Yeah, keep using that avoirdupois system and we’ll keep making fun of you.
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No kidding! All that extra sunshine is probably causing skin cancer. THANKS, OBAMA.
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I recently did a project where I sourced a juggling act of whatever obscure parts I could get, so I was using both metric and imperial, and holy cow, the problem with imperial in that situation is that even when working exclusively in imperial you’re still endlessly converting, because some imperial-only suppliers give their dimensions in computer-friendly imperial decimal (eg 0.556") while others give theirs in traditional imperial fractions (eg 7/32"), and I can’t plug them all together to apply the maths until all the dimensions are in the same number format. (So because imperial had become two systems requiring endless conversions anyway, the path of Least Conversions seemed to be just converted them to metric and be done with it, as that at least ensured that all metric dimensions were freebies.)
I also gained an appreciation for digital calipers (they do the conversion for you 
). I (ab)use them a bit like a physical calculator now. Ima call it my 21st century slide rule
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Whatever you say.
However the authorities choose to handle it, have fun with your endless (and mostly pointless) personal conversions.
No point continuing …
No, I’d suggest following what Russia did - keep daylight savings (it’s awesome) and abolish regular time.
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Even though Canada switched over to metric (in theory) in the 1970’s, we still use a lot of Imperial measurements. It gets even more confusing when you consider that US measurements and Imperial measurements aren’t always the same. An Imperial gallon is 4.54 L and a US gallon is 3.78 L. I measure my height in feet and inches and my weight in pounds.
Here’s where metric is much easier than the US or Imperial system. I recently had to have a sensor on top of my gas tank changed to pass an emissions test. Doing that required the mechanic to lower the gas tank and he wanted to know about how much gas was in there. I could estimate there was around 10 to 12 L of gas (About 2 and 2/3 to 3 and 1/4 US gallons). In metric, 1 L of water is 1 kilogram. For a rough guess, gas is probably close enough to water’s weight so I could figure out that there was about 10 to 12 kg of gas in the tank (22 to 26 pounds). Try doing that with gallons and pounds.
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Pint is a pound the world around. Sounds like you had 3 gallons of gas, 2 pints to the quart, 4 quarts to the gallon, so 8#/gallon, which works out to around 24# of gas. It wasn’t hard to do in my head, but definitely more annoying (I have a BS in physics and was brought up in the US, so I’m pretty conversant in both systems; metric is better).
You’re correct about the conversions 10cm^2=1L=1KG h20, though petrol/diesel tend to run in the 75-85% density of water.
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The children of Davenport, Iowa have always been at an advantage when it comes to remembering the number of feet in a mile, because the nine zipcodes for Davenport are 52801 through 52809. Just lop off the last digit!
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Citation needed. I have done it both ways, and in my experience unskilled laborers are far more capable of managing a system with more whole divisors. They don’t understand how to measure a third of a base ten unit, but they easily measure a third of a base twelve unit. People who carry stone for masons and mix mud by shovel proportions are not highly skilled in math, and those people can do more if you give them a system that requires less math skill.
People who are stupid at math need jobs too, and may be perfectly capable of building a beautiful house without knowing about repeating decimals and the accumulated error they can cause along an architectural face. But you are right - we are eliminating jobs for the less mentally gifted, so we will probably eventually go metric and put two-thirds of the mason’s helpers (who are chosen for brawn, not brain) out of work. We can use robots instead and put the less talented underclasses on the dole, right?
I understand the tool frustration, though; I have two wrench rolls that are annoying heavy.
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I think we should remove the English measures starting with one kindergarten or first grade year; and move it along each year… Sometime in late elementary school or in junior high / middle school introduce conversion from metric to English but continue with metric as the primary form of units. It will take a little more than a decade, but finally we’ll be metric.
I think that would be a good way to harm children for the sake of ideology. Put 'er right up there with outlawing the teaching of evolution and make 'em learn the Only True Way.
Which is why the statute mile is about 1/8" off of an international mile.
When I do that particular job, I just bang on the side of the tank and listen to make sure it’s only around a quarter full. This sometimes has the side effect of fixing the problem.
Dear America,
Please follow the example set by your soldiers, astronauts, scientists, mathematicians, doctors, pharmacists, etc. and do the switch to the metric system. We did it in Canada 35+ years ago and it was a bit painful. There are still holdouts (mostly older people) and certain things we still talk about generally in the older units – but those are usually not specific numeric amounts but more figurative (e.g. ‘I traveled too many miles today’).
You will get through it and everyone will be better off because if it.
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I’ve always though that 0 being (water) freezing made far more sense than 32. what corresponds to fahrenheit’s 0? anything?
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Science is conducted using the language of SI units. If we want to have a scientifically literate populace, we should make sure that scientists and non-scientists speak the same language.
Statements like this make it seem like every scientist is using the same units … which is nothing like what I experienced as a graduate student. I would routinely switch between MHz, wavenumbers, and atomic units when describing energy separations. Would people outside AMO be very familiar with all those units of measurement? Or would they be using stuff that I never bothered with?
Freezing of brine (which is easier to make than pure water). For its time the Fahrenheit scale made a lot of sense.
As you would know, wavenumbers are inverse metric length, with physical constants (planck’s constant and the speed of light) as scaling factors. It’s not a fundamental unit, it’s more like an abbreviation, just as the “c” in cm is an abbreviation for “*10^-2”.
Physicists also use natural units where the speed of light or other constants equal 1, for making quick math easier.
So yeah, there will (and should, until the day the human brain comes with built-in mathematica and matlab) always be custom units for making specific tasks easier. But for public measurements like height, and temperature (for weather anyway) it’s good to have a fixed, global standard.
Personally by senior year I started thinking in a mix of Farenheit and Kelvin, and have to mentally convert from Kelvin to Celsius when talking to a lot of people. Too much stat mech will do that.
