You say you know the imperial system in your bones, which makes sense as it is based on them. Things like spans, hands, feet. They are human measurements, they fundamentally make sense why they are what they are - they are what a child would come up with, so basic to humanity. It is measurements we still use today even in metric countries when we don’t have a tape measure handy. As such they will never die.
OTOH metric may die if civilization has a major setback - or perhaps even major advance. It is useless outside what we consider our modern society.
I totally disagree. When I write down recipes from my cookbook at home, and then go buy the ingredients at the store, if I wrote down “2 cups sour cream” and find containers marked “32 oz” or “1 pint”, then I have to know how to convert. If someone tells me that a distance is about 300 yards, it would be handy for me to immediately know how much 300 yards is in miles so I can do some mental calculations as to how long it will take me to walk that far. Let me put the reverse question to you: what is the advantage of having common units of measure that make it very difficult to convert from one to another?
I was living in Canada during the changeover (still do, actually). The only one that gave me trouble was temperature and it is clearly because the zero points differ.
But let me tell a story. A friend of mine lived for two years in Norway. He grew up in a town in Minnesota where everyone spoke Norwegian and he spoke it pretty well. One day in Oslo he went to a lumber to buy a 5 cm x 10 cm post. He ordered it at the front counter and heard the counter man call back to the storeroom for a 2 by 4. This would have been around 1970.
Even after metricization, plywood is still sold in 4 by 8 sheets and wood in inch based widths. One change that will take a long time to happen is that if you ask for a pound of ham, they weigh out 450 grams. In Europe, where I have been anyway, a pfund, or a livre gets you 500 grams.
On a small mountain near Zurich (the Uetliberg) there is a plaque that says something like, Thus point is 809 meters above sea level (all the numbers I give are made up, but approximately right), or 2613 French feet or 2587 British feet or 2645 German feet. What a mess!
And while it is well known that an Imperial pint was 20 ounces, in contrast to the US 16, it is less well known that the ounces were different too. Not by much, a few percent, but different.
But then you’re only maintaining one of the units, feet in your case. Depending on individual background and the context at hand, the “comfort” might lie in other units. For carpenters it’s often in fractions of inches, which your ruler eliminates, right?
I think the standardization of hardware is the most important reason to switch. Think how much money is wasted by having to stock two sets of tools and hardware, in all kinds of workplaces. I myself have wasted countless hours (paid for by taxpayers) trying to sort out compatibility issues because our lab has mostly English hardware, but some imported equipment with metric hardware.
Yes, just like metric uses meters as its unit. This simplifies multiplying area, because it’s all in the same unit base. Even with metric you need to bring all your units together to multiply, you certainly don’t measure out 9m, 3dm, 2cm, 4mm, you measure 9.324m.
I have more than 1 ruler. In fact, even my landscaper’s tape has more than 1 set of measurements, one side is decimal, the other side feet and inches, so I have a choice. Are there any metric rulers that give you 1/2, 1/4 and 1/8th of a cm? those could be useful measurements.
As for the United States going metric, no one have ever offered these two things: there’s no real impetus for going metric in the day to day life, and we’re already metric where it matters. Maybe the debate comes down to “where it matters.” In daily life, what the heck does it matter if we drive at (about) 60 mph versus 100 km/h? Who cares if it’s 32°F or 0° centigrade?
As said above, even nominally metric countries still use old measurements. Canada is obvious, as are Great Britain, Australia, etc. Mexico still uses English measurements for lots of specific things.
Heck, I’ve repeated this story enough times here: when I was living in Toronto, the deli counter people couldn’t understand “1/2 kilogram of smoked ham.” I tried to explain, not a whole kilogram, just a half. Should be easy, right? Certainly I could have asked for 500g, but it didn’t occur to me, because, duh, one-half of of a kilo is 500, right? As soon as asked for a pound, though, all confusion was gone and I got slightly less quantity of the lunch meat that I wanted.
In the end, the system of measurement has no effect on every day life, until you change that system of measurement. Enforcing a change is just arbitrary, because there’s no need, and there’s not quantifiable incentive.
I posted this is some other thread about cooking, but…
…in 5th grade, 74-75 or thereabouts, we got told a lot of things that were going to happen within the next decade. Videophones, breathable water, programmable appliances…no problem. But then we were told to get used to the metric system, 'cause we were gonna be all metric within 5 years.
