Without government intervention, would the U.S. be metric by now?

[Krugerrand]

Body parts sound more impressive when measured in metric.

 

[ShaneEnochs]

I remember when I was in 7th grade, which was eleven years ago, my math teacher told us that within the next three to five years, we would all be using the metric system. So we learned it, and I hated every second of it.

Even if it would make certain things easier to switch, I like the system that we use, and I would prefer to keep using it.

 

[Demigod]

To fishamor and kruger

So your only argument against the metric system is that the Imperial is easier for ordinary people to understand which is total nonsense.Neither system is more complicated than the other,it is just which one you are used to measure things in.

For example when you want to measure distance you measure it in yards and miles because as you say you can "measure" it with body parts,but you can do the same with the metric.For example I always thought that the conversion in the Imperial is total stupidity with no whole numbers always going into 3 decimals to convert even the most simple things.


It is all a habit.

 

[Krugerrand]

To fishamor and kruger

So your only argument against the metric system is that the Imperial is easier for ordinary people to understand which is total nonsense.Neither system is more complicated than the other,it is just which one you are used to measure things in.

For example when you want to measure distance you measure it in yards and miles because as you say you can "measure" it with body parts,but you can do the same with the metric.For example I always thought that the conversion in the Imperial is total stupidity with no whole numbers always going into 3 decimals to convert even the most simple things.


It is all a habit.

Why do you not use a metric clock?

 

[Krugerrand]

Oh ... and another thing for the metric fans ... why no metric circle? Why not divide a circle into 100 degree?

360 degrees is DRASTICALLY more useful.

In a 100 degree circle, common angles would change to:

90 - 25
45 - 12.5
30 - 8.333333333333333

 

[Demigod]

Why do you not use a metric clock?

I have never seen one and because everyone else use the 24 one.It would just make things complicated for no reason.

 

[fisharmor]

To fishamor and kruger

So your only argument against the metric system is that the Imperial is easier for ordinary people to understand which is total nonsense.Neither system is more complicated than the other,it is just which one you are used to measure things in.

I said nothing of the sort.
My point is that whiz-bang professors with eight years of college like the metric system so that they don't fuck up some elementary arithmetic, and try to convince the rest of us to use it for that exact same reason.
The rest of society, being the uneducated savages they are, choose simply not to fuck up the elementary arithmetic.

If there's resistance to metric, it's because I believe most people just aren't that stupid and are sick of being told they are.

 

[oyarde]

Oh ... and another thing for the metric fans ... why no metric circle? Why not divide a circle into 100 degree?

360 degrees is DRASTICALLY more useful.

In a 100 degree circle, common angles would change to:

90 - 25
45 - 12.5
30 - 8.333333333333333

For a compass , 6400 mils ?

 

[oyarde]

Are you putting objects in orbit? By all means, use metric. I'm sure it'll keep people with effing PhD's from making elementary conversion errors that cause the loss of a couple hundred pounds of metal.

Are you putting up a 20 story high-rise apartment complex, and relying on the fact that it's not going to collapse and kill hundreds of people?
SAE seems to be good enough for a bunch of belly-scratching hillbillies and illegal immigrants to get the job done.

, my belly does not itch today .

 

[Anti Federalist]

Is it just me, or is nobody learning or using fractions anymore?

Its two and half feet, not 2.5.

And engines for me, will always in cid. Fuck a bunch of liters.

Now, I say we all go to metric time.

Like, right now, it's just past 1300 EST.

Little over half the day down. 65 minutes past five.

ETA - I see I'm 100 minutes late to the punch, Kruggerand already addressed this.

 

[BamaAla]

If we were going to switch, wouldn't SI be preferable to metric?

 

[BamaAla]

I have never seen one and because everyone else use the 24 one.It would just make things complicated for no reason.

