
How France created the metric system - Sami_Lehtinen
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180923-how-france-created-the-metric-system
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toolslive
I wonder what will happen to the UK on the metrisation front after the Brexit.

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the_mitsuhiko
There are quite a few people that want the imperial system back. Not sure why
but it did come up during Brexit. I think it has an even smaller chance of
succeeding though.

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chrisseaton
I think some people said that it should not be illegal to label using the
metric system if people choose to do so after Brexit, presumably such as
market traders selling in pounds if that's what customers want. That was
something that wound some people up well before Brexit. I don't recall anyone
proposing anything more extreme than that.

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qwerty343
it wasn't france - it was the intellectual "elites" of the late 18th century,
which included intellectuals of french, italian, german, and many other
origins. the same people who made the enlightment, the encyclopedia, and the
french revolution. the fact that some groups of people (notably, the
descendants of the english imperialists) are still debating these things today
only serves as proof of their (maybe subconscious) racism, or just insularism.

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B1FF_PSUVM
Have an upvote, and let me point out that those people were also responsible
for a whole lot of murder in the name of "reason".

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qwerty343
nicely said, as if contemporary british, americans, chinese, japanese, ...,
people, were not murderous.

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_red
I think any sane individual recognizes the huge benefits of having a
consistent 10-based measurement system.

However, apart from that, the failing of the metric system is the actual
measurements they used (length of a meter, celsius, etc), which are not really
a great fit for humans.

Sure, its clever that 0C is water freezing and 100C is water boiling, but most
humans live only in a fraction of that range. So it forces all sorts of
inelegant practical situations (notice how nearly every euro thermostat has
decimals so you can set it to 17.5).

Fundamentally, the metric system is to measurement what "Brutalism" was to
architecture. It places the system above the human and expects us to adapt to
it.

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gumby
I agree with everything but your first sentence. 10 is a pretty useless
divisor as it has few factors while twelve has 2,3,4,6 (and since 12 is often
used with fractions, 8 is a convenient 2/3). There's a reason we've stuck with
24 hours (though we abandoned the variable-length 12 hours/day + 12
hours/night), 60 minutes in an hour, 360 degrees in a circle, etc.

Honestly how often do you really divide any measurement by 10? Perhaps km.

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charlesism
Your argument against base 10 could apply the number system in general, not
just measurement of distances. Maybe we should have used 12 from the
beginning, but as long as everyone is used to 10, I think we ought to stick
with it, unless there is a very compelling reason not to.

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gumby
I do think so; 8, 16, 12 or 2 (with 12 being probably the easiest/most
valuable). 10 is pretty worthless which is why it was adopted so late.

