senoy’s post there is actually an excellent example of a person not using measurements. What does it mean to bake something at 190º? It means that you turn the knob on your stove to the position marked 190, and wait for it to beep and the preheating light to turn off. Just like we do with Fahrenheit. There’s some temperature where something important happens to water, relevant for fishing? He memorizes the value of that number, and then compares it to his thermometer. Or maybe he just draws a line on his thermometer, and labels it with whatever the fishing significance is. He himself says that he isn’t doing any calculations with any of these, and doesn’t want to. For him, these are all just labels, not measurements.
That’s not a problem computers have with SI; that’s a problem that computers have with people who don’t understand proper use of precision. Exact-equality comparisons with floating-point numbers are always problematic, no matter what units you’re using. For example, the problem with your 1 kilogram and 10 people example arises because there are 10 people, not because it’s a kilogram: You’d have exactly the same issue dividing 1 pound between 10 people. Never mind the fact that no measurement you ever make of anything is ever going to be that precise, anyway.
The issue really isn’t better or worse. Celsius would work fine for all of those. The issue is familiarity. I am familiar with 72 degrees and so are most Americans. I am certain I could eventually figure out the other temperatures. The thing is that I DON’T have them figured out and it would be a painful process to actually do without an obvious need to do so. I certainly could learn what 39 and 40 are in Celsius and go from there, but I don’t know them intuitively. (Those are important temps because water at about 39.2 is at its densest. So if water temps at the surface are 39.5, then the water is colder at the bottom of the water column which encourages fish upwards. If the water is 39, then it is warmer at the bottom of the column which encourages them down. It allows you to better position your baits to maximize your chances of being in the correct zone and that temp is a spawning signal to certain species, but I digress.)
As for which is ‘better’ both systems have advantages. A 12 inch foot allows whole number calculations for 1/4, 1/2 and 1/3 of its length which is nice for woodworking and construction. Chair seats are typically 18 inches off the floor and table tops are 1 foot above that, so it’s easy for us furniture makers when spacing structural and decorative elements. The gallon, quart, pint, cup system allows easy doubling of quantities which allows for intuitive calculations as well. Obviously, the base 10 of the metric system makes nice conversions between units and easy math. The fact that they were more standardized back in the day definitely made things easier. I like the whole milliliter/cubic centimeter/milligram of water conversion. It’s elegant in its simplicity. I actually prefer the Fahrenheit temperature scale because 0-100 is essentially the temperature of the world we live in. If I say that temps are sub-zero, we know that that’s freaking cold in a way that single-digits doesn’t convey. Similarly, when temps are in triple digits, it conveys an extremely hot day in ways that in the 90s doesn’t. Zero and 100 are temperature touchstones in a way that I don’t think -18 and 38 are in the Celsius system.
You’re trying WAY too hard.
Zero is freezing
100 is boiling
40 below is a really cold winter day in Alaska (-40°C = -40°F)
40 above is a really hot summer day in Dallas (40°C = 104°F)
20 is so-called room temperature (20°C = 68°F)
And if the temperature changes by 10 degrees Fahrenheit, that’s roughly 5 degrees difference in Celsius.
Good enough.
“Only”.
Also, there’s another one: units are directly linked to dimensionality. While many units have customary names, if you knowhow to figure out something’s dimensionality, you know what units to use.
I remember during the attempted conversion hearing some proto-wingnut exclaiming it was all a Communist Conspiracy. I just snorted and told him that the US Army must be in on it because their tanks (M60s at the time) had been sporting 105mm cannon for some time.
When guesstimating the weight of water (something Burners do a lot) I find it much easier to use liters over gallons to the point will convert gallons to liters (I have a few benchmarks memorized like 10, 20, and 50 gallons equaling 38, 76, and 190 liters already) to do so.
Another pequliarity is that while I would have the same inaccuracy eyeballing a kilometer or kilometer and a half as a mile, being a horse racing fan, I have a furlong down cold. That’s 1/8 of a mile, 220 yards, 200 meters. I just have trouble stringing five of them together for a klick or eight for a mile
In golf, if it’s about a third of a furlong you need a mashie-niblick for the shot.
