
Death by Inches: The battle over the metric system in America - rpm4321
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/books/2014/08/john_marciano_s_whatever_happened_to_the_metric_system_reviewed.single.html
======
dalke
I have some difficulties with the issues described in the piece.

"A yard is the distance from your sternum to the tip of your outstretched
hand."

According to folk belief, it's the distance from the tip of Henry I's nose to
the end of his thumb. According to an early definition, "It is ordained that 3
grains of barley dry and round do make an inch, 12 inches make 1 foot, 3 feet
make 1 yard."

Who here has an idea of the size of a grain of barley dry and round?

At 39.3 inches, a meter is just slightly longer than a yard, and for
"traditional purposes" where the sternum/fingertip approximation is good
enough, a meter and a yard can be used almost interchangeably.

Somehow all those people using metric in their daily lives don't feel like
they are missing something special by having "ancient, organic" units. (BTW,
at what point does something become "ancient"?)

"Or don’t bother, because the definition completely changed in 1960"

The yard definition 'completely changed' in 1959, when it defined as exactly
0.9144 meters. Before then it was different in different countries.

Since the yard is pegged to the meter, this means that the yard is now legally
defined as the time light travels in 1/274130223.5952 seconds.

"The first third of the 20th century, for instance, saw some quite serious
efforts to rationalize our systems for dates and times."

As well as the 1700s, when France ran under a rationalized calendar, which
provided the name for the Thermidorian Reaction. This is part of the same
movement that brought us the metric system, so I think it's odd to exclude
that very serious effort.

~~~
keithpeter
UK: we work in Imperial but things are officially priced in metric, except for
beer. Petrol is in pence/litre. So you get price per lb and per kg. Lengths
are in millimetres on builders plans (to avoid mistakes with decimal points)
but road signs are in miles. Makes teaching basic maths to adults a bit more
fun...

[http://sohcahtoa.org.uk/pages/maths_market-metric-
proportion...](http://sohcahtoa.org.uk/pages/maths_market-metric-
proportion.html)

You would be surprised how many people have issues with decimal place notation
still. The low denominator fractions make a lot of sense for a lot of people.
French speaking African students of mine will naturally price food in half and
quarter kilos.

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
It depends a huge amount on age. Younger people in the UK use metric except
where imperial is already the de-facto standard (pints, MpH, etc).

It is really just older generations who continue to use imperial and to push
it all over the place (often inappropriately).

At least all food labeling has been standardised on metric (which honestly for
cooking and monitoring food intake is a huge improvement). I can like with
other areas remaining oddly imperial for now.

I just hope as the older generation disappear we start moving closer and
closer to true metrification (I'd even want to see km/h so it is consistent
with continental europe).

~~~
keithpeter
_" Younger people in the UK use metric except where imperial is already the
de-facto standard (pints, MpH, etc)."_

News to me. I teach a few hundred 17-19 year olds each year. They are very
hazy about _any_ form of actual measurement.

------
jwecker
I am not anti-metric by any means, but having done carpentry a lot in the past
it always strikes me when this comes up that one of the central arguments for
(a limited use-case of) the imperial system is usually glossed over: the fact
that in many crafts (especially historically), using base-12 makes certain
things much easier. It divides into 3rds far more easily, divides into 4ths
slightly more easily, and still divides into 5ths with only one digit after
the decimal.

Just like computer programmers have no problem immediately recognizing that
256 is 2^8, it became intuitive when working with the Imperial system (at
limited scales) that 48 inches is the same as 4-feet but that it is also
3-stud-distances long (studs in walls are often placed 16 inches apart).

Even if you don't work in crafts where dividing things by 3 is more frequent
than dividing by 5 it is easy to imagine how certain things might be more
difficult if we used base-10 for time (as, it has been pointed out, has been
attempted)- and thereby using the ability to easily divide an hour into 3
parts (for example).

Consistent base-10 and international standardization has advantages that far
outweigh these minor things- but I think it's important to recognize that
there is, surprise, a rational practical reason for sticking in some cases to
Imperial units- it's not purely tradition or politics or their "organic-ness"
(anymore).

~~~
Havoc
>a rational practical reason for sticking in some cases to Imperial units

That to me is the worst of both worlds. The optimal solution is to use one
consistent system and the winner is pretty clear.

>carpentry

Certainly. The future is full of 3D printers though.

~~~
nice_uname_nerd
I strongly disagree. Using the right tool for the right job is worth far more
than enforcing arbitrary universal consistency. In a math course, you'd
measure angles in radians so you're dealing with nice small multiples of pi. I
think it'd be downright dangerous to use radians in a fighter jet, say, when
the precision you need is much better provided by degrees.

Imagine if we enforced only one programming paradigm, since they're all
equivalent. Or if we demanded that logicians and cs professors only prove
things using turing machines, instead of picking the model of computation that
best suits the problem. If there's a case where the english measurement system
is more convenient, people should use it.

~~~
Havoc
>Using the right tool for the right job is worth far more than enforcing
arbitrary universal consistency.

Except units of measure are not "tools"...they are ways of communicating
information. And when each person feels the need to enforce their own version
of "right tool for right job" then things like the mars orbiter incident
happen.

>Imagine if we enforced only one programming paradigm, since they're all
equivalent.

Hardly. A better analogy would be to enforce identical calling parameters for
DLLs libraries across all languages. That would benefit all languages and
improve interoperability.

~~~
nice_uname_nerd
>units of measure are not "tools"...they are ways of communicating
information.

How you communicate information is important and has real impacts. Given a
graph, you could choose to encode it as an adjacency matrix or as a collection
of adjacency lists. Both convey the same information, but nobody would say we
should pick one and only one. I disagree with the assertion that measurement
units aren't tools or that they are exempt from similar consideration.

Sure, the Mars incident is a call for consistency, but it's a call for
consistency inside NASA. That shouldn't affect carpenters who need
divisibility by 2, 3 and 4 more than they need 5. Or those who like to use
inches because theyre significantly larger than centimeters and consequently
easier to approximate by eye.

~~~
Havoc
>Sure, the Mars incident is a call for consistency, but it's a call for
consistency inside NASA.

No its not. Realistically space travel is going to be a humanity as a whole
deal, not "inside NASA". Remember that the USA is like 4% of the world
population. Even if the US contributes 10x more than everyone else per person
that still puts the US in the minority. Consistency here is not a "nice to
have"...its mission critical.

>That shouldn't affect carpenters

So you propose teaching your future carpenters and space engineers different
units of measure?

>approximate by eye.

Approximate by eye? Seriously? Intel is aiming at 10 nanometers. Nobody is
eyeballing anything in the modern world. Note...nanometers not nanofeet...this
from an American company.

