The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)
thefabricator.com"Back when I was a Catholic-school kid in northern Wisconsin, my school lessons briefly focused on the metric system. This was in the late 1970s."
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.
It was there again in the 90s after the wall fell. Fukuyama was boldly proclaiming the “end of history.” Newt started to kick at the edges with his combative policies but the inertia continued until the dotcom crash and 9/11 came along, and fully ended with the Great Recession.*
* (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.)
>> It was there again in the 90s after the wall fell.
Don't forget that connecting everyone to the internet was going to produce world peace, utopia, universal education and understanding. Instead of creating a conduit for memetic viruses to infect the world at unprecedented speed.
What we failed to see through our hope-colored glasses, is that the same Internet that lets a gay teenager in rural Arkansas or Iran, also lets the fascists connect to one another.
> (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.)
Of course they do. It's the formative years & youth. Roughly from the time you form a mature consciousness (12-14 yo) to roughly your late 20s or maybe early 30s when all your tastes, preferences etc. are formed.
Oh that is definitely part of it. But new generations also don’t have a point of reference. I certainly don’t know if the 70s or the 80s were truly that great. Outside economic and social indicators (income, life expectancy — all of which should arguably carry more weight anywa) it’s difficult to argue against something if you never experienced it.
For Americans the 1970s were pretty terrible all around when compared to the other decades in the latter half of the 20th century. The 1980s are broadly viewed as a positive decade, albeit not an impactful decade, but the context for that perspective is coming out of a terrible 1970s.
> not an impactful decade
The Trump reign is a direct consequence of 1980s Social and Economic policy.
Although the libertarian hellscape vision of the 1980s would reject state ownership of (for instance) Intel, it might embrace the Chevron ownership of the state.
The Daily Show did a segment on this. I can't find the clip but the title was "Even Better Than the Real Thing" and it was with John Oliver. Anyway the conclusion was "the good old days when life was simpler" are inevitably "when you were a child" -- it would be interesting to see how that holds up with others
The US Metric Board was cancelled in 1982 by one Ronald Wilson Reagan (anagram: Insane Anglo Warlord).
RWR and the charismatic traditionalism he espoused have caused a great deal of harm to American society.
Metrication is not at the top of that list, but it is one of many examples that we still live with today.
>> But then [post-1970s] some kind of shit seemingly started to poison the country.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ - the oil ran out and the post-war boom ended.
If you think being tethered to gold was a good thing I wonder if you also believe wealth is a zero-sum proposal? I would think that the explosive growth of wealth since 1971 would cause most to rethink that.
>> If you think being tethered to gold was a good thing
I wouldn't say that. But the memes about 1971 are striking.
>> I wonder if you also believe wealth is a zero-sum proposal
I don't know where that comes from. Pretty clearly it's not. Building stuff that multiplies labor productivity produces more wealth for everyone.
I think the issue in 1971 wasn't the end of the gold standard per se, but the end of the post-war reconstruction boom, the end of cheap oil subsidizing literally everything, and what I didn't mention in my original comment but it also highly relevant is the drastic lowering of top tax rates.
Wealth isn't zero-sum, but dividing up the share of the newly created wealth is. The more of it that goes to capital instead of labor, the more of that share of productivity growth is captured by the rich instead of the workers, who end up not sharing in the broader prosperity of society.
You mean, cheap oil ran out. Also, the last remaining sort-of-gold-standard was abolished, so the money printer could go brrr without much restrain, as needed.
> 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 an impressionable mind, the U.S. was joining the rest of the world "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…
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.
> I find the imperial system fits in better with that warmth of humanity
Right, so you enjoy warmth such as: 1 foot = 12 inches, 1 stone = 14 pounds, 1 pound = 16 ounces. Lots of useless names and numbers to memorize compared to kilo = 1000, milli = 0.001.
> in favor of cultural uniqueness and fun over conformity
You're writing in impeccable English. As we know, English is an international language and most definitely not the pinnacle of cultural uniqueness or non-conformity. Why not adopt a more esoteric and fun language for yourself such as, who knows, Esperanto, Lojban, Klingon, etc.?
> in contrast to [...] the cold calculation of the more “scientific” metric system
Decimals are optimized for cold calculation, yes. Would you like to use a monetary system based on pounds, shillings, and pence - like the UK and Australia right into the 20th century? Did you know that the New York Stock Exchange traded in increments of $1/8 and later $1/16, before fully decimalizing?
The pre decimal systems were built with lots of prime factors. The divisions were less obvious but arguably more convenient (it's often simpler to separate something into 8ths than 10ths, and so on).
> Right, so you enjoy warmth such as: 1 foot = 12 inches, 1 stone = 14 pounds, 1 pound = 16 ounces. Lots of useless facts to memorize compared to kilo = 1000, milli = 0.001.
Most of life is just useless facts, I think it's fun and I enjoy it.
> You're writing in impeccable English. As we know, English is an international language and most definitely not the pinnacle of cultural uniqueness or non-conformity. Why not adopt a more esoteric and fun language for yourself such as, who knows, Esperanto, Lojban, Klingon, etc.?
I've been learning French actually and have really enjoyed it. When I was in France recently I was able to put some of those skills to the test and found it fun and interesting to see how both difficult, and in some other cases, incredibly easy to fit in even with knowing maybe a hundred or so words and basic grammar. I speak English since that was what I grew up with. English is actually pretty fun as a language too because of the chaos of the very language itself. Read vs read, &c.
But all cultures have some things that are unique and also not very unique about them. I'm not sure why we can't just have our measuring system like we do today and that's just one unique thing about the United States.
To turn this around the other way, maybe everyone should just eat at McDonalds and conform to what's most popular and efficient?
> Decimals are optimized for cold calculation, yes. Would you like to use a monetary system based on pounds, shillings, and pence - like the UK and Australia right into the 20th century? Did you know that the New York Stock Exchange traded in increments of $1/8 and later $1/16, before fully decimalizing?
Yea sure. How many basis points is $1/8?
Basis points are a ratio (1/100 of a percent), not an amount.
I enjoy the warmth of the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second, or as me and my friends call it: a Meter.
For those who don't know: The original definition of a metre is 1/40 000 000th of a full circle of longitude of Earth. That was considered not accurate enough, so it was redefined as the length of a certain metallic bar kept in Paris. Then it was defined in terms of wavelengths of krypton light. Finally, it was redefined in relation to the speed of light.
But each time the metre was redefined, the new definition was within the error bounds of the previous definition and the instruments that could be used within the previous definition - this ensured that backwards compatibility was retained. That's how we end up with these weird-looking numbers; it's not for fun and games.
Meanwhile, backwards compatibility was absolutely broken many times in traditional and imperial measurement systems. Heck, we have a break even in recent history: The survey foot has been discontinued in terms of the international foot, but they differ by 2 parts per million. That might not sound like much, but if you're measuring a whole continent, then being wrong by 2 ppm over 3000 km means having a discrepancy of 6 m, which is more than enough to fit an extra house in.
> For those who don't know: The original definition of a metre is 1/40 000 000th of a full circle of longitude of Earth.
That’s incorrect. It’s “one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle through Paris” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre). Different fraction, and much better defined (different circles of longitude may have different lengths)
> That was considered not accurate enough, so it was redefined as the length of a certain metallic bar kept in Paris.
I can’t find a reference, but I think it at least partially was a matter of practicality, not of accuracy. It’s not simple to measure that 10,000 km distance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_measurement_of_Delambre_an...: The arc measurement of Delambre and Méchain was a geodetic survey carried out by Jean-Baptiste Delambre and Pierre Méchain in 1792–1798 to measure an arc section of the Paris meridian between Dunkirk and Barcelona. This arc measurement served as the basis for the original definition of the metre.)
Thank you both for that info. I didn't know any of that (except for the metal bar in Paris).
> 1 foot = ...
hold on: a horizontal foot, or a vertical foot ? 0.30480061m versus 0.3048m
> Right, so you enjoy warmth such as
... Yes, I think that was unironically exactly the point.
> You're writing in impeccable English.
Which is a ornery bastard of a language with more exceptions than rules. It's about aesthetic, not popularity.
> Would you like to use a monetary system based on pounds, shillings, and pence
I wouldn't be surprised.
Your entire comment comes across like you think you're exposing contradictions that really just aren't contradictions at all.
>Lots of useless names and numbers to memorize
Do you have problems with time too? I mean, 1 minute = 60 seconds, 1 hour = 60 minutes, but one day = 24 hours? Wtf??! And one week = 7 days! And one month is 30 unless you mean an actual month which is anywhere from 28 to 31. And the year is 365 days, unless it's a leap year with 366. How do you cope with that?
> the useful scale of Fahrenheit is far superior 0-100 versus 0-32.
Well, first of all, I'm not sure why you're defining those scales as the "useful" ones. They don't even equate to each other. But why are you arbitrarily using 100 as the end of your Fahrenheit scale? Just so you can declare it 'Metric-y'? If you read his paper, Fahrenheit's scale is actually 0-96.
Well even 0-96 would be better, but I think 0-100 scales are more useful. Temperatures in most places are within those bounds and it's like a test you are graded on. You get a 0 on the test, that's really cold. You get a 100 - smoking hot.
I'm not 100% sure of the normal upper/lower bounds in everyday life for most people on the planet for Celsius, but let's say it's 0-32. It' just feels weird to me to be operating on that scale versus 0-100 where I see in every day life from battery percentages to test scores.
> Just so you can declare it 'Metric-y'?
In part, yea. But I generally just prefer the Imperial system because of its practicality in everyday life and because it's fun and weird and historical in a way that Metric isn't.
I think you're saying that where you live, the weather is usually between 0 and 100°F. Aside from the fact that outdoor temperatures aren't in this range everywhere, we don't only use temperature for weather.
100°F is warm to the touch, not smoking hot. 100°C is boiling hot. You sip tea at 60°C, and brew it at 80° to 100°C depending on the type. You cook chicken to an internal 74°C. A hair dryer blows air around 50°C. All of these are outside of 0-100°F.
> I generally just prefer the Imperial system because of its practicality in everyday life
Funny, most of us much prefer metric mainly for its practicality in everyday life.
Edit: I'll add that aesthetically, 0°C is a really nice zero point for weather. Above 0° is the temperature that the snow starts melting, below is when the streets and ground starts freezing. Which side of 0°C you're on is the biggest pivot point for what it's like outside of any temperature.
> I think you're saying that where you live, the weather is usually between 0 and 100°F.
Well let me clarify, what I was saying is that where everybody lives the temperatures tend to be within that range, which is why I think it's a superior measurement for temperature related to the weather - again just additional clarification which was missing maybe from earlier comments.
