It is a valid point that the Fahrenheit scale is a bit more intuitive. 0-100F is pretty much the range of temperatures humans experience. That said, I’m all for the switch to Metric. Getting used to Celsius only takes a bit of familiarity.
No, probably not. I was exaggerating. I didn’t realize that cup measurements themselves would be relatively even. As to doing the conversions in my head? Math is NOT a strong suit of mine. It’s not even a weak suit. If I had a conversion chart it would work, but what a pain in the butt! I don’t know about recipes having both sets of measurements. I haven’t baked for quite some time. That’s entirely possible.
Ummmmmm…
Yes, but it’s damned difficult to find. We mostly use US paper sizes, even though every piece of office equipment I’ve ever seen can handle both.
And this is another one of my beefs. Where I work, we make two separate versions of every product brochure and sales sheet and white paper, one to fit US letter size and one to fit A4. And then we send half our stuff out as PDFs even though they could be any size, really. And the office runs on US paper sizes, even though most of our customers are in Europe or elsewhere overseas.
Still, that’s not as strange as when we, a Canadian company with (at the time) mostly US customers, were bought by a British company. We had to decide which of the three dialects of English involved to use…
When last I was in Amsterdam, I went into the McD’s just to have a royale with cheese, no dice all they had was 1/4 pounders, I passed.
I’m the posterboy for the familiarity arguement. In nursing, we use metric for all wts and liquid measures, we calculate drug dosages in mg/mcg per kg of body wt, fluid intake and output, blood loss all in liters and milliliters. Temp is institution variable and once I got used to it in celsius, no big deal, 37 is normal 40 is bad news. I still have trouble with distance measures though. It’s common to think in terms of inches in describing someones laceration, and there’s no real pressure to make the transition, so I haven’t yet.
I want picas.
Not around here it isn’t.
IMHO, Metric, while clearly useful for many things, cannot and will never be universal, because it doesn’t encompass a measurement for TIME.
Well, we’ve heard from people who grew up with imperial and want to stay with imperial, and we’ve heard from people who grew up with imperial and want metric, and we’ve heard from people (I think… if we haven’t, well, I’m in this group) who grew up with metric and want to stay with metric. There ought to be a fourth group here. Have I missed all the people who grew up with the metric system, but long for their country to convert to the more intuitive and human-readable imperial system? Perhaps I’m not paying sufficiently keen attention, but that group seems underrepresented.
For what it’s worth, for reasons that escape me, we seem to measure height in feet and inches here (human height I mean) roughly as often as we use centimeters. I’m not sure why this is. Do other metric country dopers have this experience, or is Australia just behind the times in this regard? Perhaps it’s just me. Ah well.
The second is the SI unit of time. Works fine.
Seems like the Brits adjusted pretty well to having their money converted to a decimal system…
I don’t know if you can tell much by Canadian Dopers - we seem pretty firmly committed to being 3/4s metric, and leaving some things forever in imperial. Official measurements of height and weight are in metres and kgs in Canada, but everybody knows their measurments in inches and pounds. I’d have to look at my driver’s license to tell you how tall I am in metres, but I know I’m 5’6". All the measurements at Safeway are officially in kgs/mLs, but I buy a pound of apples a week. I also buy a couple 100 grams of deli meat occasionally and 4 litres of milk. Yeah, we’re pretty schizophrenic on the measurement front.
(And our most common distance measurement is hours. Saskatoon is about seven hours from Calgary; Moose Jaw is only 6.)
I think the time to make the switch has passed, conversions are so easy to make (you can do it from your cell phone by texting google) that the need to come to a unified standard is pointless.
Had it been thirty years ago, I would have agreed and said let’s make the change, but today it just isn’t needed.
– IG
It was the French in the film who had Royale with Cheese, I think.
In the UK it seems far more common to give height in feet and inches and weight in stones and pounds than the metric equivalents.
