"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.)
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.
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
> 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?
> 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?
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.)
More on the backward compatibility of the metre, this video released 7 hours ago explains it nicely: https://youtu.be/PWbfVcDcfFw?t=1039 Joseph Newton - "Cursed Units 3: The British Empire Strikes Back".
Other parts of the video highlight the insanity of inconsistent and shifting definitions of imperial units such as the mile, gallon, fluid ounce, pound-force/pound-mass, etc. It's one big damning essay against pre-metric units.
Handily enough the speed of light is about a foot per nanosecond, give or take. A nanosecond doesn't sound like much, unless you start to work out, for example, how many bits are inside your 40Gbps USB-C cable at the moment (they do travel at less than the speed of light).
Here in Canada, my family ran a fishing camp with a lot of US customers. I was talking with one of them about metric vs. US units and to demonstrate I said how about this: How many gallons in a cubic mile? And he was able to work it out in his head, and pretty quickly too. Whoa. The point I was trying to make that is than in metric (say, liters per cubic kilometer) you just need to get the number of zeroes right, but you can't argue with results.
I was able to do something similar by using gross approximations and conversions to/from metric. My coworker had just bought a surplus stainless steel water tank for solar heating, and was wondering how much it would weigh when full. It was cylindrical, so I asked him for the diameter and the height. In my head I converted those measurements to inches, then to centimeters by multiplying by 2.5. I divided the diameter by 2, squared it, and multiplied by 3 (close enough to pi) to get the area. Then I converted the area and the height to their nearest power of 2 so I could take advantage of logarithms. Multiplying the area and height was as easy as adding the exponents, which gave me cubic centimeters. The weight of water is almost by definition 1 gram per 1 cc. Divide by 1000 to get kg by subtracting 10 from the exponent, then multiply by 2 to get approximate pounds by adding 1 to the exponent. By the time he was done telling me the dimensions, I had an answer for him. It definitely wasn't correct, but all he needed was a ballpark anyway.
> he was able to work it out in his head, and pretty quickly
That's a scary ability. I wonder if that guy is equally adept at converting acre-feet to gallons, or if he's a one-trick pony.
Here's what I know without looking anything up: 1 mile = 1760 yards, 1 yard = 3 feet, 1 foot = 12 inches; 1 US gallon = 231 cubic inches (exact conversion, and a weird number at that). So 1 cubic mile = (63360 inch)^3 = 7707820032000/7 gal ≈ 1.101 trillion US gallons.
Fun fact, combustion engine displacements used to be quoted in cubic inches. Note that 61 in^3 ≈ 1 litre.
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).
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?
Back in the 1970's I tried to come up with a metric time system by breaking a day into powers of 10. A centiDay was 14.4 minutes.
I realized it would never catch on, because a 30 minute TV show would have to fit into 28.8 minutes, and the only way to do that was to lose a couple of commercials. Never gonna happen.
> Do you have problems with time too? How do you cope with that?
I have memorized how time and dates work, but I do not enjoy the system.
Time is my biggest sore point. For starters, doing any kind of arithmetic is an exercise in pain. For example when I rent a shared bike, the system tells me the start and end time to the second - for example, from 13:26:08 to 15:54:39. To calculate the duration, I have to combine the HMS into linear seconds, subtract the two linear timestamps, and then reformat it into HMS notation. Similarly, if I have to calculate ratios, percentages, histograms, etc., then HMS notation just gets in the way.
Have you ever tried writing logic to deal with HMS before? Here's an exercise for you (which I completed this month): Given a non-negative integer number of seconds, write out the number as a string formatted in DHMS format such that the leftmost unit cannot have leading zeros (so no 0m23s, no 09s) except for the special case of 0s, the string must be fully reduced (e.g. 83s -> 1m23s), and any non-leftmost unit must have full leading zeros (e.g. 1h2m3s -> 1h02m03s). The logic is pretty horrendous. The alternative, if everything was expressed in linear seconds, is completely trivial.
The second sore point about time notation is that although sub-second units (ms, μs, ns, etc.) are fine and dandy, any SI super-second unit (kilosecond, megasecond, etc.) is never used in practice and also has no alignment with days and years. This isn't merely a theoretical concern because that's how we get non-SI units like km/h, kW⋅h, and light-year. If ks was useful and popular, then km/ks just simplifies to m/s, whereas km/h = 3.6 m/s and kW⋅h = 3.6 MJ. Personally, I would've preferred the day to be subdivided into either a thousand or a million ticks, especially because I strongly prefer power-of-1000 prefixes (so milli- is good, centi- is bad).