Once you arrive at the point where you're measuring various things, I'm not sure it matters what scale you use so long as the values align as you expect. In other words, I don't really care whether I'm using 212 for the temperature at which water boils or 100 - it's just an association of values to action. You can swap between grams, ounces, pounds, milligrams, or kilos with your scale and it's not that important for day-to-day life. In terms of measuring temperature of things, like, say when chicken is cooked, I'm not really sure F or C is more practical. It's just different numbers.
Do you think the overwhelming majority of human kinds find it weird that 30 degrees is hot and 15 degrees is comfortable? (Hint: they probably find it weird that water does not freeze at "zero")
You are entitled to your subjective experience, but keep in mind other subjective experiences exist.
> Temperatures in most places are within those bounds
That seems to be a quite arbitrary and insufficient criterion. As soon as I start cooking or preparing a warm drink I already step way outside these boundaries.
In defense of the relevance of the Celsius scale in daily life: its endpoints represent critical temperatures of the most important liquid to life on Earth at ~1 bar. And at temperatures of 0°C or less I stand at danger of not just hypothermia, but frostbite.
> it's [..] historical in a way that Metric isn't.
How so? Celsius was proposed merely 18 years (1742) after Fahrenheit (1724).
> How so? Celsius was proposed merely 18 years (1742) after Fahrenheit (1724).
Sorry, I was attempting however poorly to reference the Imperial system historically, not Celsius versus Fahrenheit there which may have been confusing on my part.
> In defense of the relevance of the Celsius scale in daily life: its endpoints represent critical temperatures of the most important liquid to life on Earth at ~1 bar. And at temperatures of 0°C or less I stand at danger of not just hypothermia, but frostbite.
Right, incredibly important. I guess I would say I prefer Fahrenheit as a measurement of air temperature, if that would be more sensible to understanding my own personal preference. When I walk outside unless it's really cold I don't ever think about what temperature water freezes or boils, I want to know whether I am going to sweat, whether I'm in California, or whether I'm going to freeze my butt off when it's 14 degrees out.
> When I walk outside unless it's really cold I don't ever think about what temperature water freezes or boils, I want to know whether I am going to sweat, whether I'm in California, or whether I'm going to freeze my butt off when it's 14 degrees out.
In either system that's just a matter of remembering a few numbers. And it anyway doesn't give the full picture since humidity and wind speed play a huge role in how it actually feels like and what clothing one should wear.
The things that make the metric system superior to prior systems are:
• Using a uniform set of prefixes to designate multiples and divisions of the base units.
Having one unit of say, volume (the liter), and then using prefixes when we need smaller or larger units is way better than having cups, pints, quarts, gallons, pecks, and many more.
• Having those prefixes mean powers of 10. That fits in well with our use of decimal arithmetic.
It is the first one that is most important.
For temperature there's nothing actually 'Metric-y' about Celsius (or Kelvin), because in most cases people don't use multiples or divisions of the base unit. This includes in science and engineering. An astronomer would say (and write in their paper) that a star has a temperature of 7000 K, not 7 kiloK. They would say a neutron star has a core temperature of 100 trillion K, not 100 TK or 100 teraK.
At the low end there is more use of prefixes. The scientists that work near absolute 0 do often use millikelvin and microkelvin. They also often don't. Both 10^-2 Kelvin and 10 mK would usually be acceptable.
A metric system with the same meter, liter, and gram as the current one but that had picked F and R instead of C and K would work fine and be just as 'Metric-y' as the current metric system.
What precisely is "better" about that?
It's more predictable over -- some things that you don't know how they're going to scale?
Again, the general thrust of "imperial" is better -- base your units on "utility of the most people using them the most for real life things"
Do whatever you want for distances between stars, but no, walking off a room in "feet" can't be beat.
As an engineer, you should not even use temperature at all. All thermodynamic formulas simplify (a lot) if you use the inverse temperature.
As a hardware engineer I've been primarily using metric for over three decades, and like the machinist quoted in the article have had to deal with bullshit of converting back and forth. It's not just about inches and centimeters.
If you're working with small motors, the Ke (back-EMF constant) and Kt (torque constant) have different and crazy Reagan units (e.g. V/krpm, inch-ounces/A) but in SI they have units of V/(rd/s) and N-m/A, which if you crunch them down to kg, m, etc. are identical and so have the same numerical value (because they represent the same transformation from electric to mechanical or vice-versa). Power is the product of voltage and current or torque and speed - if you use the SI units no conversion required. Inertia was confusing as hell, some vendors specified it in MOISS, or milli-ounce-inches-seconds-squared, not only involving different unit but you can also get balled up in the mass vs force confusions.
Converting a drawing from one system to the other perfectly is practically impossible. Conversions can't always be exact and because tolerances are commonly specified in round numbers within a system.
In my garage I still have both metric and Reagan-unit tools. Even though my cars, even the American ones have been metric since the '80s, I have to have the other tools for other household things like the garage doors!
And then there's the tire size abomination - an unholy union - a 255R70-14 is 255 mm wide at the bulge, the sidewall height is 70% of that, and the rim diameter is 14 inches.
I agree that 1 °C is too big a step when dealing with thermostats but that's easily solved by using 0.5 °C resolution.
Frank Llyod Wright lacking warmth and humanity? Never been to Falling Water?
I’ve never been but the photos I’ve seen I would describe as lacking warmth and humanity. Maybe my opinion would change seeing it in person. I’m open to that.
But the other issue with that property specifically is that it seems to be that it is built out of fear of humanity and that’s why elements of the property (again from photos) look like what you’d see in a bunker or if you were trying to hide. It lacks symmetry as well which introduces fear.
You can think of it as how one might feel looking at a painting of Dance in the Country by Renoir and Guernica by Picasso. If you find the former to be near perfection, full of vibrancy, warmth, and love you may as I do find Picasso’s work to be chaotic, disheveled, asymmetric, or even psychotic.
It's certainly better in person, but if you hate the photos you probably won't love it. In particular, the interior: is cozier (smaller) than it looks, as the ceilings are a bit low; has better views of the outside when not stuck to a single exposure & focus of a camera.
I would definitely check it out if I was nearby or if it was on the way somewhere to see what the hype is all about. There’s always something to learn.
You think Frank Lloyd Wright designed big picture windows and open floor plans because he was afraid of humanity? He was afraid so he tried to induce fear? Through asymmetry? What then of William Blake’s “fearful symmetry”?
Amazing that FLW is still traumatizing conservatives 100 years later. Ayn Rand was a fan, didn’t you know?
Picasso was trying to convey the feeling of being bombed from the sky in a civil war, so at least your reading there is accurate.
> You think Frank Lloyd Wright designed big picture windows and open floor plans because he was afraid of humanity? He was afraid so he tried to induce fear?
No, I was speaking about the exterior. The blending in of the surroundings, and hiding of things like the entrance are the hallmark of post-war architectural trends. Not that I'm claiming Lloyd suffered from the same PTSD that returning American veterans did, but his building follows some of the same patterns.
For example, here: where's the door? http://www.wright-house.com/frank-lloyd-wright/fallingwater-...
But moving to the widows, even from that photo you can see how while the interior gives the occupants a nice view, the exterior hides them - sort of like a bunker.
> Through asymmetry? What then of William Blake’s “fearful symmetry”?
Idk, can you elaborate? We know as a matter of scientific study that asymmetry in architectural design introduces stress, let me know if you'd like a source in case you are curious.
> Amazing that FLW is still traumatizing conservatives 100 years later. Ayn Rand was a fan, didn’t you know?
I don't understand this comment. Why would I care what Ayn Rand thinks or thought?
> Picasso was trying to convey the feeling of being bombed from the sky in a civil war, so at least your reading there is accurate.
Sure. But in that interpretation I find cold, calculating, death, and fear. None of which I find particularly attractive in art. And Picasso in these years is probably the best "good" example of this style of art. Afterwards it gets more and more psychotic to the point where you've got the whole banana taped to a wall for $6 million. Western artists have forgotten what art is and what the purpose of it is, in my opinion.
Yes please, for the sources on assymetrical architecture and stress. That's totally new to me, and I'd love to read about it.
Cognitive Architecture by Ann Sussman is probably the best single book about this topic that I've found.
You may find this lecture of interest. I'm sorry I don't have anything shorter to read offhand.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPjezxPl3FA
-edit- This might get you closer though to the general theory:
https://asla-ncc.org/the-built-environment-impacts-our-healt...
Thank you! I read the article in your edit, and the point about symmetry seems unrelated to the rest of the article, and doesn't mention any science. I'll have to research further.
Intuitively it doesn't resonate with me. The environment humans evolved in (the natural world) doesn't have much of anything symmetrical, unless it was built by humans.
I'll see if I can find a better article. I think it's unfair for someone including me to say "go read a book" though the meat of the general theory is there in those books.
The research and science being done is measuring levels of stress relative to shapes and designs of buildings through eye-tracking software. So to really over-simplify, buildings that are asymmetrical or perhaps where the door is hard to find, or in some urban environments there specific features that cause stress and it is measurable.
> The environment humans evolved in (the natural world) doesn't have much of anything symmetrical, unless it was built by humans.
https://www.sciencekids.co.nz/images/pictures/plants/flower....
> No, I was speaking about the exterior.
But windows are exterior? The idea that massing of interior influences the form of the exterior is part of Wright's philosophy. I don't believe you know what you speak of.
> The blending in of the surroundings, and hiding of things like the entrance are the hallmark of post-war architectural trends. Not that I'm claiming Lloyd suffered from the same PTSD that returning American veterans did, but his building follows some of the same patterns.
First I've heard the sensitivity to natural surroundings was because of war. Wright lived through the Spanish-American war and the Great War, but completed Fallingwater before WW2 (which is what we generally mean by "postwar.")
> For example, here: where's the door? http://www.wright-house.com/frank-lloyd-wright/fallingwater-...
You can look up plans online if you're really curious, but since you asked it's right there, in the shadow. Maybe stop basing architectural opinions on underexposed photos. Or is it because you want a grand entrance that announces the owner's ostentatiousness?
> I don't understand this comment. Why would I care what Ayn Rand thinks or thought?
You're espousing some conservative viewpoints, so I figured you'd be interested in others.
> Western artists have forgotten what art is and what the purpose of it is
Bizarre opinion. Artists philosophizing on the definition of art and its purpose is the defining feature of modern art. You're just mad they concluded it extends beyond Renoir's florid, gauzy depictions of girls.
> I don't believe you know what you speak of.
Ok, then I guess we don't need to discuss anything further :)
I love FLW, and Falling Water (which I've toured), but yeah: his art tends to be cold, abrupt, and ... unsnuggly.
The only FLW building I've been inside is the Marin Civic Center, and I'd call it the opposite of cold and abrupt. The outside is... weird - and, yeah, the roof leaks, and not all the doors open and close all the way and it costs an absolute bomb to heat and cool - but the inside is full of natural light and wood surfaces and quirky details. I walked around thinking it would be an incredibly pleasant building in which to work.
