I have some difficulties with the issues described in the piece.<p>"A yard is the distance from your sternum to the tip of your outstretched hand."<p>According to folk belief, it's the distance from the tip of Henry I's nose to the end of his thumb. According to an early definition, "It is ordained that 3 grains of barley dry and round do make an inch, 12 inches make 1 foot, 3 feet make 1 yard."<p>Who here has an idea of the size of a grain of barley dry and round?<p>At 39.3 inches, a meter is just slightly longer than a yard, and for "traditional purposes" where the sternum/fingertip approximation is good enough, a meter and a yard can be used almost interchangeably.<p>Somehow all those people using metric in their daily lives don't feel like they are missing something special by having "ancient, organic" units. (BTW, at what point does something become "ancient"?)<p>"Or don’t bother, because the definition completely changed in 1960"<p>The yard definition 'completely changed' in 1959, when it defined as exactly 0.9144 meters. Before then it was different in different countries.<p>Since the yard is pegged to the meter, this means that the yard is now legally defined as the time light travels in 1/274130223.5952 seconds.<p>"The first third of the 20th century, for instance, saw some quite serious efforts to rationalize our systems for dates and times."<p>As well as the 1700s, when France ran under a rationalized calendar, which provided the name for the Thermidorian Reaction. This is part of the same movement that brought us the metric system, so I think it's odd to exclude that very serious effort.
I am not anti-metric by any means, but having done carpentry a lot in the past it always strikes me when this comes up that one of the central arguments for (a limited use-case of) the imperial system is usually glossed over: the fact that in many crafts (especially historically), using base-12 makes certain things much easier. It divides into 3rds far more easily, divides into 4ths slightly more easily, and still divides into 5ths with only one digit after the decimal.<p>Just like computer programmers have no problem immediately recognizing that 256 is 2^8, it became intuitive when working with the Imperial system (at limited scales) that 48 inches is the same as 4-feet but that it is also 3-stud-distances long (studs in walls are often placed 16 inches apart).<p>Even if you don't work in crafts where dividing things by 3 is more frequent than dividing by 5 it is easy to imagine how certain things might be more difficult if we used base-10 for time (as, it has been pointed out, has been attempted)- and thereby using the ability to easily divide an hour into 3 parts (for example).<p>Consistent base-10 and international standardization has advantages that far outweigh these minor things- but I think it's important to recognize that there is, surprise, a rational practical reason for sticking in some cases to Imperial units- it's not purely tradition or politics or their "organic-ness" (anymore).
> Well, to be fair, those anti-metric folks had at least one point in their favor: Customary measures make a lot more sense to us.<p>The author is full of it. Whichever system you grew up with will seem natural to you. This misconception comes up time and time again: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7821501" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7821501</a><p>The article seems like fluff; the author isn't even making <i>novel</i> mistakes.<p>He even says that the metric system "died". Hah. That's true only in a very limited parochial sense; it's the most popular system of measurement on planet earth even if it's isn't used for day-to-day things in the USA.
I love the metric system for no better reasons that it's the one I always used as a french, it just seems as natural for me as my ten fingers, I never really thought about it.
Yet, I can understand why some would not change their “English customary measures”, they must feel it the same way, thinking it's as natural as their feet.
For instance, our screens size (TV, computer, phones) are expressed in inches for whatever good reasons ... I don't have a clue at all about the size it represents, I just know 13 is smaller than 15, 11 is too small for me for a computer screen, and that 42 is a pretty good decent size for a TV.
My surfboard is a 6.2, and for all I know, it's taller than me ...<p>If I were told, we were going to change our measure system, I would be kind of scared, could it be better or worse !
After all, the hardest part is not the real use but the idea of the switch.<p>Now, if you could just use the international ISO 216 paper size, I wouldn't have to mess with my PDF export settings and just push some A4.
Everyone seems to be missing the most obvious reason to convert.<p><a href="http://gizmodo.com/5786004/these-are-the-three-countries-who-dont-use-the-metric-system" rel="nofollow">http://gizmodo.com/5786004/these-are-the-three-countries-who...</a><p>We're a global economy. By the ends of the century, India and China will have pushed us down to at least #3.