~~~
Gormo
> No its not. Realistically space travel is going to be a humanity as a whole
> deal, not "inside NASA".

I think it's a fair bet that when spaceflight becomes widespread and
commonplace, we're going to have many discrete groups of people developing,
producing, operating, and maintaining their own particular spacecraft
independently of each other, and not "humanity as a whole", as a singular
undifferentiated mass, working on a single uniform spaceflight project.

Consistency _within_ a specific project is clearly necessary; uniformity
_among_ distinct projects is, speaking at the macro level, a liability.
Variation is an evolutionary advantage; artificial uniformity slows progress.

> So you propose teaching your future carpenters and space engineers different
> units of measure?

Why would this even be a question? Should programmers only be familiar with
one single programming language? Should people in general only ever learn to
speak a single verbal language? Is there ever an advantage to only being
familiar with a single set of tools, and ignorant of all others?

> Nobody is eyeballing anything in the modern world.

Most people are eyeballing most things in the modern world. It's only in the
case of activities on the scale of building spaceships and 10-nm-process
integrated circuits that people require the level of precision that you're
talking about. The vast majority of human activity remains outside of these
domains.

The original article was about American resistance to adopting metric units as
a default practice in day-to-day life, and not about the use of the metric
system by people engaged in highly specialized disciplines. It'd be a bit
absurd to suggest that the measuring units selected for high-precision work by
the small set of people currently working on microprocessor design are
necessarily the optimal ones for e.g. baking a cake or tiling your bathroom.
In the latter use cases, one could make a very compelling case that units
optimized for alignment with intuition are vastly more useful than ones
optimized for micro-scale precision.

~~~
Havoc
>Consistency within a specific project is clearly necessary

I'll concede that it only matters within a project...but projects invariably
consist of many people and each of them "think" in their unit of measure. Sure
you can mix them and hope they remember to "think" in metric at 1AM when
pushing for a deadline, but really...

>Is there ever an advantage to only being familiar with a single set of tools

Thats the thing. These are not tools. They are units of measure. Aside from
the odd instance where its easier to divide by X all you're gaining from using
many units of measure is chaos.

>Most people are eyeballing most things in the modern world.

Definitely. Eyeballing happens regardless of unit of measure. And usually when
someone is eyeballing it its not life/death.

>It'd be a bit absurd to suggest that the measuring units selected for high-
precision work by the small set of people currently working on microprocessor
design are necessarily the optimal ones for

Absurd indeed, but not what I was getting at. Units of measure is something
thats internalized from a high-school age. So unless you have a way of
splitting the kids between space engineers and carpenters at that age then why
tech imperial? And even if you could split them, the mix of units of measures
employed nationally would be much worse than randomly picking one.

I get that Americans are attached to imperial...its just very difficult for
everyone else to under why given this:
[http://i.imgur.com/YJzhkZl.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/YJzhkZl.jpg)

~~~
Gormo
> but projects invariably consist of many people and each of them "think" in
> their unit of measure.

Obviously, you'd assemble project teams who are familiar with the tools,
techniques, and conventions that you intend to use with your project.

> Sure you can mix them and hope they remember to "think" in metric at 1AM
> when pushing for a deadline, but really...

And the Chinese engineer who's working on a project where all of the
documentation is in English might slip up when he's punchy at 1 AM and
accidentally complete some of his work in Chinese.

This is a good argument for making sure that team members are well-rested and
alert while doing their work. It's also a good argument for scheduling work
reviews, proofreading, and time for correcting errors in the project plan.
It's not at all an argument for abolishing the Chinese language.

> Thats the thing. These are not tools. They are units of measure.

Units of measures _are_ tools. Tools are devices, whether physical or
conceptual, that we use to extend our capacities for interacting with the
world. In this case, since human beings do not natively have the capacity to
quantify continuities, we apply the tool of measuring units to break
continuities down into discretely countable chunks.

And, like all tools, how well they work depends on what goals you're trying to
accomplish, and in what order of priority, in a given set of circumstances.
Metric units are great in a limited set of contexts in which uniformity of
post-hoc representation is more important than practicality in the activity of
measurement itself; but this means that they are, for the same reason, less
effective than customary units for the vast majority of situations that
involve measurement.

> Definitely. Eyeballing happens regardless of unit of measure. And usually
> when someone is eyeballing it its not life/death.

Very few situations are matters of life and death, and in those rare
circumstances that _are_ , people will naturally be cautious and rigorous in
their methods: I'd expect people to use precise measuring instruments, and to
perform measurements multiple times, so in such a situation, questions of
familiarity with particular units are scarcely relevant. When you're relying
on the precision of instruments, the actual measuring units you're using are
less important: metric, imperial, or otherwise, they'll all work just as well.

> Units of measure is something thats internalized from a high-school age

I don't know how much anyone "internalizes" any measuring units, but to the
extent that they familiarize themselves with theDefinitely. Eyeballing happens
regardless of unit of measure. And usually when someone is eyeballing it its
not life/death.m, there's certainly no cause to familiarize oneself with only
one set, at the exclusion of another.

> So unless you have a way of splitting the kids between space engineers and
> carpenters at that age then why tech imperial?

How about we keep doing things the way we are - teaching everyone both sets of
units - and letting them determine for themselves which ones are most useful
to them for each particular application?

> I get that Americans are attached to imperial...its just very difficult for
> everyone else to under why given this:
> [http://i.imgur.com/YJzhkZl.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/YJzhkZl.jpg)

All that graphic demonstrates to me is that while, with imperial/customary
measures, there are a variety of separate base units to choose from, each
appropriate to a particular scale of operation, the metric system only offers
one base unit, and pretends that applying a 10^x coefficient to that single
base unit somehow makes it a different unit.

That's what you're not getting: feet, yards, inches, etc. are fundamentally
distinct units that have been tweaked to relate to each other, where
necessary, by factors that are often much more convenient than 10. But you're
just as capable with customary units as with metric of sticking with a single
unit and applying scaling factors: I can just as easily say e.g. 24.2 x 10^4
feet as 45.83 miles.

I can even use metric prefixes if I'm so inclined, and say 24.2 kilofeet! Or
2.9 megainches! All the same value. But using these prefixes is just a bizarre
re-implementation of scientific notation: in what way does it make sense to
encode quantitative information as a verbal prefix appended to the name of the
thing you're counting, instead of just using numbers?

------
SideburnsOfDoom
> Well, to be fair, those anti-metric folks had at least one point in their
> favor: Customary measures make a lot more sense to us.