I studied abroad in Sweden during college and had a mishap with a 24 hour clock. We had gone out on the first night there and when it was over we were waiting at the bus stop to get home. The times were in 24 hour format and we were waiting for the :15 bus at around 11 o'clock. About 45 minutes into waiting, we asked the natives also waiting what the problem was as we had already been waiting 45 minutes for a bus that was supposed to arrive in 15 minutes. They laughingly informed us that the bus was going to arrive at :15...12:15. That was almost as embarrassing as mistakenly walking into (and using) the girls toilet at the theater because I had mistaken it for a co-ed bathroom like in the metro stations :o

 

[Demigod]

I studied abroad in Sweden during college and had a mishap with a 24 hour clock. We had gone out on the first night there and when it was over we were waiting at the bus stop to get home. The times were in 24 hour format and we were waiting for the :15 bus at around 11 o'clock. About 45 minutes into waiting, we asked the natives also waiting what the problem was as we had already been waiting 45 minutes for a bus that was supposed to arrive in 15 minutes. They laughingly informed us that the bus was going to arrive at :15...12:15. That was almost as embarrassing as mistakenly walking into (and using) the girls toilet at the theater because I had mistaken it for a co-ed bathroom like in the metro stations :o

Using the girls toilet is nothing to be ashamed off ( if you are drunk ) It could be said it is even tradition.

On the other hand the clock thing has no excuse .

 

[oyarde]

Is it just me, or is nobody learning or using fractions anymore?

Its two and half feet, not 2.5.

And engines for me, will always in cid. Fuck a bunch of liters.

Now, I say we all go to metric time.

Like, right now, it's just past 1300 EST.

Little over half the day down. 65 minutes past five.

ETA - I see I'm 100 minutes late to the punch, Kruggerand already addressed this.

I am good with two and a half feet , I have 1328 on the laptap. That is what I use at work too.

 

[Krugerrand]

I said nothing of the sort.
My point is that whiz-bang professors with eight years of college like the metric system so that they don't fuck up some elementary arithmetic, and try to convince the rest of us to use it for that exact same reason.
The rest of society, being the uneducated savages they are, choose simply not to fuck up the elementary arithmetic.

If there's resistance to metric, it's because I believe most people just aren't that stupid and are sick of being told they are.

I would add that I also did not advocate Imperial as easier to understand. I argued that it is more USEFUL. Clearly everything divides by 10 is EASIER to understand. 16 Tablespoons or 48 teaspoons/cup, 2 cups/pint, 2 pints/quart, 4 quarts/gallon, 2 gallons/peck, 4 pecks/bushel clearly requires more thinking than slide a decimal 1 place. However these are USEFUL units of measurement. In fact, one of the biggest arguments FOR metric is that then people don't have to think about it.

 

[The Free Hornet]

Are you putting objects in orbit? By all means, use metric. I'm sure it'll keep people with effing PhD's from making elementary conversion errors that cause the loss of a couple hundred pounds of metal.

Are you putting up a 20 story high-rise apartment complex, and relying on the fact that it's not going to collapse and kill hundreds of people?
SAE seems to be good enough for a bunch of belly-scratching hillbillies and illegal immigrants to get the job done.

Using one system or the other does not avoid unit conversions. They messed up on that Mars probe. Despite this debate, all scientists should know which units they are using and how to convert from one to the other.

In many engineering and science classes, I/we were able to infer the formulas - and thus the answers - by knowing the units. If you keep them straight, you are less l ikely to screw up. The error is best described as "human error". Take a formula for distance traveled, x (meters). You are given velocity, v (meters/second) and time, t (seconds). When you multiple "v" and "t", the seconds cancel out leaving the unit of the desired answer, x (meters). You don't need to remember that x = vt.

Your high-rise apartment is a more interesting example. To me, there is little point in converting the sizes we use to metric. E.g., I would not want to buy a 12.7 mm bolt. Although that is a size given in metric that corresponds to 1/2 inch, the practical alternative would be a 12 mm bolt. How much re-engineering has to be done to convert our lumber, electrical, plumbing, networking, our PCs (which use both a standard and metric screw).

It only makes sense to be metric if we re-tool and re-size the millions of non-metric parts we use. People who think this is about driving 55 mph or weighing 200 pounds don't know the 1% of it.

In this sense, I think the government is a hinderance in that it often mandates certain non-metric standards (like building codes or labeling requirements) without a metric equivalent. That said, the notion that the US is not metric because the government hasn't mandated such, is simply fascist nonsense.

For some reason, it is lauded to be bilingual but a hilljack with metric and SAE tools is somehow backwards.

Who applauds France or Quebec for mandating the use of French? The only mandate is not being fraudulent and we cracked that nut a long time ago.

 

[Anti Federalist]

Easier to use?

Bullshit, the Europeans seem to be leading the way in coming up with more and more obscure and confusing "metric" measurement systems every day that goes by.

For instance, measure system pressure in "bars". Entirely unsuitable for most applications as the unit is too large.

For wind speed, not MPH, not even knots, but "meters per second".