BTW, Gattica only used the exterior, and I think the entry hall - which they lit very cold. The rest of their interiors were sets, and the vibe of the actual building is (appropriately for the film, but misleadingly for people - like me! - who judged it by that) pretty much the exact opposite of what you'd expect if something like the film is what you think it would be.
So do your marh then in the roman system and have fun with it.
Enjoy the warmth!
Banksy??
>no doubt buoyed by having put astronauts on the Moon
NASA did this using customary units
>I've been missing it my entire life since
Surely you've learned by now that you're missing childhood, not an actual thing about the US? I'm asking this as someone who does think this era was peak Americana, but for totally different reasons than you present, and having not been alive then myself.
I understand existing-tool-holder opposition to a new measurement system, but sweet mother I hate fraction math.
Im the other way around and think fractional math isn't used enough because it is so easy and useful. I think fractional maths biggest obstacle is everyone trying to avoid it and not learning it in contexts and methods where it excels.
That said, I still use tons of decimal math because sometimes it is more useful, but not always.
I keep trying to make myself think in terms of 32nds. For example think of a 9/16 wrench as "18", the 1/2 wrench is just "16", and so on. It's a slow process. I want to standardize on some color code for easy cross-brand identification of wrench sizes too, but I haven't come up with a compelling scheme.
The worst is the hardware. I inherited a full assortment of #2-#10 stainless SAE UNC hardware from a business move (already in nice parts drawers, too). It was pretty awesome for just having whatever I needed on hand to build things. But now as I maintain more and more things that are metric native, I've been building up the assortment of metric threads as well.
I suspect this is one of the real pain points of fabricators (plus taps/dies). And I'm guessing they're still still Imperial native due to existing tooling, making the conversions not clean (it's easy to convert 1/2 inch to 12.7mm and measure that, but it's not straightforward to convert 10mm to 0.3937 inches (25.2/64ths) and measure that.
> I've been missing it my entire life since.
Childhood Zeitgeist is a perfect term for this. We all pine for it.
I think it was Reagan turning all backwards orientated
Katherine Carpenter Elementary, OP, KS for me, in the same era -- just a couple miles from your school.
I share some of the same disappointment, especially going back and noticing disinvestment in the schools, which were one of the gems of the area.
Shawnee Mission was a gem of the Midwest. I was told that only California had better schools (whosaidthat?).
(And then of course Prop 13 came along and impaled California.)
To those who cling to customary units because...
1. "They're more intuitive". They're not. You're just familiar with what 70 F feels like. If you're used to metric, 70 F is meaningless, but you intuitively know what 20 C feels like.
2. "Metric leads to lots of awkward numbers." All systems will fortuitously have round numbers in some contexts and awkward numbers in others. Customary units are different in that there are awkward numbers baked into the system. e.g. 5280 feet in a mile. 128 ounces in a gallon.
3. "It's too much trouble to change." You're already using metric units. U.S. customary units have, metrologically, been defined in terms of metric units since the Mendenhall order of 1893[1]. i.e. A meter is defined in terms of how far light can travel in a period of time defined by a hyperfine transition frequency of Caesium. If you needed to know exactly how long a meter is for a very precise measurement, a reference meter could be produced in a lab by aliens who have no idea what a meter is by using this definition. No such definition exists for a foot or yard. Nobody maintains physical reference yards (the old-school method) anymore. If you want those aliens to measure out a yard precisely, you tell them how to measure out a meter and then tell them 1 yard = 0.9144 m.
I read a study many years ago, I haven't been able to find it for awhile. It took people who had grown up using each system, and asked them to estimate things just by guessing. For example, "How long is that wall?" or "How far is it from here to the post office?" or "How heavy is this paperweight?". People who'd grown up using customary were significantly more accurate in their guesses.
The study surmised it was because those units had been developed over millennia to be useful at human scales. When eyeballing the length of a wall, centimeters are too granular and meters are to course, but feet are "just right". You might guess a wall is 12 feet long, and be pretty close, but 3 or 4 meters aren't that accurate, and nobody really guesses 3.5 meters.
Same with temperature. 0 - 100°F is about all we as humans will usually experience, so its very convenient when talking about the weather or HVAC thermostats.
They are worse when doing math or conversions, and while that's annoying for scientists and engineers, in most people's everyday lives it comes up so infrequently it doesn't really matter. If something is less than a mile, you don't suddenly convert to feet and do math, you just say "about a half mile".
Personally, I do woodworking (which in the US is always imperial) and 3d-printing (which is always metric), and often combine the two. When doing woodworking or carpentry, its nice that a foot is evenly divisible by 3 or 6, or that half of 3/8ths of an inch is 3/16ths.
It makes sense. Curling my finger it is pretty much dead on 1 inch from the tip to the first joint. My foot is a little shorter than 1 foot, but in shoes, pacing it out one foot after another, it is nearly dead on as well. A lot of people measure using anatomy with conventional units.
That sounds like total bullshit to me...
Temperature is the worst metric unit to pick for this. Both the imperial and metric versions of temperature are completely arbitrary. It's really baffling to me that THIS is the one that most people talking about metric superiority cling to. Where metric shines is when you talk about subunits like mg vs g vs kg. You don't do that with temperature almost ever. So so what if water boils at 212F vs 100C? Pinning 100 at the boiling point of pure water at standard atmospheric pressure is every bit as arbitrary as Fs original 100F pin to the internal body temperature of a horse.
Otherwise I agree with you. I just wish stronger arguments would be made. Measuring distance, speed, weight, volume in metric makes a lot more sense and is more intuitive. It's easy to relate 300mL to 1L. or 1cm to 1m to 1km. And that is where most of the value of metric comes from. The fact that we basically never think in terms of kC or mC is why using temperature is very weak.
(A standard horse in standard health, of course).
I mean, say what you will, but a horse is likely to have a similar body temperature regardless their location on the planet. The same can't be said of boiling water. Pretty normal elevations make pretty big changes in water boiling temperature.
You can ultimately also average out temperatures for multiple horses to get pretty close to that 100F.
A better pin would have been something like the melting point of Gallium. Something that hardly changes with a change of pressure.
Counterpoint to #1, celsius increments are too large. I laugh every time I see a thermostat in a car or home that needs to have steps like 20, 20.5, 21, 21.5.. :)
How is that a counterpoint to #1? By that same logic, inches are too big an increment so it's hilarious every time fraction of one is used. 15/16ths? lololol!
Do you honestly notice the difference in comfort between 20°C and 20.5°C? I suspect even the heating element is not that precise, let alone the actual room temperature.
They only case in daily practice where 1°C is too large is the difference between normal body temperature (36.5°C) and mild fever (37.0°C), but thermometers have to be graduated in much smaller subdivisions anyway.
> Do you honestly notice the difference in comfort between 20°C and 20.5°C?
Yeah, it's noticeable. That 0.5C move is roughly a 1F move. And there's definitely a noticeable difference between 71F, 72F, and 73F.
But I'd say that it ultimately only matters in human comfort and only when you are talking about room temps. Once you get outside that 70->75 range the exactness starts mattering a lot less. 80 and 85 both feel hot. 65 and 60 both feel cold.
I mean, it's arbitrary. I've lived in a Fahrenheit country and a Celsius country and both systems work fine. Resolution issues exist for both systems (you can still benefit from decimals in Fahrenheit for coffee and tea brewing)
I prefer Fahrenheit because it's based around the human, but it really doesn't matter, and it's probably better long term to have measurements that are not based around the human condition, but we're talking about benefits to society tens of thousands of years from now, rather than today.
> You're already using metric units.
No we aren't. It doesn't matter what the units are defined as, that is not what determines which units we are using.
In many cases we are, though. A ton of machined things use metric units (and thus need metric tools), and that’s spreading into a lot of other areas like medicine and food packaging. It’s nowhere near absolute but the trend is noticeable.
Yeah, those people should also think about the fact that even the customary units die-hard do not use micro-feet, milli-feet, or nano-feet, etc.
A slightly more esoteric Imperial unit is "mils", for thousandths of an inch. 1 mil = 0.001 inch. Which means 1 mil = 25.4 micrometers if we also want to use a non-traditional meter measurement.
"Customary units" are a varied bunch.
The inch-foot-yard-mile scale are not uniform, and not easy to calculate. Their only convenience is easy divisibility by 3. The practical example of uniform scale of this kind is seconds-minutes-hours, which, I suppose, go all the way down to the Sumerian 60-based scale. The mm-cm-m-km are much easier in practice.
Sub-inch units are an honest binary system, and as such is pretty practical. The fact that it's written as a ratio of decimal numbers is sometimes unhelpful though, comparing 7/16" and 1/2" takes either mental gymnastics or memorization. Millimeters are somehow more convenient here, but not by such a large margin as with inch-foot-yard scale.
The Fahrenheit scale is uselessly arbitrary; 0°F does not match anything useful, and 100°F is not that useful either.
The only mile that makes sense is the nautical mile, 1 nm matches 1" of arc on the map / globe, the same way as 1 km is 1/40,000th of the arc.
0F is useful in areas where they salt roads because thats the temperature many salts stop being effective and previously good road might turn to ice sheets.
But it isn't a good reason all by itself.
How hard is it to remember -17° C when that's something you grew up with since childhood though? As a trade off, you get 0° C for water freezing and you don't have to remember 32°F for water freezing instead. Or you remember all 4 of those if you leave near a borders.
I'd part with cups and teaspoons/tablespoons and the like, but you'll pry inches/feet/yards and fahrenheit from my cold, dead hands. They're both more convenient for daily use. I think I'd prefer to keep miles as well but I don't have a good reason for that one.
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.
The extra precision is fake.
They might have measured precisely at the weather station, but local variation in temperature makes that extra precision meaningless unless you are located exactly where the measurement happened.
Even in a climate controlled room, there will be a degree or two of variation between different parts of the room.
for another example of this: a lot of people "know" that the average human body temperature is 98.6 degF.
that extra decimal point gives people false confidence about the measurement being more precise than it is.
because so much science (even in the US) happens using the metric system, the actual measured average [0] is 37 degC, and 37.0 degC == 98.6 degF. the nuance of the average being more of a confidence interval (37 +/- 0.5 degC, possibly larger) gets lost as well.
> They're both more convenient for daily use.
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 ;)
Right. It's like when countries switched to the Euro or decimalized. There's a period when everything feels really janky and everyone complains and then a couple of years later everything is just fine and they forget what the old system was even like.
I know a lot of people who still think in the old currencies. Similar phenomena happen for people in countries that redenominated their currency, like Romania, where people still use the old amounts in spoken language.
Not switching to metric for time is reasonable, because there are already two existing 'natural' units for time (the day and the year), and they don't align on each other in metric (a year of exactly 1000 days would be so much easier, but we'll have to deal with reality as it is... or accelerate the rotation speed of the planet I suppose).
