Another factor is the availability of automated calculation. Powers of ten provides a massive benefit when you are calculating by hand; much less so when you can just punch the numbers into a calculator.
[Crazy Vaclav]She’ll go 300 hectares on a single tank of kerosene[/CV]
Joe
If you’re talking large quantities, I think weed is often measured in Kilos. But for personal use, a reasonable amount of weed might be an ounce, while a reasonable amount of coke might be a few grams. Nobody is going to try to buy “28 grams of weed” - the dealer would look at you like you were ummm… high or something.
Then again, you’d likely buy an eight-ball of coke - 1/8 ounce, or 3.5 grams. But I think they sell it per gram (not sure, I never did coke, but had a good friend into it.)
Joe
This is what I tell people. It’s a simplified version of the actual conversion (1.9C+32=F).
Many of us have already adopted the metric system. It’s a better, easier system than the English/Imperial system.
It drives my friends crazy that I use Celsius and kilometers and grams and liters, but I just laugh it off and tell them to get with the program. “It’s not the 19th century anymore,” I say.
Weed is sold in metric units. Every pothead knows that 7g = 1/4 oz. A lot of English measurements are used in conversation, but when it comes to actually weighing things, people use grams.
Reasonable amount of weed is one gram or half a gram. But like coke, as you try to buy more you quickly start measuring in fractions of an ounce. But all the scales are in grams (they can be switches to oz, but they’re not), so you’d be looking for the number 28. It feels more precise that way.
One reason to resist, counterintuitively, is engineering.
Metric actually has disadvantages for engineering. It is precise, of course, but useful fractions in it are more unwieldy. When designing, eg, a PCB, you need the tracks and holes to come together well. You realize the immense use of putting something exactly half-way between two other things, possibly again and again. Halfs, quarters, and sixteenths are fundamentally a good way to go about things, but in decimal you end up with things like 0.375. Or you try to round it and use multiples of 0.1, but your work comes out fitting slightly less elegantly. This is not an absolute impediment (europeans do fine), but it goes some ways toward convincing American engineers and construction workers that the metric system isn’t as brilliant as advertised.
It’s for arbitrary measurement of the environment that metric has no downsides.
I was in junior high in the early 80s and it “was coming.” There was something about it that I didn’t like, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. My science teacher was so gung-ho about it she’d spend entire classes lecturing on it.
As I got older, I realized what was bothering me…I know approximately how much a pound is, how far a mile is, how long a yard is. But I really don’t have a true sense of how much a kilo weighs, how far a kilometer is, or how long a meter is unless I translate it into the English equivalent (oh, a meter is about a yard long.) So, why bother?
Gotta disagree with you there. My calculator hates the 3/32nds and 7/16ths. To say nothing of the inch-to-foot-to-yard thing, another trouble spot for automated calculation, whereas centimeter-to-meter just sorta happens. (Don’t even get me started on area and volume.)
In the interest of compromise, I will concede that “.50-cal” sounds cooler than “12.7 millimeters”.
From George Carlin:
“The metric system. So, you and your old lady will run down to the store to cop a kilo of hamburger! Or if you’re short of bread, a lid of baloney. A nickle bag of watercress?”
If you work with the units enough, you get more comfortable. For instance, after about precalc nowadays, all angles are given in radians first, and degrees afterwards. After a couple of years, I thought in radians. Of course, now that I’ve stopped taking math that’s likely to go away, but the principle remains.
yeah, 'cause 0.375 is so much more confusing than 3/16ths or 9 /32nds…
by the way, American civil engineers still measure angles in 360 degrees, 60 minutes, 60 seconds format.
Europeans use decimals ( 400 grads = a circle, a right angle is an even 100 grads, and smaller units are in simple decimals. You think it’s easier to divide into sixtieths?.
I guess you’re right. But they’re already used to the fractions. In the other thread I argued that engineers should really be using binary numbers, so 3/16 is 0.0011 and 9/32 is 0.01001. You can directly visualize which fractions you’re combining.
Not to mention cups, tablespoons, or teaspoons.
Cookbooks in metric (even with recipes originally designed in metric) are very odd.
For me the reason the US never made the switch is in how it was taught and communicated. I recall being in grade school at the time the big push was under way. We spent all of our time learning how to convert from one to the other - formulas formulas formulas. So, what happended was that everyone associated Metric with learning conversion formulas, rather than learning a new system of measurements. If the emphasis had been placed on just learning the generalities of measurements, rather than strict conversions, it may have taken better hold.
A Meter = about a yard
A Liter = about a quart
Using that model and continuing in the same vein and they might have had a chance.
We don’t need any foreign rulers.
Tablespoon and teaspoon are metric. They are defined by the US government as 15 ml and 5 ml, respectively.
Actually the cup is also defined by metric units (240 ml), but some other countries define it as 250 ml. Probably better to just use ml to avoid confusion…
Put it in H!
Two words: “communist conspiracy”. 
OK guys, this conversion from Celsius to Farenheit is exact, and easy enough to do mentally.
Say we have a 28°C temperature:
Double it = 56
Reduct by 10% = 56-6 = 50
Add 32 = 82°F. This is accurate to within a degree.
If we had subtracted 5.6 instead of 6 it would be accurate to 1/10 degree.
Regarding calculating in fractions, I have a RPN calculator by HP that will work in fractions just as well as in decimals.
And at Boeing ( at least when I worked for them some years ago), dimensions were in inches, tenths, hundredths, etc.
I hope this isn’t considered a highack, but some of you might be interested in a little history here. Any of you guys know where an acre got it’s seemingly screwy size (43,560 square feet)? The old time surveyors didn’t actually have a measuring tape that measured in feet. They instead used the Gunters chain, which was 66 feet long and made with 100 links. If they measured a plot of ground that was 1 chain (66 feet) in width, and 10 chains (660 feet) in length it would obviously be 1 X 10 = 10 square chains in area. If you multiply 66 X 660 you get 43,560 square feet, exactly an acre. So ten square chains = 1 acre. All the surveyor had to do was to measure the plot in square chains, and then move the decimal one digit to the left to get the area in acres. No calculator needed!
Using the chain as the basic surveyor’s length is also the reason that many of the street right-of way in our older eastern cities are 66 feet wide.
Just spent an afternoon hanging pictures on a wall. Decided not to mess with this fractions of an inch stuff. Layed out the pictures with centimeters.
A little awkward - no, I don’t have a real feel for what 25 cm looks like. But the arithmetic of laying out several pictures in a row, evenly spaced, was pretty easy.
There was also the small issue of the deceit involved - if I had admitted what I was doing to my lady friend (on whose behalf I was working), she would have twitted me for severe geekdom - like it’s a bad thing or something.