Man, the progressive school (Comanche Elementary in Overland Park, Kansas!) must have had a huge impact on my life. In addition to open classrooms (I was in Unit 5, not 4th Grade), team teaching, a focus on experimental science, a circular layout to the school with a sunken (architecturally) library in the center…
Yeah, we went over the Metric System that whole year. I can still sing the "Metric Family" song from the film on metric units ("Kilo", "Milli", etc.). And to my young and impressionable mind, the U.S. was joining the rest of the "Free World" in a kind of Star-Trek-like casting aside of the old things that divided us—joining each other with a focus on progress, science, space…
President Carter came along around the same time or shortly after. And I have a photo of a family road trip to South Dakota, Montana: the sign that indicates the altitude of a particular mountain pass has both feet and meters. I Google-mapped the same location recently and of course it's no longer in meters.
I feel like in my elementary school days (the 1970's) the U.S. was on the cusp of a future of optimism—no doubt buoyed by having put astronauts on the Moon, but I was wildly on board for it.
But then some kind of shit seemingly started to poison the country. I don't feel we have ever returned to that level of national optimism. Perhaps 1976, the Bicentennial, was the end of it. (Recently watching the film "Nashville" brought me back a bit of the vibe of the times.)
I've been missing it my entire life since.
* (From my viewpoint as a millennial. Gen Z might think the golden years were during Obama, or just pre-COVID. To some extent every generation has a point in time that they see with rose tinted lenses.)
I’ve always found this peculiar because at times I have felt the same, but reflecting over the years and I guess as my mind settling on lived experience and opinions I’ve come to appreciate the Imperial system far more precisely because of its absurdities but also because of its history and usefulness without instrument.
As someone who, well, finds say Renaissance or Impressionist art to so far be the peak of human artistry, I find the imperial system fits in better with that warmth of humanity in contrast to Frank Lloyd Wright, Banksy, minimalism, and the cold calculation of the more “scientific” metric system.
Underneath that all is also this view that the United States at least needs to “join the world” and adopt Metric, and soccer, and such and I find myself increasingly rejecting both and other similar notions in favor of cultural uniqueness and fun over conformity.
I hope we never change sustems, and I don’t think we will anytime soon. If we do, however, we should not switch to Celsius because the useful scale of Fahrenheit is far superior 0-100 versus 0-32. Celsius isn’t very Metric-y.
Fahrenheit has more precision without using decimals for the thing 99% of people are using temperature measurements for: air temp. Where I live, we generally experience 5 degrees F - 100 degrees F at different points of the year. That's 95 degrees of precision with no decimal. In C, that's -15 to 37.8, a mere 52.8 degrees. The difference between 75 (usually a beautiful day) and 85 (hot) is 23.8C to 29.4C. Everything packed into this tight range.
Inches/feet being base 12 divides better into thirds and fourths, which is very useful in construction.
For science, sure, I'll use metric.
0°C.................100°C
Cold Dead
0°F.................100°F
Really Cold Really HotAnd I just poke my nose out the window and look outside to see what the temperature is
Freezing.... ~30°F.... ~0°C
Need coat... ~50°F... ~10°C
T-shirt..... ~70°F... ~20°C
Melting..... ~90°F... ~30°C
ps HN tables are not really a thing, are they?
pps Suspiciously many experiments are conducted at 293K
That's really just because you're used to it. The rest is rationalization...
OTH of course the rest of the world can hardly complain since we didn't switch time or (angle-)degrees to decimal either ;)
So long as we live on earth, metric time won't make much sense.
AS someone that grew up with metric that feels fairly natural and not tight at all?
>Inches/feet being base 12 divides better into thirds and fourths, which is very useful in construction.
I used ruler tapes with both metric and imperial on either side and i always wondered how one could use the inches since they're so big and didn't always have the same minute subdivisions. Also doing my math in decimals seemed easier than calculating with quarter or 1/8th inches or smaller.
>For science, sure, I'll use metric.
Surely it would feel more natural to use the same for everything and all measurements.
I want to know how much rainwater my IBC roughly holds. I take out my measuring tape real quick. I'm not even sure how I'd get started in imperial without some strong intuition build up over years?
Really all there is to that discussion.
Your tape measure didn't have 1/3, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, and 1/32 subdivisions? Sounds like a bad tape measure (or really just one where US Customary was an afterthought).
As for science, well, most people don't do it. Those that do can use different things in different contexts, it's not that hard.
I think one of em did and the other didn't. Either way it seems far more difficult to do some math with.
But if it was closer to freezing say 42°F =5.556 °C (again) so 5°C. So arbitrarily we could say 57°F was 12°C =53.6 °F actually.
But a true Canuck knows knowing the temp is barely half the battle, what’s the wind speed and humidity? 29°C can be a lovely day if it’s dry or completely unbearable if it’s humid.
We hardly ever use decimals for weather-related measurements, the other factors above being more relevant.
Contrast that with measurements where I would say if you need to know a precise one you should be using decimal; ie what do you do if it doesn’t precisely third or fourth? If you’re talking about tool sizes then any system works as long as your froodle matches the grommlet.
I wonder if there's a place on the internet where I can find more of this sort of seemingly strong and well-thought out arguments for something that is so clearly subjective (if not just inferior).
For those wondering why there is this distinction, the British Imperial units were created by the Weights and Measures Act 1824; US customary units follow the Winchester Standard of 1588.
Road signs are still in miles.
We also use Pints in pubs, which are a different size to US pints.
And so we should.
A British pint is 568 ml. We will switch to metric 500 ml 'half-litre' beers over my dead body.