So long as we live on earth, metric time won't make much sense.
A year and a day don't line up at all, so we get weird leap days.
Is there any reason they should? Unless the Earth were tidally locked to the Sun, I'm not aware of any reason a day would have any relationship to a year.
It would be convenient to not having to deal with leap days and other such constructs. Of course, we cannot choose how these things behave, and therefore using a calendar not aligned to the natural cycles of our planet would be even less convenient, and would only start making sense when humanity develops into an interplanetary civilization.
The US isn't on a 365.24-based system, either. Days don't fit neatly into years, anyway.
That would have no impact on decimalizing sub-day units: 10 decidays in a day, 2 millidays to cook an egg... But no country did it, which speaks to the power our time traditions really hold in our psyche.
The French did try to switch time to decimal after the Revolution. It was probably the most hated change they made by the local population, and didn't last long.
The problem was that it messed with the week, having a "day of worship / rest" every 7 days, which was then every 10 days
An eyeballed yard is roughly the same as an eyeballed meter. An eyeballed foot is 1/3 of that. You can stick 4 inches in 10 cm roughly.
And I just poke my nose out the window and look outside to see what the temperature is
Rules of thumb can be learned either direction!Freezing.... ~30°F.... ~0°C Need coat... ~50°F... ~10°C T-shirt..... ~70°F... ~20°C Melting..... ~90°F... ~30°Cps HN tables are not really a thing, are they?
pps Suspiciously many experiments are conducted at 293K
What you're ignoring is that a hundred plus or minus is a good range for average humans to grapple with and Fahrenheit splits the temperature swings in a given region across an approximately 100deg range.
So using Fahrenheit results in a pretty decent "as high as it can be without being clumsy" measurement system that covers just about all earthly temperatures.
If we only cared about increments of five or so degrees you could go higher resolution and it'd be fine because rounding would occur like we do with vehicle speeds. Or we could go lower resolution and just make the degrees bigger, which is basically what celsius is.
Eh, all the degrees (Celsius, Fahrenheit, Réaumur, etc) are all about equally bad. Nicest thing that can be said about Celsius is that it's decimal, connected to water (0=freezing, 100=boiling) so it plays well with the rest of metric.
Kelvin is actually the most practical of the lot, FSVO [1]. It's not a 'degree', because it's anchored at absolute zero. It's just a bit unwieldy for our day-to-day, with room temperature at 293K. But I can imagine if people were to grow up with it, it wouldn't be too bad even then.
[1] eg. "Why can an aircon still heat the house at ten degrees below zero?"- "Well akshually, you still have 263K of heat energy to pump, not an actual problem"
Right, we are just arguing which is the most practical range. It's like choosing a calendar: we could define one using entirely metric time units, but nobody would want to use it as long as human civilization is anchored on Planet Earth.
The difference between a yard and a meter adds up quickly. Already a 25 yard swimming pool yields significantly different times to cross it than a 25 meter one.
>Everything packed into this tight range.
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?
> (...) grew up with (...) feels fairly natural (...)
Really all there is to that discussion.
Mostly yeah at which point the only relevant arguments are being able to tie in with the rest of the world and being able to easily tie measurements togheter/do math.
I mean it's mathematically a tighter range. I think part of this comes down to the more mild and less variable European climate. There is just less emphasis on air temperature so you don't see the drawbacks.
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.
>Your tape measure didn't have 1/3, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, and 1/32 subdivisions?
I think one of em did and the other didn't. Either way it seems far more difficult to do some math with.
I would be highly concerned if I saw a 1/3 division of an inch instead of 1/2.
That’s funny because when I work with Fahrenheit I just work with 5°F ranges to compensate for the approximate mental math required. Eg very quick mentally, 100°F = 37.778 °C (thanks autocorrect) = (100-32)/2 = 34.
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.
(F - 30) / 2 = ~C
C * 2 + 30 = ~F
No need to simplify this.
(F - 32) / 1.8 = C
C * 1.8 + 32 = F
I personally find the math just as easy to do accurately. For example, 87F -32/1.8 = 55/1.8 =~30.5C. Compare that to your approximate method, which would give 28.5C, which is just wrong
(Maybe I just got really good at this when working a public facing job with a lot of American tourists - they would ask what our celsius temperatures were "in real units", so I got quite comfortable converting the air and water temps. Fahrenheit never once became intuitive to me, though.)
For C to F you can often simplify the mental math by doing the multiply by doubling then taking off 10%.
E.g., to convert 31℃ to ℉: 31 x 2 = 62. Subtract 6.2 = 55.8. Add 32 = 87.8℉.
If you want to round the result to the nearest integer the subtract 10% step is a convenient place: 31 x 2 = 62. Subtract 6 (rounded 6.2) = 56. Add 32 = 88℉.
> The difference between 75 (usually a beautiful day) and 85 (hot) is 23.8C to 29.4C.
If you convert a nice, round number from one system to the other, you'll end up with a more precise, less nice number, which will give the impression that Celsius is harder to use.
In reality, people from metric countries just think in 5-degree increments: 25 is a beautiful day, 30 is hot. It doesn't feel any harder to read than Fahrenheit.
I wonder if there are people that moved to the U.S., switched to Fahrenheit and now find it more intuitive than Celsius. If one is easier than the other, I assume it still doesn't make up for the hurdle of learning a new system.
> I wonder if there are people that moved to the U.S., switched to Fahrenheit and now find it more intuitive than Celsius.
I've done the move twice in each direction. Neither is more intuitive.
When I moved back to C after 22 years in F, I had to adjust again. It took a few months. The other times were after fewer years, but still took (re)adjusting.
Even in construction, feet/inches/yards kinda sucks. 1:10 scale drawings are painful to do manually, division by 2 is a bit erratic, and bolt sizing is a horrible mess. Metric bolts are nice and consistent.
With you on temperature though.
My wife was a surveyor in a past carreer. We have a tape measure in the garage that measures to the nearest hundredth of a foot. It is just so weird to see. Forcing decimal on a measurement that does not normally have it just makes me uncomfortable.
https://surveysupplyinc.com/lufkin-12-foot-hi-viz-engineers-...
The tension that you experienced is common in imperial and traditional systems of units. Here's another example for you: Carpenters working with wood use mixed feet, inches, and fractional inches (like 2' 5 3/8"), but machinists working with metal use exclusively decimal inches (like 29.375"). Both hold steadfast to their traditions and won't consider adopting the other system.
If you take a look at American grocery stores, you'll see things like: “40 × 16.9 FL OZ (1.05 PT) 500 mL BOTTLES / NET 676 FL OZ (5.28 GAL) 20 L” https://www.instacart.com/assets/domains/product-image/file/...
To dissect that product: It's a pack of 40× 500 mL of bottled water. I have zero problems with the metric labeling. But for the US customary units, you can see a jumble: decimal fluid ounces, decimal pints, a large number of fluid ounces, and decimal gallons. Note that the gallons can be broken down into mixed units (and some packaging does that); 676 fl oz = 5 gal 1 qt (0 pt) (0 cup) 4 fl oz exactly. The US units are basically "whatever I feel like using" (don't forget tsp and tbsp, which aren't used in the current example). The metric units for liquid consumer products are always mL and L, which greatly simplifies learning and comparison for the consumer.
Note that ft/100 is almost exactly 1/8", which is also the most standard resolution used in construction. I love decimal feet (it's worth noting that there used to be a survey foot, but it has been deprecated).
I was an archaeologist, but use a similar tape measure. It's fantastic. It also works very well with GIS systems, since decimal degrees almost perfectly correspond to metric powers of 10 at tropical latitudes.
> My wife was a surveyor in a past carreer. We have a tape measure in the garage that measures to the nearest hundredth of a foot
Survey foot or international foot?
Miles didn't click for me until I learned that it's defined by how far you'll travel in 1,000 paces (where a pace is an L+R step). Now I find it very useful to convert steps<>distance traveled, which is actually quite useful if you walk a lot!
You'd have to be quite tall to average an ~80cm step. 193cm (6'4") according to a quick search.
The original unit was the [slightly smaller] Roman mile which was standardized with the military in mind, i.e. able-bodied men in their prime. Seems like the average for men today is 2.5 feet or so which is more or less still on the money for 2k steps/1k paces to a mile.
Nobody I know speaks of temperatures in decimals of Celsius, like no one.
> inches/feet/yards ... more convenient for daily use
only because that is what you are accustomed to
because I grew up with metric, m/cm are much more convenient for daily use
I will allow that a "foot" is useful as an approximate intermediary unit between m and cm
> Inches/feet being base 12 divides better into thirds and fourths, which is very useful in construction.
again only because the US construction industry grew up using fractions instead of decimals
The UK uses miles and miles per (UK) gallon. We talk in feet, inchs lbs and stone for weight. But when it comes to engineering works it is ALL now in metric aside from the older builder, all of my schoolwork was in metric, and we never dealt with the hellish conversions it was all SI units, and we just had to know maybe one or two magic constants in physics and chemistry (molar and something else to do with joules in bond enthalpy)
I worked as an engineer and the only drawings specified in imperial were pre 1970s and all the CNC controls are programed in mm feed rates in mm/rev or mm/min
I like this!
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).
>seemingly strong and well-thought out arguments for something that is so clearly subjective
Any platform where snooty articulate people congregate will have such arguments by the bushel.
> by the bushel
Well played
Interesting. As an European living in the US. The only US units that I find useful are cups, teaspoons and tablespoons. And that's only for cooking. It's way faster to measure volume than weight (although less accurate)
As a pretty experienced American home baker I don't understand how you can assert that it's faster to measure volume with cups or etc. than to put a bowl on a scale and simply pour stuff in, measuring everything in grams. It's not even close in terms of speed, convenience, _and_ accuracy.
It is indeed not even close, but not in the way you are asserting. It takes a second to dip a measuring cup into the flour and level it off. So if I need 4c of flour, it takes me about 4 seconds. Meanwhile, to measure with a scale I have to slowly, carefully pour into the bowl so that I don't overshoot the amount I'm going for (and then then sometimes I overshoot and have to try to scoop the ingredient out a bit). Volume measurements are damn near an order of magnitude faster than weight measurements. And it's not like the extra accuracy from weight measurements is actually that important 95% of the time. Baking is not that precise, contrary to popular belief.
Welp not much I can say to that or to RandallBrown's response, seems obvious our experience and way of thinking is pretty different on this matter.
(EDIT: Also fwiw I often use a spoon or whatever to scoop things into the bowl, vs. pouring, which means I have more control but can still offload the measuring part to the scale...)
Whatever gets the delicious baked goods in your mouth I guess
Maybe it's my skill with a scale, but it's much faster for me to scoop a measuring cup or spoon into a container and scrape off the top than it is to go back and forth adding/removing stuff on a scale.
So one just needs a conveniently sized measurement cup then.
