Chafee: Time for the US to complete its transition to the metric system

[WelshBloke]

The United States is a world leader, not a follower.

By GOD almighty we do not have to conform to what the world expects.

Yeah, you keep using the system King George told you to use.

 

[Aikouka]

If we just used metric, it would save me the time from having to perform conversions or know them in the first place. There aren't too many people who want to know crap like 1 inch = 2.54 cm or 1 mi ~= 1.6 km or 1 gal ~= 3.8L (learned that one from seeing it on urinals ). Although, I'd guess that most people don't run into metric all that often, but let me say... when I'm watching anime and they say something like, "It's going to be 26C tomorrow!", it's a real pain to have to divide by 5 multiply by 9 and add 32 just to say, "Oh yeah, 78.8F is kind of hot!"

Thinking about it now... I should just use Siri next time and save myself the hassle.

 

[MiniDoom]

Pretty low on my list of issues to give fucks about...

 

[who?]

Republican hero President Reagan eliminated the metric conversion that Presidents Ford and Carter started which proves that forcing metric on everybody is unamerican.

 

[Darwin333]

Um, try the late 60s / early 70s, kid.

That's just more depressing that we tried, and failed, twice.

 

[BoberFett]

Why change? What problems does it solve? I'll admit I'm not up to speed on what difficulties using a system other than metric adds. Does it increase the cost of commerce? Cause rounding errors in some obscure system somewhere that will cause a nuclear plant to meltdown?

 

[Strk]

If the metric system is superior because it uses base 10, why don't we divide our years and days into units of 10? Why not 10 months in a year, 36 or 37 days in a month, 10 hours in a day, 10 minutes in an hour, 10 seconds in a minute?

What no one here is considering is that while the imperial system is never as elegant as a base 10 system like metric, it is oftentimes far more practical.

WRT to time, the obvious answer is that is makes a ton of sense to divide your day into 720 (or 1440) units, because you can evenly divide those numbers by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9 10, 12, 24, 36, 48. What can you evenly divide 100 by? 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, and 25? Oh, that's handy!

It's the same with length and volume measurements. 12 inches in a foot makes it easy to divide a foot into two (six inches), three (four inches), four (three inches) or six (two inches). Two cups is a pint, two pints is a quart, four quarts is a gallon. Very easy to double or halve volumes.

Note: That's not aways useful. For example, I think for bolt sizing, metric, or any base 10 system, makes a lot more sense. Because you want nice even steps up in size.

Because one is a system of measurement while the other is about orbit(s)?

 

[MovingTarget]

Why change? What problems does it solve? I'll admit I'm not up to speed on what difficulties using a system other than metric adds. Does it increase the cost of commerce? Cause rounding errors in some obscure system somewhere that will cause a nuclear plant to meltdown?

Here is one example where the utilization of two different systems caused a significant loss:

Mars Climate Orbiter

Closer to earth, the use of two systems still causes issues:

Gimli Glider incident

Yes, conversions between the systems are easily mathematically done if you take the time to do them (barring floating point rounding errors when using computers). Oftentimes, these kinds of mistakes are seen too late. Having one system for use would completely eliminate the possibility of those types of errors.

 

[Darwin333]

Why change? What problems does it solve? I'll admit I'm not up to speed on what difficulties using a system other than metric adds. Does it increase the cost of commerce? Cause rounding errors in some obscure system somewhere that will cause a nuclear plant to meltdown?

For one shit like this won't happen anymore.

http://www.wired.com/2010/11/1110mars-climate-observer-report/

$125M satellite plus the cost to launch the damn thing to mars went splat because we refuse to use the same units as the rest of the world.

And yes it does cost industry time and money to use both systems. We have a very high tech brake in our shop that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. They are only made in Europe and so it only accepts metric units. My guys in the field are typical Americans and measure stuff in inches, our plans are in imperial and so our the shop drawings. It costs money for my guys to convert every single measurement into metric before they start running metal. Then there are mistakes, which are always bound to happen, every once in a while in the conversion which costs more money.

That's just in my relatively very small field of work.

 

[Sheik Yerbouti]

Yeah, you keep using the system King George told you to use.

Toothless...

 

[hal2kilo]

Republican hero President Reagan eliminated the metric conversion that Presidents Ford and Carter started which proves that forcing metric on everybody is unamerican.

Probably about the same time he had the solar panels ripped off the White House roof.

God, what a ludite.

 

[rudeguy]

you will have to pry my freedom degrees from my cold, dead hand

 

[Belegost]

Who cares? The bottles made in China can say 500mL(16.9oz) with effectively no overhead for anyone because the computer storing the design has a class full of accurate conversions to use.

Also, for those with issues with fractions - metric units can use fractions too. US/Imperial units can (and often are) expressed in decimal form as well. Use both and be happy.

And my preference as an engineer is to work in fractions for the precision, especially when describing fractional powers of 2 (1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 etc) where anyone should be able to easily do the arithmetic in their head (certainly no less easy than fractional powers of 10, or decimal units), and make a hell of a lot of sense for storing on binary systems where fixed point elements take fractional powers of 2 on the right of the radix. Unsurprisingly many common US units follow such sizing - i.e. 1oz = 1/8 cup = 1/16 pint = 1/32 quart = 1/128 gallon.

 

[BurnItDwn]

Of course we should co away at once with the outdated "stupid" system, and switch to the standard earth human system.

 

[Blackjack200]

We have a very high tech brake in our shop that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. They are only made in Europe and so it only accepts metric units. My guys in the field are typical Americans and measure stuff in inches, our plans are in imperial and so our the shop drawings. It costs money for my guys to convert every single measurement into metric before they start running metal. Then there are mistakes, which are always bound to happen, every once in a while in the conversion which costs more money.

That's just in my relatively very small field of work.

IMO By far the best argument for moving to metric is that that's what the rest of the world uses.

 

[WelshBloke]

Toothless...

You're the one using our cast offs.

 

[werepossum]

You want to sell the metric system to the American people? Tell them that they're not some 300 pound fatass, they're a scant 136 kilos. No, you don't have a small 5 inch penis, that thing is damn near 13 centimeters. The metric system is the vanity sizing of the measurements.

You sir are a marketing genius.

lol +1

We had a running joke at one employer: All foreign-manufactured cut sheets would be received with a note reading something like "For your convenience, we have converted power to furlong-stones per fortnight."

For one shit like this won't happen anymore.

http://www.wired.com/2010/11/1110mars-climate-observer-report/

$125M satellite plus the cost to launch the damn thing to mars went splat because we refuse to use the same units as the rest of the world.

And yes it does cost industry time and money to use both systems. We have a very high tech brake in our shop that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. They are only made in Europe and so it only accepts metric units. My guys in the field are typical Americans and measure stuff in inches, our plans are in imperial and so our the shop drawings. It costs money for my guys to convert every single measurement into metric before they start running metal. Then there are mistakes, which are always bound to happen, every once in a while in the conversion which costs more money.

That's just in my relatively very small field of work.

The shop at one employer had a saying - you design it to a 32nd of an inch, we'll mark it with chalk and cut it with a torch. Thankfully the machine shop had a different philosophy, so when it had to be precise, it had to go through the machine shop.

I don't know that machining with micrometers and millimeters is particularly superior to machining to ten-thousands and thousands of a inch, but it certainly isn't any worse. I faced the metric problem all the way back in the early 80s designing carpet handling equipment which was sometimes sold to Mexico; sad to know people are still facing the same problems.