It was not only foisted on us, it was enforced in a manner more appropriate to countries where “democracy” wasn’t even a word in the dictionary: gas stations that refused to switch had their pumps locked and sealed by the government, and their owners were arrested (anybody remember the saga of the Car Cafe gas station in Toronto, that wound its way through the courts?), retailers’ scales in Imperial were seized by the government and the businesses fined, and so on. No cites, just the memory of a guy who lived through that time (me) and who read the papers daily.
Events like these made many Canadians resentful of the metric system and their government. This, plus the fact that no good reason to change was ever given, made many Canadians not terribly enthusiastic about learning it. Of course, by 1982, the adoption of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and its section 2(b) on freedom of expression meant that Canadians need never utter any metric measurement or term again. I don’t think the Charter has ever been challenged this way (certainly, the government did continue enforcement efforts through 1983 and 1984), but if any current or future government takes any steps (such as a new metrication law or the creation of a body) to enforce metrication the hard way, as it once did, I think we’ll see the Charter come into play to defend Canadians’ rights to express themselves however they please: miles, kilometers, Fahrenheit, Celsius, gallon, liter etc.
Would you happen to have an example of a serious measurement, anywhere, that did not express that value as simply .245 meters, 2.45 decimeters, 24.5 centimeters, or 245 millimeters?
… and yes, I am aware that initech’s question probably was meant to be rhetorical.
One reason why European countries’s switch to metric in the 19th century wasn’t blocked by the public probably was that businesses had to contend with a multiplicity of regional/national units before and were well aware any universal system was preferable to that.
For a start, you only use one unit at a time. If you’re in the carpentry or the construction industry in Australia, it’s all in millimetres – so you don’t even need “mm” written on your plans, because it’s understood. So you conceptualise that as one third of 245 mm, i.e., approximately 81.7 mm – or 82 mm at the level of accuracy you would normally work with.
I don’t think the metric system is superior to standard. It’s not a matter of not wanting to go through the trouble of switching to a better system. It’s not better.
Well, there was that, but another thing was that most of the countries were monarchies, and not all were warm and fuzzy constitutional monarchies. Simplified the transition enormously.
I figure if people are so convinced of the virtues of decimalization they should convert to decimal time, too. Calculating time measured in combined base 12 and base 60 is a pain in the ass. Months that approximate a lunar cycle? A year of 365.2425 days, based on how long it takes for Earth to orbit the Sun? WTF! How will that have any meaning on another planet? For that matter, hardly anybody lives on a farm anymore and us office workers have only a vague idea of the height of the sun at any moment, much less the season. And nobody cares about the phases of the moon anymore except astrologers and werewolves, so why do people doggedly hold onto this remnant of an agricultural past? Conservatism, plain and simple.
Put your money where your whiny mouth is, Europe, and convert to a 100-day year made up of ten months, of ten days, of ten hours, of ten minutes, of ten seconds. THEN you can come back and call Americans conservative.
Given that the day and the year are both based on astronomical facts, having a 100-day year would mean either slowing down the Earth’s rotation, or speeding up the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. The latter would require the Earth to be much closer to the Sun, unless you get rid of a lot of the mass of the Sun.
If you change the rotation of the Earth, you do it for everyone – it would be odd for the United States to be sliding past Europe several times each week – so that would mean a 100-day year for the United States as well.
That’s a good example. You probably would think of this as 28 5/8 inches. In terms of accuracy, if you asked a carpenter to cut a board to that length, you’d probably be happy with plus or minus 1/16 inch – or if you are really fussy, plus or minus 1/32 inch. However, expressing it as 28.625 inches suggests that you want an accuracy of plus or minus 1/1000 inch – and your average carpenter can’t give you that sort of accuracy with normal carpentry tools. So you might be better off expressing it as 28.6 inches or 28.62 inches, depending on what accuracy is really required.
But isn’t basing the year on the sidereal year just a little too, er, Babylonian for you metric types? There’s no reason to use such a useless and external event, especially one whose value is an irrational number. And the day, based on an approximation of the time between sunups, is no better. Complete chaos from a calculation standpoint and irrelevant in a world of artificial climates and lights.
I propose the creation of a committee of the UN to fix the length of a Metric Year, from which we can determine the lengths of its subunits. After that we can move to mathematics. Pi seems to be real useful in math, so from now on Pi will equal one.
Nitpick: The calendar year is based on the tropical year, so that the equinoxes ad solstices don’t move too far around in the calendar.
Both one and pi are useful in mathematics, but they lose a bit of their usefulness if you define them as being the same. It would be far better to say that circles are inconveniently irrational, so that they will be replaced with squares, and the value of pi can be 4.
Americans seem very conservative when it comes to anything involving units of measurement. Take money, for example, especially the lack of a dollar coin (“WAAAAH! Dollar coins will make holes in my pockets! Paper is easier to carry!”),the dated, user-unfriendly design of our currency (“WAAAAH! I don’t like seeing color on ten and twenty dollar bills! It looks like Monopoly money!”), or the design of our coins (mostly unchanged from the 1930s, no numbers actually appearing on the coins, “WAAAAH! Jefferson’s face is in a profile in the new nickels”, etc.). If the US didn’t adopt decimal currency after the revolution, I think it would be very unlikely we’d be using it now; today there would probably be six cents in a nickel, 12 nickels in a dime, 8 dimes in a dollar, and so on.
Proposing the preposterous to make a point (not to be confused with trolling) aside, I think that, aside from the obvious and good reasons, like “it’s a lateral move that has no obvious benefit to the average American but which carries costs in both money and annoyance for 300,000,000 people, many of whom own guns,” our reluctance to go metric is a hearty “FUCK OFF!” to those who want us to change.
However, even I, one of the louder supporters of continuing to use the American system so we can piss off everybody else, find it silly when I’m reading a popular science book and they give measurements in both systems. I’m an edumacated person and can deal with metric units. I find it patronizing.