It used to be based on relative size, so if you have a set of spoons and cups and use the same for all measurements they are ballpark right for your recipe (and some minor difference accounting for user error). These day's it's defined anyway in both metric and imperial. As soon as you start weighing something from the recipe it goes out of the window as that defines the rest of the relative measurements. For that reason I really dislike the recipes telling you to measure teaspoons of spices but grams or ounces of flour. I don't have two sets of measurement cups available. These days most cooking sites mention both though.
On a sidenote: an ounce is 100g here and a pound 500g. Mainly by being in common usage and translated to common used weights. "An ounce more okay?" is an easy way to sell more without mentioning how much it actually is in numbers.
The validity of relative measurements in recipes starts to break down as soon as eggs are in play, which are not easily subdivided. On the other hand, that rarely matters and most recipes are fine with up to one more or less egg.
In some European countries, it's common for rough recipes to use decilitres, e.g. 2dL of flour.
1 US cup is 2.37dL.
Otherwise, a metric tablespoon is 15mL and a teaspoon is 5mL.
Those are not US measures, we use them in Europe as well
They are different sizes to the American ones.
If you want to get even more divisive, try converting people to metric baking measurements. Baking bread and cakes is much more repeatable if you use mass rather than volume to measure ingredients.
The results from this recipe were never consistent when I used volume measurements. I converted to mass in metric and now I get consistent results.
adapted from: [https://www.justsotasty.com/wprm_print/11594](https://www.justsotasty.com/wprm_print/11594)
Banana Brownies
Prep Time: 15 minutes mins
Cook Time: 35 minutes mins
Total Time: 50 minutes mins
### Equipment
- 9x13 inch (23 x 33 cm) baking pan*
### Ingredients
- 227 g unsalted butter (2 US sticks) unsalted butter (The better the butter, the better the results. In the U.S. market, Kerrygold yields the best results, followed by Cabot, and "well, it's still brownies" Market Basket house brand.) - 400 g dark brown sugar - 2 large eggs - 5-10 ml vanilla extract - 150 g mashed bananas (about 2-3 large, brown bananas) - 156 g all-purpose flour (I prefer King Arthur All Purpose Unbleached Flour) - 60-70 g cocoa powder - 2-3g teaspoon salt - 280(ish) g chocolate chips (I prefer Ghirardelli Bittersweet 60% Cacao Baking Chips, use 1 bag) )
### Instructions
- Preheat the oven to 350F degrees (180C or 170C fan forced). Line a 9x13 inch (23x33 cm) pan with parchment paper or aluminum foil leaving an overhang around the sides. Alternatively, lightly grease the pan. - Melt the butter in a double boiler. Add in the brown sugar, stir, and let it sit in the double boiler, stirring occasionally until the mixture has a nice caramelly flavor. - While the butter-sugar mixture is cooking in the double boiler, combine the dry ingredients. - Sometimes cocoa powder is lumpy, and you may need to sift it. The alternative I use is combined flour, cocoa powder, and salt, and use a whisk to mix it all together and break up any lumps if there are any. - Take the brown sugar butter mixture off of the double boiler and mix in the mashed bananas and vanilla. - The bananas usually cool the mixture enough that the eggs won't cook when you put them in, but if the mixture is hot, add some flour, add some of the dry ingredients, and that will cool it down enough to add the eggs safely. - Stir in the chocolate chips. - Pour/spoon the batter into the prepared pan and bake for about 35 minutes, or until an inserted toothpick comes out clean or with a few damp crumbs. - Cool fully (about 4 hours), then slice. Store brownies in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 4 days. (Never last that long in my house)
I use volume measurements for baking and I get consistent results all the time. Perhaps your recipe is especially gnarly, but that isn't true of all recipes.
Volume measurements work acceptably in cooking only when you use some volumetric spoons for quantities corresponding to a completely filled spoon.
Otherwise, if you use a vessel with markings for various volumes, you waste a lot of time to ensure that the quantity in the vessel lines precisely to a marking and its surface is perfectly level, in comparison with weighing the same ingredient. Moreover, you have one more vessel to wash.
I eat only food that I cook myself and I use only 2 kinds of volume measurements. I use a set of volumetric spoons for measuring various kinds of powders used in small quantities, e.g. salt and spices. I also use a graded beaker for water. For any other ingredients, it is much faster to put the vessel in which they will be cooked on digital weighing scales, and pour there each ingredient until the right weight is reached. Besides being faster, this also avoids the need to use additional vessels, which would need washing. The graded beaker is better for water only because it must be taken from the tap, where I cannot put the weighing scales.
For example, this includes making bread, when I pour water in a bowl that will be used for kneading with a graded beaker, then I pour the flour while weighing until the desired weight is reached, then salt is added with a small volumetric spoon.
Regular results from volumetric measurements are due to the process. For example, sifting the flour every time gives you a degree of consistency approaching that of a mass-based measurement. Mass-based measurements make it easier to have that precision in the baking process.
[edit: speech recognition error correction.]
What's the problem with decimals? They're all numbers. -4.5 degrees C is fine, isn't it? (The actual temperature right here right now). Where's the problem?
You don't even need decimals. 45x10^-1. There, fixed
You don't even need decimals. Nobody who uses celsius gives a shit about the decimals. It's -4 or it's -5 and even that distinction is irrelevant.
Unless you're doing some kind of scientific calculaton there's no need to think about decimals of celsius at all. Just like Fahrenheit users surely don't care whether it's 50 or 53 or whatever. It's around 50, that's all you need to know.
Only place I could imagine something is cooking and even there I probably would not be able to differentiate steak at 56C, 57C and 58C...
For sous vide, I will differentiate by 1 or 2 Fahrenheit degrees but I take your basic point.
It might make a difference for mashing when brewing beer but even that’s a crapshoot.
Yes, but then you might conceivably still measure temperature in degrees Réaumur, if it's a rather traditional brewer. Or so I was told by a Reliable Source(tm).
Fahrenheit forever!
0°C.................100°C Cold Dead 0°F.................100°F Really Cold Really HotI see this argument repeated every single time someone tries to defend Fahrenheit.
if "room temperature" was smack in the middle, at 50 degF, you might have a point.
but no, it's pure post-hoc rationalization.
being naked at 0 degF will kill you. being naked at 100 degF will (usually) not. they're not remotely equivalent.
instead, think of it this way - human beings are mostly water, and 0 to 100 degC is "percentage of the way from water's freezing point to boiling point".
room temperature is "about 20% of the way to boiling". 40% or higher starts to cause our bodies to overheat. a typical sauna will be somewhere between 50 and 70% of the way.
Don't forget:
0K..................100K Dead Still Dead0C = Frozen!
Only if you're made of pure water at standard pressure. Which I'm not.
Close enough for government work, actually. And it's not just flesh. Lots of things behave approximately like water, which is handy for all sorts of back-of-envelope estimates.
You better take precautions against frostbite below that temperature though. And a lot of things need to be watched as they could be frozen then.
You don’t need to worry about taking up room for a decimal place when your outdoor temperature is only ever 2 digits at most.
Can you at least switch to 1/10th of inches? The 1/4th, 1/8th, 1/16th is very annoying
That would be negating 90% of the usefulness of using a fractional system though. It is barely a step up from using a prime number like 7 or 11 as a number base or divisor.
we do. being a machinist in the US means being able to convert between decimal inches, mm, fractional inches, and things like feet all the time. not to mention other completely arbitrary units like sheet gauge, fastener number and inverse thread spacing. there are also decimal feet for carpenters.
this for me is the real appeal of metric, not that somehow a meter is magical, but at least there is one system, with a consistent set of rules, that allows us to do some magic things like tell the approximate volume of water given a weight.
edit: omg I forgot about nominal wood sizes. the underlying system actually has different units based on the material and the usage. copper gauge is not the same as steel gauge. thats pretty hopeless. for precious metals we also have the pennyweight
> Inches/feet being base 12 divides better into thirds and fourths, which is very useful in construction.
all of the math normal people use in everyday life happens in base 10.
"it's easy because it's base 12" is an absolutely ludicrous idea.
what's 7'5" divided by 3? divided by 4?
what happens if you need to divide by 5?
and sure, there are various mental math tricks you can learn to make this easier...or you could just use the metric system.
7'5" is 226cm. that's a normal, boring, everyday, base 10 integer.
you don't need to learn a special set of "mental math for base 12" tricks. instead you can re-use the same mental math tricks you use for every other base 10 number.
> U.S. customary (the more accurate name for what’s sometimes the called the British Imperial system)
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.
And in a few places they're different (US measuring "cup" vs UK, US gallon, etc)
As someone who generally uses metric units, but grew up around English Imperial units - if an American says that a person weighs a certain number of pounds, I need to convert to stone and pounds in my head in order to get a meaningful mental model of how much that person weighs.
UK doesn't use cups in recipes and fuel is dispensed in litres.
Road signs are still in miles.
I'll drive 80 miles to walk 25 km to climb mountains because they are over 3000ft high (Munros) even though I think about the heights on the mountains in metres!
It has been a long time since fuel was sold here in the UK in gallons, but most cars still are spoken of in terms of MPG (miles driven per gallon of fuel). There are steps to move this to L per 100km - but most people here still use MPG.
We also use Pints in pubs, which are a different size to US pints.
> We also use Pints in pubs
And so we should.
A British pint is 568 ml. We will switch to smaller 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.
Australia switched to 570ml, rounding up. Would that be acceptable?
Do they still call them pints?
Apparently everywhere except South Australia: https://manofmany.com/culture/drinks/beer-glass-sizes-in-aus...
It's worth pointing out the convenient imperial units are the ones that are hardest to get rid of. The "pints" in pubs is because a pint is about how much a drink should be, in fact I've often found drinking 500ml to be just slightly too little to drink, probably because I'm used to the pint, but "1 unit" is also just a lot easier to keep than "500 units" or "50 units".
I would have agreed with you for a long time (especially when I was very aware of how many pints I could drink and still work well the next day), but since homebrewing and having my own beer taps, I now drink any amount I want. I have a few half pint jugs I use, but often I'll pour myself a drink that would be less than this, as that is what I actually fancy drinking at that time.
That said, I exclusively drink pints in pubs.
Engines have been in litres since forever it feels.
Everywhere. All the car companies in the us switched to metric in the 1980s. You find some inch stuff once ina while - but only when the part hasn't been changed in the last 40 years.
Fuel is in litres but cars are in miles per gallon, I guess nobody wanted to do miles per litre or some unhinged calculation
The standard cup is not the same size between us and uk Sumthin sumthin breakfast cup
The US being stuck in imperial is such a meme nowadays with "freedum units" and the like. It's yet another odd thing that makes it easy for the rest of the world to laugh at the US. In these isolationist times I doubt this will change soon though, but it'd definitely help international collaboration.