The author is full of it. Whichever system you grew up with will seem natural
to you. This misconception comes up time and time again:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7821501](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7821501)

The article seems like fluff; the author isn't even making _novel_ mistakes.

He even says that the metric system "died". Hah. That's true only in a very
limited parochial sense; it's the most popular system of measurement on planet
earth even if it's isn't used for day-to-day things in the USA.

~~~
vpeters25
> The author is full of it. Whichever system you grew up with will seem
> natural to you

This is true to at least my case: grew up under the metric system and after 15
years living in the US, still have to mentally convert dimensions to metric in
order to make sense of them:

\- If you point at something and ask me how far it is, the first number that
comes to my mind is in meters, then I say that number and add "yards" or
mentally multiply it by 3 and add "feets"

\- If you ask me to grab something and give you the weight, the number comes
in Kg and I mentally multiply it by 2.2 to give and approximate weight in
pounds.

~~~
Natsu
Just FYI, "feets" isn't a word. The plural of feet is feet :)

Similarly, "softwares" isn't a word either, but I hear it a lot. There's only
software.

I say this because it's a common mistake among people who speak well,
otherwise.

~~~
MrJagil
Interestingly, and to my big surprise, "fishes" is quite correct!

~~~
letney
"fishes" refers to multiple species of fish, while "fish" is the correct
plural form of a school of a single species.

~~~
MrJagil
Awesome!Though, which one should you use if both are correct?

"... plenty of fish(es) in the sea." for instance?

------
hrbrtglm
I love the metric system for no better reasons that it's the one I always used
as a french, it just seems as natural for me as my ten fingers, I never really
thought about it. Yet, I can understand why some would not change their
“English customary measures”, they must feel it the same way, thinking it's as
natural as their feet. For instance, our screens size (TV, computer, phones)
are expressed in inches for whatever good reasons ... I don't have a clue at
all about the size it represents, I just know 13 is smaller than 15, 11 is too
small for me for a computer screen, and that 42 is a pretty good decent size
for a TV. My surfboard is a 6.2, and for all I know, it's taller than me ...

If I were told, we were going to change our measure system, I would be kind of
scared, could it be better or worse ! After all, the hardest part is not the
real use but the idea of the switch.

Now, if you could just use the international ISO 216 paper size, I wouldn't
have to mess with my PDF export settings and just push some A4.

~~~
Pxtl
Inches to cm and back are actually an easy conversion so thinking in both
isn't hard - 2.5cm/in, 30cm/ft. 1.6km/mi and 2.2 lbs/kg are a bit more
annoying, and Fahrenheit are a freaking abomination.

~~~
jimbobimbo
C is roughly (F - 30)/2, not too bad. To make my life easier I also measure lb
as 1/2 kg and driving distances as time.

~~~
BrandonM
> C is roughly (F - 30)/2, not too bad.

A few months ago, I was concerned about the inaccuracy of this rough
conversion. It's actually accurate to within ±3°F for all temperatures -5°C to
25°C (23°F to 77°F). If you're OK with ±5°F, it works for -15°C to 35°C (5°F
to 95°F).

So the conversion works pretty well for the vast majority of environmental
conditions. C = (F - 30) / 2 and F = C * 2 + 30 are great approximations.

------
melling
Everyone seems to be missing the most obvious reason to convert.

[http://gizmodo.com/5786004/these-are-the-three-countries-
who...](http://gizmodo.com/5786004/these-are-the-three-countries-who-dont-use-
the-metric-system)

We're a global economy. By the ends of the century, India and China will have
pushed us down to at least #3.

~~~
alayne
The U.S. uses the metric system and the customary system.

Even many countries that are primarily metric use non-metric units like stones
for body weight or feet for airplane elevation.

I agree that metric would be a better system, but your implication that we
can't compete in the global economy with our mixed unit system seems
hyperbolic since we have already been competing just fine.

~~~
riffraff
who uses stones for body weight?

~~~
dublinben
The UK and Ireland notably use stones as a measure of body weight.

~~~
DanBC
UK use of stones and pounds for weight is informal and declining. Feet and
inches for height is also informal but is perhaps more popular.

------
Htsthbjig
For me this is too much rationalization for a single fact: people hate to
change, even if it is for the better.

So simple. I study Chinese and I am 100% certain than the reason Chinese did
not develop like the West was the printing press and the superior method it is
to have to print 25-30 symbols instead of 30.000.

Just look at Chinese and even Japanese delay in getting to use computers as
ASCII was so simple compared to their language. Japanese use kanji(chinese
symbols) for lots of things.

The Chinese writing came first, the Indian copied the Chinese language and
basically improved over them, then the Greeks copied that via Persia, and then
the Romans copied the Greeks.

Romans started copying Greek culture because they were so ignorant compared
with the Greeks, let alone Chinese at the time.

But at the same time, they started anew.The language was so refined, and it
took the best thing of each iteration(better than Greek, better than Indian
Scripts, better than Chinese).

I worked with someone doing programming and the fact that I used Vim instead
of a visual text editor really infuriated him.

So one day I explained it to him and expended 30 to 40 min teaching him why it
was so good for me. He looked confused. One month later he only used vim.

The reason most people don't use programs like vim or emacs is because it
takes some effort to learn before you get the benefits.

The same happens with metric or any other measurement system.

~~~
richdougherty
> The Chinese writing came first, the Indian copied the Chinese language and
> basically improved over them, then the Greeks copied that via Persia, and
> then the Romans copied the Greeks.

Latin script's origins are in Egypt and Sumer, not in China. Writing was
invented in the Near East about 3200BCE and about 1200BCE in China.

~~~
Htsthbjig
When I say the Chinese came first I did not want to say that they invented
writing.

