence, followed by an "oh." No apology or "my mistake." Note there that the "area" we turned in was a metric estimate. People and their preferences are _always_ more of a problem than any particular measurement system.
Obviously most Americans don't seem to have the mental capacity to realize how much simpler the metric system is. They still fiddle around with fractions and pounds and what ever else the twisted Brits could come up with. Wasn't it President Carter who tried to change this? But in a country, where 80% of the people are ill educated and most can't even spell their own language correctly, what do you expect? I had a granite countertop installed once. A guy came to take measurements. I heard him mumble things like "48 strong... 72 low... I'm still amazed that the countertop actually fit!
Metric makes a lot of sense, as a kid it was on the 10th July 1967 the day we in New Zealand decimalised the currency that I remembered that there was 240 pence in the pound.
Another thing I noticed in the article is that the author was using the American form of English what has happened to UK English?
I think the craziest thing is what I have found in the Canadian building industries.
Here, the university educated architects design in metric.
The trade school educated erectors insist on working in feet and inches.
The beams and column drawings for the cutting and prefab shop are done in metric.
The site layout drawing has elevations done in metric.
On the same drawing the location of the beams - it is done in inches.
Don't even get me started on the 'standard' distance tolerance over the length of a 20m steel beam being +/-1/16" on the site layout. It would start a whole new argument as to whether the reference temperature should be the 20C of the architects office or the balmy 45F of the site.
It is all very well saying go metric, but I have machines that use various imperial, I do not feel that I need to change and if someone else uses something else so be it , BUT there are different metric threads, coarse, fine, different coarse, really fine so where does one stop. I might as well carry on using my 1/2" 21 tpi etc my zeus book has the differences and my old bikes and machines are all going together thanks. I do not need metric thank you very much. However, the different size metric spanners are a pain in the rectal passage and 18 mm cannot be found easily yet spark plugs are that! Various other sizes are also weird. Stupidly, I can buy a pound of cheese in France but get told that I cannot in the UK.
It is still not mandatory to throw away your old stuff. It never was, never will be. For newer stuff metric is mandatory and imperial is supplemental. A "French pound" or "German Pfund" is exactly 500g, half a kilogram. Not 3rd, not 5th, not 12th, not a 5080th etc. If that is too much for you, well, then you are too old to learn and get in line with the other "old times were better" grumpies.
Your recital of the US experience with the decimal metric system is deficient on several key points.
1. The decimal metric system is legal for use in the US and has been since 1866. No one is prohibited from using it in the US.
2. As the US legalized the decimal metric system, it was invited to participate in the Metric Convention of 1875. As a participant, the US received prototype meters and kilograms.
3. When these prototypes were delivered to Washington, DC, it was determined that they were of superior quality to the prototype yard and pound that the US had received from the UK many years earlier. As a consequence of this, the US government issued the Mendenhall Order of 1893, which redefined all of the US customary weights and measures in decimal metric equivalences, based on the meter and kilogram prototypes.
So, in fact, even the customary weights and measures currently in use in the US are defined by the decimal metric prototypes.
Thus, we that the REAL issue is NOT whether to adopt the decimal metric system, but whether or not to OUTLAW the use of the customary units. My libertarian inclination tells me the leave things as they are, an let each user choose which system to use.
But, if that's too taxing for some folks, let me propose a compromise: redefine the customary units in more convenient metric equivalents. This is basically how Napoleon got people to use the metric system. He redefined the French toisse as 2 meters, and the livre as 500 grams. Thus the French continued using the customary units, which were then cleverly reworked as metric measures
We could do the same with US customary units: redefine the foot as 30 centimeters, the imperial, or dry, gallon as 4500 milliliters, the fluid ounce as 30 milliliters, and the pound as 450 grams, which would all be within 2-3% of the current values.
Neitheg the Imperial nor the SI system of measures are optimal. Had the French acadamy stuck with their first thoughts of basing the mwtric system on a numeric base of 12, we may have thr advantages of both Imperial and SI sytems. All it would take is adding two new digits for ten and eleven. Then we would havr a system that has single digit fractions for halves, quarters and thirds! Onr half would be 0.6, a quarter 0.3 and a third 0.4 exactly.
Other advatages include increasing 11 digit telephone numbers by ove 600% and probably avoided the need for IP6 internet addresses.
Then there is the more regular multiplication tables, and while still being able to identify even numbers just by seeing if the units digit is 0, 2, 4, or 8, we could even identify if a number is divisible by 3 as long as its units digit is 0, 3, 6 or 9!
There are many more advantages but not enough time or space here.
Shoes are still sold in barleycorn units, in US and in UK. 1 barleycorn = 1/3 inch, which is the difference between (say) a size 9 and a 10.
UK uses the same sizing for men's and women's shoes.
US men's are one number higher than UK for the same size foot, US women's are 1.5 number higher than US men's.
Australia Population: About 26 million. Not that much mindset difference between the various areas where people live in, so easy to deal with.
USA Population: About 333. And the mindset difference between various states is so big, it's mind blowing. Not easy to deal with for such a conversion. Or can you imagine towns with more than 10'000 people where most don't lock the front door when they leave the house, even when going on vacation? I was stunned by that! Germans knows something similar only for small villages. Other, and much larger, towns of USA are like a large high security compound, and everyone there sees it as the norm since they live in that local bubble most of their life.
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