Everyone who wants to collaborate internationally is already doing it. Science in the US is entirely metric. Construction and domestic measurements are the two biggest holdouts and honestly they’re both negligible. Given the proliferation of global manufacturing, most businesses are converting at the end before retail for US customers.
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.
re construction, we use 8x4ft sheets of timber in Britain still, same as before, we just call them twelve-twenty-by-two-four-forty now.
Honestly, I don't think anyone would raise much of a fuss over changing distance measurements to metric. Both centimeters and inches are easy enough to eyeball or rule-of-thumb, meters and yards are basically the same, and larger units are only relevant for speed limits and travel planning. Metric lacks a good "foot", but I guess people would get used to eyeballing things in ~50cm increments instead.
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.
> Metric lacks a good "foot", but I guess people would get used to eyeballing things in ~50cm increments instead.
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 ;)
In a country where every single facet of life is being increasingly politicised, you think this wouldn't cause a fuss?
Oddly enough if any government could just push and shove this through it might be Trump. I bet 20 years later you'd have a sizeable constituency who could be convinced that the change from imperial to foreign units was the beginning of the fall and decline and that everything could be fixed if you went back.
Oh, you bet they would. Nothing causes old white people to riot like mild inconvenience.
That's only mildly sarcastic. For many people, it's become a part of being American, especially on the conservative side of the isle. Now, I personally live in celsius and work comfortably in kilometers, liters, and grams. However, it has become a weird point of pride for some Americans.
Now sure what sucks on Celsius, water freezing and boiling have been some of the most important scientific and just plain existence facts of mankind since we evolved. We humans have 10 fingers so its split by decimal system.
Since we humans operate 99% of our existence in a narrow band between 0 and 100 degrees celzius, I'd say its more important than starting from absolute 0 and dealing constantly with big offsets.
0 or 100 or -100 or 10 Fahrenheit is what? From Gemini: "0°F was the lowest temperature achievable with a mixture of ice, water, and salt (brine), while 96°F was set as the approximate temperature of the human body (blood heat), chosen because 96 is easily divisible by many numbers, allowing for finer divisions" - rather insignificant things.
In Celsius, my daily life uses values from ~ -20 to +30 for the weather, but from ~0 - 90F. For cooking both are equally arbitrary, as the only place I set or read a temperature when cooking is candymaking, setting the oven, or cooking large amounts of meat.
The unit itself doesn't actually matter. Even industries with the least precision set their stuff up with so much precision that the unit you use basically doesn't matter.
Your machine may spit out widgets that are plus or minus an inch. But when you set up the machine you set it up to the 1/16 regardless. Swapping all that to metric doesn't actually change anything other than the number the guy setting it up dials it in to.
1/16” is just over 1.5 mm, so yes, the guy setting the machine in millimeters is giving you more precision. In the real world measurements aren’t just abstract figures you can move around losslessly.
I have a socket set in half-millimeter sizes for the absolute plague of cheap bolts and nuts that are being manufactured with obscene levels of slop.
You're missing the point.
The guy buying the widgets doesn't care because he's expecting a widget that's plus or minus dozens of the unit the machine is being set to. The setting is just as precise as it is in order to set the fat part of your output curve over the middle of your quality control pass range.
The machine might not even be calibrated in a direct measurement, it might be calibrated in a secondary measurement. Like tons of force or rpm or cycle speed or something that then translates to the dimension of your output part.
The units on machines mostly only exist for calibration. Beyond that they can just be made up "my amp goes to 11" type scales because they're so divorced from the outputs, either in precision (or are literally indirect as described above) that you "just have to know" that if you want a "X<unit>" widget you'll actually set the machine
Tons and tons and tons of stuff in our world is even intentionally spec'd out in this manner. A 14" tire rim is not 14, there's a tolerance. A 3" pipe isn't 3". These are all just nominal sizes. Just about everything in our world is nominally sized. A nut and bolt manufacturer doesn't care whether they're making 12mm or 1/2 on a given day. Those are just nominal sizes, arbitrary names, in their minds. It doesn't matter whether the factory runs on metric or imperial or something else because they're just shooting for an arbitrary number.
The only time your unit really matters is when interfacing with other parties and it only matters insofar as you need to know what each other are uses.
He's not giving you more accuracy though. A machine that's accurate to 1/32" is accurate to .75mm. If those cheap bolts were in US customary they would still need to be in smaller increments.
The US has gone almost fully metric on plywood thickness due to globalization.
The fact that canadian lumber companies seem to be switching their machinery to metric is funny though. https://woodcentral.com.au/canadas-sawmills-weigh-metric-swi...
Construction is negligible?
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.
There is nothing half inch in a half inch pipe. One inch emt is not one inch, it is 27mm outside diameter (for some reason I know that one)
I believe 1/2" pipe is exactly the same as DN15 pipe. 1/2" and 15mm are both just nominal sizes. Calipers will only help you if you happen to know the pipe schedule.
You might eventually end up calling 15mm pipe half-inch, depending on where the cheapest pipe can be sourced from.
Ironically, a lot of countries with metric system calling half inch pipe a "1/2" :-)
They got rid of the penny. Just suggest that the Imperial system is some leftist conspiracy and they'll have moved over by the end of the month.
Most likely the current administration will pass executive orders banning the use of metric system, and then force other countries to switch to imperial or face heavy tariffs.
Jokes of this form were tired by about November 5, 2024.
>They specify dimensions in feet, inches, and fractions of an inch. But not all of them do.
There are many more fun and exciting non-metric measurements you might encounter than plain old fractional inches.
A fabricator might encounter sheet metal thickness in "gauge". Wire sizes, ammunition, and machine screws also come in "gauge" sizes but all four are different scales. US drills come not only in fractional inch sizes, but letters and numbers as well. Furnace efficiency is often specified in percent, but air conditioner efficiency comes in SEER. Water softener capacity is in "grains". Pipe threads come in "inch sizes", but that usually means NPT. Metal hardness and rubber durometer measurements have their own scale which doesn't really belong to either camp.
To be fair, a lot of these are categorical units. Screws come in #2 or #6 or #4, but you'll never need to worry about #3.7.
A wise professor once told me "All these different units will not be going away within your lifetime, so you better get used to working with them."
Gauges are a measurement, but they aren't a unit. They don't necessarily have any linear correspondence to actual distance/volume/whatever, and in fact are typically inverse (higher number = smaller thing). And yes, they're categorical. (Sometimes you even see 00 as a gauge number.)
> Sometimes you even see 00 as a gauge number
or 0000. Which then can conveniently be abbreviated to 4/0.
Metal hardness having a bunch of different units is quite annoying but also interesting.
There are quite a few ways to measure the hardness the most interesting being Vickers. You plunge a diamond of a known force into a surface and measure the size of the indentation. This is surprisingly accurate but does leave a small diamond mark on your surface.
With a sufficiently small part a blacksmith or other folks can determine the hardness of a steel just by listening to how it rings. Hey, you can also test for cracks with a ring test, the most common use is ring-testing a vitrified grinding wheel to see if there is no crack
Alot of engineering is just listen and maybe the odd hit with a hammer
If you specify all your bolt heads as 19mm and 13mm, then a 3/4" wrench or a 1/2" wrench is usually good enough to get the job done.
Similarly, a 1/4-20 bolt will fit in a M6 tapped hole if you use a large enough hammer.
A hazardous aspect of US threadforms is that #10-32 machine screws and #8-32 machine screws have the same pitch. So you can fit #8 bolts in a #10 hole and sometimes, they FEEL like they made good torque, because they engaged one side of the tapped hole, when they really have no tension capability whatsoever.
Reference the British Airways flight 5390 accident where the pilot got sucked 3/4 the way out the cockpit window and slammed against the side of the fuselage while a flight attendant clung to his feet and the co-pilot safely landed.
Also note that a British designed and built product was using US threadforms...
https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-near-crash-of-britis...
> Reference the British Airways flight 5390 accident where the pilot got sucked 3/4 the way out the cockpit window and slammed against the side of the fuselage while a flight attendant clung to his feet and the co-pilot safely landed.
That incident led to a major change in how aircraft windows were designed. Instead of being fitted from the outside they were changed to being fitted from the inside.
When fitted from the outside the job of the fasteners is to keep the cabin pressure from blowing the window out when the plane is high up and the outside pressure is low. When the plane is on the ground gravity will keep the window in place and the fastener isn't doing much.
Botch installing the fasteners and you don't find out about until the window blows out at high altitude, like on that flight.
When fitted from the inside the job of the fasteners is to keep the window from falling in due to gravity when the plane is on the ground or at low altitude. At higher altitudes the cabin pressure pushes the window firmly into the frame and the fasteners aren't doing much.
Botch installing the fasteners and the window falls in on the ground or at low altitude which is a lot easier to deal with then a window blowing out at high altitude.
The diabolical case is M5 versus 10-32. About a 4% difference in diameter and about 0.8% difference in thread pitch. Basically indistinguishable with the naked eye and even the "nest the threads in each other" check doesn't help without a pretty long length of threads.
An argument can be made that we should blame Pirates of the Carribean for the fact that the USA is not metric. O:-)
https://www.nist.gov/blogs/taking-measure/pirates-caribbean-...
We're in such a stupid time. I'm an EE, I typically do all my engineering in millimeters, but most of my coworkers prefer the clownshoes unit "mils". Half our soldering irons are set to Fahrenheit, the others Celsius.
In ordinary every day life, I've found that I use metric for measurements under an inch or under an ounce. At a certain upper limit it makes more sense to use metric for large values too.
So I have to suffer with the magic constant 25.4 bouncing around my brain every day forever and constantly converting trivial measurements into worse units.
I will never convert a measurement to fractional inches. If you must have inches as an input you can suffer a damn decimal point.
It’s a bit odd in the U.S. because we use a mix of units, largely due to industries that combine metric and imperial systems. Most people are familiar with metric volume since so many drinks are sold in 1 and 2 liter bottles, and medications are typically measured in milligrams. Lengths and weights are more of a mixed bag. Many track and field events use metric units now, though longer distances are still measured in miles. Temperatures are still Fahrenheit, which I tend to prefer because the smaller increments give a more nuanced sense of change. I’m comfortable with the metric system since I was a chemistry major in college and a mountain biker, where measurements like suspension travel are usually given in millimeters.
The smaller increments of Fahrenheit don't matter outside of a chemistry lab.
Speaking of mixed units, don't forget the alwys fun distinction of avoirdupois pound vs troy pound...
People sometimes ask "what's heavier, a pound of feathers or a pound of gold?", the implication is that you're stupid for for asking a dumb question. The technically correct answer is that the pound of feathers is heavier. The expected answer is usually that they're the same weight, because there is no difference in weight between the two things that both weigh a pound. The problem is that, in the USA, a pound of feathers is measured with the avoirdupois pound, while a pound of gold is measured in troy pounds. The troy pound is lighter than the avoirdupois pound, so the answer is that a pound of feathers is heavier.