Even after Canada has been metric for decades, I still have some residual Imperial measurements stuck in my mind. I have no idea my weight in kilos, it’s all pounds. Going the other way, I have a very good sense of weather range temperature in Celluloid (-40 to +45), but have to think to translate it to real degrees. Wood here is still in inches - no reason to change and basically too much confusion if we do, especially if the USA won’t. I buy gas in Litres (I even remember buying in in litres in Michigan in the 1980’s) but still consider car performance in MPG. (And even more confusing - is that Canadian Imperial gallons or US gallons?) Groceries have started showing prices in both pounds and kilograms for some stores, some merchants. Cans and bottles etc. are all metric, but some sizes are pretty close to old imperial sizes slightly rounded- 330ml instead of 12 oz, etc.
But the point is - there was serious screaming when Trudeau - the other, arrogant one - switched us to metric. It is convenient for these sort of things that a majority government in parliament is basically a dictatorship for 5 years. (and some cynical politician suggested once that the voting public’s memory only extends to two years back…) There was serious screaming, claims of communist conspiracy, and the government had to threaten merchants with fines if they did not convert. Plus, the government had suggested that it would be as simple as sticking a new set of scale numbers on your merchant scales - but oddly enough, the scale manufacturers never produced those, preferring instead to sell brand new scales - which added to the protests.
In the USA the only thing that terrifies politicians more than losing funding from lobbyists - is screaming constituents; I cannot imagine US politicians going along with any plan to threaten small businesses over metric.
Everyone who thinks that the great advantage of traditional units is that you can divide them easily into thirds and fourths, well, you can do the exact same thing with metric.
You can have a quarter of a gram, or a third of a meter. The exactly same calculations can be done as with a third of a yard. The only thing that’s missing is that a third of a meter doesn’t have a traditional name. A third of a yard is a foot, sure. But if you’re doing length calculations, you’re not going to separately keep track of yards and feet, are you? That’s a messed up way to calculate.
Yes, you can say six feet three inches. Wow, that’s precise! And in metric you’d have to have some gawdawful repeating decimal that goes on forever! Except did you really measure six feet and 3 inches? Or did you round that fucker off to the nearest inch? You rounded it off. So if you were measuring the same distance in meters, you’d round it off at some point, just the same as you always did when using traditional units.
If you’re building a house, and keeping track of measurements as combinations of feet and inches, then all you’re really doing is keeping track of measurements in terms of feet and fractional feet. You can do the exact same thing in metric. You could write 2 2/3 meters on your blueprint. The reason why nobody ever does that is that, and they just write 2.66 meters is that preserving that exact fraction is a fiction. You measured 7 feet 3 inches, sure. But you didn’t measure 7 feet 3.000000 inches. You measured 7 feet 3.0 inches instead, and called it good. So you don’t actually have more precision. And again, if you really do need that precision, you can express metric units as fractions if you need to, for some unknown reason. For the same reason that when you’re calculating you should keep terms like pi, e, or sqrt(2) as long as you can, rather than writing out a decimal approximation and using that.
You can’t do an exact decimal expression for a third of a foot. All you can do is write 4 inches. Which is just another way of writing a third of a foot. Again, if you have a need for that kind of precision, just write down a third of a meter instead of 0.33333 meters.
Exactly. I would have no problem with the metric system for lengths, weights and volumes, and would actually prefer it for some applications like wrenches and kitchen measurements. But not temperature. Yeah, I get the scientific rationale for 0=freezing and 100=boiling, but that means little in everyday life as we live it. Fahrenheit is much more intuitive and useful for weather and indoor and outdoor temps.
As for:
Seatbelt use is now at 90% in the US. If some are screaming bloody murder, it isn’t making much of an impact. We’re actually higher than many European countries, though not nearly as high as the obedient Japanese (99 percent).
Interesting that on one hand you speak of kitchen measurements and on the other, apparently you don’t cook.
