The exceptionalism, it burns.
Do Americans really think that every objection in this thread about legacy measures has not already been encountered - and dealt with - by almost every other developed country on earth?
If you have enough legacy measures that in order to implement the metric system you need to make thousands of exceptions, where is the efficiency?
As has been shown, the British still use stones, the imperial pint, miles. The Thai still use legacy land measurements. In the US the east coast still uses meets and bounds; Hawaii uses its own rules along with Texas. Louisiana uses yet another measurement, arpents.
Where is the promised efficiency with adding yet another layer or measurement? Where do you draw the line between a country that has gone metric with legacy measurement exceptions and one that has not?
We teach it, learn it, and use it for science.
Indeed - the chief utility of the metric system (IMO) is that it’s all in decimal, but a decimalised Imperial/American system would still suffer from lack in the metric system’s second-most-important utility - ease of conversion between linear, area and volume measurements, etc (even though I may have appeared to dismiss this feature earlier in the thread).
Sure, we could have a system based on inches and tenths, but how would that work for very large measurements, and would we be comfortable buying cheese in cubic inches, or land in square inches? If not, then the system still has mathematical disadvantages vs metric.
That said, I acknowledge the argument that imperial measures had something more of a ‘feel’ about them - because they were created that way.
In reality, none of these things greatly impact efficiency - they’re a tiny handful of exceptions, thrown in to keep the loudest complainers slightly happier, or work around situations where there is massive inertia.
Oh, and British people only use stones conversationally, really. In any official capacity (which is the only control), people are weighed in metric, I think.
There have been several miles of different lengths in different countries.
Why is it that among Asian manufacturers and consumers at least, TV and monitor panels are all specified in terms of inches? And go into any McDonald’s or Starbucks in the greater China region, and the server will ask if you want a 16 or 20 ounce drink? Not to mention the universal measure of floor space, “pings,” which is easy to visualize as one unit is about the size of a queen size mattress.
Because that is the industrial standard.
Honestly, I pretty much dismiss this utility. While it has a theoretical value, I will never buy cheese in cubic inches, nor land in square inches, nor water by the pound. I’m not going to need to know how many 9 inch licorice whips, laid end to end, will stretch 30 miles. I don’t need to know how many tablespoons of mulch I need for my garden beds, since it’s sold by the Cubic Foot / Yard.
I use each unit of measure for the purpose it is best suited for. Long distances, miles, with 1/2 1/4 and 1/10ths thereof. Medium distances, such as in my back yard, feet. Short distances, or exact measurements, inches alone.
The largest market was historically the one with the Luddite measurements.
Does McDs really size its drinks in fl oz in China? I admit it’s a long time since I went into a Chinese McDs, but I don’t recall this. (Though the obvious answer would be: it’s an American company.)
Isn’t that begging the question, though? Why does the panel industry (most of whose manufacturers are based in Asia) adopt inches as a standard measurement?
That’s probably no longer the case; and anyway, I’m talking about domestic sales in Asia–it’d be easy enough to change the label to cm if that’s what consumers prefer.
They probably could, but why? Inches is the industry standard and most consumers don’t even know exactly what is being measured anyway, for them it’s just a number that tells them that one tv is bigger than some other tv.
True, but “conversationally” is just about everyone. I never hear anyone saying “I lost 2kg.” It’s always pounds and stone.
Oddly, I’ve met British people who speak in pounds and stone and yet can’t remember how many pounds are in a stone. That’s just weird.
Sure, but to that end, it doesn’t really matter.
Me too. “I lost three stone” actually means “Wheeee! Look at me!”
Therefore, there will be boundaries requiring conversions that are not so simple as they are with metric. That was actually my point.
TVs and Computer Monitors are still sold in inches, most people (even teenagers) seem to speak of people’s heights in feet and inches, you can still buy Pints (of Guinness, usually) in pubs.
It is. Infinitely so. Dividing by 60 makes no sense at all to me outside of a “Time” context.
I grew up with the Metric System and whilst I understand most Imperial measurements (with the exception of Fahrenheit, which makes absolutely zero sense to me), I invariably have to equate them back to Metric measurements to get much out of them. I can work with inches, feet, and yards “as-is” but everything else gets converted.
Languages are funny that way, but yeah you would think they’d come up with a formal system to deal with this, yet I suspect you’d get the same kind of excuses for not changing over that you get in the US for not going metric.
But what bugs me is that I have only recently become aware of a couple points of international incompatibility that affect the metric system. First of all, it appears that in some European countries they use commas to set off the decimal and periods to mark the intervals – the opposite of what we do in the US. A minor source of confusion, but still. More importantly, countries like France are on what’s called the “Long scale”. Whereas we in most English-speaking countries on the “short scale” increment the descriptor of an order of magnitude every 10^3, e.g.:
10^6 = Million
10^9 = Billion
10^12 = Trillion etc.
