The US going 100% metric - do we all have to die? Plus: weird measurements around the world!

In My Humble Opinion
21

It certainly would not kill us to go metric. And I can see the advantages just to eliminate having extra sets of tools.

However, I don’t understand hostility toward either system. There is nothing wrong with US Customary units, we shot the moon with customary units.

As an engineer in the US I regularly go back and forth between using US Customary units and metric units, and I’ve got no trouble doing so. If anything it has taught me to pay damn close attention to units (and I’m not sure that is a bad thing). They’re just sytems with agreed upon standards. It really makes no difference to me.

I just don’t see any urgent need to making US people adopt the metric system for everyday usage. If metric makes more sense I would imagine people will adopt it naturally and voluntarily.

A funny story: when my brother and I were kids, we used to go to this very traditional, about 80yo, barber. He asked my brother, about 8 yo, how much hair to cut off, and my brother replied, “about a centimeter.” That barber had the most confounded looking expression and blurted out, “A centimeter! what the hell is a centimeter!? I’ve never heard such a thing in my whole life!”

22

Nope, not at all. I don’t know why you’d suppose otherwise, it seems that they’d basically given up all pretense of trying to teach the metric system outside of science classes by 1990.

23

I can use both almost interchangeably, except for really small numbers. Just today we had a problem with a part print from a supplier wherein he had “helpfully” put all off the nominals in inches (and he’s a Chinese immigrant to Canada; both nominally metric countries). WTF? We’ve not used those tiny, little measurements in years. We still use psi and lbs-force, though.

Whether to go metric or not is really an economic decision. Despite fully fluent in metric, there’s no compelling reason to force everyday folks to change. They’ll do it on their own if there’s self-interest enough to do so.

24

I have been comfortable with the metric system since physics class in HS 50 years ago. I learned that it was an international system and have been thinking in dual terms ever since. If the US were serious about it, they would have shifted long ago for real. Ssitting on the fence is what hangs everyone up.

25

The United States can’t go metric in less than a couple generations, even if we all wanted to right now. We have far too much stuff built to old standards that would still need to be used and maintained. And a considerable body of craftsmen and skilled tradesmen will resist a changeover. It’s not just a matter of sets of tools; when you work with measurements on a daily basis, the units become ingrained in you, in motions and reckonings.

In practice, such a switch would require an increasing range of mandates for various new things to be built to metric standards (while continuing to make parts for the old standards), thus requiring an ever-increasing range of those craftsmen and tradesmen to work in both, if they don’t already. Eventually a tipping point would be reached when working with the old system would become a specialty, and standard “new work” training would no longer require anything but metric.

I don’t see any great effort underway to make all this happen, so my guess is that the United States isn’t going metric in my lifetime or yours.

26

There was a girl whom I briefly dated, just after I got out of college, who had, as I gathered it, lived a very sheltered life. She had not learned how to drive, and we once had this very odd discussion.

Me: “It’s about a mile away.”
Melanie: “How far is a mile?”
Me: “Ummmm…5280 feet?”
Melanie: “Seriously…I mean, I know what the word means, but I can’t picture how far it is.”
Me: “OK…let’s see. Can you imagine riding in a car on the highway?” (Note that I said “riding”; I knew she’d never driven)
Melanie: “Yes, I can.”
Me: “Now, the distance that a car goes in a minute on the highway is about a mile. So, if it drives for 10 minutes, it goes 10 miles, 60 minutes is 60 miles, and so on.”
Melanie (brightly): “Oh! I get it now!”

Nice girl, but odd.

27

I do find it really annoying that my (American) car’s compter has two settings:

  1. “American” units
  2. “Metric” units

So…uhh… neither? I want miles and mph, which are not “American” or “Metric”.

28

Yeah, Imperial units were left out in the cold. 1 gallon = 4.54 litres, anyone? I occasionally see MPG here in Canada, and I’m never quite sure whether it’s US gallons or Imperial gallons.

29

The U.S. did get “serious” about it in the 1970s, thanks to the Metric Conversion Act in 1975. When I was in grade school, we had lots of classes specifically geared to learning the metric system (and I remember watching educational programs on PBS about it). Highway mileage signs were put up showing distances in both miles and kilometers. Weather forecasters would give the temperature in both Fahrenheit and Celsius. Stores sold booklets on metric conversions.

The issue was, it being the U.S., it wasn’t a mandated or universal changeover. And, Americans being who we are, many Americans didn’t like being told to change how they did things (and the “rest of the world does it this way” wasn’t going to be convincing).