I am talking about sophistication in language,not just script. Most of the
early Egyptian and Sumer writings are very simple accountings, mostly numbers.
Very little to do with what we consider writing today.

latin is called an Indo-European language becomes it comes from India. Not
just the language, but the race.

~~~
richdougherty
> I am talking about sophistication in language,not just script. Most of the
> early Egyptian and Sumer writings are very simple accountings, mostly
> numbers. Very little to do with what we consider writing today.

I guess sophistication is subjective, but a lot of Chinese writing was just
record keeping too, and there was literature in Egypt and Sumer, e.g. the Epic
of Gilgamesh.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_literature](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_literature)

> latin is called an Indo-European language becomes it comes from India. Not
> just the language, but the race.

The most popular theory is that the Proto-Indo-European language had its
origins in Eastern Europe.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-
European_origins](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_origins)

------
shmerl
_> Customary measures make a lot more sense to us._

Did they make any less sense in UK where they originated? Yet UK pushed
through with switching to metric and went way further than US did. So this
excuse isn't really valid.

The real answer is, that in US politicians were too weak to push this through,
because all kind of manufacturers and unions were pressuring them to stop the
effort. In UK they just ignored the pressure. In US they budged.

I wish US would already push this through, but so far it doesn't look very
promising.

About natural. Take for example Celsius and Fahrenheit. Celsius based his
scale on water freezing and boiling points, which are quite intuitive borders.
At 0°C weather changes significantly since water freezing / melting has a
noticeable environmental impact. So if you see -1° or +1° you can expect quite
a change. On the other hand what are 31° and 33°? Fahrenheit took his scale
without any pragmatic or practical goals of common usage. He did it for his
scientific purposes. People more naturally operate with two digit numbers,
which in Celsius case covers most of the normal range temperatures. It's good
that at least Kelvin's scale didn't become commonly used in some countries...

~~~
wtbob
> The real answer is, that in US politicians were too weak to push this
> through, because all kind of manufacturers and unions were pressuring them
> to stop the effort.

No, the real answer is that US politicians were too weak to push this through,
because the people wouldn't have it.

The people spoke.

~~~
shmerl
Not people. Lobbying groups. I wouldn't equate the two. Don't tell me in UK
people suddenly spoke the opposite. No, most were not comfortable with the
change either, but it was a necessary change. The difference is that in UK
unions and lobbying groups were less inclined to fight it, because they are
more involved in global European market which uses the metric system. It
wasn't about people, it was about politicians losing or not losing lobbying
support.

------
analog31
I started grade school around when the big push for metric occurred in the US.
Here's what I remember. Inches were taught as inches. Here's a ruler, measure
some things.

Metric was taught as a bunch of math. Here's how you convert between different
units.

Many years later I was talking to a machinist who told me: "My daughter is
learning metric in school but I don't like it because of all the math."

------
upofadown
Since our civilization seems to have moved to binary for actual computations I
wonder if we will someday go back to thinking in terms of halves, quarters,
eighths, etc. of some standard unit. Then people would mock the metric system
for being implicitly based on the biological accident of ten fingers...

~~~
kps
Indeed —​ you can't even represent 0.1 in IEEE floating point, so who in their
right mind would try to build a measuring system on tenths?

~~~
letney
> "you can't even represent 0.1 in IEEE floating point"

Not true, the IEEE 754-2008 standard provides a Decimal Floating Point
specification in binary.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_floating_point#IEEE_754...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_floating_point#IEEE_754-2008_encoding)

~~~
kps
Ah, well, you're the best kind of correct. IBM even have instructions for it.

I'll counter with the Ferranti Orion (1959) which had _mixed-base_ operations
(primarily for £sd accounting).

------
kazinator
I was born and raised in Europe. I live in Canada that has (mostly) gone
metric in the 1970's. Yet, I use inches. They are nicer!

I recently built a shelf and hanger rack in a weirdly-shaped closet. I used
Sketchup to design it, and naturally made everything in inches.

Inches are "semi-metric" too, thanks to mils: thousandths of an inch. Mils are
very nice units for fine work, like circuit boards. Millimeters are way too
crude, and micrometers are outside of macroscopic human experience.

When doing PCB work, I use mils, which create a virtual metric system within
the space of an inch. E.g. the pins of old-school DIPs are 100 mils apart, or
0.1" Through holes are in mils: 25 mils, 40 mils. Same for track widths: 8
mils, 10 mils, ... very nice numbers to work with at that scale: one, two or
three digits, no decimals.

~~~
notastartup
Canadian here as well, but I always thought that we had metric system all
along!

I just assumed that everyone was using such standards when I was little and
then came things like miles, pounds, yards, foot and I was like wtf, it's so
complicated.

I know how long a cm is by pinching my index and thumb finger and measuring
the distance between the nails. I know roughly how long is a meter based on my
height. I know roughly how long is a km based on my running distance.

------
moron4hire
I see we're still perpetuating the "DVORAK is inherently better than QWERTY"
myth, as well as "QWERTY was designed to prevent key-sticking" myth. And I
don't want to know what it suggests about the author that he still has Tommy
Lee's penis on the brain. _That_ is your go-to inch example?

I had always intuited a higher opinion of Slate, just because I had friends I
respected who read it, but the more I actually read it myself, the more it
seems barely above the likes of BuzzFeed or HuffPo.

>> "when a foot is 12 inches... it gets tough to do quick mental
calculations.'

Except, you know, when you want to easily divide by three or six. Or by two or
four and end up with integer results. But why would anyone ever want to do
that in normal, day to day living?

~~~
dalke
It doesn't say that Dvorak is better than QWERTY. It links to an article in
The Atlantic titled "The Lies You've Been Told About the Origin of the QWERTY
Keyboard". Quoting from it, which quotes from elsewhere:

> ... the QWERTY system emerged as a result of how the first typewriters were
> being used. Early adopters and beta-testers included telegraph operators who
> needed to quickly transcribe messages. However, the operators found the
> alphabetical arrangement to be confusing and inefficient for translating
> morse code. The Kyoto paper suggests that the typewriter keyboard evolved
> over several years as a direct result of input provided by these telegraph
> operators

That's why the Slate article says "the QWERTY keyboard was designed for a
different age (to suit the quirks of telegraph operators)", and does not refer
to the myth about key-sticking.

(Personally, I thought the same as you, and it required a closer reading to
understand that my thought was incorrect.)

The discussion about mental arithmetic concerns conversions between different
scales, like foot and mile, not in fractions of a foot. If you have a
surveyor's wheel marked in feet or half-rods and want to measure 1/4 mile --
how long is that?

That said, see my other post for aspects about this article that I didn't
like.

------
raldi
The article uses "Anyway, we have calculators now" as an argument _for_
decimalization, but I see it as an argument _against_ it. The less people do
math on paper (or in their head), the less need we have to tie our system of
measurement to the number of fingers the human hand happens to have;
calculators divide by 12 as easily as 10.

~~~
yen223
The nice thing about the metric system is that the base is consistent - it's
always some multiple of 10. With the imperial system, it gets tricky
remembering whether you have to multiply by 12 or 16 or 5280 or whatnot.