While a troy ounce is heavier than the avoirdupois ounce, and the grain unit is equal in both. So, depending on whether you ask for a pound/ounce/grain, the answer can change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_weight
>“I’m currently working on a mounting plate that’s 4.5 by 8 in. that needs a 40 mm bore 1/2 -in. deep located 75 mm from the edge with m10 tapped holes and two 1/4-20 set screws tangential to the bore. Please kill me.”
When I was designing stuff here in Canada, that was basically Wednesday. One big advantage of the USA withdrawing from trade is that Canada will have the opportunity to finally complete the metric conversion.
I work across both english and metric all the time (CAD, 3d printing, science, woodworking in the US) - I just mentally switched (age 52) to metric first in my head (specifically, I think "that's 10cm" not "that's 4 inches" when I look at something.
Woodworking became a lot more enjoyable- I don't know why- when I started to think "I need to shave off 1mm" instead of "shave off 3/64 inch" or whatever.
I read once that all the educational materials produced to help people move from the old system to metric would cover 3 football fields and weigh more than 28 elephants, so it's nice to see it starting to have some effect.
Having converted science, manufacturing etc, what's the first (or next) true consumer facing thing that could change?
Grocery sizes. In fact, a lot of them already have it on the items. Typically because a lot of products are also sold in Canada so they put the ml measurement next to the gallons.
An interesting case on grocery items is that solid things that you pour (breakfast cereal, flour, sugar, salt, for example) the nutrition label gives the serving size in a US customary volume measure and in a metric mass measure.
For example my breakfast cereal label says a serving is 1 cup or 45g.
Liquids seem to give a US customary volume and a metric volume. For example the milk I put on that cereal says a serving is 1 cup or 240mL.
Checking some sauces I have on hand thick liquids (ketchup and sriracha) are US volume and metric mass like pourable solids and thin liquids (like soy sauce) are both US and metric volume like milk.
Butter is also US volume and metric mass.
A little bit of research says that this is actually regulatory. For things where how much you can fit in a given volume varies quite a bit depending on how you pack it the FDA requires that the metric units on the label be mass units, and that nutritional information is for that amount of mass of the thing.
The actual amount of flour in a cup of flour for example can vary quite a bit depending on how much air got in when you poured it. If the label says it is 110 calories for 1/4 cup (30g) and you want to actually use 440 calories of flour in something you should measure out 120g rather than 1 cup.
For things like milk 1 cup is going to have the same amount of milk no matter how you pour it, so they use volume measurement for both customary and metric.
If I understand correctly, the FPLA ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Packaging_and_Labeling_Ac... ) requires grocery items to be labeled in both American units and metric units. Metric-only is illegal in America but legal and common in Canada. I have shopped in American and Canadian supermarkets and speak from personal observations.
It seems the exception is that wine imported into the US can keep metric-only labeling, so I have indeed seen bottles labeled only "750 mL", sold in the US.
When I go to buy liquor it seems to already be mostly in metric, sizes are 500ml, 750ml, and liter.
Most all of it is, even from US companies, but customers still often use the imperial shorthands of pints, quarts, fifths, half gallon, and gallon. Everyone I know just doesn't care that it isn't precisely correct, its all relative due to varying alcohol content anyways.
Yeah is fl.oz on consumer containers _really_ seen as a volume measurement, i.e. thought of in terms of conversion "How many of these to a gallon", "what does a 6-pack weigh" and so on?
Or are they more like t-shirt sizes "I know I want a 16oz can to drink and I know how big they are"?
Mexico too. Anyone immigrated from basically anywhere is more used to buying in metric. And some products have already made the conversion, e.g. soda bottles.
> And some products have already made the conversion, e.g. soda bottles.
Some soda bottles. 20 oz bottles are still very much the norm at convenience stores, and 12 oz cans are the norm when you buy 12-packs.
> manufacturing
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.
Force and mass is what always drove me crazy in engineering school. I assume that courses in the US have largely given up trying to pay some lip service to common older units but sorting out pounds-mass, pounds-force, and slugs? Pretty sure I couldn't do it today.
The rocket company I worked at designed their orbital rocket in inches and lbm. Engine flow rates in lbm/s, temperatures in deg Rankine, thrust in lbf. Btu/hour/inch^2/degR heat transfer coefficients.
Honestly, the best way to cook is with grams. Throw everything into the same pot on a scale and keep zeroing it out. Way less mess to clean up. All the top baking recipes tend to already be in grams, but there's plenty of others out there that are not
Also a great use for LLMs. I'll tell it to convert recipes from volume to grams by estimating density. It's surprisingly accurate
My elementary school years in the US really pushed metric units.
And every science class I've ever had was exclusively SI units. Except for Thermodynamics, which sometimes uses BTUs and steam engines.
I don't think the title is accurate.
There is no super-slow "conversion" of the US to metric.
There is a super-slow adoption of metric _alongside_ the "customary" Imperial system.
The US Customary system is not the Imperial system. Though they are frequently confused, since they share a bunch of units, and even more names of units with different definitions.
The highway between Tucson and Nogales, Arizona, I-19, is the only highway in the country that has signage only in kilometers. It has been that way since 1980. It was a pilot project for the Metric Conversion Act. The highway is 102 kilometers long (63 miles).
You can keep your fahrenheit, your feet and your gallons, for all I care, but one thing I will never abide is bolts and nuts and drill bits coming in fractions of an inch.
Everybody still loses the 10mm socket anyway, even in the US.
There's now a product for that: https://www.lowes.com/pd/Kobalt-1-4-in-to-1-2-in-Drive-Metri...
Fractions of inch are still tolerable. But just having "#X" drills and screws is pretty silly. 7/32" might need some mental arithmetic, but #6 is just unknowable.
The fish is the last to know it lives in water.
96% of the world’s population and 75% of its nominal (but not PPP adjusted!) GDP is metric.
All science is metric.
Other arguments simply don’t matter. How fine the Fahrenheit vs Celsius scales are or whatever is pointless, irrelevant debate.
Join the rest of us, or slowly fade into irrelevance. There is no third option.
You’re that one mansion with the doddering old cranky fool still lighting their place with town gas while everyone else has been using electric lighting for decades.
The next time the street is dug up, your pipes won’t be reconnected.
“So what if our spaceships occasionally crash into Mars at full speed because we got mixed up with our units… again? We can afford it!” — apologists.
Seems like the U.S. uses metric for most of the important areas and just lets everyone continue to use imperial, whatever they want everywhere else.
Obligatory "what it's based on doesn't matter."
Like programming languages and UIs, it's what and how people use them. Imperial tends to be better because it's more "evolutionary."
Base 10 is more evolutionary because we, and many animals, evolved with 10 digits on our hands and feet.
funny related video from Loic Suberville.
People get bogged down in arguments about what's better or more natural, but in my opinion those always miss the point. The truth is, there's no incentive for the US to switch. If you're a typical adult living in the US, you already know all the conversions you will need (12 inches to a foot, etc etc). The math isn't hard, because you always have a calculator at hand in this age. In short, imperial units have zero downside for most people. On the other hand, switching units of measurement does have a major downside as you have to relearn to estimate everything in the new units. That would be fine if metric was solving a problem for you... but it's not, so why switch?
The only people who benefit from a switch to metric are kids (cause they won't have to learn the imperial conversions). And they, for better or for worse, don't get a say. If people really want the US to switch measurements so badly (which I have no idea why anyone gives a shit what our country does, it's not like it affects them), then they need to come up with an actual compelling benefit to adults in the US if they switch. 100 years ago there was one: you can do conversions more easily. But today there is not, and until one surfaces there's going to be zero pressure to switch units.
This just reinforces my old saying:
If you want to try to understand why the US is so fucked up, just look at England...
> just look at England.
And perhaps Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, and/ or Great Britain, the British Isles, and/ or the United Kingdom?
Fucked up, indeed.
It will never cease to drive me batty every time I try find a metric fastener for an automotive purpose at a local hardware store.
There are many reasons I can find for leaving the US, but engaging in DIY projects utilizing local suppliers are what's come closest to pushing me over the edge. Especially in this post-SEARS hellscape of low quality made in china junk the market's flooded with. Now not only can I never find the fasteners I need, the tools suck too!
I used to end up blowing all my money on ordering from Amazon and paying for same-day delivery, which usually means within a couple of hours in big cities.
I'd always waste my time going to Home Depot etc and getting aggravated at their metric fastener selections.
Hopefully some future president will mandate that the federal government use metric, like Trump getting rid of the penny. The rest of society will gradually come along.
Carter literally did this. Society did not come along.
The feds gave up too early.
Why change? Imperial was Washington's dream, after all... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYqfVE-fykk
The metric systems's worse flaw was doubling down on base 10 instead of the plainly superior base 12.
Only in certain fields. For most interactions divide by 10 is far easier than divide by 12, and you'd end up with far, far more "eyeballed" measurements.
So no, as a human being, I'm fine with base 10.
Or you'd have to go all in and write numbers in base 12 too, then dividing by 12 would be easier...
I hope you're comfortable with changing literally every number in society to base 12. My house cost $42A765_12. My SSN is 399-AA-5866 and phone number is (289) 257-B84A. The distance to the moon is actually 50A693_12 feet. I used the additional symbols A and B as per usual notation, but it's okay if society agrees on some other symbols for the extra two digit values.
If you don't make the base of the number system agree with the base used for converting between units, then conversion becomes so much harder. For example, it's not immediately apparent that 204 inches is 17 feet, but it is immediately apparent that 204 cm is 2.04 m. Furthermore, when the base disagrees with conversion factors, you run into issues like variable-length fields - like, "2ft 9in", "2ft 10in" (notice the inches transitions from one digit to two digits).
The right time to fix that mistake wasn't in metric, it was while creating our numbering system.
Base 12? That's a small number. Now base 13? 13's a big number. The biggest number, perhaps. That's what they're saying at least. Base 13, 13 colonies, now that's America.
The PDF standard uses base 85 encoding (Ascii 85).
Obviously base 60 is superior to all
Possibly yes. But every implementation of base-60 I've ever seen is actually implemented as alternating base-6 and base-10.
A true base-60 would have 60 unique symbols for the different digital values, much like how in our set of ten digits {0123456789}, none of the symbols have any rhyme or pattern with respect to the others.
Good luck memorizing the ~1800 entries of the base-60 multiplication table.
The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it!
Someone else must be paying for your fuel. Nobody who pays for their own fuel likes that.
This can make sense for currency, but units of weight and distance and so on are infinitely divisible. You can just have a third of a metre if you like. Or 333 mm if the inaccuracy is acceptable. And so on.
And it's not like 1 is some special value. If you start from a base of 120cm you get enough even divisions that you rarely run into the need for fractions
Unless everyone worked in base 12 numbers too, that'd be a mess. Part of the beauty of metric is how often calculations devolve to shifting the decimal point.