As for dates, we can't get around the fact that there are roughly 365.25 days per tropical year. The Gregorian calendar is hacky because February is shorter than other months, a leap day is put at the end of February instead of the end of December, and the naming is shifted so that Sep (number 7) = 9th month, Oct (number 8) = 10th month, Nov (number 9) = 11th month, Dec (number 10) = 12th month. I think the least bad solution is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar .
>> Lots of useless names and numbers to memorize
You are correct to point out that time units have many weird names and conversion factors. Now on top of that, try learning all these names and conversion factors:
• Length: 1 mile = 1760 yards (let's skip furlongs and chains even though they are part of the derivation of the mile), 1 yard = 3 feet, 1 foot = 12 inches. Then there are industry-specific measures like mils in machining, points in typesetting, nautical miles.
• Volume: 1 US gallon = 4 quarts, 1 quart = 2 pints, 1 pint = 2 cups, 1 cup = 8 fluid ounces, 1 fluid ounce = 2 tablespoons, 1 tablespoon = 3 teaspoons. Also, 1 US gallon = 231 cubic inches exact, surprisingly. Throw in some more industry-specific units like cubic feet of water, cubic inches of engine displacement, acre-feet of rain, cubic miles of dirt mined, barrels of oil...
• Mass: 1 short ton = 20 hundredweights, 1 hundredweight = 100 pounds, 1 pound = 16 ounces, 1 ounce = 480 grains; also, 1 stone = 14 pounds (pervasive in UK but nonexistent in US).
• Power: horsepower, BTU/h, ton of cooling, possibly foot-pound-per-second.
The point is, all of the above names and numbers are completely arbitrary and you have to learn them all from scratch. If you aced the test on units of length, that has told you exactly nothing about the units of mass.
It should go without saying in the metric system, the following series mean exactly what you think they mean:
If you know how many metres are in a kilometre, you know how many hertz are in a kilohertz - you didn't need to learn anything new. You just needed to think for two seconds upon the first time you heard that prefixed unit.
An LED bulb advertised as 2000 lumens (lm) can be easily rewritten as 2 kilolumens (klm) if you wanted to. A power bank marketed as 20000 mA⋅h can at least be simplified to 20 A⋅h (and 72 kilocoulombs if you get rid of the hour).
I don't know what do you do, but most people need to know how many yards (or inches, or feet, or chains, or whatever) in a mile as often as they need to know how many seconds, minutes, or hours in a quarter i.e. never. Yet it's the strongest point proponents of the metric system have, so makes me wonder why are they so agitated?
For the record, I am from a metric country and immigrated to the US as an adult. I still find American system to be more adjusted to human needs. E.g. temperature in F does not need decimals unlike temperature in C, tool sizing in inches is simpler (look at the sets of drill bits in different systems for example), tire pressure in psi (e.g. one of my bikes is 53 psi rear and 51 front, or 3.65 and 3.51 bars, you could say I could remember just the decimals, but another bike is 33 and 31, or 2.27 and 2.13 so no, it's 3 digits with bars vs 2 in psi), house dimensions are in even number of feet so much easier to find furniture, which is designed with this in mind, obviously. Miles are great to estimate time of travel by car, take 1 minute per mile of distance on a highway and 2 minutes in the city and you will be pretty close.
But, of course, the reason the American system is never going away is because it would be insanely expensive: you either will have to rewrite all building codes/standars/recipes with stupid conversions e.g 50.8x101.6 instead of 2x4 even though the lumber dimensions are not really 2 and 4 inches or scrape them and write the new ones using the more sensible metric dimensions but then you will need to scrape all the tooling you had and buy new, metric tools. All so you could say how many micrometers in a kilometer and feel smart?
> Miles are great to estimate time of travel by car, take 1 minute per mile of distance on a highway and 2 minutes in the city and you will be pretty close.
That might be true where you live, but it's hardly a universal constant. 1 minute per mile might be sort-of-universal for long distance Interstate driving, but then again, you can just as easily phrase that as ~1 hour per 100 km in metric.
I'm rather doubtful about your 2 minutes per mile (= 30 mph average speed) figure for "city" driving, though – how's that even possible when urban maximum speeds are usually in the 25 – 40 mph range, and that's not counting time lost for traffic lights and other intersections, general congestion and parking?