The “long scale” increments the name every 10^6, with median units to cover the 10^3 increments in between:
10^6 = Million
10^9 = Milliard
10^12 = Billion
10^15 = Billiard
10^18 = Trillion
10^21 = Trilliard
There is no great rationale to prefer one scale over the other, but the fact that we’re on different scales is important to know, and it’s a damned shame we didn’t manage to settle this ages ago before we got used to the systems we now use.
The version I read (possibly on The Straight Dope) went like this:
30 is hot,
20 is nice,
10 is cold,
0 is ice.
The odd numbers we use in Fahrenheit are actually conversions of the round metric numbers:
37 C = 98.6 F = Average human body temperature
38 C = 100.4 = The start of a fever
40 C = 104 = The starting range of a fever that could cause brain damage
The very specific numbers you get by converting these temperatures to Fahrenheit disguise the fact that they are actually arbitrarily chosen to be nicely round numbers on the Celsius system, making the Fahrenheit numbers look artificially precise.
And we lost a Mars Orbiter because of them.
I recently had a new pipe installed, and the label on the pipe reads in both millimeters and inches:
50 x 50 mm
2" x 2"
Which is not actually equivalent. But for certain craftsman purposes, it seems that you don’t always need accuracy.
It’s also useful to keep these in mind:
A nickel is standardized at 5 grams.
Not only is water 1 g/ml, but most liquids you use in cooking are close enough to this density that weighing on a digital scale is quicker and easier than taking volumetric measurements.
A CD/DVD is 12 cm across. The distance between the edge and the hole is 5 cm. The hole itself is 2 cm wide.
When you need a ballpark conversion between cm and in, remember that inches are quarters and centimeters are dimes. E.g., a 32-inch TV screen is 32 quarters – half, 16; half again 8; times ten equals 80 dimes – 80 cm diagonally.
Here is a speed range I worked up once long ago, just to give a sense of what these numbers mean:
50 km/h - residential
70 km/h - service roads
100 km/h - highways
110 km/h - interstate
130 km/h - only in West Texas
I can buy that, and I do like to think of the old fashioned units as “poetic”. There is something distinctly more utilitarian to the metric system. Yet, I suspect that our belief that the old system had more of an intuitive correlative is biased by familiarity. After all, a lot of units with poetic connections to our lives have gone archaic because of the need for precision and universality – spans, clothyards, paces, cubits, hands, barleycorns, etc. But a meter is actually very close to a yard, which corresponds approximately to the span of outstretched arms, to a single strident step, etc. If the immediate experiential correlative range was the key factor, the meter has more tying it down than the foot. And I myself don’t have any more trouble picturing a meter eight-eight than six-foot two.
Recently I was translating a passage from Pyle’s Robin Hood into Latin. He uses the word “clothyard” to describe the length of an arrow. Latin doesn’t have such a unit, of course, but on investigation I find that it’s really approximately a yard. My dictionary gives an english yard as trēs pedēs in Latin, which gives a plenty good idea how long the arrows are. Some things, like the different ‘feel’ of words like ‘yard’ and ‘clothyard’ or even ‘yard’ and ‘three feet’ just have to get lost in translation. But on investigation I realized that the clothyard had an experiential correlative – it was the distance you could stretch cloth between your two hands with your arm outstretched. It only makes sense then that an arrow would be described in the same way, because its length would be a function of how far apart you could stretch your two arms. It turns out that there is a word for this in Latin: ulna – literally the forearm, but in measurement it means the length of the “span of the outstretched arms”. So a clothyard arrow would be sagitta ulnāria. But again, if approximate length was all that was at stake, a meter is about as good as a yard.
They’re not. Go and measure your TV. Mine thinks it’s 44", but it’s actually 43.3", or exactly 110 cm. They’re just labeled in inches because Americans won’t buy them otherwise.
I’ve noticed lately that televisions in the United States are being marketed as (for example) “44-inch class” television.
Some countries have done a partial, incomplete conversion to metric, UK being the most obvious example. But you don’t need to do it that way. The rest of Europe uses km for distance and kg for body weight.
I grew up in Japan where metric is used for almost everything. The only exceptions I can think of are:
- Area for real estate (land and building area) are often listed as tsubo, which is 3.3 square meters.
- Recipes use teaspoon, tablespoon and cup, but they are defined as 5ml, 15ml and 180ml respectively.
- Sake usually comes in 1 sho bottles, which are 1.8 liters.
That’s about it. Until I moved to the US I never had to learn any non-metric units for distance, mass or weight. I vaguely remember weather reports using millibars when I was little, but they’ve long since switched to hPa (hectopascal).
Anyway, as I tried to point out earlier, the biggest benefit to switching to metric is the standardization of tools and hardware. Some US industries have already switched to metric because they rely heavily on exports and/or imported parts - automobiles, computers, etc. Other industries are still hindered by the fact that any country they want to import parts from, or export their products to, will want things done in metric.