And nothing really prevents metric system from working in base-12. Ofc base 12 kilometre would be larger than base-10. But it still would work.
Base 10 really is used because our number system is base 10. And more so base 1000. Apart from some cultures.
As long as we count in base 10, it makes sense for the unit system to also be based on base 10.
As for changing the world to counting in base 12, yes there would be some advantages, but really, good luck with that.
Too bad there are 11 players on the pitch, otherwise US could switch entirely to the football fields measurement system.
Isn't base 10 easier because you just add/remove zeros, and also we have 10 fingers to count..?
No, converting units is not a useful exercise. airplanes are measured in mm - even the full length is in mm not decameters or even hecameters (i had to look those prefixes up, spellcheck doesn't even know the word, but I think they are correct)
Being able to count using fingers is more valuable than having one more prime factor.
You can actually count to 12 on your fingers using one hand. Use the thumb as a pointer, then for each of your other fingers you have three joints. So 3*4=12.
This is why men are superior to women, we can always count to one higher. (or two including the tip, as someone suggested with the fingers) :-p ducks
If you include the tip, you can do base 16.
Let’s go hexadecimal all the way.
No. Base 16 is only divisible by 1, 2, 4, and 8, while Base12 is divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6. Of course, Base 10 is only divisible by 1, 2, and 5.
Switching from Base 10 to Base 12 would be difficult. Instead we should go back in time and ensure we evolve with 6 fingers on each hand and foot.
But all the techniques to multiply numbers with your fingers are more confusing in base 12.
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.
Or use a hand as a 5-bit integer, then you can count to 31 :)
It's hard to actually count using more than 4 bits/hand though. The quickest methods that require the least dexterity are those that count the knuckles (which are actually used in some counting traditions, unlike binary finger-counting).
Consider marking it with /s next time.
Lol sure, in no A0 years!
Aren't imperial units considerably easier to calculate on the fly in construction and when squaring? They seem to come more natural for me.
Can you give an example? I can't imagine calculating conversions between inches and feet to be easier than using millimeters/centimeters/meters. Or using mostly millimeters in construction in Europe. You have one unit to deal with that generally tends to be integer value. No need to fractions.
You don't convert. Airplanes are designed in mm and you never need meters. Houses are in inches - we say 92 5/8. Or sometimes 2 feet 3 inches. Our measurement tools have both marks so we can do it without coversion.
Depends. they are designed so the whole units are easy for the common things you do with that size. this is a common case for things will still do today like we did 200 years ago (like build houses). But even in those areas a lot of things are not round units.
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
Related to this, I find the "default to round numbers" influence interesting on things like minimal speeds. Where my understanding is many metric based systems have a smallest max speed of 30km/h. Which is between the common 15 and 20 that I'm used to seeing as the lowest.
I tried asking on a forum once on how this impacted default room sizes. I see standard ceiling size in the US is moving to 9 feet. I am assuming places on metric would not standardize on that number, but curious if they would just stick to the nearest half, or go to the nearest whole meter. (I "tried" asking, as people seemed to think that you would just design the room to be 2.74 meters and call it a day. That strikes me as very unlikely, as design tools really love "snap to grid.")
When one of familiar with something, it always feels more natural.
Units based on base 12 or base 2, as U.S. standard measures tend to be, are easier to divide in many ways.
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.
No. They are only more natural to you because you are used to it.
The problem is that Fahrenheit is a bit more convenient for describing the weather. Inches and feet are a bit more convenient for measuring human scale things and for being easily divisible by more numbers. And we’re used to the rest of it.
Unless someone comes along and forces it on you, for the average person, there’s not enough incentive to switch.
As someone born and living in a country that uses the metric system, I do not understand a bit of what inches and feets mean. Tell me something has 10-15 cm, and I know what it means. I measure 173cm, I know what one meter is about. 5'10? What the hell is that?! 5 feet and 10 inches? Some people have small feet, some have larger. And what is an "inch"? :)
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..
That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m saying that a system where the majority of air temperatures in the vast majority of the country fall between 0 and 100 is slightly more convenient than one in which they fall between -17 and 37. 0 is really cold it doesn’t frequently get colder than that in most of the country. 100 is really hot, in most places it doesn’t get hotter than that.
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.
Saying "I'm 5 feet 11 inches" requires about 3 digits, saying "I'm 180cm" also requires that many digits. It takes about as many syllables as well, because in practice you say "five-(feet)-e-leven" or "one-eighty" (Note that I don't know how to say US customary units out loud)
(it's actually five-foot eleven inches, to add to the confusion)
Was in Fairbanks last weekend and it was -15F. So, having Fahrenheit staying positive for weather in US, is not really an argument. I am fine with Celsius based on water (0 freezing and 100 boiling). But I get that changing is confusing when you have adjusted your whole life to a system. If taught at school and displayed, in half a generation we could move to metric. Like others said groceries are already there.
You're suggesting it's not convenient to know when temps are below zero, or above. A quite critical distinction on the road actually.
Choose your poison.
You're just saying this because you're American and accustomed to it.
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...
It should be noted here that the daily high for a good 1/3-1/2 of America is below 0C/32F/freezing for a good 3-5 months each year. Our weather varies much more significantly than most (not all) of Europe. Even with Fahrenheit, it is not uncommon for places like Detroit to be sub-zero for days without getting into positive temperatures.
I've personally lived in Marquette, Michigan and now live in Phoenix, Arizona and have experience both -40F(-40C) and 118F(47.7C). To me, the 0 = really cold, 25 = cold, 50 = mild, 75 = comfortable, 100 = really hot scale makes sense having lived through those extremes. But you're right, that's largely because it's what I grew up with. And with that in mind, it is extremely unlikely America would ever transition away from it for that very reason.
Both 0F and 100F happen regularly in many parts of the US and I would not say here one is rarer than the other. NYC has seen both in the last 12 months.
1 foot is the distance light travels in one nanosecond.
And 1/10 of an inch is a very common distance in electronics (PCBs)
> And 1/10 of an inch is a very common distance in electronics (PCBs)
I hope you can guess why that is, right? It could have just as well been .25cm instead.
Yeah but just saying we can't easily change it now.
"Fahrenheit is a bit more convenient for describing the weather" - you might need to show us an example here that is not biased. Because to me, Celsius is a bit more convenient for describing the weather.
On the Fahrenheit scale, the majority of daily temperatures in the vast majority of the US fall between 0 and 100, which is -17 and 37 Celsius, and it’s more granular without introducing a decimal point.
I enjoyed reading this exchange, it's really a matter of perspective.
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.
In metric world nobody cares about decimal points in temperature outside. Measuring precision is not that good because of wind, humidity, exposure to sun etc. We just don’t need that granularity, so it is really hard to understand why would you need that. Is there really any difference between 56°F and 57°F that you can feel and want to measure?
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.
below zero days are really really crazy cold and above 100 days are really really crazy hot. I don't think the fact that things occasionally exceed the 100 point "normal" range makes it less useful, if anything the out of bounds numbers emphasize the severity of the temperature. it's common where I grew up in the midwest US to hear "wow its going to be BELOW ZERO" as a way to express extreme cold
For me personally “really really cold” starts below -30°C and crazy hot is above +30°C. It’s very subjective and outside of US many areas have climate where Fahrenheit doesn’t make sense at all.
maybe that's why its popular in the US? for most of this country the 0-100 range works quite well to describe the normal range of outdoor temperature. we seem to like 0-100 ranges, for instance speed in MPH works out nicely.. "over 100 MPH!" is a common expression for extreme speed drivers. school grades are often a value out of 100, etc. which makes you wonder why we don't prefer metric lol
0 degrees F is a cold winter day, 100 degrees F is a hot summer day
0 degrees C is a cold winter day, 100 degrees C means you're dead
I think he's suggesting that a 0-100 scale for temperature/"relative warmth outside" is more intuitive than a 0-37 scale. It's easier to to place 73 degrees on a 0-100 relative warmth scale than it is to place 18 degrees on a 0-37 scale (unless of course you grew up calibrated to the 0-37 scale and know that 18degrees means you maybe need a light jacket or whatever).
I think it's funny that one of the main benefits of metric is its base-10-ness where things scale so nicely from 1-10-100-1000 etc. but then for temperature we're supposed to be fine with a 0-37? Fahrenheit is basically the 1-100 version of temperature (when it comes to weather).
It is what you are used to for both of you. you could make your own measurement system and it would work fine once you get used to it - until you need to communicate with someone else who isn't used to it.
A big part of it is certainly what you're used to.
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 the degree size is about twice as granular as Celsius.
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. Ideal might be both a smaller inch and a smaller centigrade, but between the two a smaller inch is more helpful than a smaller centigrade.
This is just your familiarity.
Someone from the tropics might say 8°F is really darned cold, or 15°F, or whatever.
0 lines up with freezing point is very intuitive.
Perhaps, but useless for most purposes. You need to know how think of a coat to wear and you need a mental map from some number to some coat. It doesn't matter what the scale is, just that you have that map.
I agree its having the mental map that matters but my intention was to disagree with the parent comment's claim that Fahrenheit is more appropriate to the "human scale of things".
its a small advantage, but I think zero indicating when things might freeze is a more useful than "0 degrees lines up with really darned cold"
Not as laughable as "metric is more convenient for human scale things". "Human scale things" includes fractions of an inch and fractions of a mile, which are horrible in customary units, and includes both the foot and yard which are used confusingly interchangeably. Metric is far superior for human scale measurements.
And that's only length. It gets worse outside of length. Like WTF is an ounce?
And using different ounces for metals, fluids, drugs, and, er, everything else - how does that not send people screaming into the arms of the metric system?!
And then there's the hundredweight, where "hundred" actually means "eight"...
Celsius isn't granular enough for describing how humans feel temperature.
Why are you restricting yourself to whole numbers? Do you refuse to measure lengths shorter than a barleycorn?
Oddly enough as a person born in a metric country, now living in Canada which is metric, and always educated in metric, I agree with you on the feet and inches. "A couple of inches" doesn't imply nearly the precision that "5 centimeters" (using the US spelling on purpose) implies. Similarly my own height of 5'10 is much more "human scale" than the 178cm that it says on my passport.
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...
And I would come the opposite conclusion to you.
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.
Around here, temperatures range from -40ºC to +40ºC. The most important information temperature offers is whether it is going to snow or rain. 0ºC being roughly the temperature where that transition happens makes thinking about it seem more natural than picking a random number out of the 30-100 scale (well, -40-+104).
> Inches and feet are a bit more convenient for measuring human scale things
nope, this is mere familiarity. You find it more natural because you're more used to it, nothing more.
There is nothing convenient about a system where "below zero" and "below freezing" are not synonyms. Or at least that's how I find it. because of what I'm used to. But at least I realise that might be a fact about me, not a fact about the world.