How much of the Metric system do Americans use now?

[Skinner]Not only are the trains now running on time, they’re running on metric time. Remember this time people, 80 past 2 on April 47th, it’s the dawn of a new enlightenment.[/Skinner]

Bless me, Almighty Metric User, for you are obviously perfect :rolleyes:

Can we please hurry up and get to the Grandpa’ Simpson quote?

Its always been my impression that the answer was ‘all of it’.
As far as I know every ‘American’ (‘Imperial’? ‘Avoirdupois’? What the heck is it called anyway?) measurement is defined in terms of SI units. So an inch is 2.54cm. Thats not a conversion: thats a definition. See Inch - Wikipedia.

Volts, Amps and Ohms, also spring to mind.

The quasi-religious fervour with which some Americans defend the American system of measurement amuses me no end though. I once spent a happy half hour in a public library in New York reading a book - a 150 page book no less - about the evils inherent in the metric system and the natural superiority of the American system. ‘Farads are too small’ and 'Farenheit is better because between 0 and 100 degrees defines a livable environment for people ’ were two of the choicer bits of insanity in it.

And while I’m at it: The one that gets me is the pint. In the US its 473ml, on this side of the pond its 568ml. I’ll be damned if thats ‘superior’. I always felt stiffed buying a pint of anything in the US (e.g. milk or much more likely: beer :frowning: ).

Don’t products have to be labeled in French and English to be able to be exported to Canada? Does this apply for measurements too? I notice that every single item in my bathroom (shampoo, hair spray, toothpaste, etc) has both French and English on it and some Spanish.

And Wendell, what do you have in your apartment that’s 200yards? I hope it’s a tightly wound ball of string!

The problem was caused by a failure to convert between units, which can happen no matter what system you use. If you have a variable holding a distance measured in meters, and you use it as if it’s measured in centimeters instead, you’re still going to have problems - you’ll just be off by a nice round factor of 100, instead of nasty old 2.54.

You could avoid the problem by deciding from the start that all distances will be measured in centimeters, but of course you could also decide they’ll all be measured in inches. In any case, when you write a program to convert between fields of measurement (distance to area, mass to volume, etc.), you’ll probably use named constants for clarity, so it isn’t really any harder to use conversion factors like 2.54 instead of 10.

ZipperJJ writes:

> And Wendell, what do you have in your apartment that’s
> 200yards? I hope it’s a tightly wound ball of string!

Dental floss.

Alright, I’ll take care of it.

The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that’s the way I likes it.

minor nitpick (major for some people):
There is not one thing metric about referring to a megabyte as one million bytes. That’s just incorrect, something hard-drive manufacturers’ marketing departments want you to believe, so you think you’re getting more than you are.
/minor nitpick

abby

Well, while I agree that this isn’t really metric, why do you think it’s marketing departments making it sound like more than it is? Aside from the fact that kilobyte and megabyte have been in common computer use long before they were mass market terms, a megabyte is actually more than 1,000,000 bytes.

Makers of hard drives and memory cards uniformly overstate the capacity of their storage, by using powers of ten, instead of powers of two.

For them, a megabyte is 1,000,000 bytes. For everyone else, a megabyte is two to the power of 20 bytes - 1,048,576.

It gets worse as the devices get bigger. A real gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes, so when you buy a “20 gigabyte” hard drive, there’s a roughly 7% rip-off factor.

That’s a paraphrase from www.dansdata.com.

abby

sorry, that’s not a paraphrase, it’s a quote, my apologies to Dan.

a

In America, on our daily lives, the metric system has not made a huge impact. Our cars are still in miles, our daily temperature is still in fahrenheit, we weigh ourselves by the pound, and drink most drinks by the ounce. However, if you’re in any sort of engineering or scientific field, you are usually using metric more often than not. Any science class you take will usually be done with metric units, and math is one of the only classes I can immediately think of that used English units for anything.

To paraphrase better, they make their products with somewhat small capacities and then report their capacities in the smaller base-ten units, which are largely unsuited to the task except that they are smaller and can be used to pump the numbers a bit.

For an example, say you buy a floppy disk with an advertised capacity of 1.44 MB (Megabytes). You pop it in your drive, mount it, and run df to see how big it really is. df reports 1423 1-KB (one-Kilobyte) blocks, which is correct.

Now let’s do some math. 1423/1024 (the correct way to find out MBs) is equal to a little below 1.39. Therefore, the correct capacity is 1.39 MB. Not quite as large, is it?

As abby said, the screw factor is minimal on this level, but it increases progressively as one begins buying denser media.

BTW, abby, where on the site does he explain this issue? He sounds like the kind of guy who’d get POd at it, but I haven’t been able to find a specific explanation of what’s going on.

Hi

An article of his is here, but every time he reviews a storage device he brings it up.

A thoroughly entertaining site by a guy who’s funny and dead smart. Recommended.

abby

That’s actually a different screw factor - a 1.44 MB floppy disk has 1440 one-KB blocks (not counting filesystem overhead), which makes a “floppy MB” equal to 1000 * 1024 bytes, different from either a RAM MB or a hard drive MB.

There is a lawsuit in the USA by customers against computer OEMs where plaintiffs allege your point of view and I believe they do not have a leg to stand on. What you say is just your opinion, it is not a fact. We just recently discussed this in another thread and you are welcome to post there rather than hijack this one.

sailor, I agree that it’s my opinion that it’s bad of manuf’s to mislead consumers - sorry to opine. My intent was not to hijack, but to factually correct Mr2001.

However, I am sure we all agree that computers (and megabytes), are base 2, not base 10, and thus not metric specifically - the point of intial post.

abby

True, but that’s the root of the problem. People have become used to calling 2[sup]10[/sup], 2[sup]20[/sup] and 2[sup]30[/sup] kilo, mega and giga respectively. This is wrong. According to IEEE and others, it should be called kilobinary, megabinary and gigabinary, and the corresponding prefixes are ki, mi and gi.

Never mind that nobody really uses them…
Now, back to the discussion of metric units in the US.

No, any number can be expressed in any base numbering system and numbering systems are all just as good to express any number. Decimal is what most of humanity is best acquainted with.

Consumers were not misled as was demonstrated in the other thread where you are welcome to answer the questions I posed there.

You are not “factually correct”. Again, there is a thread dealing with this if you want to continue the discussion. Are hard drive sizes deceptive?. You are welcome to address the points I made there.