Everyone and their brother (including my brother’s brother) is linking to this Xkcd strip over in Google Reader, so I might as well share it with those of you who don’t check out my Unblogged Bits.
I was a wee lad (well, a teen) when the metric system became the ostensible official system of measurement in the US. And … feh. Nobody uses it for anything common; it’s been slipstreamed into food containers (2 liter bottles, 375ml booze, etc.), but when it comes to distance or temperature — well, Fahrenheit and the Imperial Gallon seem to be taken as an Inalienable Right by the majority of the the US.
Why don’t we use the metric system here in the US. First, there’s little apparent incentive, compared to the cognitive pain. It matters not to me whether the next exit is 5 miles or 8 klicks — but kilometers are unfamiliar, thus painful to actually think about. You’re only going to learn to “think” in them if … well, if that’s all you’re given. Which means that someone needs to be willing to dare the wrath of “It’s unfamiliar (and foreign), thus eeeevillll!!!” goofballs in order to make that what people end up seeing.
The problem is, of course, lack of political will. All of those interstate highway signs have been changed at least once since 1976, but nobody in Congress or the Executive saw any cause or had the guts to actually shift things over to kilometers. Federal forms (and I keep harping on “federal” because the states would never do it) don’t require height and weight in meters and kilos. All those standardized Federal tests for kids don’t use metrics where they could, either. The Feds — the only entity that could actually make it happen in this country — don’t. And so we limp along in a world gone metric, like the obstinate immigrant uncle who (ironically) never thought it worth while to learn English.
The greatest service the Founders did for us was give us a decimal currency. Otherwise, I’m sure we’d still be counting in shilling-and-six-pence increments.
Anyway, if you want to learn metric, you could do far worse than check out the above-linked cartoon. Have fun.
“The British understand 0 is freezing and 100 is boiling, but still think of 70 as a comfortable temperature”
Terry Pratchett.
I tend to think in both- most Brits seem to use Centigrade for cold- because 0’C makes sense, but hot in F 100′ is a magic number.
I drive in Miles, but decorate in meters because 2m x 3m is easier to multiply than 6’6″ x 9’8″. Also the next division after 3 is 4, not 1/4 to 3/8.
Why any one would want to stay with ounces I don’t know – “so I dont carry 1 until it hits 16?”
Oh Fl Oz- Am I right in thinking they are different to normal ounces? WHY MEASURE LIQUIDS BY WEIGHT. Half, Pint, Quart, Gallon. Get to the 1950s- then try to get to 2009.
I like metric, use it a lot, prefer it. But if I were a politician, I wouldn’t touch it with a 3-meter pole. People get really worked up about it! There are more important things to use political capital on. (Jimmy Carter wasted a lot of his credibility pushing metric.)
I have a book about how metric is the manifestation of one-world government or the antichrist or something – very amusing.
“A pint’s a pound the world around.”
Boulder use to have the Elevation on the City sign in Metric, but it went away under Owens. 🙁
XKCD, still not funny.
Metric is, however, the measument of choice for medicine. Dosages are in Cubic Centimetres and Milliliters. Folks just haven’t caught on that that’s what CCs and MLs stand for.
That’s because “people” don’t need to know the difference, any more than they worry about the unit of measure on bottles of wine, whereas medical folks are essentially scientists and see the value of a decimal measurement system.
Actually I think it’s pathetic that “people” can’t get with the program; the rest of the world sighs and makes everything all special for the Americans in the short bus. But politically there’s not much advantage in calling the voting public a bunch of lazy morons.
(Enter stories HERE of crashed Mars probe, or the US section of the ISS that uses all different bolts, or the Gimli Glider, or any of a number of other screwups due to the US’ apparent politicization of even a small learning curve…)
Hehehe…
I will add to this the last project that I worked on at Rocky Flats (PuSPS!), which made me see that the British were *far* ahead of us technologically (UK = Robotics, US = Push sticks and Ramps FTL! =P ).
As part of the clean-up project DOE needed to reprocess the 14 tons of Plutonium Oxide it had sitting around from the decades of production, but first it needed to be repackaged into safe easily storable cans, that was where BNFL came in.
BNFL built a fantastic fully glovebox contained robotic multi-laser packaging system, one which no human needed to even do anything but push buttons on a control panel, and the machine would take a can of the PuO2 on one end and put it into a laser sealed bigger can on the other end. It was a thing of beauty to watch work…and of course we promptly broke it. Also, being from BNFL it was all in metric.
