There are no measures inherently intuitive or counter-intuitive. The units which are intuitive are the ones you’re used to. I “intuitively” know how long is a meter, a decimeter, a centimeter, how heavy is a kilo, and how cold is 0°C. A foot is…well…roughly one third of a meter. Telling me it’s roughly the size of my foot doesn’t help, since I don’t have an “intuitive” idea of how long my feet are, and I don’t use them to measure things. I’ve no “intuitive” understanding of what a “cup” might be, either. Cups come in various sizes.
A meter is roughly a wide pace, though. That’s how I would measure, say, a yard if I had no ruler.
By the way, I just measured my foot, and it’s significantly shorter than one foot.
Well, you aren’t King Edward I of England, are you? (look of triumphant illogic)
(What was that conversion again? Multiply by two and add thirty, like how a six-pack in metric is 42 metric beers?* I’d better play it safe and use a conversion site.) Pluto is a measly four below zero Fahrenheit? It’s warmer than Chicago? snicker The decimal place will screw you just as easily in metric, too.
Okay, that reference is probably not fair to our Yurpeen pals. On the other hand, our Canadian chums all grew up with Bob and Doug, didn’t they? You can admit it. I grew up with guys like that, too. Hell, I was one of them before I turned into Red Green at around age 40.
The best example of a silly argument for an “intuitive” length of measure came from a Usenet sysadmin who lives in New Jersey. He argued that the mile was an ideal unit of measure, since where he drives it is on highways, and the number of miles he travels is directly correlated with the number of minutes that it take to travel. If he has to go 60 miles, he knows that will take 60 minutes. I immediately jumped on that like a sailor does with a $10 whore. Around where I live, like most other people in the US, typically travel is on surface roads with stoplights. In this area, in 60 minutes one can at best travel 60 kilometers. Ergo, much better in the US to have speedometers and road signs set as km/h.
If you go into a normal stationers and buy a ruler, the smaller ones are 30cm long. That’s an odd length, isn’t it? You would expect perhaps a more metric-sounding 25cm. Ah! I see it now! 30cm is very close to 6 inches - half a foot!
Similarly, athletics races are run over reasonable sounding metric distances: 100 metres, 200 metres, 400 metres [one lap], 800 metres [two laps] … but then not 1,600 metres [four laps] but fifteen hundred. Because it’s closer to a mile. There’s also the 3,000 metres steeplechase, i.e. two miles.
As a child at primary school in the early 1960’s I remember being handed an even then old-fashioned arithmetic book with all sorts of multiplication and division sums in it like: divide 3 tons 4 hundredweight 9 stone 5 and three-quarter pounds by 19 and three-fifths [this was for 10 year olds!]. It has to be easier with base 10.
I have to agree with earlier posters that for the temperatures we experience in temperate places like the Great Britain and Ireland I find it convenient to think of warm temperatures in Fahrenheit (“Phew, it must be about 90 out there”) and cold temperatures in Celsius (“Blimey, it’s effing sub-zero today”). But say 28 degrees to me and I will always assume you mean Celsius.
I am happy to live with the two systems side-by-side. But what slightly annoys me is when people go out of their way to pronounce “tonnes”. There’s bugger all difference. “Oh, it’s OK: the lorry that ran me over weighed 35 tonnes, not 35 tons”.
Because changing the standard would be even more costly. Convert your carpenter, and our handy 16" stud spacing, 4’x8’ sheet goods, etc all have to change. You either maintain the imperial size and start working with unwieldy metric equivalents 40.61cm for example, or you resize and all your new lumber won’t fit on the 100 million existing homes, or you maintain 2 sets of lumber, metric and imperial. Change household measures, and the billion recipes that are written down all have to be converted, along with every single spoon and measuring cup in the land, again do you convert to odd metric equivalents or resize the recipe, possibly fouling it? Change your plumber and none of the new, metric sized pipes will fit the old 1/2" and 3/4" pipes in everyone’s houses, so he needs stock in 2 sizes.
I think you overestimate the cost of maintaining the two systems and underestimate the cost of forcing a change on the populace. In the marketplace of ideas, Americans have decided that imperial is more than good enough for our day to day lives, and behind the scenes, in manufacturing and science and engineering, they’ll use metric if it is better for their purposes.