For me this is too much rationalization for a single fact: people hate to change, even if it is for the better.<p>So simple. I study Chinese and I am 100% certain than the reason Chinese did not develop like the West was the printing press and the superior method it is to have to print 25-30 symbols instead of 30.000.<p>Just look at Chinese and even Japanese delay in getting to use computers as ASCII was so simple compared to their language. Japanese use kanji(chinese symbols) for lots of things.<p>The Chinese writing came first, the Indian copied the Chinese language and basically improved over them, then the Greeks copied that via Persia, and then the Romans copied the Greeks.<p>Romans started copying Greek culture because they were so ignorant compared with the Greeks, let alone Chinese at the time.<p>But at the same time, they started anew.The language was so refined, and it took the best thing of each iteration(better than Greek, better than Indian Scripts, better than Chinese).<p>I worked with someone doing programming and the fact that I used Vim instead of a visual text editor really infuriated him.<p>So one day I explained it to him and expended 30 to 40 min teaching him why it was so good for me. He looked confused. One month later he only used vim.<p>The reason most people don't use programs like vim or emacs is because it takes some effort to learn before you get the benefits.<p>The same happens with metric or any other measurement system.
<i>> Customary measures make a lot more sense to us.</i><p>Did they make any less sense in UK where they originated? Yet UK pushed through with switching to metric and went way further than US did. So this excuse isn't really valid.<p>The real answer is, that in US politicians were too weak to push this through, because all kind of manufacturers and unions were pressuring them to stop the effort. In UK they just ignored the pressure. In US they budged.<p>I wish US would already push this through, but so far it doesn't look very promising.<p>About natural. Take for example Celsius and Fahrenheit. Celsius based his scale on water freezing and boiling points, which are quite intuitive borders. At 0°C weather changes significantly since water freezing / melting has a noticeable environmental impact. So if you see -1° or +1° you can expect quite a change. On the other hand what are 31° and 33°? Fahrenheit took his scale without any pragmatic or practical goals of common usage. He did it for his scientific purposes. People more naturally operate with two digit numbers, which in Celsius case covers most of the normal range temperatures. It's good that at least Kelvin's scale didn't become commonly used in some countries...
I started grade school around when the big push for metric occurred in the US. Here's what I remember. Inches were taught as inches. Here's a ruler, measure some things.<p>Metric was taught as a bunch of math. Here's how you convert between different units.<p>Many years later I was talking to a machinist who told me: "My daughter is learning metric in school but I don't like it because of all the math."
Since our civilization seems to have moved to binary for actual computations I wonder if we will someday go back to thinking in terms of halves, quarters, eighths, etc. of some standard unit. Then people would mock the metric system for being implicitly based on the biological accident of ten fingers...
I was born and raised in Europe. I live in Canada that has (mostly) gone metric in the 1970's. Yet, I use inches. They are nicer!<p>I recently built a shelf and hanger rack in a weirdly-shaped closet. I used Sketchup to design it, and naturally made everything in inches.<p>Inches are "semi-metric" too, thanks to mils: thousandths of an inch. Mils are very nice units for fine work, like circuit boards. Millimeters are way too crude, and micrometers are outside of macroscopic human experience.<p>When doing PCB work, I use mils, which create a virtual metric system within the space of an inch. E.g. the pins of old-school DIPs are 100 mils apart, or 0.1" Through holes are in mils: 25 mils, 40 mils. Same for track widths: 8 mils, 10 mils, ... very nice numbers to work with at that scale: one, two or three digits, no decimals.
I see we're still perpetuating the "DVORAK is inherently better than QWERTY" myth, as well as "QWERTY was designed to prevent key-sticking" myth. And I don't want to know what it suggests about the author that he still has Tommy Lee's penis on the brain. <i>That</i> is your go-to inch example?<p>I had always intuited a higher opinion of Slate, just because I had friends I respected who read it, but the more I actually read it myself, the more it seems barely above the likes of BuzzFeed or HuffPo.<p>>> "when a foot is 12 inches... it gets tough to do quick mental calculations.'<p>Except, you know, when you want to easily divide by three or six. Or by two or four and end up with integer results. But why would anyone ever want to do that in normal, day to day living?