Volume measurements in "cubic meters" instead of barrels, gallons or even liters which I could deal with.

Weights not in pounds or tons or even kilograms, but in stress force measurements as Kilo/Newtons, almost impossible to convert.

 

[Krugerrand]

Is it just me, or is nobody learning or using fractions anymore?

Its two and half feet, not 2.5.

And engines for me, will always in cid. Fuck a bunch of liters.

Now, I say we all go to metric time.

Like, right now, it's just past 1300 EST.

Little over half the day down. 65 minutes past five.

ETA - I see I'm 100 minutes late to the punch, Kruggerand already addressed this.

Isn't it amazing we could go 100 years as a country without our government dictating time to us.

http://www.pitt.edu/~aobsvtry/history.html
By May 1867 interest in the observatory had waned and the declining membership, being in debt, voted to donate the telescope and observatory building to the Western University of Pennsylvania, later to become the University of Pittsburgh. In that same year the observatory was infused with new life through the appointment of Professor S.P. Langley as Director of the Observatory and Professor of Astro-Physics. The observatory received new scientific direction. Langley used the telescope to study the sun, especially sunspots and heat from different parts of the solar spectrum. At last true research had come to the Allegheny Observatory .

Through the friendship and aid of William Thaw, a Pittsburgh industrial leader, Langley was able to improve the observatory equipment and build additional apparati. One of the new instruments was a small transit telescope used to observe the position of the stars as they cross the celestial meridian. With this instrument Langley obtained accurate time. Realizing the need many industries, especially the railroads, had for accurate, uniform time, Langley arranged to send time to subscribers through the telegraph.

The money paid by these users, nearly $3000 annually, helped finance the observatory's research, pay staff salaries, and help maintain the building. One of Langley's greatest interests was to see the observatory put on sound financial footing.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/03/0330_040330_daylightsavings.html
In 1883 the U.S. railroad industry established official time zones with a set standard time within each zone. Congress eventually came on board, signing the railroad time zone system into law in 1918.

Weren't those early 1900's grand?

 

[Demigod]

Easier to use?

Bullshit, the Europeans seem to be leading the way in coming up with more and more obscure and confusing "metric" measurement systems every day that goes by.

For instance, measure system pressure in "bars". Entirely unsuitable for most applications as the unit is too large.

For wind speed, not MPH, not even knots, but "meters per second".

Volume measurements in "cubic meters" instead of barrels, gallons or even liters which I could deal with.

Weights not in pounds or tons or even kilograms, but in stress force measurements as Kilo/Newtons, almost impossible to convert.

Wind:

First we measure wind speed in km/hour which is just like measuring in miles per hour,measuring in meters per second is just converting the km in meters (1= 1000 ) and hours in seconds.Maybe some weather forecasters use it meters per hour because the numbers are bigger and they think that makes the news more sensational.


Volume:

Liter represents one cubic decimeter.I read someone here said that one liter is equal to 1 kg but that is only true if you take one litter of water and it is more close to 0.98 kg.

Also measuring volume in cubic meters is the most practical.You can not say this warehouse is 1000 liters or barrels big.


Weight:


It is always taken in kilograms and I don't even understand why would anyone put it in newtons when newtons is a force measurement .I think that you may have confused weight and mass. The mass of one kilogram is equal to 1 liter ( 10 cubic decimeters of water at normal pressure and at a temperature of 4 degrees Celsius ) while weight is a force that is given to the mass by the gravitational pull that is measured in Newtons.

So one kg of mass on earth has around 9.8 newtons but instead of newtons we use kilograms

It is very simple

 

[Krugerrand]

Wind:

First we measure wind speed in km/hour which is just like measuring in miles per hour,measuring in meters per second is just converting the km in meters (1= 1000 ) and hours in seconds.Maybe some weather forecasters use it meters per hour because the numbers are bigger and they think that makes the news more sensational.


Volume:

Liter represents one cubic decimeter.I read someone here said that one liter is equal to 1 kg but that is only true if you take one litter of water and it is more close to 0.98 kg.

Also measuring volume in cubic meters is the most practical.You can not say this warehouse is 1000 liters or barrels big.


Weight:


It is always taken in kilograms and I don't even understand why would anyone put it in newtons when newtons is a force .

60 seconds / 1 minutes, 60 minutes / 1 hour, 24 hours/1 day. Sorry - why use a half 10-based system and pretend it is truly metric?

At least you can admit that your units are not practical.