This is absurd. You’re using arbitrary Fahrenheit measures that you’re used to, and converting them precisely into Celsius. This is a false comparison. The ‘exaggeration’ is purely because you’re used to 0º being really damn cold. Over here, we know that 0º means cold enough for frost. -10º means very freaking cold. 20º is a comfortable room temperature, 30º is a hot day, and 40º hellishly hot. Yup, they’re arbitrary too, but don’t confuse your habituation with the scales themselves.
Actually, 25 is not a very natural number in the purely decimal system. It’s a holdover from the fraction-based system (it’s 1/4 of 100). Multiples of 10 are more natural.
In fact many (perhaps most) countries do not have 25-unit coins. Euro coins come in 1, 2, 5, 10, 20 and 50 cents (and 1, 2 Euro), and Japan only has 1, 5, 10, 50, 100, 500.
And by the way, 30cm is close to one foot, not half.
Ah, well spotted scr4 … My feet are getting smaller.
But are 50 cm rulers normal? A bit too big for my schoolbag I think.
And if 1,600 metres is closer to a mile than 1,500 metres, why the heck isn’t it a running distance? It’s four whole laps, not an awkward three and three-quarters.
I grew up with metric. Someone claimed earlier you could simply multiply imperial units by 10 in order to produce the same advantage of the metric system. This is simply not the case since many units are meaningless in large numbers.
E.g. I’m building shelves 21.34 inches wide. I want to build 100 shelves, so I need 213.4 inches of shelving–which is a meaningless number, so we need to convert to feet. But just how many feet are there in 213.4 inches?
If, OTOH, my shelves were 54.20 cm wide, I would need 542.0 cm of shelving. Even a child could make the necessary conversion to metres.
One advantage I concede to imperial is while driving long distances. Since common cruising speed is 60 mph and there’s also 60 minutes to the hour, it’s easy to approximate driving time. E.g. if it’s 234 miles to Bumblefcuk, it’ll take us about 234 minutes at highway speed.
There is a non-imperial reason for 30 cm rulers. They are just a tiny bit longer than the long side of A4 paper (29.7 cm). 20 cm rulers would be just one cm shorter than the short side. Longer rulers like 40 or 50 cm are used for more specialized applications, but they are rarely required for working with A4 paper, e.g. in school.
And, quick, how many hours is that? (watches Jervoise scramble to divide by 60).
Metric wins here, too - a good estimate of overall freeway speed (averaged out for delays) is about 100 kph. So if your destination is 375 km away, it’ll take you (drumroll) about 3.75 hours to get there!
Frankenstein, that’s a fair point, of course, GM and IBM willingly made the conversion because it benefitted them, not because it was shoved down their throats by a government that “knows better” than they do. Americans have a serious issue with the government suggesting that the people don’t know what’s best for themselves.
Oh, and Noone Special, I think your problem is with there being 60 minutes per hour… Metric Time, here we come!
I think you exaggerate the ‘shoving down throats’*. It’s a very slow process, and still hasn’t completed in either the UK or Ireland. For nearly a decade the temperature on the TV weather, for example, was given in Fahrenheit and Celsius. About halfway through, the Celsius temperature was given first, and finally the Fahrenheit was dropped, and nobody seemed to care. Furthermore, even the independent TV stations have voluntarily dropped Fahrenheit - I don’t believe there’s any law to say they can’t.
*Though there have been a couple of absurd causes celebres in the UK, such as the butcher who was fined for selling meat in pounds not kilos. But they’re few and far between.
There are some areas, like aeronautical navigation, where converting to SI units would be a nightmare. Besides the costs, how do you do it without killing large numbers of people in accidents during the transition period? We have enough trouble keeping the air traffic control system operating safely as it is.
Have you any evidence to suggest that, in countries which have successfully converted to metric, people died during the conversion process? Why should this be a problem for the US? :dubious:
Around where I live, like most other people in the US, typically travel is on surface roads with stoplights. In this area, in 60 minutes one can at best travel 60 kilometers. Ergo, much better in the US to have speedometers and road signs set as km/h. 
(:))