USA just will not go metric.

Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) said:

ShawnG said:

192/195ths of the world uses the metric system. 

Just for accuracy

Although the UK still uses imperial for somethings.

Having spent about 1/4 of my life in Canada, I'm a pretty big hater of English units.  Metric is so remarkably intuitive and simple.  It makes so much more sense.

0 is freezing.  100 is boiling.  Everything is a function of multiples of 10.

Imagine if we had all grown up with Metric and then someone comes and says,

Someone:  What if we used something called a Mile?
Us:  How far is a Mile?
Someone:  It's 5280 feet
Us:  What's a foot?
Someone:  It's 12 inches.
Us:  Why not 10, that would be so much easier
Someone:  But 12 is mysterious and different.
Us:  I suppose you want to change temperature to something other than Celsius/Kelvin
Someone:  YES.... Picture it.  Freezing is 32 and boiling is 212.
Us:  Wait... dafuq you just say?  Why those numbers?
Someone:  Well, I was 32 years old when I invented it, and 212 was my apartment number in college.
Us:  (staring blankly)  You know you're batE36 M3 crazy, right?
Someone:  But wait, I haven't even told you how "ounces" can be weight OR volume

Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) said:

Having spent about 1/4 of my life in Canada, I'm a pretty big hater of English units.  Metric is so remarkably intuitive and simple.  It makes so much more sense.

0 is freezing.  100 is boiling.

[rant deleted]

It depends on context.  For weather reports Fahreinheit is much more useful than Celsius, because most of the temperatures that we encounter in daily life fit in the 0-100 range (OK, slightly outside it if you're in Phoenix or Minneapolis).

As for "English" units, that's historical.  Numbers like 12 and 60 can be divided evenly into a lot more factors than 10 and 100, and so are better for people who have less math education than is the norm now.

j_tso said:

SV reX said:

Civil engineers use tenths of a foot. That's not metric OR imperial. 
 

I think they do it just to berkeley with us. 

And machinists use thousandths of an inch.

I had a CAM teacher tell us "fractions are for carpenters"

Ford designers were carpenters, then    Ford engines used to be engineered to 64ths of an inch.

codrus (Forum Supporter) said

As for "English" units, that's historical.  Numbers like 12 and 60 can be divided evenly into a lot more factors than 10 and 100, and so are better for people who have more math education than is the norm now.

 

Fixed. 

In base 12 it is easy to divide by 2, 3, or 4 in your head.  Base 60 is just five-enabled base 12.  US gallons are based on powers of two: one gallon is 2⁷ ounces, it subdivides into halves and quart[ers] nicely.

Base 10 is awesome if you reach for a calculator for everything.  Which is fine, but I was really amused by an AvE video where he was trying to divide something by twelve in his head and spent ages because he was working with numbers in his head, not fractions.

Pete. (l33t FS) said:

Ford designers were carpenters, then    Ford engines used to be engineered to 64ths of an inch.

One of my favorite things about working on 80s and 90s Fords is that the engines are all in english, and the chassis and everything else is metric. IIRC, they made the switch in 1984 or so.

In reply to Tom_Spangler (Forum Supporter) :

I know everything GM designed after 1980ish is metric.  Ford is similar.

The engines all dated back to the 60s or so so they stayed SAE, the new chassis were metric.  Keeps the tooling and parts inventorying simple.

The U.S. already uses metric. A lot.

It just uses standard for a lot of everyday stuff that is very visible.

Switching all those little SAE measurements to metric when be a phenomenally involved and expensive process.

Take speed limit signs. How many of them are out there? A *lot*. You can't just phase out MPH signs for KPH when they need to be replaced. You would need to replace them ALL at the same time. Ideally, this would be nationwide, but would have to be at the very least across entire states at a time. West Virginia is the 10th smallest state in the U.S. Imagine what it would take to change every single MPH sign to KPH in *just* West Virginia.

In reply to Beer Baron :

I am only a little older than you and I do remember metric speed limit signs.  55mph/88km/h.  Hell, that's how I convert back in forth in my head, it's a factor of 5/8ths.  Or 8/5ths.

codrus (Forum Supporter) said:

Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) said:

Having spent about 1/4 of my life in Canada, I'm a pretty big hater of English units.  Metric is so remarkably intuitive and simple.  It makes so much more sense.

0 is freezing.  100 is boiling.

[rant deleted]

It depends on context.  For weather reports Fahreinheit is much more useful than Celsius, because most of the temperatures that we encounter in daily life fit in the 0-100 range (OK, slightly outside it if you're in Phoenix or Minneapolis).

As for "English" units, that's historical.  Numbers like 12 and 60 can be divided evenly into a lot more factors than 10 and 100, and so are better for people who have less math education than is the norm now.