All other imperial measurements can bugger off to the history books where they rightly belong.
That said, I exclusively drink pints in pubs.
If the government was competent, they could rip off the bandaid and everyone would adapt within a year or two, but we need to wait at least 3 years for that to even begin to become a possibility again.
Weights are even easier as pretty much everyone uses grams as the smallest daily unit and most people can convert to and from metric on the fly for ounces, lbs, kgs. Liters aren't uncommon, and ml<->gram equivalence for water is well-known. Traditional kitchen volumes probably wouldn't be displaced because metric has no answer for those in first place.
Temperature is where metric will fail to gain adoption because Celsius totally sucks unless your daily life consists only of boiling or freezing water at sea level. No advantages over Fahrenheit except maybe arguably for science, because it's Kelvin with an offset.
Perhaps as a compromise we could adopt the meter but divide it by halves, quarters, and so on. Binary fractions are so much more universal than arbitrary base ten ;)
I guess you imagine we’ll all be calling half inch pipe twelve seven after this year adjustment period?
I guess people do it with bullet calibers.
https://www.nist.gov/blogs/taking-measure/pirates-caribbean-...
Or are they more like t-shirt sizes "I know I want a 16oz can to drink and I know how big they are"?
This is sadly far from the truth. Manufacturing is nowhere near metric conversion. Horsepower, foot-pounds, and my all time least favorite unit, the mil, are everywhere. And relatedly, manufacturing execution systems that use localtime internally cause all manner of hilarity twice a year. It’s like we’re just deliberately trying to be bad at measuring things.
Unless someone comes along and forces it on you, for the average person, there’s not enough incentive to switch.
Oh, and fahrenheit, what the hell it means? 0ºC means ice, 100ºC means boiling water, 40º feels summer around here..
I guess I'm saying that you understand the values of the imperial system because you're used to them, as I'm used to values in the metric system..
Feet are slightly more convent for declining human sized things because meters are just a little too big to describe human height and centimeters are a bit you
If you were designing a system to describe humans with no other consideration you’d probably pick one where 10 units was the average human height. And feet is closer to that than meters. Also you can divide 12 by 6 and 3.
I’m not saying that customary is superior just that it does has certain advantages.
To you, a 0-100 scale makes sense but to me it doesn't because 0f (-17c) is way rarer of a temp than 100f (38c).
Anyway, from the metric perspective, most people look at it like... 0 is coat and boots weather, + 10 degrees is jacket weather, + 10 degrees is t-shirt weather, and + 10 degrees is hot. IMO, using "freezing" as the reference kinda makes sense...
And 1/10 of an inch is a very common distance in electronics (PCBs)
For someone like me living in a country with the metric system there's no issues with negative values for the temperature. It just mean it's below freezing, which is cold, the more below freezing it is, the colder it is. And inversely the more above freezing it is, the hotter it is. For me 20C feels good, 30C is too hot, 40C is at the point where I can't work anymore, and anything above that doesn't exist around here. 100C is where water is boiling at sea level. Easy.
Another thing that's interesting to me is that going from 300m to 0.3km is automatic, it maps to exactly the same concept to me in my mind, I don't feel like I'm doing any conversion at all and one is not harder to use than the other.
And choice of 0/100 for weather is absolutely baseless. You do have below-zero days and in some places it can be over 100. With Celsius you know when it’s going to be ice on the roads and when rain becomes snow.
The other part, which I'm sympathetic to, is that for human scale everyday things, Fahrenheit 0 degrees lines up with really darned cold, 100 degrees with really hot outside of an oven, and the degree size is about twice as granular as Celsius.
And while Celsius degree size is indeed widely used in engineering calculations, you're often using Kelvin as the absolute temperature scale. (Which does use Celsius degree increments of course.)
And then they'll argue that the inch is more convenient than the centimeter because it's twice as large.
That's backwards. Fractions of an inch are in far more common usage than fractions of a centigrade.
And that's only length. It gets worse outside of length. Like WTF is an ounce?
Not for engineering though!!! Being able to add 1/64 and 5/16 and 17/32 etc. in your head without stumbling is a skill that I did not acquire.
Don't agree on the Fahrenheit though and for the same reason! Degrees are just the right scale, and besides, anchored at freezing (0) and typical boiling (100) points. But that's just habits. Probably if I'd grown up with Fahrenheit, I'd prefer it too. And besides the oven defaulted to Fahrenheit and we never changed it. 350F...
On Fahrenheit, the Americans are surely right. For describing the weather, a system where the usual range is 30-100 is clearly more useful than one where it's 0-37, because you can say "high 70s" instead of the weirdly specific "about 27", and "low 40s" instead of the awkward "around 5 to 7".
I say this as a European who has never used Fahrenheit.
I have no clue what the origin is of this myth, but at this point I wouldn't be surprised if Trump held this belief too.
So no, as a human being, I'm fine with base 10.
As for changing the world to counting in base 12, yes there would be some advantages, but really, good luck with that.
https://www.wikihow.com/Multiply-With-Your-Hands
Those techniques can be useful. If you add toes, multiplying numbers up to 20 (like 16x18) is easy.
Now if we used base 12 numbers instead of base 10, and we had a system of units based on that, I bet we’d have the best of both worlds. No idea if Napoleon could have imposed base 12 arithmetic on most of Europe the way he did metric, though.
When things are not nice round units though both systems are equally hard. This is common in the modern world where we do a lot of things impossible 200 years ago.
in reality you almost never calculate on the job. You measure what is on the print and anything not on the print is figured out 'when you get there' by measuring the space left when you get there - which also corrects for previous measurement errors