Now all we needed to do was build a several gloveboxes where we would empty the existing PuO2 into crucibles, melt it into pucks, and load the pucks into the packaging system.
Easy peasy…
Except for one small problem.
Now, the easy thing would have been to build the entire thing in metric and call it good.
But no.
We had engineers that kept trying to make English bolts and such work in metric threads and such. My major contribution to the project was to introduce the Engineers to a Metric Granger catalogue and designing the English to Metric coupling Glovebox.
My still favourite line from a project meeting when an engineer stood up and said that some item was a “32nd short of 4 inches”…when I raised my hand and corrected him and said it was 10cm….after that entire the meeting went like that, my job became to state what the actual measurement was.
1,2,3… 9, 10, 11, One. (?) One and 1, one and 2… Two and 10, 2 and 11, ONE (???)
A room is 3 yards, 2 feet 4 inches by 4 yards 5 inches. What’s the floor area?
Metric just sort of crept in here- they went years running it side by side, and I just go with it. But my son gets told its a mile to town and a mile and a quarter to school. I know a bold etc will be either 10mm, or 13mm (’cause thats half an inch- ish) For most non technical stuff close enough is close enough- so the door that is 6’6″ gets replaced by a 197cm one. MPH for driving though, until someone sorts out the clock- 60mph = 1 mile minute. Av speed calculations are easier like this.
Some wargames rules are odd- Arty Conliffe (from NY) specifies figures based on 1 1/8 bases. Why? However these are (in my house) 30mm to fit with Peter Pig rules. No one would say 28.5mm. What is this fascination Yanks have with 1/8ths of an inch?
I think this is the reason for those funny memory sizes- its nothing to do with binary, just Americans prefer 1000 to mean 1024.
Right, and 60 mph is 88 feet per second, or about 1.465 feet per mile per hour. Which means when the schoolteacher was going 46 in a school zone (where the speed limit is 20) she was knocking off about an additional 29 feet per second, or just enough to cover the distance from her front bumper to the crossing guard in the two seconds she dialed her cell phone.
Wait, what was the question? Oh right, furlongs per fortnight…
No idea why carpenters divide inches into 8ths, 16ths, 32nds, etc. Machinists read decimal inches – 4.028 inches and so forth. Except for drill bits, which have three different designations; numbers for sizes that are interstitial between fractional and decimal equivalent sizes. So a size H drill bit is 0.2660 inches, then a 17/64 which has no letter or number designation but is 0.2656 inches, then a size G, which is 0.2610 inches. Pretty sure the letter and number designations (as distinct from decimal and fractional) correspond to wire gauge sizes, but it’s been a long time since I had to figure them out.
Then there’s typesetting sizes. A friend of mine who did advanced precision woodworking got hold of a typesetter’s saw, which was graduated in 1/72 inch markings. He used it to make chessboards, because it could cut absolutely precise straight lines. The nice thing about standards is there are so many of them, you can take your pick.
George, I hate to break it to you, but in this country, even if the machine (even the really spiffy 5 axis mills) are capable of machining to 8 decimal places, the Machinist is not. They still think in fractions. So, even if you call something out as, say 3/32s, v .09375, it will cost less and easier for the machinist to do the fraction than the decimal I had this argument all the time with contractor Machinists, even if the machine was CAD/CAM…fractions were always easier for the human to figure out and understand.
~shrugs~
Now, as a funny aside, when the USSR copied the B-29, their version had less range because their Metal Gage size was thicker then ours due to English v Metric and was far heavier.
Ow… my head hurts. In doG’s name, why?
Guess it’s just a good reason why “change” is so hard. Maybe they’re so proud of having mastered all those fractions and weird archaic gauges that they just can’t throw them out even if it makes sense to do so.
Oh, and 8 decimal places? Wow! I had no idea.
Yep, we had one at the Flats that would do 8 Decimal places, but that was what was required the get the geometry correct on verious bits and pieces of the “triggers”.
My drill bits are all mm
Even in the 70 cars were quoted in cc or litre engine capacity.
Cars changed over to CC/Liter capacity that long ago, yes. But they are still (in the US, or by US auto makers) using inches as the gauge for parts, tools, etc.
I still have a metric wrench and socket set from my old VW (from when I used to do my own car maintenance). Fortunately, MM gauging is such that it will fit (loosely, sometimes) most inch-measure nuts and bolts.