Checking a few destinations around where I live in Germany, non-Autobahn cross-country driving is closer to 2 minutes per mile rather than 1 minute per mile (and highly variable depending on your exact destination, so no point trying to estimate driving times to the nearest minute, anyway), and never mind actual urban driving.
>That might be true where you live, but it's hardly a universal constant.
I have not said it's a universal constant, it's true in the US, where we use miles. ~1 hour per 100km is not as easy.
I cannot say I care much if you are doubtful, especially if you live in Germany and not in the US, I doubt many people in the US will care about your doubts too.
> 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.
I live in one of the most populated cities in North America. The temperature on Saturday is forecasted to go down to -18°F (feels like -29°F with wind chill). It's not at all unusual for temperatures to be below 0°F in winter in much of the world.
> 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.
You can't have it both ways. The entire advantage you proposed for Fahrenheit is that the outside temperature is often between 0 and 100. It's a tiny aesthetic advantage that doesn't even work very well because 0°F isn't actually the coldest temperature we get and 100°F isn't the warmest.
You're right it doesn't matter that much if water boils at 100° or 212°. It's just different numbers. But by the same token, it doesn't matter if the warmest weather is about 100°F or 40°C. It's just a different number. At least 0°C and 100°C are actual points that mean something and are relevant to everyday life, while 0°F isn't really anything. As I said before, the weather outside changes more at 0°C than at any other temperature.
TL;DR: "The remarkable result here is that 0℉ is nearly exactly the 1st percentile of daily lows, and 100℉ is nearly exactly the 99th percentile of daily highs." NB: The context is the continental US.
It's a pretty neat analysis, but it looks like the "nearly exactly" part must be a coincidence for the particular methodology and data they used (most significantly that it's based on 2018 weather).
Fahrenheit was created in northern Europe, using the temperature of a salt water and ice mixture as the zero calibration point. It was later adjusted to define the difference between water's freezing and boiling points to be exactly 180°, since 180 is a highly composite number with many divisors. So off the bat, it's a bit odd that 0°F and 100°F would match the 1st and 99th percentiles of population-adjusted daily highs and lows in the US with that much precision. It's a coincidence already in the sense that the creator was not aiming for this.
But it's also a coincidence because they used 2018 data, which was a particular warm year on average. (2012 was warmer, but I don't see any warmer years before 2012 in the National Weather Service's table which goes all the way back to 1875.) Average temperature across the US can vary by 3° or 4°F year to year. The population adjusted temperature should vary even more because it depends on lot on which weather systems hit the major population centers that year. I'm not sure how much the 1st and 99th percentile would change if they redid the analysis for a different year, but it would probably vary by several degrees.
It's also kind of interesting that you would never have gotten this result before around 2012 or so, due to global warming.
It doesn't matter if it's a coincidence or not. The fact that it works out that way still plays to its convenience and "good feel" in the US.
Arguing that it's a coincidence isn't really relevant.
I agree with the poster further up: I'm more or less good with all metric units expect temperature. While I still "feel" all the US customary units better than metric, I can intuitively "see" meters, liters, and kilograms. But Celsius continues to elude me, even after dating and being married to someone for 8+ years who grew up in a metric country.
I'm not sure you fully read my comment. It only works for 2018. If you did their analysis any other year, you'll get the 1st percentile is -4°F or something similar.
I only called out the "nearly exactly" part of the claim. US weather is approximately in the range of 0-100°F, give or take 20 degrees. But the analysis found 0°F to be nearly exactly the first percentile of daily highs and lows, to within a twentieth of a percentile point.
It's true that US temperature is around 0°F-100°F but usually false that those temperatures are the 1st and 99th percentile.
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.
One thing that is great about 0°C representing the freezing of water is that at that point you know there will be ice on the paved surfaces (unless they were dry, cleaned or salted).
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.
> Do whatever you want for distances between stars
Actually, this is very problematic as well. As it stands, astronomical distances are quoted in single/thousands/millions/billions of kilometres, astronomical units (Earth-Sun distance), parsecs and kilo- and mega-, and then light-years (and thousands, millions, billions).
I would strongly prefer to use metric units: metre, kilometre, megametre, gigametre, terametre (AU is around here), petametre (parsec and light-year is around here), exametre (about a thousand light-years), zettametre (about a million light-years), yottametre (about a billion light-years). The scale ends there because the observable universe is about 886 Ym in diameter.