30

I bet that’s not uncommon. If you got a wide open, unmarked highway, and (one at a time) asked (non-runner) people to walk a mile on it, then stop, I suspect you’d get a wide range of actual distances, probably as little as about a quarter mile, probably as much as five or six. I don’t think people who don’t walk or run known distances often have nearly as good a sense of it in terms of actual distance as you’d suspect.

31

How many homes built in the United States have walls filled with studs spaced 16 or 18 inches apart? We have a lot of rebuilding to do to go 100% metric.

32

In the part of Switzerland I grew up in (farmland, the boonies, cow country) we said “soixante, septante, huitante, nonante”. In the rest of French-speaking Switzerland, people typically say “soixante, septante, quatre-vingts, nonante”.

33

Yes, but does riding in a car on the highway really give a sense of a mile? Only in a limited sense involving time, and only for driving the distance. To know what a mile is, spatially–to have a sense of how big a mile is, independent of driving a car over it–you have to knowingly walk it.

34

All homes in Canada are built using imperial measurements. 16" is the standard, but 20" is becoming more popular. In manufacturing industries it’s a mixed bag, but imperial is probably still dominant.

Golf courses are measured in yards only.

We always talk in Fahrenheit when discussing swimming pool temperatures, for some unknown reason.

As you can see, we’ve been at it for 30 years and are still not 100% metric.

35

I don’t think even the most fervent of metric lovers would suggest destroying everything that was ever made using a different system. In the UK, plasterboard and other sheet materials are described in metric dimensions for sale, but their actual sizes are typically based on 6 by 8 foot boards, or portions thereof.

36

So the cow-herders recognised the illogic of the way they do it in Paris and regularised the language?

37

I really don’t get what the big deal is about Metric conversion, in that, I really don’t get why people feel we need to do it. I’m fairly comfortable working with both, though I do feel more intuitive working with standard rather than metric. There are certain things I’d like to see standardized, particularly tools (eg, “Is that a half-inch or 13mm bolt?”), but I don’t really see why we need to settle on one standard for everything.

The big selling point on metric is that it’s easier to convert between units, but how often in practical every day life do we really need to convert between miles and feet or gallons and ounces or whatever. The whole reason that standard units arose as they did is because the units themselves were useful for something and, in many ways, I think they’re more intuitive because they’re based on precisely the sorts of things that people used them to measure.

For example, I think a foot is a more useful and intuitive measurement for a lot of everyday things, where cm are too small and meters are too large, like measuring someone’s height. I think inches and cm are roughly close enough to be useful on the same small scale, but metric really has no real reasonable unit inbetween. I feel the same about Farenheit vs. Celcius. Around here, the temperature typically ranges between 0-100 over the course of a year and I have a very intuitive feel for temperature ranges therein, but I feel like the resolution for Celcius just isn’t high enough to be useful for describing weather. I think miles and kilometers are close enough, but like I also saw upthread, I find the roughly one mile a minute at highway speed slightly more useful. Similarly, I think pounds and kilograms are close enough that they’re useful in similar situations; in fact, I feel like metric weights really worked out pretty well for intuitiveness.

OTOH, I very much see the usefulness of metric in applications where manipulating units is important, particularly in the sciences and engineering. I have done some physics equations with standard units, and working with the odd conversion factors just introduced more problems. Moreso, the usefulness of intuitive and useful measures is practically zero because these sorts of applications require precision, which intuition isn’t.

So, I’m actually quite happy with being in an in between state because we can get the benefits of both systems in the appropriate contexts, and get few drawbacks. I also think this is exactly why even a lot of mostly converted countries still hold onto some non-metric units. As such, I don’t see the US ever going fully metric, because there just isn’t a need or really a desire for it.

38

I kinda like that sense, and it works well for me because I have good perception of speed. But I also do a lot of running/walking as part of my workout regimen. For me, a mile is also easily worked out based on time, where a walked mile is around 15 minutes, unless you walk particularly fast or slow. However, I don’t think anyone who is actually walking a distance of a mile or more is going to really be strolling along at 3 MPH and will probably stick closer to that 4 MPH speed.

39

It helped her put her head around the concept, for purposes of the discussion we were having. If I was asking her to walk a mile, no, it wouldn’t have helped her.

(Mostly, I was just boggled by the idea of an adult woman who simply had no way to conceptualize a mile.)

40

I put it to you that this is a hopelessly arbitrary statement. I suggest you can’t see the wood for the trees due to being immersed in a single numbering system. “Most of the world” does not in face see zero F, and many places don’t see 100F. In my arbitrary view (and as I said, I do comprehend both systems), having the freezing point of water as zero makes a whole heap more sense as the lower end.

Most of the world, however, does use a single numbering system to express temperature. Except for one major country.