The article uses "Anyway, we have calculators now" as an argument <i>for</i> decimalization, but I see it as an argument <i>against</i> it. The less people do math on paper (or in their head), the less need we have to tie our system of measurement to the number of fingers the human hand happens to have; calculators divide by 12 as easily as 10.
This whole article just feels like fluff. The very first "fact" about the origins of the qwerty keyboard are completely wrong. The Wikipedia page doesn't have a single mention of telegraph and has a complete history of its development. A history can be found in this 1996 article among others <a href="http://reason.com/archives/1996/06/01/typing-errors/" rel="nofollow">http://reason.com/archives/1996/06/01/typing-errors/</a>.
A yard is currently defined by the metric system.<p>Metrology is the discipline of measuring. It concerns itself with ensuring that everyone has the same definition of measuring units. For a long time, the yard was based on physical standards. i.e. Somewhere there sat a physical rod 1 yard long that all other rods were measured against to define the yard. The meter was defined this way until 1960 too. The unfortunate problem with physical standards is that they change. A physical rod is different lengths at different temperatures and will, of course, gradually get shorter as it's handled and wear occurs on its ends.<p>The meter is now defined in terms of how fast light can travel in a given period of time. That period of time is defined in terms of hyperfine ground state level transitions of a Cesium atom. Yes, it's complex. However, while a physical standard changes, these standards are built into the laws of the universe and are thus reproducible and fixed for all time. <i>For this reason, the yard is currently defined as 0.9144 meters in the U.S.. No matter how the metric system defines the meter, a yard is 0.9144 meters.</i><p>So, the U.S. really has gone metric, at least where it counts. The average American is just ignorant of the fact.<p>P.S. Even the metric system is not completely free of physical definitions... yet. The kilogram is still based on a physical prototype. However, there are proposals to change that to something based on physical constants. Once this is done, the metric system will be defined entirely in terms of physics.
The thing about measurements is that they don't matter in your everyday life. I get that it makes physics calculations easier and international machining companies need to interface with the world, but measuring the speed of my car in miles per hour and knowing my couch is 7 1/2 feet long are perfectly fine, and there is absolutely no compelling reason to switch to metric for those kinds of things.<p>People don't want to switch because it's a huge burden to retrain yourself to think in those units. I remember growing up that the US tried to do it—roadsigns in California had both miles and kilometers on them and our speedometers had both readings for a while. But it didn't stick because there's absolutely no point—it doesn't improve anything, it's just churn.<p>I've got a very intuitive notion of how long a mile is, and Europeans have a very intuitive grasp on how long a kilometer is. It isn't because one system is intuitive and one isn't, it's just what you're used to—you know it because you use it every day.<p>The article is wrong. Imperial Units are not "better". But, the system you know and use every day <i>is</i> better than the weird foreign system.<p>As Abe Simpson once said, "The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!"
Could you imagine Boeing/lockheed/GM/some some oil company or any other manufacturer going up to their stockholders and saying: "This next year, profits will be significantly reduced as we replace every piece of equipment we own, replace every 1/4-20 screw with an M5, and redesign every aircraft/automobile/widget to meet new metric specifications"
If I visit Starbucks they sell something called a "Venti" it's part of Starbucks attempt to change the language of coffee so that their regular customers can't order elsewhere.<p>"Venti" is of course Italian for 20, let's ignore the fact that Starbucks appear to invalidly trademarked a number, when I find myself stuck with a Starbucks in an American airport I love to ask "that's Italian for twenty, twenty what?" the usual answer is "fluid ounces" .... but "that can't be true, Italy uses the metric system, it must be litres or millilitres ..." usually they choose "litres", it is a big cup<p>Of course the American fluid ounce is a weird thing, different from the Imperial fluid ounce (which is exactly 1oz of water at 62F)- a strange historical thing due more to British Kings monkeying with the tax system than anything else
There's a great video treating imperial measurement units.
I instantly fell in love with it:
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7x-RGfd0Yk" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7x-RGfd0Yk</a><p>I landed there after watching one on paper sizes on the same channel. Also pretty much worth it!