Yes, but in Amsterdam, you can walk into a movie theater and buy a beer. And I don’t mean no paper cup, I’m talking about a glass of beer.
…and they also have Krusty Partially Gelatinated Non-Dairy Gum-Based Beverages. They call 'em shakes.
I TAd the Organic Chemistry lab for 5 terms.
Every time, at least one student would whine about having to measure stuff using the decimal system (chemists use it for pretty much everything except when we use calories, we like our calories because we like their definition).
Every time, they’d say that the decimal system is too hard to remember.
Every time, I asked them “how many pounds are in a stone?”
They never knew it.
So, really, before complaining that a decimal system is “too hard to remember”… have you taken a good hard look at yours?
Point two:
my Mech Eng bro works in construction in Spain. Lots of stuff (nuts and bolts come to mind) are in inches, a unit that was never used in Spain (well it was, but none of our inches was the same length as the US inch). People will say “gimme a 3/4” and have no idea “3/4 of what”. These things are built to standards that were defined before Napoleon Buonaparte entered the military academy… they’re not likely to change even if the US went metric.
Oh, sorry: the TA stuff was in Miami.
I shall pass on the metric system because I think the English system is superior. This business about powers of 10 is tremendously overrated. The units make more sense:
Length: OK, a meter is about a yard. We can visualize that. But inches are better at measuring things less than a foot than mm are. And a foot is- well about the size of your foot. A mile is 4 times around a US running track or the distance between most county primary roads.
Temperature: Fahrenheit rules. Being a bit more than half as big as a degree C, degrees F allow for more precision in reporting whole degrees. And 0-100 being the range of typical weather makes it quite easy to remember.
Weight: Again, being smaller, pounds are more precise than kilograms. And there is a handy relationship between weight and volume for common liquids: a pint a pound the world around.
Volume: for cooking, English rules. For amounts < 1 Tbsp, teaspoons and their fractions are easier than ml. For larger amounts, cups are convenient and intuitive: a cup of fluid is about what you put in a drinking cup. Sure, ccs are good for injections, but notice that your American doctor still reports your weight in pounds, your height in inches, and your temperature in degrees F.
You’ll never sell this inferior system, especially the way the US schools teach it. Every fall, every science class spends time memorizing silly prefixes that nobody ever uses. What a waste. IF it was desireable to make the switch, there are better ways to go about it.
Who uses mm? If it’s something you’d measure in inches, I’d measure it in cm.
I don’t know anyone who goes measuring things against their shoe. If it needs measuring, that’s what rulers are for. Doesn’t matter if they’re marked in cm or inches.
And a km is 1.5 times a Olympic standard track. Who runs the 100 yard dash anymore? It’s the 100m. Standard, worldwide. Even American athletes run the 1500 at the Olympics. Guess they’re traitors to the Imperial Way.
Only if you’re not used to Celsius. Fahrenheit temps make no sense to me at all. Plus I’m not scared of a decimal point in my temperature readings. And Celsius works better for cooking, too, since it relates to boiling & freezing more directly.
By that logic, grams are better than ounces. Why do you fear the decimal point?
Not in Antarctica or Tibet , & 1 litre weighs one kilogram at STP. Same difference.
See my post above about measuring spoons, which have a fixed ml equivalent.
See previous post - I also use a cup, mine’s just a metric cup. Same diff.
My doc uses only SI units - that’s simpler, and simpler is better when you’re talking standards.
We* never memorize all the prefixes outside science classes. Kilo, milli and centi are all we use regularly. Don’t blame the metric system if your education system has a shitty bway of presenting it, blame your education system.
The rest of the world made the switch. That should be the entirety of its desirability right there, but I guess this will be like all the other ways the US likes to thumb its collective nose at sensibility. The metric system’s just too French, I guess.
I hope we will go metric, but there is something to be said for the Imperial system all the same. From George Orwell’s “As I Please” column, published in the Tribune, March 14, 1947: