dirtyparrot
Upholding Brannigan's Law
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- Oct 6, 2005
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Antartica is really dragging it's heels on this one
Should the U.S adopt the Metric system completely and why?
- Thread starter Xanikk999
- Start date
classical_hero
In whom I trust
What the hell? That is extremely confusing.
scherbchen
well that can´t be good
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- Aug 1, 2006
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time to get out those t-shirts. only if you are a brit or me, apparently.
which goes nicely with the pattern of you don't really care what the predicted temperature is anyhoo (not to mention humanity's failure to accurately predict the weather anywhere close to accurate) as everyone perceives weather and weather conditions differently and if you for some professional reason care about celsius decimal points you are supposedly scientifically educated enough to make the conversion.
but OT... dunno, it's quaint. like having speed limits on highways and a two party system or paying a shilling-and-tuppence in Britain. it's cute. leave it as is.
Oh, ok, I see what you are saying.
Though, even if I understand the math, and the difference between them, it will still take time before I can imagine them as the "standard" distance/unit of measurement. Like when talking, even though I know the math and how long a kilometer is, I will still default to mile because the distance is ingrained in my mind. And for the ingraining to take place all over again with the metric measurements, it will take a while.
It's not confusing if you grow up with it. The complexities of pre- and post-decimalisation currency are analogous to Metric/Imperial confusion.
Lillefix
I'm serious. You can.
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You mean the Mars Climate Orbiter. Very embarassing mistake. Let us also not forget the Gimli Glider.
There's the vast shell of a prospective stately home somewhere in France, I think, which was commissioned by a Briton and designed by an Italian. Unfortunately, the Briton was dictating measurements of walls and suchlike in feet, whereas the architect thought he meant metres.
amadeus
Bishop of Bio-Dome
No, because I'll never be able to figure out my gas mileage. A liter gets me 15 kilometers at $1.28... I don't know if that's good or bad. 
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Would the effort required to re-educate everyone be worth the benefit in saved conversions? For the layman, it may well not be. In some areas (construction, engineering, aerospace, international trade), it may well be. Even if the net benefit is positive, though (and surely it would be over centuries), humans are naturally lazy. Why learn something new when what we have is getting the job done? Or, it ain't broken, so why fix it?
I almost exclusively use U.S. (not quite Imperial) measurements, and as more or less a layman it does seem to get the job done. Once in a while I buy a half-liter water or soda bottle, but the 16.9-ounce part of the label is more prominent, and it's pretty much a pound, anyway. I can roughly convert temperatures to Celsius with a fair degree of accuracy and without actually doing the math (86ºF = 30ºC, it's 60F right now so that's 15 or 16 Celsius, and so on), but there's almost never a need to. About the only thing I naturally think of in Celsius is computer temperatures. Anything above 80C is getting pretty toasty, anything above 90 is too hot. Hard drives should be below 55, but preferably below 45. Seeing someone write that their computer is 188ºF is strange and triggers an immediate "way too hot" before processing the ºF.
So I do think it depends on what you are used to measuring something in. Measuring things in leagues, barleycorns, and slugs seems unnatural to me (although barleycorns do explain shoe sizes), but if I'd grown up measuring in those units, it would probably seem perfectly ordinary.
Cursive. That's definitely something I almost never use anymore. I remember in 3rd grade they said, "You'll be writing only cursive in 5th grade"; in 5th grade they said "You'll be writing only cursive in 7th grade", in 7th grade they said "You'll be writing only cursive in 9th grade", in 9th grade they said "You'll be writing only cursive in college." By 11th grade no one mentioned cursive anymore. Nowadays half the time that I try to write something in cursive I end up using Cyrillic characters instead of Roman ones because 98% of the cursive I've written in the past three years has been in Russian. I can still easily write my signature in cursive, but I never really realized the "faster than print" benefits.
I've seen A4 and A3 in printer settings and occasionally on printer trays, but to be honest I have no idea what A4 and A3 and so on mean. I pretty much go by inches in paper meaurements - 8.5x11 is your standard printer paper, notebooks and lined paper often come in at 8x10.5 or so, index cards are 3x5 or 5x7, and I think legal is slightly longer than 8.5x11, maybe 8.5x13? Letter corresponds to 8.5x11 I think, I don't know what ledger is. So far it hasn't been important for me to know the difference. If I needed A4 or A3 paper for some legal document or whatever I'd probably go over to the office store and search the paper aisle, and ask them which one that was if no labels said A4 or A3.
Imperial-U.S. is even more confusing than U.S.-Metric for me when the Imperial and U.S. measurements don't match up. A 40-ounce quart? An ounce not being quite the same as an ounce?
But even worse than that is U.S. dry and liquid volumes. How is a quart of flour not the same as a quart of milk? Can't we just have one "quart"? Most of the time I just use either dry measurements or liquid measurements for everything when cooking or baking, and, despite the 14% difference, my recipes usually turn out pretty good (although maybe that's why some of them didn't turn out quite as good as when my parents made them
).
