Metric System

Teaspoon and Tablespoon are Metric-based units, defined as 5 ml and 15 ml respectively. Even the US government uses these definitions for food labeling purposes.

IMO the main reasons English units prevail in the US are:
[ul]
[li]The US is a fairly isolated and self-sufficient nation. (Isolated in the sense that most people and many companies don’t regularly deal with other countries.) Most information and products are either produced within the US, or designed specifically for the US market.[/li][li]Americans have, in general, more skepticism towards their own government and towards foreign influences than most other people.[/li][li]American government botched their Metric campaign by emphasizing conversion factors (“to convert centigrade to fahrenheit, multiply by 9/5 and add 32”) rather than encouraging people to acquire a feel for the new units (“20 degrees is a nice warm day, 30 degrees is a really hot day”). [/li][/ul]

More like a nice warm day. (Surely in Alabama it must take something closer to 40 to be “really hot”.)

Whatever. You know what I was trying to say.

D’oh!

More salt in the wounds, but man, 30 degrees is a nice, cool day here!

You are also going under the mistaken assumption that metric system is just inherently better.

Yes, it’s better if you’re trying to compare measures or calculate using measures because it is essentially base 10. However, the measurements don’t tend to be nearly as useful in every day life.

I.e. the metric system is useful for everything but measurement :slight_smile:
For example, in foods, a gram is too little to be meaningful and a kilogram is too big. An ounce and a pound however are very convinient.

In making crafts or tools, again, an inch/foot combo is a lot more convinient than the cm/mm combo. Mainly because of size.

In general, imperial system tends to be divisible into things that it historically evolved to divide into, 3’s, 4’s, etc. Dividing by 10 is a useful feature of the metric system, but it’s not as universal. Metric is just not as natural.

Groman

P.S. I’m a 21 year old immigrant from a metric country and I’d much rather use american system than metric.

This is way into Great Debates territory, but I’m going to offer a defense of the English system – at least as it pertains to feet and inches. In woodworking, which I do a certain amount of, I find the English system vastly superior to metric, and not incidentally, much more intimately tied to a traditional aesthetic view that relies on proportionality. For example, any given number of inches can be cut in half, and halved again, and again, and again, and again, and each halving will correspond to a line on your ruler. Try that with metric, and pretty soon you’re into fractional millimeters, and you’re squinting at the tiny little identically sized lines on your ruler, trying to figure out where the hell you are.

So maybe the answer here is that Americans cling to the English system because certain parts of it make sense to them – I mean, on a rational level, not just a familiarity level. (And I don’t see why we can’t use both systems. For scientific/industrial use, use metric; for everything else, English.) But I think we should reject out of hand the notion that metric is simply superior because it’s based on tens.

(On preview, I see that some of the same points are being made by groman. Consider this as seconding his views.)

I too was just going to post that ‘feet’ and ‘inches’ (but especially feet) are superior to metric units of length. Considering these are some of the measurements that are used most often day to day by regular people, it is not good advertising.

I’m a person who has moved in his lifetime from the Imperial system to the metric system to the US-customary system, and I really like metric over the alternatives.

As far as carpentry goes, Australian carpenterrs and builders work consistently in millimetres, and I’m sure it makes their work easier. Since a saw cut is about a millimetre thick (for a hand saw – it’s thicker for a power saw), you never need to work in fractions of a millimetre. And calculatons are generally easier, e.g., to build a 7-shelf cabinet, it’s easier to divide 2400 mm by 7 to the nearest mm than to divide 8 feet by 7 to the nearest 1/16 of an inch. OK, I get 343 mm in a couple of seconds mental calculation, and what, 1 foot, 1 inch, then what’s 5/7 to the nearest 1/16 – I think I’ll give up of that, it looks like about 3/4. Now I’ve got to work out the multiples of 13 3/4 inches to mark off my shelves, which is a bit harder than multiples of 343 (especially if your calculator doesn’t handle fractions).

I don’t know much about woodworking, but do you never have to cut a given number of inches into 3, 5, 6 or any other number that isn’t a power of 2?

I do work with mechanical drawings all the time, and everything is in decimal inches. It’s worse than metric because English tools and parts (drill bits, bolts, etc) are in fractions of inches, and you end up having to convert between the two.

But college grads are a distinct minority in the US; most other Americans aren’t encountering kilos unless they’re getting cocaine shipments.

I am from the US, but live in Colombia where everything except Gasoline is metric. Gasoline is in gallons. Really, metric is not difficult. You get used to it quite fast.

You ain’t a 'bama born boah, are ya. Brrr.

Now, now. Don’t forget the emerging popularity of 9mm guns.

I’m not sure what this says about American culture…

Metric is fine, though Fahrenheit is a much better temperature scale for everyday use. It just happens to roughly mark the extremes of temperature that people are likely to encounter and is thus much better in determining how the weather stacks up.

???
that sounds like a matter of perception

I remember learning to drive in Colorado (U.S.) in the 1970’s. There were dual-unit signs (miles & kilometers) springing up all over the highways. Now, everything’s just miles again. It’s like we converted halfway and gave up.

