I also still find it weird someone mentioned the division of the dollar into one hundred cents as an argument for the metric system. The way you divide your currency is basically independent of how you measure things. The first coinage act by the United States under the Constitution established basically the coins we have now ($1/$0.50/$0.25/$0.10/$0.05/$0.01) and a few that either do not exist any longer or are not really used as coins ($10 eagles, $5 1/2 eagles, $2.50 1/4 eagles, $0.005 coins.)
That was all before the metric system was invented (1792 vs 1799)–the French did not invent the concept of using base ten…
I can very easily estimate when I’ve gone 100 m vs 480 m whether in a car or on foot. I do it all the time. Directions around here are often given as “200 m past the intersection” or whatever.
I’m very surprised that you think you can’t tell when you’ve gone 200 ft vs 520 ft.
I disagree. While not that advantageous, Celsius does seem a little less arbitrary. Marking 0 degrees as the freezing point seems much less arbitrary than labeling it as 32. Same with labeling 100 as the boiling point instead of 212. If you use Celsius, below freezing means the same thing as below zero which seems a little more intuitive.
I agree with this 100%. You know, I just started getting a feel for Celsius a couple days ago (I changed the settings on my phone and started speaking and thinking in Celsius terms), and it’s already starting to come naturally. I don’t think you would be converting for a very long time and I think this is a false argument. It may take a few days of adjustment, but after that it should come naturally to you.
Another +1. How did you get a feel for what US customary units mean in their own terms? The answer is: by being exposed to it everyday in life and it wasn’t long before you got the hang of it. It really doesn’t take long to adjust.
When driving, multiplying the first number on a kilometre speed-limit sign by six gets its near equivalent in mph. 50 km/h is close enough for jam to 30 mph. 100 km/h is close enough to 60 mph that only a jerk would honk because you’re going too slow.
All you metrication people have got it wrong. Units are fixed in stone, more or less, because people don’t change what they’re brought up with. It simply isn’t done. It’s like in math, where the local minima on a function can be quite similar even if they’re separated by a large high point: The current system is one local minimum, the new system is the other, and the big hill that conversion represents is too big to justify climbing just to end up at a different local minimum that’s only a little bit lower. Anyone who’s over 35 is too old to change, anyone who’s younger doesn’t care, and making all of the new labels is too expensive anyway.
That’s why there will be 12 pence to a shilling and 20 shillings to a pound, for ever and ever, AMEN!
Um, I don’t think I can’t tell, I know I can’t tell. Who else in this thread could possibly claim to know what I think other than myself? Maybe I just don’t have the same navigational abilities or techniques as other people, but while driving I certainly can’t distinguish between that level of distance very easily.
I had a GPS unit once that even announced stuff like that, “in 600 feet, turn right” and I was thinking “well I literally have no fucking clue if that’s this next turn or a few turns later.” Now, that’s obviously contextual, if I saw a turn a bit later and no other turns at all, it’d be obvious, but driving down a street with a turn every block, it’s much more difficult.
Now, I can certainly tell if I’ve gone substantially further than say, 200 feet. I’d know if I went 2,000 feet I had gone further than 200 feet, but I wouldn’t bet any money at all that I could get it right within 500 feet. I might sense out it was 1,000-2,000, but I doubt even that.
Ok, well that surprises me. I think most people can tell the difference between driving 200 ft and going more than twice that distance - or at least they could if they had some practice. Because few intersections are signposted here and there are no street addresses directions are often given in 100s of meters. People don’t seem to have much of a problem with it.
Except, that’s if you assume that in everyday use you need to know at what temp water boils or freezes. But you don’t. What you need to know is what the weather is going to be, and if your kid is running enough of a temp to call the Doc.
For that F is superior. Weather forecasters almost never need to use negative numbers. And, if they’d left it alone, Body temp would be 100. See Fahrenheit picked what he thought was the best two numbers for 0 and 100- body temp and the coldest you can get a ice & salt water mix.
And see, you’re also wrong about Centigrade. Celsius picked 0 as boiling, 100 as freezing.:eek:
Not to mention he apparently insistently demanded it not be named after him. So, of course the French did.