Going all-metric wouldn't solve this right away, though. All our existing recipes are in U.S. units, so we'd still be using them for quite awhile.
That's pretty bad... rounding a liter to a quarter-gallon, that's $5.12 per gallon.
That must be a pretty big house. You would think the architect would have thought twice when he saw that each step in the staircase was a whole meter tall. Or that some of the rooms were absolutely gigantic for their purpose. But maybe he figured hey, that's much more revenue than your average stately home.
I almost exclusively use U.S. (not quite Imperial) measurements, and as more or less a layman it does seem to get the job done. Once in a while I buy a half-liter water or soda bottle, but the 16.9-ounce part of the label is more prominent, and it's pretty much a pound, anyway. I can roughly convert temperatures to Celsius with a fair degree of accuracy and without actually doing the math (86ºF = 30ºC, it's 60F right now so that's 15 or 16 Celsius, and so on), but there's almost never a need to. About the only thing I naturally think of in Celsius is computer temperatures. Anything above 80C is getting pretty toasty, anything above 90 is too hot. Hard drives should be below 55, but preferably below 45. Seeing someone write that their computer is 188ºF is strange and triggers an immediate "way too hot" before processing the ºF.
So I do think it depends on what you are used to measuring something in. Measuring things in leagues, barleycorns, and slugs seems unnatural to me (although barleycorns do explain shoe sizes), but if I'd grown up measuring in those units, it would probably seem perfectly ordinary.
Cursive. That's definitely something I almost never use anymore. I remember in 3rd grade they said, "You'll be writing only cursive in 5th grade"; in 5th grade they said "You'll be writing only cursive in 7th grade", in 7th grade they said "You'll be writing only cursive in 9th grade", in 9th grade they said "You'll be writing only cursive in college." By 11th grade no one mentioned cursive anymore. Nowadays half the time that I try to write something in cursive I end up using Cyrillic characters instead of Roman ones because 98% of the cursive I've written in the past three years has been in Russian. I can still easily write my signature in cursive, but I never really realized the "faster than print" benefits.
I've seen A4 and A3 in printer settings and occasionally on printer trays, but to be honest I have no idea what A4 and A3 and so on mean. I pretty much go by inches in paper meaurements - 8.5x11 is your standard printer paper, notebooks and lined paper often come in at 8x10.5 or so, index cards are 3x5 or 5x7, and I think legal is slightly longer than 8.5x11, maybe 8.5x13? Letter corresponds to 8.5x11 I think, I don't know what ledger is. So far it hasn't been important for me to know the difference. If I needed A4 or A3 paper for some legal document or whatever I'd probably go over to the office store and search the paper aisle, and ask them which one that was if no labels said A4 or A3.
Imperial-U.S. is even more confusing than U.S.-Metric for me when the Imperial and U.S. measurements don't match up. A 40-ounce quart? An ounce not being quite the same as an ounce?
But even worse than that is U.S. dry and liquid volumes. How is a quart of flour not the same as a quart of milk? Can't we just have one "quart"? Most of the time I just use either dry measurements or liquid measurements for everything when cooking or baking, and, despite the 14% difference, my recipes usually turn out pretty good (although maybe that's why some of them didn't turn out quite as good as when my parents made them
).Going all-metric wouldn't solve this right away, though. All our existing recipes are in U.S. units, so we'd still be using them for quite awhile.
That's pretty bad... rounding a liter to a quarter-gallon, that's $5.12 per gallon.
That must be a pretty big house. You would think the architect would have thought twice when he saw that each step in the staircase was a whole meter tall. Or that some of the rooms were absolutely gigantic for their purpose. But maybe he figured hey, that's much more revenue than your average stately home.
classical_hero
In whom I trust
I still cannot get my head over what you just said abut what a pound was and the division of it.
I managed to use the measurements of and A4 piece of paper for a lesson about standard and the like, since I got some children to make a 30cm ruler from anA4 piece of paper. Of course right from the get go they would never be right, which was part of the point.
12 old pence in one shilling; 2.5 shillings ("two and six") in a half-crown; 5 shillings (60 old pence) in a crown; 4 crowns in a pound/sovereign; 21 shillings in a guinea. What could be at all complicated about any of that? 
warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
Then you have the population. People are resistant to any change no matter how much it could benefit them; "We live in America so why should I learn Spanish?!" comes to mind. (Very different question than "why should I have to learn Spanish!")
Just tell Americans that the measurements they are using are based on the feet of dead English kings and the armpits of their wives.
Also tell them that metric is an American invention.
JoeCoolyo said:
I am the same with Farenheit, actually, so what you are saying isn't so weird after all... at least for temperature. My thermostat is F only, so I've had to figure out that 80 is too hot, 65 is too cold, and 72 is just about right. But ask me about temperatures outside of the 65-80F range, and I'm clueless. Yeah, I can do the conversion in my head, but my brain just wants to talk in Celcius.
If I actually started using the F scale on a day-to-day basis, I would pick it up, though. But I don't, cause F sucks.
Miles are easy though, you should be able to "think in kilometres" just fine without doing too many mental gymnastics.
