Hey what ever happened to Metrification?

[retromike22]

The US is the only industrialized country where the metric system is not the official system of units, the only other countries are Liberia and Burma.



This is ridiculous.

[Negusa Nagast 🚀]

The Metric Conversion ACt had no teeth and when it was reported to Congress that the Metric Board needed a mandate to make the change good ol' Reagan decided to scrap the initiative.

[minionofmidas]

American Exceptionalism.

[greenforest32]

[opebo]

One of the few things I truly love about the Bad Place - their resistance to this annoying system.

[memphis]

When in was in the UK several years ago, they used quite a bit of non-metric as well. Is this still the case?

[Bandit3 the Worker]

If George H.W. Bush had been reelected in 1992, the metric system would have become official. He issued an order to implement metrication, but Clinton nixed the order before it took effect.

Big Business wanted metrication. The public didn't.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I really don't see why the metric system is so inherently superior in non-scientific use. That implies that when someone drive from one city to another they care about what fraction of the Earth's circumference they are driving.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

When in was in the UK several years ago, they used quite a bit of non-metric as well. Is this still the case?

Yes.

[Bandit3 the Worker]

I really don't see why the metric system is so inherently superior in non-scientific use.

Big Business thought it was, and their opinion was the only one that mattered to them.

[Simfan34]

I am ardently pro-Metric. Metrification will help US businesses save money. It will prevent catastrophes like the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter. It will help combat American close-mindedness. The idea of a decimal system of measurement was proposed by our founding fathers!

Metrification now!

[The Mikado]

I've gotten really, really good at in-head Metric-Standard conversion, given that I read so much stuff written outside the US.  The one I've never quite gotten good at was fluids conversion. 

[retromike22]

Is it because of too many people like Grandpa Simpson:

"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!"

[Supersonic]

Gotta love the UK being the moderate heroes here, with both systems being used.

[Bacon King]

I really don't see why the metric system is so inherently superior in non-scientific use.

It's just simpler and more intuitive.

Do you know off the top of your head how many feet make up half a mile, and how many meters make up half a kilometer? Which one is simpler to do in your head when needed?

Do you know how many teaspoons make a tablespoon, make up a fluid ounce, make up a cup, make up a pint, make up a quart, make up a gallon? Isn't that a bit... needlessly complicated? Hell, I can never remember how many ounces are in a cup and that's screwed up my cooking on several occasions. Wouldn't it just be SO much simpler to have small volumes measured in milliliters, and big ones in liters? And for intermediate measurements, just round to the nearest 50 or 100 mL? Certainly beats keeping track of the incredibly complicated system used in the US (never mind the fact that some of those terms are used identically in other places, but for different volumes).

Those are just a couple of examples, but using the metric system really does make life a bit easier.

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Actually, the size of a meter is no longer related to the Earth's circumference; it is officially defined as the "length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Decimalization isn't all it's cracked up to be.  There's a reason the Babylonians went with base 60.  However, that's a minor quibble.  The main quibble is that the Celsius/Kelvin temperature scale has a unit that is less conveniently sized than Fahrenheit/Rankine does, so °F is superior to °C since both scales are arbitrary.

[Win32]

I was in England for four months. Milk and water were sold by the liter, which took some getting used to. I think speed limits were still in miles per hour, but as I obviously didn't drive, I don't remember with any certainty. (You know what's a real affront to social harmony? The British drive on the wrong side of the road.)

It is interesting that no one advocates stamping out languages for the sake of uniformity, though many of the arguments advanced for metrication would apply a fortiori to the spoken and written word. Likewise, I have yet to hear anyone argue that we phase out the minute, hour, day, week, etc. on the ground that they involve arbitrary conversion factors.

The Achilles' heel of the metric system was its adoption of the meter as the basic unit of length. That, when combined with a decimal system for derivative units, makes the metric system positively painful to use when estimating lengths of about 1 to 10 feet—which is to say, the very things we are more likely to estimate than to measure.