For those griping about the “convenient sizes” of English units, you’re just using the wrong metric units. Groman says grams are too small and kg are too large. Try hectograms. About 3-1/2 ounces. Great unit. Shagnasty thinks inches and feet are better measurements. For day-to-day use, maybe mm are too small and meters too big, but centimeters are quite convenient, and decimeters are about equivalent to hands (perfect for measuring horses :wink: ).

Okay, that was partially in jest, because people resistant to metric don’t want to learn the in-between prefixes, but what’s the big deal with this “too small” stuff? So what if you have 56 grams instead of 2 ounces? They’re still both perfectly good units.

There’s still a dual-unit sign somewhere outside of Knoxville, Tennessee, on I-40. About 12 km outside in fact, if I remember the sign right. But you hardly see those otherwise.

I don’t doubt that Australian carpenters are able to work consistently in millimeters. It’s all what you’re used to, of course. That said, I don’t find your example particularly compelling. Obviously if you start with 2400 mm, you can divide nicely by seven, but what if you’re stuck starting with 2000 mm? Dividing by seven, you get 285.7 mm – hardly an easy figure to work with. And your observation about the width of the saw cut escapes me altogether.

Beyond proportionality, I find the English measurements on the ruler easier to take in at a glance. I can find 13 5/8 much more readily than I can find, say, 33 cm, 7 mm. This has to do with the way the increments of the inch are stepped off on the ruler: a full-size line for the inch, a half-size line for the half inch, etc.

My point is that from a usability perspective, you can argue, as I am doing here, that the English linear measuring system is superior to the metric for certain purposes. Why abandon it then? Just because everyone else has? I think American contrariness is serving us well here.

If I were king, I’d get people shifted over in just a few short years.

Everyone has been taught the metric system in school, for 50 years, but always taught it wrong.

It’s always been taught in math class as a way to justify multiplication of decimal constants.

In real life, there is no math in the conversion - You don’t convert, you re-measure. Or, mostly, just read the new measurement off the product.

Right now, 2liter bottles have the oz. in parentheses. Cans have the ml in parentheses. Nobody actually has to read either one. They look at the container and know what it is.

So, to change weights to metric, on food you just put the opposite number in the parentheses. No calculator required.

If you pull up to a gas pump in Canada and the digits start climbing, you don’t care if its litres or gallons, but just the dollar amount. And you don’t care that it’s Canadian dollars, because either you have that much cash to cover it or you must charge it whatever the number. Conversion doesn’t enter in. And you don’t ever need to convert litres and currency to shop for gas. You just pick the station with the lowest price on their sign.

So, you should teach metrics by printing a tiny chart with the 3 or 4 things that most confuse tourists today. But without using the old units at all. For example, for temperature, instead of charting Celsius vs. Fahrenheit or the coversion formulae of the math class, you just list about few key temperatures, the one where you can sunbathe, where you put on a sweater, where you see frost on the lawn, and that’s about it. Just those few will tell you how to dress after hearing the weather forecast. Nothing else needs a number. The teapot boils when it boils, no conversion needed.

Heh…not in engineering we don’t. The only reason some (but certainly not all) American cars use metric fasteners is because many components are manufactured abroad and are in common with other, non-American cars. (General Motors used to be particuarly annoying about this, interchanging metric and SAE fasteners wherever it randomly suited them.)

There’s more to swtiching to metric than just changing a few measurements and switching road signs; dials, gauges, test fittings, and so forth are all calibrated to English units. Standard hydraulic and pneumatic fittings are made to SAE specs and are not interchangable (and in fact, many foreign-build hydraulic tools and equipment are forced to use SAE-standard fittings for compatibility). Standard building materials and raw metal stocks are all made to English dimensions, and unless you are Catepillar or John Deere and can order entire mill runs of material, you are not going to be able to order metal sheet in metric thicknesses. And every year the problem is compounded, as more equipment is manufactured to our increasingly antiquidated specification.

I used to work at a construction equipment manufacturer (telescopic material handlers) when the Engineer Manager got the bright idea that we were going to build our new flagship machine line in all metric–metric fasteners, high pressure metric hydraulics, metric engines, even specially formulated metric-thickness high strength corrosion resistant metric steel. :rolleyes: This lasted only so long as the team of purchasing agents and engineers (of which I was thankfully not one) reported how much it would cost to build such a machine; the conservative estimate was about an order of magnitude greater than building a machine out of standard material stock and SAE-spec powertrain and fasteners. Not to mention all of the extra tools we’d have to buy (or have the assemblers buy) in order to continue operating.

The reason we don’t–and until the Post-Industrial Morass finally wipes out manufacturing and engineering in this country, won’t–switch to metric is simple: inertia and cost, both of which are prohibitive difficulties.

As for people who “hate” metric; WTF? What is there to hate about it? It is a different–and frankly, much more consistant–system of measurement; one which doesn’t contain anachonisms such as ergs, British Thermal Units, horsepower, rods, slugs, drachms, hogsheads, pennyweights, acres, perches, chains, Imperial vs. Standard bushels, gallons, short tons vs gross tones, et cetera, and all the accompanying, obfuscating, and unmemorable conversion factors required. Any student of science or engineering knows that calculations using metric measurements are a hell of a lot less prone to being farked up by some misapplied conversion than the anachronistic measurements of the English system.

Stranger