As soon as I got home, I went and found one of each type of measuring cup and tablespoon-thingy and hid them in the back of my closet, as well as hand-writing all my favorite recipes to save for after the Reich took over. I was SO not going metric, damnit! Not in MY kitchen!!
Good thing it never came to pass, 'cause as easy as it is logically, I still know dick-all about metric conversions.
There’s no need to do metric-English conversions. Just use the correct measuring device and don’t worry about it. In the last 20 years I taught high school, we never used any English/customary measures. I did teach the following for reference/guesstimation only:
16 C is 61 F
1 kg is 1 liter of water, so a 2 liter coke is about 2 kg.
Any U.S. currency note is 1 g. The kids liked checking this with a triple beam.
1 km is 5/8 of a mile, since 50 mi/h matches 80 km/h on speedometers.
I have used a meter stick so often, yard sticks just feel wrong to me.
I live in a metric country, but am old enough to have been brought up imperial. The only imperial vestiges I find still commonly used are feet and inches for height and stone for weight (curiously, we don’t tend to say “stones” as plural when discussing weight, but do when discussing geology). I suspect there is much in the argument that these measures happen to be well-suited to human capacity to resolve coarse differences in weight or height. It is possible to judge a person’s weight by eye to units of about a stone, but not much more. Similarly, feet or coarse fractions thereof down to the level of an inch is about the level of resolution of discrimination of height judgments. I can readily say someone is about 10 stone, or 5 and half feet or even 5 foot 10, but further detail (at the level of individual kilograms or centimetres ) is beyond me and I guess most people.
Secondly, the only “free market” weight system of which I am aware is our local illegal drug market, where one would think that government imposition of standards would be irrelevant. There, small amounts tend to be measured in grams and larger measures in imperial. Thus one buys a “weight” (gram) of heroin or speed, or “points” (tenths of a gram) at the retail end of the market, but once one ascends to the level of wholesaling, even the bottom end, powder drugs are all in imperial - ounces (fractions of ounces are used, such as an “eight-ball” for an eighth of an ounce) and pounds for mid-level distributors. Curiously, at the level of distribution very close to the source, one tends to find metric re-emerging - kilos, etc.
Clearly, the market has struck a balance between the comfort of historical standards and the convenience of metric, but that is against a background where metric has been here for 30 years. All kids know is metric, until they get into drug dealing when they learn about ounces again. And for some reason, they are prepared to put up with the inconvenience of converting between fractions of ounces and grams at the bottom end. Weird.
You were that emphatic about never switching to the metric system and that worried about losing your favorite recipes, when you were 10 years old? Seriously??
“As said above, even nominally metric countries still use old measurements. Canada is obvious, as are Great Britain, Australia, etc.”
There are older people who might still think that way, but apart from sports (ie yard lines etc), I cant think of many areas where metric isnt the default in Oz now.
As in speed, weight, height, liquids, temperature etc.
Indeed. Not to mention that, much like Blaster Master’s complaint about the everyday use of metric units, calculating temperatures with that level of specificity isn’t something most people need to do on an everyday basis.
But you don’t have ‘work with it’ any more than you have to work with any other (F or C) temperature.. It is just as easy to understand that -3 is 3 units below 0 as it is to understand that 93 is 3 units above 90. I really don’t think many people have too much trouble with the concept of negative numbers.
No one’s brought this up yet, but I’ll pass it along again: if anyone tells me, as I start out driving on the interstate, that San Francisco is 725 klicks from LA, I’ll have a quick estimate of how long the drive is. Normal highway speed is 100 kph, so that’s about 7.25 hours, probably some less.
Otherwise, sure, I can figure one mile per minute, then all I have to do is figure hours from so many minutes. Er, thanks, but this is one case where the metric really is better.
It’s the behind the scenes stuff that nobody thinks about. Do you realize that there is a metal monument marker just about every square mile in the western US and parts of Alaska? Someone walked those lines and surveyed them. Later, new surveyors used those monuments to build descriptions for legal documents, titles and deeds. There are property descriptions in half sections and quarter sections and chains. You try and change this stuff and you run into more problems than you fix.
If dividing by 100 is tremendously easier for you than dividing by 60, I suppose that might be the case. At least for me, dividing by 60 to make that estimation is second nature by now.
My students know liters better than quarts or gallons because of pop, but otherwise they are equally ignorant about metric or customary measurement. I don’t care which one we use, but pick it and, either quit talking about metric if we want to keep customary, or switch already if we choose metric.