The round off though for inches and feet makes for ease of calculation. Let’s say you’re building a chair. You’re going to make it 18 inches high with a support halfway down and then one at 2/3 of the distance between the halfway point and the floor which is a fairly common design. So I have 18/2 = 9 inches and then 2/3 of that is 6 inches off the floor. If we move that to metric, it’s probably 45 cm. Half of that is 22.5 and then 2/3 of 22.5 is 15. You can certainly get there, but the calculation isn’t nearly as quick. Similarly with building. US standards are 16 inches on center for studs. This gives you 6 studs per 8 foot which is a standard size for plywood and drywall. Metric standards are 45 cm which is 6 studs per 2.7 meters although some countries have gone up to a 60 cm standard (which honestly I think is dangerous since it’s basically 24 inch studs, but I think they rely on fewer weather extremes and they up their nominal stud size to about 3.86 inches from our 3.5. It’s interesting though that they still colloquially tend to refer to things as 2x4. Canada is also an exception in that it just builds using Imperial measures rather than metric.) just so that it can go evenly-ish into 1220 x2440 plywood (although some countries mill at 1200x2400, the 1220 x 2440 is more standard) Regardless though, Imperial makes for very easy construction calculations that are much more difficult in metric.
100 doesn’t matter for cooking. The 100 is only at sea level and most of us don’t live there. The boiling point where I live is about 98.5. For any cooking application that requires that type of precision (the only thing that I make that does is various candies), you’re using a thermometer with a very specific temperature point that typically doesn’t mean much in either Celsius of Fahrenheit. Caramels for example are about 245 Fahrenheit or a touch below 119 Celsius. They’re just numbers that don’t really mean much.
Actually, it’s not at sea level; it’s under a pressure of 1 atmosphere. Back to 6th grade physics with you.
The Fahrenheit scale really isn’t that much more of a precise than the Centigrade scale. Each degree C is only 1.8 times as large a degree F.
Yes, but 1 atmosphere is based on standard gravity which is a calculated average gravity at sea level. That’s why water boils at very close to 100 at Sea Level and at 95 in Denver.
Just to clear up a possible point of confusion, the metric system didn’t exist when the United States was founded. We became an independent country in 1776 and adopted our current system of government in 1788. The metric system was introduced in France in 1800.
I cook a lot, actually. I know I like to cook my steaks to 125 and I like to BBQ at 225 to 250. I bake stuff at 350 most of the time, but sometimes at 300, 325, 400 or 425.
When I need to boil water, I heat it until I see the bubbles coming to the top. I don’t stick a thermometer in it to see if it is 212 F or 100 C. When I need to freeze something, I stick it in the freezer until it’s solid. No measurement necessary.
I was referring to teaspoons, tablespoons, etc. I think it would be much easier to use 5ml, 10ml, etc when trying to halve or double a recipe.
0.33333 of a meter is an approximation and rounding errors do matter.
Explosion of the Ariane 5 rocket, Patriot Missile Failures, the Green party getting a seat in German parliament, and the crash of the Vancouver Stock Exchange are all examples of disasters caused by rounding errors.
Rounding error can accumulate, sometimes dominating the calculation.
Sure you could keep all number 100% rational, but computers don’t, and the claim that rational numbers are too hard for people to use is a large reason why the SI system is typically advocated for. The claim is that 9/16’s being smaller than 5/8’s is beyond the average person (which I don’t believe) but your statement seems to make a case that reduces the need to change.
Plus how do you even use the metric prefixes while keeping rational numbers? As my previous post pointed out 1/10 or 1/100 or 1/000 isn’t a number you can even write in binary, so just changing prefixes has a loss of precision. FYI even when you write 10^-3 a computer converts that to 1/1000 and gives back the rounded off result of .001.
The SI system is the most prominent standard, that is it’s primary value. While precision may not be important to you, I am very happy that, for example, air travel uses the nautical mile which is equal to one minute of latitude for navigation. It is a ICAO standard for good reason.
Yeah, just to piggyback on that, the world didn’t really become metric until relatively recently. French speaking countries converted first in the early 1800s. Most of South America and Western Europe went in the 1870s. Eastern Europe and China in the 1920s (although parts of Eastern Europe went earlier, it was very gradual there.) The Middle East in the 1930s. The rest of Asia in the 40s and 50s and finally the English Commonwealth in the 60s (although Jamaica held out until 1998) Africa was still under the influence of colonialism during much of the conversions and tended to be dragged along by whatever their ruling countries did.
Are gas marks a thing in US ovens?
I’ve always had gas ovens so I cook by gas marks but lots of recipes have temperature, that’s a pain to remember