What the hell is this even supposed to mean? How does this comment even begin to make sense to you?
Duh, because I’m an American!
But there’s nothing like contemplating teaching some concept to a child (the Firebug’s 7 years old) to help you sort out what sort of sense it makes.
And much as I’m used to it, the current American system of measures is really, really stupid. 12 inches to a foot, 5280 feet to a mile, and inches divided into 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 (Antelope Freeway, anyone?), etc. fractions? 16 ounces in a pound (or is it 16 ounces in a pint? Yes, an ounce is both a floor wax and a dessert topping!), 2000 pounds in a ton. 16 ounces in a pint, 2 pints in a quart, 4 quarts in a gallon. 4 pecks in a bushel, 12 bushels in a shitload (OK, I made that one up).
We really want to keep on teaching all this crap to kids? Really??
I will hold out for Fahrenheit, though. It’s got a scale that fits well with the temperatures we normally experience. 0 and below is too damn cold, 100 and above is too damn hot, and taken as a group, we Americans spend the vast majority of our lives somewhere in between, but using most of the 0-to-100 scale.
Celsius’ 0-to-100 scale is defined by the freezing and boiling points of water, but that’s not the scale that matches our lives. It often gets below freezing during the winter in temperate climates, but we never get anywhere near the boiling point - an outdoor temperature above the 50s, Celsius, has never been recorded.
Story of metric time.
Unlike weights and lengths, that emphatically did not catch. Despite being so much more sensible that 60 minutes to the 24 hours of the 28/29/30/31 days of the 12 months. 10 hours of 100 minutes of 100 seconds, 10 days to a week, how complex is that ?!
Never had a problem with it, Fahrenheit temps look weird to me.
I’m an Anerican who also grew up in the 1970s when they tried to teach us metric in school. I’m another who is of the opinion that if they had just switched the country overnight, within a month only cranks would still be griping.
Myself, I use the metric system whenever possible. It’s early and a bit chilly still, but today is expected to be a beautiful 25ºC in Las Vegas (in February)!
The usual complaint against the metric system is that people who grew up with the customary system don’t understand it. This is true. But what the complaintants don’t mention is that those people don’t understand the customary system, either. There are crazy conversion factors all over the place, and most people don’t know most of them, even though most of them are needed. If you see one sign on the freeway that says “Exit 500 feet ahead”, and another that says “Exit 1/4 mile ahead”, which one is closer? If you know the length and width of a square plot of land in feet (and we’ll assume for the sake of kindness that it’s just feet, no miles, yards, furlongs, or inches), what’s the area in acres? If you have the length, width, and height of a container in inches, how many gallons will it hold? Heck, I’ve met people who didn’t even know the relative sizes of things, like asking how many cups there are in an ounce.
But even all of that, I could forgive. The real sin of the customary system is that it’s an incoherent system of units, which makes it unusable for any purpose involving physics (which, yes, includes engineering). And since it’s unusable, engineers therefore have invented ways to mangle it into coherence. But they’ve invented three different ways, including one that’s just pants-on-head stupid, and you usually can’t tell from context which one is being used until halfway through a specification. Far, far better to just use a system that was designed to be coherent, and is consistent throughout the world, and if the conversion between different size scales is also made easier by doing so, so much the better.
Although in many ways the metric system could be said to be inherently superior, as an American, I have a native proficiency with our system of weights and measures that I could never develop with the metric system. Do we owe it to America’s future children to change over so they do not have this handicap while us old folks must stumble along as best we can for the remainder of our days?
I say no. Why throw sand in our own eyes, plus put the whole country at a disadvantage while we fumble around trying to make the switch?
We make everyone else speak English to deal with us and that’s working out well too. I suggest we cling to these things as long as possible.
I’ll hold out for the freezing point of water being 0. That just plain makes sense - if it is below zero, it is snowing; above zero, it is raining.
Yeah, I’d written a post about how US standard units were more “natural”, in the sense of being properly sized for use. I had some stuff about how measuring height in meters was goofy, and so was cm/mm, but then decimeters sort of made sense. Saying someone is 18.3 dm is no less awkward than 6" really, and saying that you want 3 hectograms of lunchmeat isn’t any more awkward than saying you want about 3/4 of a lb or 10 oz.
It’s what we’re used to, that’s all. I imagine had I grown up in a metric country, thinking in km/h wouldn’t be weird at all, and neither would height in cm, etc…
Yeah, if I could edit that now I would, but not enough sleep and your mental parsing goes crap when writing.
Now, in Canada we have the veneer of metric on top of american standard. Almost everything you see is listed in the metric system, with the american conversion already done, in a smaller font. The exception might be the signage is completely metric, speed limits and distances.
Two examples come to mind, regarding that comment about not being a human system. At the auto show in Toronto last weekend, the presenter for one of the new ford models was extolling the features and came to the milage that the car was supposed to get. Liters-per-100-kilometers, which tells me nothing personally, she then gave the MPG equivalent. Why her script did not just drop metric alltogether, is mystifying.