To pace off something in feet most people actually try to pace in yards and multiply by 3 if they want to express the result in feet. They could just as easily pace in meters.
What is better with metric is the consistent way to name multiples and divisions of the base units.
Metric uses power of 10 prefixes but another power could work fine. Power of 2 for example actually fits well with Imperial volume measurements, where a quart is 1/4 gallon, a pint is 1/2 quart, 1 cup is 1/2 pint, a fluid ounce is 1/8 cup, and a tablespoon is 1/2 a fluid ounce.
Just make some prefixes that mean 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32, 1/64, 1/128, and 1/256 and use those with gallon instead of having separate names for everything, and use the same prefixes with yards when you need a unit smaller than a yard and you'd be off to a good start. Add some prefixes that mean 2x, 4x, 8x, etc too.
Yards and gallons don't have to be the base units. Could be feet and cups or anything else. The key is prefixes to get bigger or smaller units instead of naming those others units, and using the same prefixes across unit types.
Again, you're optimizing for the wrong thing, a thing we especially don't much need now that we have computers and calculators.
Intuitive and immediately useful TO HUMANS for what they actively do is the most important thing.
No, it is not easier to deal with meters if you're talking about physical spaces that humans inhabit. And it's not easier to deal with C when talking about the temperature of a room, because an F degree is just about the smallest difference a human can tell. I know I can tell a 74 from a 73 from a 72 etc in my house.
> No, it is not easier to deal with meters if you're talking about physical spaces that humans inhabit. And it's not easier to deal with C when talking about the temperature of a room, because an F degree is just about the smallest difference a human can tell. I know I can tell a 74 from a 73 from a 72 etc in my house.
Why? For anybody who grew up in a metric country, dealing with metres is pretty damn easy. Case in point, my GF is an architect working for an US military base, and she gets royally pissed off every time she has to deal with feet and inches.
You are indeed right that in most numeric computations using the inverse temperature, a.k.a. the reciprocal temperature, is more convenient.
Nevertheless, there are many important quantities which are proportional to temperature, e.g. pressure, internal energy, voltage generated by a bandgap reference and so on. Because of this, there are many cases, especially in qualitative reasoning, when using temperature is more convenient than using its inverse.
This is similar to waves, where in most numeric computations wave-number and frequency are more convenient, but there are also many cases, e.g. when reasoning about resonance frequencies or stationary waves, when using wave-length and periodic time is more convenient.
Another example is in electrical circuits, where for some problems using impedance and resistance is more convenient, while for others using admittance and conductance is more convenient.
Perhaps one would need a simpler name for reciprocal temperature, to facilitate its use wherever this makes sense. However, when implementing a physical model in a program, where one should always define distinct types for each kind of physical quantity, using a short type name like "RecTemp" would not stand out among the many abbreviations typically used in programs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.")
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.
> hiding of things like the entrance are the hallmark of post-war architectural trends.. PTSD... American veterans
Post-war architectural trends don't have a lot to do with the war experiences but are, since you are talking about modern architecture, a direct continuation of pre-war modern architecture.
> 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.
The features that remind you of a bunker are more in the direction of brutalism (blocky, fortress like appearance but without the intent and function).
> We know as a matter of scientific study that asymmetry in architectural design introduces stress
No it does not, that's just complete nonsense. Have a walk around a really old (250+ years) historic neighborhood (preferably without a lot of tourists), it will be full of asymmetry, and then measure your stress levels. They should be through the roof, right?
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.
> 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.
Except that Fahrenheit's extra precision doesn't really matter. Unless you can tell the difference between 72°F and 73°F, or 34°F and 33°F.
I absolutely can tell the difference between house temperatures of 67, 68, and 69 F. Not so much down in the 30s, but in the typical ambient range of temperature, that level of precision seems to match my body's sensitivity (in fact, I wish my thermostat was just a bit more precise).
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.
Even the existing-tool-holder is a weak excuse. My socket wrench set came with two near-identical sequences of wrenches, metric and imperial. I regularly the encounter metric variants in the US. Switching to metric, like the rest of the world, would make things simpler.
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.
>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.
My son went to LA-area and LAUSD schools, and the echo of that same commitment from those years in California was still faintly detectable in the 2010s, highly attenuated by Prop 13, as you mention.
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.