Something that you have to take in account is how expensive and difficult it would be to make the change to metric. the US is huge. changing every sign to Metric would take huge sums of money. And think of all the products that would become obsolete when we do change. If anything we are slowly adopting the metric system but it isn't happening overnight.
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Serious America and the metric system
- Thread starter Adamant Zoroark
- Start date
It certainly isn't happening overnight. Last time I checked, metrication happened overnight.... Nowhere.
The immediate costs of going metric are there. I'm not doubting that. But if these immediate costs of going metric are insignificant compared to the long-term costs of not going metric, then I think it'd be worth it to speed up the process.
Here's something interesting:
http://nonpartisaneducation.org/Review/Essays/v3n3.htm
Cut to this quote:
"It (USA education system) teaches two systems of measurement in the schools and, the confusion from learning two systems aside, there is a cost to the time spent in teaching two systems. A full year of mathematics instruction is lost to the duplication of effort."
While I'm not sure about the actual figure, the idea of losing mathematics instruction is huge. Less mathematics instruction due to having to teach two systems? I think that alone would make teaching only metric in schools an ideal change.
Obviously, Americans are too lazy to convert, since there's really no reason to not use metric once the switch is done. I admit that everything being so nicely organized is something I really only started to appreciate when I took my first physics class. When you're a common person who only works with length, volume, time, temperature and weight measurements, it's easy to keep track of the imperial system for your own use (and of those, temperature only has one unit per system, and time is the same in both systems). Throw in energy in various forms, force, pressure, electrical resistance, charge, etc. all with conversion factors pulled out of a monkey's ass and anyone would get confused. I don't even know the imperial units for any of those except force is pounds.
As for weird conversions, you get used to it. Sure a mile is 5280 feet because...uh...shit? But people are familiar with how big a foot is, and how big a mile is, and have enough sense to use a number of units someone can work with easily (ex. that house is 7 miles away, instead of saying 36960 feet to force someone to convert to miles to accurately imagine it). So most of the time, I don't care that a mile is some weird number of feet, because I just don't need to work with both units in any situation. Or if I do, I approximate with 5000 and it's not a big deal.
As for weird conversions, you get used to it. Sure a mile is 5280 feet because...uh...shit? But people are familiar with how big a foot is, and how big a mile is, and have enough sense to use a number of units someone can work with easily (ex. that house is 7 miles away, instead of saying 36960 feet to force someone to convert to miles to accurately imagine it). So most of the time, I don't care that a mile is some weird number of feet, because I just don't need to work with both units in any situation. Or if I do, I approximate with 5000 and it's not a big deal.
The only positive thing about the imperial system is that Fahrenheit is much more precise for weather readings.
It'd be lovely to have us swap over. But the only thing that bothers me is when people are all "HURR HURR 12 INCHES TO A FOOT? WTF IS THIS MADNESS?" A universal base 10 makes a lot of sense, but so does a lot of the imperial system's origins, which probably would have been much more useful in extremely ancient times.
Except oz-quart-pint-gallon. Screw that stuff.
And the slug? Our unit of mass is DEFINED by our fundamental units, and isn't a fundamental one itself? Absolutely unacceptable.
It'd be lovely to have us swap over. But the only thing that bothers me is when people are all "HURR HURR 12 INCHES TO A FOOT? WTF IS THIS MADNESS?" A universal base 10 makes a lot of sense, but so does a lot of the imperial system's origins, which probably would have been much more useful in extremely ancient times.
Except oz-quart-pint-gallon. Screw that stuff.
And the slug? Our unit of mass is DEFINED by our fundamental units, and isn't a fundamental one itself? Absolutely unacceptable.
As far as making sense of metric, it's completely arbitrary. The definition of a meter could not get more fucking convoluted and the cubic meter is way too large a volume for everyday reference. (At least grams are a bit more intuitive.) It's designed to be simple to convert between units, that's the easy part, compared to the Imperial system where you have 12 inches in a foot, three feet in a yard, etc. where you have to remember a lot more shit than "move the decimal over" to move between units. Growing up learning it and being used to using it doesn't make the metric system more intuitive than Imperial, though. Less intuitive but easier to convert between units, neither is "better" than the other.
I couldn't care less about the cost of the U.S. switching over but in all honesty, there's no reason to change either except for what basically amounts to international peer pressure. [Almost] everyone else uses the metric system, so we should too!
I couldn't care less about the cost of the U.S. switching over but in all honesty, there's no reason to change either except for what basically amounts to international peer pressure. [Almost] everyone else uses the metric system, so we should too!
And the Coulomb? Our unit of charge is DEFINED by our fundamental units, and isn't a fundamental one itself? Absolutely unacceptable.
Anyway, the reason America hasn't "converted" to metric is more or less the problem of switching a whole, relatively ingrained system over to another one. Metric is pretty much the only thing you use in any sort of scientific environment (believe me, it bothers me to see work in my math classes in foot-pounds), but you tend to use imperial in a few random areas - measurements of small lengths (feet / inches), large distances (miles) and measurement of temperature. It's used for small volume measurements for cooking, I guess.
With respect to measurement of small lengths, it's kinda trivial which you use and I'd even argue that it's more convenient to use feet, if only because the number of inches in a foot is divisible by a lot of numbers (due to the fact that we use a decimal system, it's divisible by all numbers from 2 to 6). For long distances, this is again something that you just kind of get a feel for; there's no particular advantage to measuring how long a trip is in kilometers over miles. For temperature, I think pretty much everybody is well aware that 32 F is 0. Smaller unit of temperature allows for a slightly more precise temperature reading with the same amount of significant figures.