~~~
raldi
That objection is growing obsolete, too: Nobody these days divides by 5280;
they go to Google and type "1/4 mile in feet"

~~~
matymador
Don't you feel handicapped having to use a computer to express basic
distances? In the metric system, you have to have some sort of low IQ not to
be able to convert from meters to kilomethers on the fly. Hours to seconds is
trickier, and would be much improved by decimal notation.

------
geuis
This whole article just feels like fluff. The very first "fact" about the
origins of the qwerty keyboard are completely wrong. The Wikipedia page
doesn't have a single mention of telegraph and has a complete history of its
development. A history can be found in this 1996 article among others
[http://reason.com/archives/1996/06/01/typing-
errors/](http://reason.com/archives/1996/06/01/typing-errors/).

~~~
ZeroGravitas
Are the people who link to this libertarian propaganda every time qwerty or
Dvorak gets mentioned underhanded libertarians hoping to spread their brand of
economic religion or people who have been utterly taken in by the former to
the point that they think this is an unbiased debunking?

~~~
scholia
The article points out that: "In April 1990, we published a more detailed
version of this material in a Journal of Law and Economics article titled 'The
Fable of the Keys.' This journal is well known and has published some of the
most influential articles in economics. In the six years since we published
that article there has been no attempt to refute any of our factual claims, to
discredit the GSA study, or to resurrect the Navy study."

Pointing to Reason is not a valid reason for dismissing an argument that is
well known from other sources that are, as a matter of fact, not libertarian.

It would be more interesting if you stopped smearing sources and actually
provided -- or at least pointed to -- some rational articles that try to
refute the factual case.

------
beloch
A yard is currently defined by the metric system.

Metrology is the discipline of measuring. It concerns itself with ensuring
that everyone has the same definition of measuring units. For a long time, the
yard was based on physical standards. i.e. Somewhere there sat a physical rod
1 yard long that all other rods were measured against to define the yard. The
meter was defined this way until 1960 too. The unfortunate problem with
physical standards is that they change. A physical rod is different lengths at
different temperatures and will, of course, gradually get shorter as it's
handled and wear occurs on its ends.

The meter is now defined in terms of how fast light can travel in a given
period of time. That period of time is defined in terms of hyperfine ground
state level transitions of a Cesium atom. Yes, it's complex. However, while a
physical standard changes, these standards are built into the laws of the
universe and are thus reproducible and fixed for all time. _For this reason,
the yard is currently defined as 0.9144 meters in the U.S.. No matter how the
metric system defines the meter, a yard is 0.9144 meters._

So, the U.S. really has gone metric, at least where it counts. The average
American is just ignorant of the fact.

P.S. Even the metric system is not completely free of physical definitions...
yet. The kilogram is still based on a physical prototype. However, there are
proposals to change that to something based on physical constants. Once this
is done, the metric system will be defined entirely in terms of physics.

------
__david__
The thing about measurements is that they don't matter in your everyday life.
I get that it makes physics calculations easier and international machining
companies need to interface with the world, but measuring the speed of my car
in miles per hour and knowing my couch is 7 1/2 feet long are perfectly fine,
and there is absolutely no compelling reason to switch to metric for those
kinds of things.

People don't want to switch because it's a huge burden to retrain yourself to
think in those units. I remember growing up that the US tried to do
it—roadsigns in California had both miles and kilometers on them and our
speedometers had both readings for a while. But it didn't stick because
there's absolutely no point—it doesn't improve anything, it's just churn.

I've got a very intuitive notion of how long a mile is, and Europeans have a
very intuitive grasp on how long a kilometer is. It isn't because one system
is intuitive and one isn't, it's just what you're used to—you know it because
you use it every day.

The article is wrong. Imperial Units are not "better". But, the system you
know and use every day _is_ better than the weird foreign system.

As Abe Simpson once said, "The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car
gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!"

~~~
mpyne
> But it didn't stick because there's absolutely no point—it doesn't improve
> anything, it's just churn.

This is pretty much it, though I'd throw on that Europeans acting like they're
morally superior for using metric as their native measuring system (and that
Americans are intellectually slovenly for not) certainly doesn't do many
favors for the cause of metricization in the U.S.

------
tfinniga
Here's my proposal: America goes metric, and the rest of the world starts
driving on the right hand side of the road.

~~~
anonymfus
Can America also adapt Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals? Please.

~~~
farva
"MUTCD specifies yellow lines between lanes of traffic moving in opposite
directions and white lines between lanes moving in the same direction, whereas
the Vienna Convention uses white for both." (Wikipedia)

No thanks.

------
harshpotatoes
Could you imagine Boeing/lockheed/GM/some some oil company or any other
manufacturer going up to their stockholders and saying: "This next year,
profits will be significantly reduced as we replace every piece of equipment
we own, replace every 1/4-20 screw with an M5, and redesign every
aircraft/automobile/widget to meet new metric specifications"

~~~
rakoo
It's not like the metric system was invented yesterday and will vanish
tommorrow. Change doesn't have to be instantaneous, it can be gradual over the
years (and, as the article pointed out, already is)

~~~
kalleboo
> Change doesn't have to be instantaneous, it can be gradual over the years

As an example, NASA is partially-metric, partially-imperial. Of course, they
have that famous failure attributed to mixing units...

~~~
spiritplumber
I did a bit of work at NASA a couple years back, they wanted everything in
millimeters (possibly to deal with the aftermath of that incident).
Everything. Even antenna lengths.

------
Taniwha
If I visit Starbucks they sell something called a "Venti" it's part of
Starbucks attempt to change the language of coffee so that their regular
customers can't order elsewhere.

"Venti" is of course Italian for 20, let's ignore the fact that Starbucks
appear to invalidly trademarked a number, when I find myself stuck with a
Starbucks in an American airport I love to ask "that's Italian for twenty,
twenty what?" the usual answer is "fluid ounces" .... but "that can't be true,
Italy uses the metric system, it must be litres or millilitres ..." usually
they choose "litres", it is a big cup

Of course the American fluid ounce is a weird thing, different from the
Imperial fluid ounce (which is exactly 1oz of water at 62F)- a strange
historical thing due more to British Kings monkeying with the tax system than
anything else

~~~
beloch
Occasionally people blurt out "venti" in a place that isn't a Starbucks. The
staff always knows that means "biggest cup we've got". Conversely, if I order
an "extra large" in Starbucks they always force me to pick one of their sizes
and say it's freakin' nonsense name. Also, I'm in Canada (a country that uses
metric) and they list their sizes in fluid ounces.

~~~
billpg
Is that a Canadian Starbucks thing? In English Starbucks I've never had a
problem with asking for a "large" or "medium".

------
arnehormann
There's a great video treating imperial measurement units. I instantly fell in
love with it:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7x-RGfd0Yk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7x-RGfd0Yk)

I landed there after watching one on paper sizes on the same channel. Also
pretty much worth it!

------
wolfgke
Relevant xkcd: [http://xkcd.com/526/](http://xkcd.com/526/)

~~~
xxs
What 26C cold to swim? 26C is absolutely warm, around 20C is cold and below 16
is when the balls :freeze:, still doable though.