Saying that Centigrade is superior to Fahrenheit by using boiling & freezing of water is like saying the Metric system is superior to English for measuring a meter stick, as a meter stick is exactly one meter long!!!:eek:
Basically the French* picked C as it was invented by a Frenchman**, instead of a hated & despised German***. Not for any scientific reason. Just for reasons of rampant nationalism. The same reason why they didn’t just start with a yard. They also came up with the hated and detested French Revolutionary Calendar- which was metric (of sorts). If Metric is so damn superior, why don’t we have a metric calendar?
*, yes, I know that technically it was a International body- pretty well run by the French.
** Yeah, I know. Celsius was a Swede. But only months after he invented his scale, a Frenchman (Christen) came up with a scale with 0 for freezing, 100 for boiling, so part of the honor belongs to a Frenchman, altho the great Linnaeus reversed Celsius’s scale just a short time later. His prestige was so great, everyone dropped Celsius’s original. To give Linnaeus credit, he was insistent that Celsius got the credit, not he. Note that Celsius died before he saw his scale in common use.
*** and yes, F was Dutch-German-Polish. But still…
BTW, Thailand kept its cake and ate it too. For example, originally there were 24 niu (fingers) in a sok (distance from fingertip to elbow) and 4 sok in a wa (distance from outstretched fingertip to opposite fingertip). The Thai finger size presumably differed from that of King Henry IV(?), but when they converted to metric, sok and wa continued in use, meaning 0.5 and 2 meters respectively. There are now 20 niu to a sok instead of 24, or, officially, 19.6850393701 niu to a sok since the niu has changed to the International Inch.
In rural Thailand, to measure a plot of land roughly(*) in the shape of a rectangle ABCD, opposing sides are added and then multiplied: Area = (AB + CD) x (BC+ AD). You may think that a divide-by-four is missing here, but no: the distances here are measured in wa but the area in square meters. (My impression is that some Thais overlook this change of units and think the formula as stated is the correct formula for a rectangle’s area. :smack: )
(* - If the shape is an exact rectangle, two of the measurements are unnecessary; if not, the formula is inexact anyway. Still, it gives a good-enough approximation for near-rectangles.)
BTW; show of hands, please. How many knew the following
one International Inch = 2.54000000 centimeters, but
one Statutory Surveyor’s Inch = 2.54000508 centimeters?
Are the surveyor’s measures still in use in the U.S. for surveying?
Really? You can’t imagine why someone would want to know whether it is below freezing before they start driving, or if there is going to be a frost overnight, or what temperature to set your refrigerator to so it doesn’t freeze what’s inside?
You absolutely weren’t wrong that an ounce and a kilogram do not measure the same quantity.
Kilogram is a unit of mass, ounce (in this context) is a unit of weight. Take an ounce of granite as measured at sea level on a properly calibrated scale and launch it up into space, and it is no longer an ounce of granite. Take a kilogram of granite as measured by a properly calibrated scale and launch it up into space, and it is still a kilogram of granite.
A scale that says it is measuring kilograms is lying to you, and frankly it’s a little upsetting that the unit everyone uses for measuring the “weight” of something is the kilogram when really we should be talking about how many Newtons something weighs.
So no there is no perfect conversion between an ounce and a kilogram because they are fundamentally different units (ounces measures a force, kilogram measure a mass). The table for converting between ounces and kilograms is making assumptions (namely that you are measuring your ounce/kilogram in the presence of ~9.8m/s/s acceleration).
You’re making their point for them. None of those things are things that normally come up. They’re all esoteric usages, where it’s easier just to do it the hard way rather than change an entire system. We don’t even think metrically. It’s a lot of change for a rather low benefit, at least, at the individual level.
People like to say that Americans are more resistant to change, but I don’t think that’s it. Our government is inherently more resistant to change. People probably complained just as loudly in your country as we did in ours. It’s just that we couldn’t be forced into into the change.
Outside of school, I’ve probably made unit converstions maybe a couple handful of times in my life. Remove cooking from that, and it goes down to never.
He’s saying no one knows it because it’s pretty much irrelevant as the difference is too small to be of any significance on most scales.
Hence it is a poor way to advocate for the superiority of the metric system; such advocation is the default assumption for any post in this thread that shows the complications of the customary system.