 

F would be much better for weather reports if the "end points" actually meant something. 0 is meaningless. 100 is meaningless. Most of my life has been spent in climates where F goes "out of range". As I said earlier, the only reason you think it makes sense is because it's what you've lived in, so you know what the numbers mean. The actual values convey no useful information as they are uncoupled from the physical world. It's just habit. 

In reply to Keith Tanner :

Stupid will be stupid.

The Ohio BMV has these TV screens with information and also trivia to keep people entertained, kind of like movie theaters show before the previews start.  This year, I was treated with "Human saliva has a boiling point three times higher than water".

Que?

There are two problems here, both stemming from scientific illiteracy.  First is that people may think that zero means the bottom. 80F is not twice as hot as 40F, and 636F is completely different from 300C.  Need to start from absolute zero and I somehow do not think that the boiling point of saliva is 3(459+212) Fahrenheit, which is probably somewhere around the melting point of most metals.  Having spit on glowing yet solid steel, I can confirm that the boiling point of saliva is lower than that 

What they probably meant was that the heat of evaporation for saliva was 3 times higher than that of pure water, which is a whole different kettle of fish (or whatever the metric unit for a fish kettle is).

All steel produced at steel mills in the US is done in inch based measurements. 

Try buying 10 mm thick plate steel, or metric based square or rectangular tubing.  Sure, you can get it, but the price is WAY higher.

Pete. (l33t FS) said:

In reply to Keith Tanner :

What they probably meant was that the heat of evaporation for saliva was 3 times higher than that of pure water, which is a whole different kettle of fish (or whatever the metric unit for a fish kettle is).

I am going to assume there is a British kettle, a slightly different kettle used by sailors, an American kettle that's about 10% off and the metric system uses  a measurement that is a few orders of magnitude higher or lower than, say, a standard fishing boat's cargo capacity or something. A microhold.

Keith Tanner said:

F would be much better for weather reports if the "end points" actually meant something. 0 is meaningless. 100 is meaningless. Most of my life has been spent in climates where F goes "out of range". As I said earlier, the only reason you think it makes sense is because it's what you've lived in, so you know what the numbers mean. The actual values convey no useful information as they are uncoupled from the physical world. It's just habit. 

I've lived in the UK where Celsius was used commonly -- I'd rather use Fahrenheit for weather.

The actual values of Celsius are only coupled to the physical world at specific elevations, anyway.  IIRC water freezes at -3 and boils at 94 in Denver.

Don't forget, there's two different gallons. 

In reply to ShawnG :

That's why I was careful to specify US gallons

Without going into the historical reasons why US gallons are different, it makes the mnemonic "A pint's a pound the world around" wrong.  Unless beer is really cheap in England.

I didn't realize they were different until I was in my early 20s, I just thought a UK gallon had five quarts or something, which made the one bit in 1984 confusing.  Winston was talking with a prole in a pub somewhere, plying him with beer for conversation, and the prole was complaining that this new "metric system" was BS because they no longer sold beer in pints, they sold it in liters!  A half liter wasn't enough and a full liter was too much!  (And Winston though wryly that he'd just bought the guy a couple liters of beer while he was conversing with him)  Young Pete was like, a quart is so close to a liter as to be interchangeable in smaller amounts...

In reply to Keith Tanner :

History of science stuff that I went through mentioned that the 100 mark was supposed to be body temperature, but he based numbers on his wife, and she turned out to have had a fever, at the time.

ShawnG said:

Don't forget, there's two different gallons. 

And don't even get started on the ton.

I had learned that fahrenheight was based off 0 being as cold as it could ever get, and 100 the hottest.

Maybe not so, but it makes sense.

In reply to Streetwiseguy :

The difference between water boiling and water freezing is 180 degrees (there's that dang 12 again, or is that 60?  Half a 360 degree circle?) and I suppose we have someone's immune system to thank for the numbers being shifted 32 degrees instead of 34.

Of all of the imperial vs. metric, temperature is the one that truly makes no difference which you'd use.  It's an intangible.  You're not going to divide or multiply it.  If we switched to C then it'd make no difference (to me anyway) aside from having to adjust to "kinda cold" being 20 degrees and "kinda warm" being 30 degrees.  Half my temperature charts are metric anyway.

Keith Tanner said:

ShawnG said:

Don't forget, there's two different gallons. 

And don't even get started on the ton.

And then there's troy ounces, which is slightly heavier, for precious metals. So a pound of gold does weigh more than a pound of feathers.

We could go to the apothecary system with scruples,grains,drams, minims, etc for weight & volume, and start using rods,chains, & leagues for distance.

If you measure parts of the male anatomy using the metric system they sound bigger.  

In reply to dean1484 :

On a similar note, there's a reason that runners race 5k and 10k races instead of 3 and 6 miles* :)

Kids at gas stations are impressed by the speedo in my Canadian Miata that goes to 220.

* yes, I am rounding for convenience

dean1484 said:

If you measure parts of the male anatomy using the metric system they sound bigger.  

But if you use inches, you can round up to the nearest 1/2".