::: Waves ::: Hi Caribbean Man welcome to the boards.
I was brought up in the US and the metric system was so hard to understand. Now I have to teach precision measurement. Damn the metric system is easy. The only part of the metric system I have problems with is torque and fuel mileage. I can understand foot pounds (I know what a foot is and I know what a pound is), but I have no clue what a Newton-meter is. And what does a fig cookie have to do with torque? As far as fuel mileage, liters burned per 100 Km is just backwards to what I am used to thinking about. (MPG)
On the hogsheads and that, I have a list of various Murphy’s laws and one of them is:
So I had install a spoiler on some new cars back in 1993. To do so required my laying out the placement of 6 small holes 6mm or so plus one 9 mm hole.
I had to find the center of the trunk lid and make a center line then measure so far from the center line to where the holes would be.
OK step one measure the width of the trunk lid, take 1/2 of that to find the center line. Trunk measures 33" +11/32" quick what is half of that? Bottom line when I got done measuring I looked very long and hard at my layout. It did not look right. I doublechecked my measurements and it came out different, and still did not look right.
I finally said screw it and left if for the day. That night I bought a tape measure that measured metric. The next AM I laid out all six trunk lids in about 5 minutes each, all of them right the first time. It turns out I can divide 843 mm in half in my head.
Computers don’t do everyting.
I left out the month of Humor, between You and In. :o
The starting point of October 1, 1952–the first issue date of Mad–is reckoned as Clarke 1 of the “mingo” (month) of Tales, 1 Cowznofsko Madi. Any Doper with time on his hands is welcome to reckon the current date from that point.
Oh, you can do a lot of heavy science and engineering in traditional units. Physical and material properties constants are just numbers. If all the physics constants and material properties were nice round numbers in Metric I might agree with you, but 9.8 meters is just as arbitrary as 32 feet.
First off if this jackass knew much of anything about the metric system he would know that 0.5 centimeters is 5 millimeters. Let’s see 1, 2, 3, 4, short marks are millimeters, and the medium mark is 5 millimeters. The next four short marks are 6, 7, 8, 9, and the tall mark is 10 mm or 1 cm. And if you leave the conversion to cm out of it and just use mm then the only math necessary to build a house is simple addition or subtraction.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 Lather rinse and repeat.
Compare that to the imperial system, not only do you have add and subtract, you have to deal with conversions of fractions to find the lowest common denominator (multiplication and division) , improper fractions, and who knows what else. More than once I have herd the following on a construction job:
let’s consider a simple job, I need a piece of wood that is 3 and 5/8 of an inch longer than the existing piece of wood which is 22 and 11/16 inches long. Let’s see 5/8 has to be converted to 16ths is 10/16ths plus 11/16ths is 21/16ths. 22 plus 3 is 25 so I need apiece of wood that is 25and 21/16ths of an inch long. Wait, that isn’t right. 21/16 is 1 5/16” long so I need a piece of wood that is 26 and 5/16 long. How many times, do you suppose, the piece of wood came up one inch short because the improper fraction got incorrectly added? :smack:
Geez, anybody who cannot count to 5 without getting lost, should not be allowed to handle sharp objects or swing heavy things like hammers, for the simple reason that they are dumber than a box of hair. This is not brain surgery.
I’m not sure what you’re getting at there, but I’ll say this. The more common Imperial measurements (pounds, pints, inches, and a few others) have survived because people find that an inch is a ‘nice’ length, and so is a foot. So what if everything doesn’t run to a nice neat base of ten? Getting back to your quote about pints being ‘natural’, the answer is yes… sort of. Since a pint of liquid is both managable and satisfying (for most people), doesn’t it make sense for individuals to buy and sell it in that preferred quantity?
In my own experience (I live in the UK), I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say in a conversation that something is (x) km away or that somebody is (x) cm tall. The metric system might be the ‘baseline’ these days, but people still think in Imperial when it comes to certain things. I don’t know about other people, but if I was told that somebody was 1m 60cm tall, I wouldn’t be at all able to visualise it unless I translated it into 5’4’’. The average person doesn’t feel comfortable mentally working with 60 of any unit if that 60 can’t be factored in any way (as with currency).
I’m vaguely ashamed to say that while I know a few numbers on temperature scales (0-100 Celcius, 32(?)-212 Farenheit, and somewhere in the 2-300s Kelvin), weather reports (when I come across them) are a complete mystery to me. I’m one of those people who looks out of the window to see what it’s going to be like today.
How would it have been done in the days before metric? With a bucket? Is the reason it’s practically impossible because inches measure two dimensions and gallons measure three? Or something like that (I can’t seem to find the right words for it. It’s half four in the morning and I should probably clear off to bed). Whatever the answer is, is it because there’s no way of connecting what it is that these two measurements measure?