On another note, as far as I know, a lot of various industries in America rely on imperial units for what they do; you're never going to see slugs or shit like that, but you'll certainly see pounds and (on occasion) more silly shit like the BTU. Again, this isn't something you can just magically will to change; as much as I wish I could magically convert every BTU value to kJ, it's not something that can be magically accomplished with legislation. A similar case could be made for street signs for speed limits.
I don't understand why people like to circlejerk so much about the topic of imperial vs. metric (I guess a lot of it is LE YUROP IS LITERALLY THE BEST LOL) and I frankly find it to be a stupid debate. America learns science in metric; I don't have any idea of any other place where it's extremely relevant which one you use. If I choose to measure my flour out in globnarks, does that make my system of globnarks, harkmans, and yortels any worse if it's convenient for me?
As far as making sense of metric, it's completely arbitrary. The definition of a meter could not get more fucking convoluted and the cubic meter is way too large a volume for everyday reference. (At least grams are a bit more intuitive.) It's designed to be simple to convert between units, that's the easy part, compared to the Imperial system where you have 12 inches in a foot, three feet in a yard, etc. where you have to remember a lot more shit than "move the decimal over" to move between units. Growing up learning it and being used to using it doesn't make the metric system more intuitive than Imperial, though. Less intuitive but easier to convert between units, neither is "better" than the other.
I couldn't care less about the cost of the U.S. switching over but in all honesty, there's no reason to change either except for what basically amounts to international peer pressure. [Almost] everyone else uses the metric system, so we should too!
How is imperial not arbitrary? Like, how is 3 barleycorns = 1 inch not arbitrarily defined? That seems pretty arbitrary to me. And how is metric "less intuitive?" I learned imperial and metric at the same exact time and found metric more intuitive. Also - Dare I say it - the inch is currently defined as... 25.4 millimeters. It's defined using the metric system!
I'm not really understanding this. Care to explain?
That's a conversion, absolutely not a definition. Yes, it is completely arbitrary. Both are. When you set a bunch of numbers to have some sort of non-natural meaning it's going to be arbitrary. It comes down to imperial's arbitrary conversion factors versus metric's arbitrary unit basis.
The reason the switch hasn't happened and will probably never happen is (as I said in a previous post that wasn't "Serious" enough for this thread) is that it would be expensive and tedious to replace all of America's infrastructure e.g. the highway system.
Actually I'm not joking - that's LITERALLY how the inch is defined (from the International yard and pound defining 1 yard as EXACTLY 0.9144 meters), and how it has been defined since 1959.
http://books.google.com/books?id=4aWN-VRV1AoC&pg=PA13#v=onepage&q&f=false
The inch existed before the meter, and it has been a twelfth of a foot since long before the metric system was conceived.
Yes, but how it's currently defined is based on the meter.
Either way, this is fucking pointless.
It's odd, I'd say we're still a mixture. I'd use metric (and don't know too well the imperial measures) for most things, but for someone's height it's still in feet and inches, distances(for journeys, ordinary maths is still metres) and speed are still in miles, and while I use kg myself I know a lot of people that still use stones/pounds even though I have no clue how they work. Oh, and penis size is still in inches! We do definitely use the metric system though, there're just some vestiges left clinging on.
Yes it could: a metre is simply "the distance travelled by light in a vacuum in one 299,792,458th of a second". Easy
Of course, now you have to define the second... that's "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of oscillation between the two hyperfine energy levels of the ground state of a caesium-133 atom at absolute zero". See, the metre actually has a pretty simple definition by comparison?
Btw America, note the correct spellings of "metre" and "travelled" (and "caesium", for that matter, but that's not a word you see in everyday parlance).
And aluminium? And colour, flavour, neighbour, etc.? And centre? And tyre? Jeez, this list of spelling differences between American English and British English is way too long...
If only there was some sort of pattern.
What I was getting at is that the definition of a meter has changed many times since its inception. Intuitively, everyone knows what a "foot" is. Regardless of the high variance of feet size between individuals, it makes sense to people. A foot is the size of a foot. What the fuck is a meter? It's a completely arbitrary construct. Even the original definition didn't make any damn sense to the average person.
The metric system is a base 10 decimal system used only for measurement of distance (meter) and mass (gram/kilogram). Time is not measured in metric, so yeah I could complain about that too but it's irrelevant to the topic. The original definition is fairly intuitive anyway, it's just 1/60 of 1/60 of a day. The atomic definition is recent and stems from a need for the scientific community to have a more precise definition of time, since the length of a "day" is not actually fixed.
"Everyone knows what a foot is?" That's a bold claim to make, considering over 90% of the world doesn't use the foot...
Also you forgot that the metric system measures volume too! Sorry, had to be pedantic.
Use of the metric system.
I think it's a side-effect of being at a competitive Pokemon website...
Short term pain, long term gain.
I think base 10 is extremely overrated. We should've moved on to base 16 numbers a long time ago, but NOOOOOO gotta hold onto tradition.
I'm still failing to see what benefit the average layperson would get from a switch to the metric system. Considering the fact that the sciences already work exclusively in metric, a switch just seems like unnecessary cost.
And why does it seem like every British person on this site feels the need to bitch about "correct" English spellings? "Center" is in the dictionary over here, it's pretty correct for us.
And why does it seem like every British person on this site feels the need to bitch about "correct" English spellings? "Center" is in the dictionary over here, it's pretty correct for us.
As a scientist I understand why the metric system is so much more efficient, but then again I'm a "power user," I don't see my Mom getting too much of a benefit from switching. The people that benefit from the metric system already use it, and changing it for everyone else would take a large amount of money and willpower that would be better spent on other things. On the list of problems in the US, I'm pretty sure our outdated measuring system is not in the top 10