------
dghughes
Someone (a jogger/runner?) on reddit a few days ago made an interesting
observation, maybe this was known. The Fibonacci sequence can be used as a
rough guide to convert km to miles and vice versa.

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34

The first four don't work very well but:

3km is about 2 miles

5km is about 3 miles

8km is about 5 miles

13km is about 8 miles

21km is about 13 miles

34km is about 21 miles

and so on

~~~
readerrrr
Nothing mysterious there; in the Fibonacci sequence, the ratio of the number
and the one before it converges to the golden ratio which is almost the same
as the conversion rate between km and miles.

I think it is easier to multiply by 0.6. Or do the simpler approximation: n/2
+ n/10 + ( n/100 )*2

You can drop the last term if you don't need an accurate result.

Divisions and multiplications by 2, 10 and 100 are really easy.

850km to miles:

425 + 85 + 17 = 527 miles , the correct result is 528.166 miles

258km to miles:

129 + 26 + 5 = 160 miles , correct result is 160.314 miles

------
ivanhoe
Author wrongly presumes that people using the metric system are not
visualizing the measures in almost the same way. We do. One step is about a
meter, or the width of finger is about 1 cm. More often used 10 centimeters (1
decimeter) is approx. a distance from your thumb to the index finger. It's all
about being used to certain system of measures, so that you can automatically
relate the measure to something from the real life for comparison, e.g. my car
is 5m long, also the wall in my room is around 5m, so if you ask me how big is
5m I can instantly visualize the distance very accurately (without even
consciously thinking about cars or walls)

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Whereas my foot is ... a foot. My pace is a yard. My thumb is about an inch.
Works both ways.

~~~
ivanhoe
absolutely... problem is that I have to think hard to figure out how much a
yard is, and you have the same problem with meters. That's what standards are
for.

------
u124556
How about "either is arbitrary so fighting over which is better is pointless,
just choose the one with higher acceptance."

------
chrismcb
One of the biggest arguments for metric (other than the rest of the world uses
it) has been that it is easy to convert from liters to kilometers. In your day
to day life, how often do you need to convert from one thing to another? For
most people, the answer is they don't. Occasionally in cooking you need to
convert, other than that you rarely need to convert. So don't go and switch
the system just because something people rarely do is easier. And yes there
are lots of jobs that require doing conversions. Many of those jobs already
use metric.

~~~
MisterBastahrd
Converting liters to kilometers? I need to know how to do this! How many beers
is a kilometer? Gonna get my jog on.

~~~
fennecfoxen
Assuming a 500ml beer... (500ml / 1 km) = 0.5 square millimeters.

For interpretation advice, see also: xkcd. [https://what-
if.xkcd.com/11/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/11/)

~~~
T-hawk
This actually has the same physical interpretation, right? If you took 500ml
volume of beer and stretched it out to 1 km long, the stretched form would be
0.5 mm^2 in cross-section.

------
watson
I think the "but it's easier to visualize" claim is BS.

I would argue that it's just as hard for a person who's is used to the metric
system to visualize inches, feet and yards as it is for a person used to those
units to visualize centimeters and meters.

It's all a matter of which units your brain is used to thinking in.

When I speak to my US friends and they say stuff like, "I'm 7 feet and 10
inches tall", I have no internal visual metal picture at all. But if I say,
"I'm 193 cm tall" I would guess they don't have either.

~~~
xxs
You have some really tall friends: 7feet,10inches would be uber-tall - 239cm.
To convert I use some baselines 5'7 is 170, 6' is 183, then adding/subtracting
inches to fit.

~~~
watson
I think this illustrates my point ;) But since when do I get down-votes for
favouring the metric system??

------
ajuc
Centimeter is about 2 grids in a school "checked" notebook. Everybody know
after using these notebooks fot the whole education how long exactly that is.
No problems with eyeballing. I have problems eyeballing an inch (only used in
5.25 or 3.14 disk sizes and in monitors' sizes).

Milimeter is close to smallest unit useful in human scale - when you try to
draw 0.5 milimeter scale with a regular pen, for example, the lines will
probably touch each other. You can't cut with regular tools with better than
1mm accuracy, too. Tools are commonly scaled in milimeters, and you can almost
use 14 key for 13 screw etc, so no point in smaller units for regular
mechanics work either.

Food stuff is bought in "dekos" (dekagrams). You say "10 deko of this meat, 40
deko of that cheese, and 1 kilo of these berries, please". Somehow hektagram
haven't caught up.

Land is measured in ar (10x10 meters), hektar (100x100 meters) and squared
kilometers for anything bigger. Flats are measured in squared meters (50-300
m2 for most flats).

1 kg of water (and most other common liquids, with precision good enough for
cooking etc) is 1 liter, everybody know that and use them interchangeably. 1
glass is 250 ml is 250 g of most liquids and powders, people measure stuff
with glasses when cooking assuming 1 glass = 250 g.

There's a joke about this 1 liter = 1kg assumption. When asked what's 10 times
100g everybody answered 1kg except Russian and Polish who answered 1 liter
(because shot glasses of alcohol in pubs are sold as 100g).

1 meter is almost exactly 1 step, 1 km is how far you can walk in 10 minutes.

I don't think one system is better than another in everyday usage, except the
much easier calculations in metric.

~~~
stephen_g
> Food stuff is bought in "dekos" (dekagrams).

Where? I've lived my whole life in a metric-using country and I'm fairly sure
I have literally never heard of that unit until just now...

Our food here is all in grams (i.e. a 100g packet of chips, 300g steak) or
kilograms (1.5 kilo bag of rice).

~~~
edejong
In Slovenia, for example, food is measured in decagrams.

------
tim333
From the geek point of view we should really all switch to Planck units of
course.

------
adventured
I agree the US should fully adopt the metric system, it makes logical sense.

And Europe should abolish about three dozen major languages that should no
longer be in use and adopt English (or perhaps Spanish). Why does Bulgaria
need its own language? Or Romania, or Sweden? Why does French still exist?
We're talking about efficiencies here, right? What's less efficient than
people not being able to easily communicate by sharing a common language.

I always get a kick out of bringing this up, because while it's
extraordinarily logical to narrow down dozens of languages to one or a few,
people lose their minds about it and regard it as a sacred cultural issue that
is to never be touched. Whereas converting to the metric system... well but of
course, that only makes sense!