The metric system should have been based on some variant of the foot, which has been in use since ancient times. The Roman foot (pes) differs from ours by only about a third of an inch.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

The Achilles' heel of the metric system was its adoption of the meter as the basic unit of length. That, when combined with a decimal system for derivative units, makes the metric system positively painful to use when estimating lengths of about 1 to 10 feet—which is to say, the very things we are more likely to estimate than to measure.

The metric system should have been based on some variant of the foot, which has been in use since ancient times. The Roman foot (pes) differs from ours by only about a third of an inch.

What's so painful about estimates of 3 to 30 decimeters?

The really painful bit of the metric system is the mass unit.  The base mass unit was always intended to be the kilogram, so you might wonder why they didn't give it a name of its own.  They did, the grave, named after gravité, but the name was judged too similar to a title of nobility, so they axed the name, but kept the gram which had originated as a alternate name for the milligrave to be used with small quantities.  (Volume also had two base units, the litre and the stere which was equal to a kilolitre and expected to be used for such things as firewood, ore, or timber.)

[Win32]

What's so painful about estimates of 3 to 30 decimeters?

The units just force too precise an estimate, at least for my less-than-stellar spatial intelligence. (Sure, you can always just take your feet estimate and multiply by 3. But the very fact that you might have to do that is a testament to the greater utility of the foot.)

[Bacon King]

What's so painful about estimates of 3 to 30 decimeters?

The units just force too precise an estimate, at least for my less-than-stellar spatial intelligence. (Sure, you can always just take your feet estimate and multiply by 3. But the very fact that you might have to do that is a testament to the greater utility of the foot.)

Nah, you don't need to do that. An average five year old is about a meter tall. Just think in your head how many small children it'd take to fill the length, lying end to end. One kid and up to the knees of the second? That's one and a quarter meters!

[Supersonic]

I was in England for four months. Milk and water were sold by the liter, which took some getting used to. I think speed limits were still in miles per hour, but as I obviously didn't drive, I don't remember with any certainty. (You know what's a real affront to social harmony? The British drive on the wrong side of the road.)

Milk sold by the litre? I don't think I've ever seen that before?

I'm pretty sure it's by pints, unless it depends on the brand of milk you buy.

[Vazdul (Formerly Chairman of the Communist Party of Ontario)]

What's so painful about estimates of 3 to 30 decimeters?

The units just force too precise an estimate, at least for my less-than-stellar spatial intelligence. (Sure, you can always just take your feet estimate and multiply by 3. But the very fact that you might have to do that is a testament to the greater utility of the foot.)

Nah, you don't need to do that. An average five year old is about a meter tall. Just think in your head how many small children it'd take to fill the length, lying end to end. One kid and up to the knees of the second? That's one and a quarter meters!

That's nice. Now estimate the height of a random adult. Meters are no good- most adults are well under two meters. The next step down is the decimeter, a word which I have never seen outside of a math textbook. So we're stuck with centimeters, and estimating a range between 150 and 200.

[Holmes]

Yes, measuring height using the metric system is pretty difficult, same for shoe size. Europeans seem to love doing it, but it's really the only time I don't use the metric system.

[Win32]

I was in England for four months. Milk and water were sold by the liter, which took some getting used to. I think speed limits were still in miles per hour, but as I obviously didn't drive, I don't remember with any certainty. (You know what's a real affront to social harmony? The British drive on the wrong side of the road.)

Milk sold by the litre? I don't think I've ever seen that before?

I'm pretty sure it's by pints, unless it depends on the brand of milk you buy.

Hmm, I thought it was in mL. But maybe I misremember, as this was almost a year ago. I was just shopping at Tesco and Sainsbury's, so it wasn't anything exotic.

All I know for sure is that the jugs did not look like the familiar (U.S.) sizes.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It's sold in pints, though there will be a litre measurement on the bottle as well.