Someone (a jogger/runner?) on reddit a few days ago made an interesting observation, maybe this was known. The Fibonacci sequence can be used as a rough guide to convert km to miles and vice versa.<p>0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34<p>The first four don't work very well but:<p>3km is about 2 miles<p>5km is about 3 miles<p>8km is about 5 miles<p>13km is about 8 miles<p>21km is about 13 miles<p>34km is about 21 miles<p>and so on
Author wrongly presumes that people using the metric system are not visualizing the measures in almost the same way. We do. One step is about a meter, or the width of finger is about 1 cm. More often used 10 centimeters (1 decimeter) is approx. a distance from your thumb to the index finger. It's all about being used to certain system of measures, so that you can automatically relate the measure to something from the real life for comparison, e.g. my car is 5m long, also the wall in my room is around 5m, so if you ask me how big is 5m I can instantly visualize the distance very accurately (without even consciously thinking about cars or walls)
One of the biggest arguments for metric (other than the rest of the world uses it) has been that it is easy to convert from liters to kilometers. In your day to day life, how often do you need to convert from one thing to another? For most people, the answer is they don't. Occasionally in cooking you need to convert, other than that you rarely need to convert. So don't go and switch the system just because something people rarely do is easier.
And yes there are lots of jobs that require doing conversions. Many of those jobs already use metric.
I think the "but it's easier to visualize" claim is BS.<p>I would argue that it's just as hard for a person who's is used to the metric system to visualize inches, feet and yards as it is for a person used to those units to visualize centimeters and meters.<p>It's all a matter of which units your brain is used to thinking in.<p>When I speak to my US friends and they say stuff like, "I'm 7 feet and 10 inches tall", I have no internal visual metal picture at all. But if I say, "I'm 193 cm tall" I would guess they don't have either.
Centimeter is about 2 grids in a school "checked" notebook. Everybody know after using these notebooks fot the whole education how long exactly that is. No problems with eyeballing. I have problems eyeballing an inch (only used in 5.25 or 3.14 disk sizes and in monitors' sizes).<p>Milimeter is close to smallest unit useful in human scale - when you try to draw 0.5 milimeter scale with a regular pen, for example, the lines will probably touch each other. You can't cut with regular tools with better than 1mm accuracy, too. Tools are commonly scaled in milimeters, and you can almost use 14 key for 13 screw etc, so no point in smaller units for regular mechanics work either.<p>Food stuff is bought in "dekos" (dekagrams). You say "10 deko of this meat, 40 deko of that cheese, and 1 kilo of these berries, please". Somehow hektagram haven't caught up.<p>Land is measured in ar (10x10 meters), hektar (100x100 meters) and squared kilometers for anything bigger. Flats are measured in squared meters (50-300 m2 for most flats).<p>1 kg of water (and most other common liquids, with precision good enough for cooking etc) is 1 liter, everybody know that and use them interchangeably. 1 glass is 250 ml is 250 g of most liquids and powders, people measure stuff with glasses when cooking assuming 1 glass = 250 g.<p>There's a joke about this 1 liter = 1kg assumption. When asked what's 10 times 100g everybody answered 1kg except Russian and Polish who answered 1 liter (because shot glasses of alcohol in pubs are sold as 100g).<p>1 meter is almost exactly 1 step, 1 km is how far you can walk in 10 minutes.<p>I don't think one system is better than another in everyday usage, except the much easier calculations in metric.
I agree the US should fully adopt the metric system, it makes logical sense.<p>And Europe should abolish about three dozen major languages that should no longer be in use and adopt English (or perhaps Spanish). Why does Bulgaria need its own language? Or Romania, or Sweden? Why does French still exist? We're talking about efficiencies here, right? What's less efficient than people not being able to easily communicate by sharing a common language.<p>I always get a kick out of bringing this up, because while it's extraordinarily logical to narrow down dozens of languages to one or a few, people lose their minds about it and regard it as a sacred cultural issue that is to never be touched. Whereas converting to the metric system... well but of course, that only makes sense!
I prefer Imperial but I'd be willing to switch, provided we also switch to a new spelling and time system.<p>It's funny the same people that make fun of the Imperial system also cling to bad standards because they are more familiar and have a high switching cost.