~~~
anotherevan
Please describe the sacred cultural issues around retaining imperial units of
measure.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
I'd be happy to, but it is difficult to understand. For some reason things
like changing to metric, in some people's mind, means adapting 'European
culture' and is anti-traditionalist. From what I can tell, the same group that
holds onto the imperial system is the same group that is upset that cursive
writing isn't a mandated subject in schools (how will kids read the
constitution) and other such aversion to change.

------
Houshalter
I prefer Imperial but I'd be willing to switch, provided we also switch to a
new spelling and time system.

It's funny the same people that make fun of the Imperial system also cling to
bad standards because they are more familiar and have a high switching cost.

------
Gormo
The biggest liability of the metric system to me is its system of unit
prefixes: this is just a bizarre reimplementation of scientific notation that
expresses the most significant quantitative information not as part of the
actual quantitative component of its notation, but as an arcane verbal prefix
attached to the name of the thing being counted.

What on earth is the advantage of a notation that makes it easy to scale a
value by an order of magnitude without having to alter its numeric
representation?

This seems to be a much more significant "WTF" of the metric system than the
fact that its base units don't seem to have any meaningful anchor in any
substantive context.

~~~
ygra
You get several related units of measurement that each have sane conversion
factors. If something goes well beyond centimeters, meters and later
kilometers are much nicer to handle. Inches to feet to yards to miles doesn't
scale nearly as nicely because of conversion factors of 12, 3 and (I think)
1760 involved there.

And since this property is shared by every unit you have the same conversion
factors everywhere. No need to memorise hundreds of units, just a dozen and a
pattern. Also when combining units (e.g. N being kg⋅m/s²) the conversion
factors stay sane.

~~~
Gormo
It seems like you have only a single base unit of measurement; the rigid
powers-of-ten scaling factors prevent any other useful base units from being
applied, e.g. there's nothing that approximates a foot in the metric system.
So it seems a bit disingenuous to treat a centimeter as a distinct unit when
it's really just 1 x 10^-2 meters.

The whole "conversion factors" thing seems like a superfluous gimmick. Why
would you start working with one unit, then spontaneously decide to start
using a different unit in the same context? But in the unusual circumstance
where you _would_ need to switch units, perhaps due to a shift in the scale
you're operating at, the metric system still prevents you from using a unit
appropriate to the context, and limits you to only scaling a less appropriate
unit up or down by a power of ten.

It really is just scientific notation re-implemented in a bizarre and arcane
way. With customary units, you can still represent quantities with scientific
notation, and use inches, feet, miles, etc. as your base unit as the context
demands, but you've still got a variety of base units to choose from, each
more optimal than the others when operating its appropriate context.

------
amenghra
I remember listening to this podcast a while back:
[http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/why-isnt-the-
u-s-...](http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/why-isnt-the-u-s-on-the-
metric-system/)

~~~
anotherevan
I remember listening to that podcast and being quite annoyed by it. One of the
protagonist's who was obviously in favour of sticking with imperial units kept
smugly saying the US is already metricated. Comes across disingenuous as best.

The US rarely uses metric in it's popular culture. Weather reports are in
Fahrenheit, movies almost always use miles and pounds. By any measure of
cultural output that they export that I've seen (and Australia is a huge
consumer of US popular culture) they do not use metric.

~~~
vacri
Temperature is a weird one, and shows the difference between 'metric' and 'SI
unit'. Fahrenheit is neither, and for me is far from intuitive. Celsius is a
metric unit, but it's not the SI unit, which is Kelvin.

Celsius certainly makes more sense on the human scale than the other two - the
general public is familiar with 'water freezes' and 'water boils' \- but it's
a neat example of a metric unit not being the SI unit.

------
pavanred
>> The Mars Climate Orbiter disintegrated due to an error introduced because
its software used metric measures, while its ground crew used pound-force
units.

There was an incident in 1983 where Air Canada Flight 143 ran out of fuel at
41,000 feet (12,500m) altitude [1] about half way through its flight. An
investigation revealed that one of the cause was a conversion error between
metric and non-metric units for the fuel loading calculation.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider)

------
Tloewald
The beauty of the old system was that it mapped onto the everyday experience
of farmers. I am sure hundredweights and furlongs and so forth all made lots
of sense. But units have to cross cultures and times — the only intuitive
units left to boast about are the foot and the yard, which are 30cm and
roughly a meter. Indeed, we are probably taller now than when the yard was
defined to the extent that the meter is probably closer to an intuitive yard
than the yard is.

Incidentally, the official definition of an inch is 2.54cm. Now that's
intuitive.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Or by Wikipedia: 25.4 millimetres

------
acomjean
The things that remain often get 10 ized. we have measuring tape with feet and
tenths of feet. Inches are divided into mils (1000th of an inch). So we get
base 10 with familiar units of measeure.

------
raldi
I wish the article had touched on temperature systems; I feel like Celsius is
metric at its weakest. Farenheit has beautiful bands:

<0: So cold it's off the scales

0's: So cold you have trouble doing anything and just want to warm up
immediately

10's: Wear a ski jacket with hat and scarf and gloves

20's: Wear a ski jacket and hat

30's: Wear a ski jacket but leave it open

40's: Wear a wool overcoat

50's: Wear a heavy jacket

60's: Wear a light jacket

70's: Leave the jacket home

80's: Wear shorts

90's: So hot you have trouble doing anything and just want to cool down
immediately

100+: So hot it's off the scales

~~~
Sharlin
Well, to a non-American like myself the Fahrenheit scale feels weird and
arbitrary (and yes, I understand the "human scale" argument, just don't buy
it") while the Celsius scale makes sense.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Or is it just more familiar? We all like what we're accustomed to. Is there
some reason Celsius 'makes sense'? Why does it make sense that 22 is
comfortable but 40 is miserably hot? It doesn't make any more sense than 72
and 100.

~~~
dghughes
The familiar part has changed for Canadians.

I grew up during the transition period I was too young to know Fahrenheit, I
had just entered school when the switch was occurring.

My parents are pretty well used to Celsius now but still may occasionally use
Fahrenheit such as some electronic device that allows F or C they choose F.

It's still a but messed up though since Canada borders the US. The old joke
being weather reports that show the border with the US say Detroit shown as 90
and Windsor as 32 "See Marge as soon as you cross the border into Canada it
goes dow to 32!"

