How do you feel about converting to the Metric system?

Oh, only that? What a nothingburger.

STP isn’t no connection. Hell, anyone using natural gas uses that one one, indirectly.

Clearly that’s important, but it’s not an inherent quality of SI units in the way that coherence is. You have the other units that fit together like a nice set of puzzle pieces, where if you altered one you’d have alter all the others to keep them fitting together. And then you have kelvin off to the side. The shape doesn’t matter because it doesn’t actually connect to anything (except via ugly constants like the Boltzmann constant).

STP is just an arbitrary point on the scale. 275 K frankly would have been easier to remember. Or really, 300 K would have been fine since all that matters is that it’s standard.

It’s not even consistent. STP itself changed in 1982. And there are several other “XTP” measures that use 0 C, 15 C, 20 C, or other. You mentioned natural gas, but Wikipedia says that:

The International Standard Metric Conditions for natural gas and similar fluids are 288.15 K (15.00 °C; 59.00 °F) and 101.325 kPa.[7]

That’s not STP at all.

Importance is all that concerns me. I see no reason to prioritize coherence exclusively, it is sufficient that K is important.

All these scales are arbitrary anyway. That’s not a counter-argument.

“Easier to remember” isn’t one either, or g would just be 10.

There’s not one STP.

Don’t be ridiculous.

Coke comes in 2 liter bottles also.

As far as why? We’re Murricans and don’t have to make sense.

And I have no clue why we haven’t switched. A couple decades ago there was a movement to have highway signs showing mileage in both miles and kilometers - but I haven’t seen that in ages. No clue what happened. If we’d just made the switch when the momentum began, people would barely remember it and would be wondering what this baloney was with miles etc.

Of course in the UK, they still measure people’s weight in stones, versus pounds OR kg - so at least we’re not the only holdouts, if only in that one little way.

Decades ago, a friend was driving somewhere in Canada with her mother. Both grew up with the imperial system (miles etc.). The mother was British, but pre-metric; the daughter was American, but well educated in metric.

The friend was translating distances from metric to imperial - e.g. 60 km, that’s about 35 miles - that sort of thing. She found herself somewhat absentmindedly translating a POPULATION sign from imperial to metric, and cracked them both up.

But they did pick round numbers in C. It’s just that it inherently makes for un-round numbers in K. If they had thought a little further ahead, they’d have picked a round number in K instead. Within reason, it didn’t matter what number they picked as long as it was convenient to work with.

Uh, that’s not exactly an argument in favor of STP being a compelling use-case here…

Clearly I don’t have the allergy to decimal fractions that imperial users seem to.

I don’t see how K/C actually being used for multiple things is an argument against it “getting you anything”. It’s clearly useful.

Presumably the B-series envelope sizes would come along with the A-series paper, so envelopes and folders would not be a problem… after the old supply is used up, of course. As for printers, any consumer-level printer/copier sold internationally can accommodate both US and ISO paper. Certainly if the printer can hold US legal, it can hold A4 as well.

(I can’t speak for old consumer printers or for industrial-sized printers. And it could also be the case that cheap printers would have size-specific paper trays for the market they are sold in, just like they have for power cords/adapters. It’s just that the printers I am familiar with can do both US and ISO.)

I wouldn’t go there if I were you. That reads as casual misogyny.

I think the overall theme is: let’s make everything the same everywhere, because Science and Convenience, the twin gods of modernity.

But there’s the minority opinion, which is let’s not. Let’s not have everyone speak one language. Let’s not have all foods be Fusion Cuisine, all houses be three bedrooms two baths, all cars be silver automatic SUV crossovers, and on and on. There are those of us who don’t want everything to interchangeable and universal. If I were world empress we’d still be using spans, hands, and ells (horses are still measured in hands, which is pleasant).

Hell, I live in a country that has never been anything other than metric, and yet pipe diameters are measured in inches (referred to as “tzoll”, which I think we stole from the Germans).

The most popular sport in the metric world (football/soccer) uses yards instead of meters. American football wouldn’t need to change.

An interesting idea, but can you actually name a single non-metric unit?

It’s all very well to talk about, say, inches, but by the early and certainly by the mid 20th-century traditional units had been abandoned in favour of standards like 1 inch ≔ 25.4 mm, and no more elementary-school quizzes involving converting between Virginia inches and New Hampshire inches and Flemish vs English ells.

I agree and yet this is just one more example of the forcible uniformity we are all funneled toward. Obviously, this heavily STEM-oriented discussion board is heartily in favor of it. There are no different drummers in that world.

Being 70 yrs/o and living in Canada all my life, I can work with both systems. Metric is far easier for calculating time to distance. 100 Km/hour is a common non-divided highway speed limit and that means at that speed it will take you one hour to travel 100 klms. If a place is 125 klms away, that means an hour and a quarter, 150 klms is 1 hour and one half hours away, 250 klms is 2.5 hours away, etc. Very easy.

I think there are some things about the non-metric system that are superior to the metric system, it’s name not being one of them (imperial, US-SAE, British, whatever). The main one is the units seem much more human related, at least to me, and many non-metric units were derived from practical units that real humans actually use. Foot and acre comes to mind right off the bat, the apx size of adult male foot and how much farm land that adult male can work in a day. Horsepower helps us decide what size engine we need to replace our horses, and though that is mostly no longer needed, it does relate somewhat to the original concept, teaching history and helping us realize what is needed in the past to do what we now do with engine. Fahrenheit I feel is far superior to centigrade, room temperature can be set in whole numbers, centigrade needs half units, and the basic 0F-100F scale which covers the human range of existence pretty darn well.

That being said, the world would be a better place with one system, so I’m fine with the non-metric system going away.

I wouldn’t touch the metric system with a decafoot pole.

But it is not:

It is arbitrarily useful. It is not useful because it is structured more sensibly than F/R, or because it has a unique or deliberately designed connection to other metrics. Celsius is simply a different standard than Fahrenheit, and all of our SI units relating to temperature could have used F/R instead of C/K without changing anything but the size of the unit.

Fahrenheit did not have ANY of the Imperial Measurement problems that have been described over and over, no strange association with other metrics, no historical use of fractions, or related units without simple conversions. It’s identical to Celsius, except each degree is smaller. If it hadn’t been replaced by Celsius, everything metric would work exactly as well as it does today.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. An hour and a quarter?? That sounds like imperial units to me! Surely you mean 1.25 hours, or 125 centihours?

I would argue that the freeze/boil associations are a more sensible structure than not, but I’m learning this is not the hill to even visit anymore, let alone watch people senselessly die on. I’m out.

Well, I view a “quarter” as being .25, like “twenty-five cents” and a “quarter past one” is 1:15, etc.