The biggest liability of the metric system to me is its system of unit prefixes: this is just a bizarre reimplementation of scientific notation that expresses the most significant quantitative information not as part of the actual quantitative component of its notation, but as an arcane verbal prefix attached to the name of the thing being counted.<p>What on earth is the advantage of a notation that makes it easy to scale a value by an order of magnitude without having to alter its numeric representation?<p>This seems to be a much more significant "WTF" of the metric system than the fact that its base units don't seem to have any meaningful anchor in any substantive context.
I remember listening to this podcast a while back: <a href="http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/why-isnt-the-u-s-on-the-metric-system/" rel="nofollow">http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/why-isnt-the-u-s-...</a>
>> The Mars Climate Orbiter disintegrated due to an error introduced because its software used metric measures, while its ground crew used pound-force units.<p>There was an incident in 1983 where Air Canada Flight 143 ran out of fuel at 41,000 feet (12,500m) altitude [1] about half way through its flight. An investigation revealed that one of the cause was a conversion error between metric and non-metric units for the fuel loading calculation.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider</a>
The beauty of the old system was that it mapped onto the everyday experience of farmers. I am sure hundredweights and furlongs and so forth all made lots of sense. But units have to cross cultures and times — the only intuitive units left to boast about are the foot and the yard, which are 30cm and roughly a meter. Indeed, we are probably taller now than when the yard was defined to the extent that the meter is probably closer to an intuitive yard than the yard is.<p>Incidentally, the official definition of an inch is 2.54cm. Now that's intuitive.
The things that remain often get 10 ized. we have measuring tape with feet and tenths of feet. Inches are divided into mils (1000th of an inch). So we get base 10 with familiar units of measeure.
I wish the article had touched on temperature systems; I feel like Celsius is metric at its weakest. Farenheit has beautiful bands:<p><0: So cold it's off the scales<p>0's: So cold you have trouble doing anything and just want to warm up immediately<p>10's: Wear a ski jacket with hat and scarf and gloves<p>20's: Wear a ski jacket and hat<p>30's: Wear a ski jacket but leave it open<p>40's: Wear a wool overcoat<p>50's: Wear a heavy jacket<p>60's: Wear a light jacket<p>70's: Leave the jacket home<p>80's: Wear shorts<p>90's: So hot you have trouble doing anything and just want to cool down immediately<p>100+: So hot it's off the scales
As a guy with a chem degree, I prefer Metric in the lab, and Imperial (US) in the kitchen or workshop. It isn't really that hard to shift gears/units for your task.<p>Even better is when you learn to cook or build without measurement, just transferring sizes directly. See James Krenov on building a cabinet.
If we went metric on the interstates, exit 880 on Interstate 10 in Texas (at the Louisiana state line) would retain it's status as the highest numbered exit in North America. Only it'd be exit 1408.<p>(exits are generally numbered by their mile (err, kilometer..) marker in the US, not consecutively)
I've wanted the USA to finish going over to the metric system for about as long as I can remember. It annoys the heck out of me that I have to have two sets of tools at hand, have to determine if fasteners are one or the other (both in their threading and drive mechanism), etc.
Sort of related: Discussion of the Time Zone article mentioned:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8138200" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8138200</a>
A recent issue of Nature featured a 100 years ago in Nature clip that showed the USA thought it would be too hard to switch to the Metric system in 1914. 100 years and counting.
In an age where everyone carries a computer in their pocket, the metric system's only advantage (that it makes converting units easier) is irrelevant.
It drives me crazy that people think base 10 systems are so great. The choice of base 10 is so deeply irritating to me. Divisions of 60 are fantastic, obviously, and we all benefit from being able to divide an hour in to 5ths, 6ths ... Meanwhile splitting a check three ways is likely to always be uneven.<p>Base 12 or 60 end up being more precise in every day life, and i wish whoever thought up the metric system had been smart enough to realize that.
Even though I'm an ex-physicist where nearly everything was done in metric, I'm decidedly anti-metric. Most of the metric system has no empathy for the everyday life of humans and is better suited for making scientific equations easier. It is roughly the equivalent of choosing esperanto for consistency.