But still you get people of all ages saying things like "300km/h wow that's
nearly 200 mph" or "You weigh 70kg what's that like 150 pounds?". It's more
due to history and the influence of the US on our culture, I bet more french
speaking areas like Quebec, northern NB don't do that but who knows maybe they
do.

~~~
dalke
I was born and raised in Florida. I now live in Sweden. Because of experience,
I understand C pretty well between -15 and +10, and between +80 and +100
(Swedish sauna temperatures).

Between +20 and +50 I'm still more comfortable with 70F-120F. I also spent
some time in Illinois, where I learned to understand the subzero range from
-15F to 0F.

At LOX temperatures of 90K and below, I'm most comfortable in Kelvin. ;)

------
jjindev
As a guy with a chem degree, I prefer Metric in the lab, and Imperial (US) in
the kitchen or workshop. It isn't really that hard to shift gears/units for
your task.

Even better is when you learn to cook or build without measurement, just
transferring sizes directly. See James Krenov on building a cabinet.

------
chiph
If we went metric on the interstates, exit 880 on Interstate 10 in Texas (at
the Louisiana state line) would retain it's status as the highest numbered
exit in North America. Only it'd be exit 1408.

(exits are generally numbered by their mile (err, kilometer..) marker in the
US, not consecutively)

~~~
ecopoesis
Not really true. In New England and most of the NE, exits are numbered
consecutively, or at least started that way until ABCs got added in and others
got removed.

~~~
chiph
So switching to metric would give the various DOTs in those states the
opportunity to correct their numbering. They'd have fewer A,B,C exits as well,
since kilometers are smaller and would increase the chance of the exit
location falling nearer to a milepost.

------
mmagin
I've wanted the USA to finish going over to the metric system for about as
long as I can remember. It annoys the heck out of me that I have to have two
sets of tools at hand, have to determine if fasteners are one or the other
(both in their threading and drive mechanism), etc.

------
disillusioned
Even worse for cities that are laid out on a mile by mile grid, like Phoenix.
Yikes.

------
MrJagil
Sort of related: Discussion of the Time Zone article mentioned:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8138200](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8138200)

------
ted5555
A recent issue of Nature featured a 100 years ago in Nature clip that showed
the USA thought it would be too hard to switch to the Metric system in 1914.
100 years and counting.

------
infra178
In an age where everyone carries a computer in their pocket, the metric
system's only advantage (that it makes converting units easier) is irrelevant.

~~~
stephen_g
Conversions being easier is nice, but the main advantage of the metric system
is that it is a set of properly standardised units that the rest of the world
uses...

Having a computer in your pocket is never going to change that.

------
acd
We should all use the metric system and UTC time.

~~~
bluecalm
UTC time would make it convenient for internet sites and international travel
but would suck for things like talking/writing about daily activities,
schedules, times of the day. Now "a jog at 5:30am was pleasant experience
because there was barely a soul on the streets" wouldn't allow you to imagine
what the experience was (was it before sunrise or maybe late evening, or maybe
middle of the night?).

------
whiddershins
It drives me crazy that people think base 10 systems are so great. The choice
of base 10 is so deeply irritating to me. Divisions of 60 are fantastic,
obviously, and we all benefit from being able to divide an hour in to 5ths,
6ths ... Meanwhile splitting a check three ways is likely to always be uneven.

Base 12 or 60 end up being more precise in every day life, and i wish whoever
thought up the metric system had been smart enough to realize that.

~~~
Jedd
As has been pointed out elsewhere, the 95% of the planet that uses metric
systems (including dollars and cents - a decidedly metric-friendly currency)
has not ended up starving due to an inability to split a food bill by the
number of people at the table.

Of course, you're right that if you and 59 of your closest friends were out
for dinner, it'd be easier if currencies were based upon divisions of 60, that
certainly makes some sense.

Maybe whoever thought up the metric system was smart in ways that you don't
yet fully appreciate?

------
jccalhoun
When I read t he Tommy Lee dick joke I had to check to see how old this was.
Who still makes Tommy Lee jokes?

------
spullara
Even though I'm an ex-physicist where nearly everything was done in metric,
I'm decidedly anti-metric. Most of the metric system has no empathy for the
everyday life of humans and is better suited for making scientific equations
easier. It is roughly the equivalent of choosing esperanto for consistency.

~~~
yen223
I grew up in a metric country. The metric system is totally fine for everyday
use. We know that 1.8m is tall, that anything below 5 celsius is cold, and
that 100kg is heavy.

The only downside is that some stats are only published in imperial units -
fuel efficiency being the worst offender.

~~~
spullara
It really isn't the point that you can learn those things. People can also
learn phone numbers and SSNs but we still use names. Wouldn't everything be
much easier if we just referred to each other by our unique number? Addresses
are also superfluous, just lat+lon with a unit # should be sufficient.
Imperial measurements and their now American counterparts are based on human
experience rather than something convenient with which to do calculations.
Though the carpenters make a good case for 12in since it is so easily divided
into 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/6ths which are used often in construction. Even 1/5ths
and 1/8ths go to only 1 decimal place. Metric is convenient for calculation
and computing and not much more. Otherwise it is just a tradeoff you are
making for a measurement system that wasn't designed around everyday life.

~~~
stephen_g
Take it from someone who grew up in a metric country - it makes _absolutely_
no difference in everyday use. You are used to imperial units, so they make
more sense to you. I'm not, so they feel weird, complicated and completely
arbitrary. Typically I have to mentally convert to a metric measurement to
have any intuition of how big or heavy something is.

In everyday use, I don't care if something is one and 3/5ths of some part of
somebody's finger - I'm used to metric so it looks about 4 centimetres...

I'm not a builder, but I've never once heard any hint from my friends in
construction that using millimetres has ever been a problem for them in their
work, as they are used to it and the construction industry in every other
country except the US is geared towards metric...

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chj
I am really glad that a second wasn't broken further into 72 pieces.

~~~
spiritplumber
In some fields (cinematography) it gets broken into 29.9 pieces...

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transfire
Sumerian base 60 and kumbaya y'all!

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JohnDoe365
> Likewise, employer-provided health insurance was a historical accident

As an European, a stance like that is near to instant execution.

~~~
johan_larson
What are you talking about? In some places, health care is a matter between
you and the government.

The US has an odd system of subsidized employer-provided health insurance. It
covers most workers, except at the low end of jobs. The government, meanwhile,
provides direct coverage of the very old and the very poor.

The people who really get screwed in the US system are the ones in crappy
jobs, who aren't poor enough that the government steps in directly, but don't
make enough that it's worthwhile for their employers to take advantage of the
subsidies of employer-provided insurance.

~~~
true_religion
Or anyone who is self-employed or own their own business.

