
America Has Two Feet. It’s About to Lose One of Them - sohkamyung
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/18/science/foot-surveying-metrology-dennis.html
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gpvos
I'm mostly surprised that the standardization of the American measurements and
the development of the metric system happened nearly at the same time. A few
years could have meant a huge difference regarding the American adoption of
the metric system.

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hyperman1
Pretty interesting article. What stood out for me was why the US didn't
standardize to metric:

They standardized the whole country on something because they had to - too
much people from different places came together, each with their own
measurement system.

The rest of the world standardized later. I assume the overhead from
conversion only became unbearable when some level of commerce between
different nations was reached. When they standardized, they had better science
available.

So now there are 2 landmasses, each big and integrated enough to have internal
units, not feel too much pain from using a different kind of units. Everything
goes reasonably well, unless they meet.

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spicymaki
I do feel pain anytime a NASA spacecraft explodes or I need to find and need
to replace a screw and wonder which unit it is in.

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Lammy
This article was way more interesting than the headline makes it seem. It's
about the 1893 vs 1959 definitions of a unit of distance.

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Yaa101
It should lose both, saves them from stupid conversion mistakes...

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tasogare
And also using a rational date format (yyyy/MM/dd or dd/MM/yyyy) would be
nice.

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ericmay
We do mm/dd/yyyy because that's how we say it. In Europe if you ask someone
the date do they say 2020, August, 18th? or 18th, August, 2020?

Stuff like this really isn't a big deal. I don't get why people get so hung up
on it.

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chownie
Except for cases like the 4th of July, in which case it's suddenly DD/MM
again. Much like the UK's relationship with metric/imperial, the problem with
US dating is that it's not consistent.

In the UK we'd say "18th [of] August, 2020"

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ericmay
Because when we say "4th of July" it's not being said in the context of a
date, it's an event. It's used in the same context that Christmas or
Thanksgiving would be used. You don't say that we're inconsistent because we
call Christmas "Christmas" instead of December 25th. We also call the 4th of
July Independence Day. It's just colloquial usage.

If you ask someone what date Independence Day is they'll say July 4th, 1776.
Not 4th of July, 1776. Test it.

> In the UK we'd say "18th [of] August, 2020"

Cool. In the US we say August 18th, 2020. So that's why we do MM/DD/YYYY. If
you have any American colleagues or friends you can text this by asking them
what the date is. They'll say August 18th (maybe with the 2020 part depending
on how specific they want to be).

I really don't understand why people are so hell bent on changing our culture.
We do it this way and like it. It's not a big deal.

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spacedcowboy
I just asked 4 people “what date Independence day is”, got 3 weird looks and 4
answers of “4th July”, no year specified.

Non-US people don’t like it because it’s (a) different, _and_ (b) illogical.
If it were different and logical (ie: the numbers were in some hierarchical
sequence), there’d be a lot less criticism of it, IMHO.

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daveslash
If you asked US people, it makes sense that you'd get weird looks -- they
think that you're asking because you don't know the date (and they expect that
you would), whereas you're _actually_ asking just to see how they say it.
Also, as other's have pointed out, Independence day is an anomoly in how the
US says dates -- we actually call this one _" The 4th of July"_

A less conspicuous date might work better. "When's Valentine's Day?" or
"When's St. Patrick's Day?" (Feb 14th and Mar 17th, respectively).

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vr46
Opportunity to switch to metric lost? While I think it’s a bit dumb to not
standardize, I grew up in the UK with gallons of petrol, quarters of sweets,
weighed myself in stones and drank pints of beer. And none of those things are
relative to each other in my head and don’t need to be standardized. They’re
units of communication that work for us because we all have a common language
and a context, so it’s fine. When they’re units of measurement, everything
goes sideways.

I’ve just about gotten to grips with fuel expressed in litres. I suspect it
was only changed to make the unit price look cheaper from a distance.

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SandunGunn
[https://archive.is/sIrFG](https://archive.is/sIrFG)