The other one, tire pressure listed as kilopascals per something, its probably terribly accurate and useful to someone, but if its used by anyone in normal conversation, I simply have not heard of it. I don’t want to rip metric to shreds, what it does is useful, but not as a general purpose system of weights and measures.
So given the amount of time that has passed since Canada has gone officially metric, its clear that we are not, and will never be a Metric country.
The part about France, had to do with the sale of a bolt of cloth. The standard measure was the amount of cloth a man could display with arms stretched outright, given different size humans, this square footage would differ.
Delcan
You do know that this is not at all the case, correct??
Metric Force? Dyne, Newton or sthene?
Metric pressure? barye, Pascal or pièze ?
Ergs or Joules?
Square meters or Are? How many Are in a hectare? How much wood in a stere?
We really want to start teaching all this crap to kids? Really??
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t most serious manufacturing and science already done in SI units?
I mean, I seriously doubt that Boeing or Lockheed is still using 5/32 wrenches to put together the 787 or F/A-18E, just like most US auto manufacturers are pretty much metricated as well. And I know that various science departments have long used SI units- well before I went to college in 1991.
A lot of manufactured products are already in metric increments, or could very easily be converted by adding a tad more or less to the bottle and changing the label. For example, my contact rewetting drops are 0.27 oz / 9ml, and my hand sanitizer is 10 oz /295 ml. They could easily add 5 ml to the bottle and just call it 10.1 oz without any major changes. We have 2 liter bottles, 355ml cans (which could easily be 350 ml cans if we chose), 16.9/500ml bottles, and so on, and so forth.
I think for temperature, F is superior to C. 100 is too damn hot, 0 is too damn cold, in between we have a lifetime of experience to relate to. The finer gradations I think are a plus.
The problem with the rest of it is we just teach it wrong. As a parent, I remember the first week of every kid’s science class every year was the conversion between prefixes that nobody every uses- convert 16 hectometers to dekameters. They did this crap every single year and none of it sank in. Just stick to the commonly used prefixes and screw the rest.
The other thing is that the infrastructure is all in US units. It helps to know that you probably have 2x4 studs spaced at 16". We can’t have lumberyards full of metric lumber and metric drywall sheets and so on, we have to maintain the old stuff so why build the new stuff with metric sized material?
It’s a generalization. :rolleyes: Like “it is freezing outside”.
I sometimes forget how wonderfully pedantic and literal some people on this board can be.
Yes, indeed, it is perfectly possible to have rain below zero and snow above zero, something I know full well. I assumed - I guess wrongly - that everyone would get that point without a lot of elaboration.
The point being that the freezing point of water does, in point of fact, have a big effect - as a generalization - on one’s experience of the great outdoors.
I have no real beef with it. On the surface it seems to make sense: all units multiplied (or divided) by factors of 10 to get other units. Heck, I remember when I was in grade school that there was going to be this major effort to convert the U.S. to the metric system. Clearly that didn’t happen (the biggest cause I’ve heard is the cost). The only problem with switching is that it would take some time to get used to the new system. I mean, off the top of their head how many “Merkans” know how tall, in meters, someone who stands 5’ 11" is? Or how many kilograms someone who weighs 190 lbs. is? (Personally I can do the conversion to kilos fairly quickly in my head but I have a little more trouble with the one for height)
Ah, the stuff we use every day!
Chances are most people wouldn’t know what the hell you were talking about if you used the non-metric terms. Or only know it as the number of PSI that you’re supposed to inflate your tire to.
(I really have no sense of what a pound per square inch is, and neither do most people; they just keep the air hose on the tire valve until the pressure is the right number. So some other number, with some other name, wouldn’t be any different from now.)
How much wood in a cord? And are you talking a ‘real’ cord, or a ‘face cord’? How many square feet in an acre? (43,560. Now, there’s a number every kid should know. And 640 acres in a square mile.)
Keep digging. 
True, but that’s a weak argument for its being at the (sorta) endpoint of the scale.
In Celsius, I spend my life between about -16 and +38. Not a good fit between scale and life.
A mildly readjusted Fahrenheit scale that had freezing at a round number, like 30°, would make sense, since certainly the freezing point of water is significant. But nobody’s going to make that sort of alteration to the scale.
I don’t understand the notion that using a minus sign is an imposition. To my mind, having a minus sign in play works just fine - when “it’s freezing out” it is, indeed, worthy of a minus sign in front of the temp number.
In Canada (where I live and where it is often “below zero”), a lot of people switched easily and naturally to C when the change came, for outdoor temperatures, for exactly this reason … it makes more intuitive sense.
Where they retained F, was for body temperatures - because of the ease of use for indicating a bad temperature, without resorting to fractional degrees.
As in, “it was -10 out when I went to see the doctor, because I was running a temperature of 101”. It would be perfectly understood that the first was in C and the second was in F.