What Chronos is saying is that even if you multiply out the three dimensions to get the number of cubic inches in the tank you can’t convert to gallons unless you know that 1 gallon = 231 cubic in.
But in the metric system if I have a tank 30 cm by 45 cm. by 60 cm. I multiply them out to get the volume of 81000 cubic centimeters. Moving the decimal point three places to the left, because 1 liter = 1000 cc, I get 81 liters without any strain.
Of course you have to know that i liter = 1000 cc but that’s sort of automatic because that is one common definition of a liter. I don’t think anyone defines 1 gallon as 231 in[sup]3[/sup]. A gallon is 4 quarts, not 231 in[sup]3[/sup].
Rick, I think that part of his point is that it’s not so much hard to count the lines, but hard to see them. I can sympathise… I have a rule I use for laying out fretboards. It’s graduated in hundredths of an inch. I think I may switch my calcs to 64ths, on the grounds that my vision stinks.
I keep hearing this argument but I still don’ t understand why pounds, pints and inches are “nicer” than kilograms, litres and centimeters. I’ll say it again: just because you are used to it doesn’t mean it’s inherently better.
Quick, how many feet is 15"+34"? If you have ten 14oz objects, how many pounds is the total?
With a decimal system it’s a simple matter to, for example, multiply 200 grams by 20 and get 4 kilograms, or add 74cm and 50cm to get 1.24 meters. We have a decimal number system, and it makes no sense to use a non-decimal unit of measure.
And I can’t visualize 5’4" unless I convert it to 160cm. (At least, I couldn’t until I lived in the US for several years.) And if you have problem dealing with three-digit heights, how do you measure your weight? OK maybe Brits still use Stones but I’ve never heard an American complain that three-digit weight (in pounds) is too difficult to deal with.
This is an interesting point which has not been addressed in this thread. While some things (in the US) are thought of as “always” being pints, others seem to be in litres (milk vs soda).
Here in Australia, people between 25 and 40* (roughly!), can use imperial and metric interchangeably for a lot of things, especially casually, and especially lengths and distances. And sometimes, something really IS an “inch out of whack”, or “a mile down the road”. So it comes down to what’s the most convienient way to communicate the information.
Arguably in those examples one could have used “a few centimetres” or “a few kilometres”, but plenty of time more accuracy is required (even in casual conversation). And saying “Two point five four centimetres” is just silly. If it’s an inch out, then bloody say “it’s an inch out”, I reckon!
I count myself as being very lucky to be jiggy with both imperial and metric, but some things catch me totally off guard. I have no idea what a fluid ounce, an ounce, a pint, a gallon nor a pound is, but I am intimately familiar with feet and inches.
And while everyone else is offering their personal anecdotes and opinions, I’d like offer that it’s probably the most annoying thing ever to have not only Imperial and Metric bolts, but for imperial to have BSW, UNC, and Whitworth possibilities. And none of them are compatible, right? Will the world ever be rid of this stuff? Grr.
Abby
Younger than 25 year olds, most of them only know metric, and the over 45’s seem to set in their ways to not bother to learn the new stuff (generally speaking, and people from the countryside seem to have a better grasp of both types, persumably cos they are taught metric in school, yet their parents use imperial on the farm?).
Formally, yes. Stop 1000 people on the street and ask what is a gallon. How many do you suppose will say 231 cubic inches as opposed to 4 quarts? As *Chronos, I think, said, hardly anyone knows our present units either.
And, to complete the thought, I suppose if you ask the same people what is a liter you will get blank looks.
But Chronos’ point still was that figuring liters from cubic centimeters is a snap except for the very most mathematically challanged, while gallons from cubic inches requires knowing a relatively obscure, to the general public, conversion factor.
Newtons. Or kilogram weight (kilogram force), which is 9.8 Newtons, depending on context.
However it’s very rare that one needs to measure weight rather than mass in everyday life. And the mass/weight distinction is annoying to deal with in any system. Metric is no more difficult than others.
Isn’t it indicative that the answer is outside the metric system?
Pounds are a unit of weight. I know more people who have less trouble with pounds than I do know people who have trouble converting mass to weight in metric.
About 850 Newtons. And if I had learned the metric system from kindergarten, 190 lb. would sound just as odd.
Besides, in the metric system it is common to quote mass in grams or kg, not weight as force such as dynes or Newtons.
Whatever you are used to is easy. Dinosaurs like me will soon disappear and if children are raised in the metric system they will think in is just as you and I do in ft., lbs. etc.
I think you are just playing devil’s advocate here, you rascal.
