The Metric System

DC_DEEP

When you get to the pub, will you order a pint of ale, or half a liter, or 473 mL?

dong20

Tsk Tsk, that would be 568 ml.

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. ~ Niels Bohr

DC_DEEP

Stop, you are making it so difficult. Metric system is supposed to be easy.

dong20

It's made harder when imperial nations can't even agree on the 'same' measurement for a gallon. I'm familiar with both systems, but mathematically and logically, metric is simpler IMO and experience both to use and understand. The unit names are much less interesting though.

The US and others can't hold out forever... besides how can one take a nation seriously when it measures things in cups (and no, I don't mean Bras).

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. ~ Niels Bohr

220483

CHANGE to the metric system... IT a lot easyier! for YOU [americans] and for us [the rest of the world [apart from the other two countries still in the inch WORLD...].
I wouldn't be a 8", but a GRAND 20cm... :D

ManlyBanisters

You may have a pint of milk - but I bet the side of the box has the equavalent millilitres right there.

Oh, and 10 stone is 140lbs, not 140 kilos. 10 stone is 63.6 kilos and 140 kilos is a snidge over 22 stone.

Yup - that's how it was when I lived in the UK for a spell. And though that's not ancient history it's not that recent either.

The gallon thing pisses me off. I never understood what a gallon was until I finally beat it into my own skull recently*. With both UK and US cultural influences I just could not visualise a gallon because what was being referred to varied from book to book, film to film, etc.. Bastards.

*I have a car that measures miles to the gallon in UK imperial, I like to convert that to k per litre, and I occassionally like to annoy Americans who winge about gas prices by telling them they have it easy compared to the prices here, but I have to say it in dollars and gallons or else it would mean nothing to the majority of them.

Catchoftheday

When I got to the pub. I saw the jugs and remembered that some things are still measured in inches here, clothes sizes (bras for instance )
I have had a couple of pints thank you and very nice too but if I was to have had a bottle I could have had 275ml or 330ml or 500ml or even 568ml (a pint)

my little willy video/

Dragonfly20

When I worked at a smelter Myself and my crew had both Imperial and metric tools.
We used both every day in doing our job.
Alot of the old timers on crew talked in imperial measurements.
We had to refit, refurbish and recalibrate the casting technology.
As you can imagine the need for accuracy was vital.
Having and using both imperial and metric systems was never an issue or underminded the safety or the accuracy of the work.

The Greek Dude

Which of the following sounds bigger?:

or

(Space for Rent. PM for details)

mista geechee

what exactly about our use of inches and feet ..etc..etc hinders something in your life? why so much animosity towards hindreds of millions of americans you dont even know? what exactly makes YOU so much better or smarter than anyone else? does it really bother you that much that you say civilised and we say civilized ? is that how it is in your mind? different is wrong? backwards? stupid? ignorant? its wrong for a language to change?

you're not a liberal cynic. you're just a pretentious asshole

" ...better just deal with whatever comes your way...while we speak , time is envious and is running away from us. seize the day , trusting little in the future..." - horace

"...energy can never be destroyed-only the flesh..." - nas

Phil Ayesho

Hey... we had the metric system in our money 200 years ago...

When the heck will the british empire adopt a decimal monetary system?

Here's why I prefer standard over metric.

Engineering.


a base 10 measurement system is only evenly divisible by 2 and 5.

And dividing it by 3, or 6, or 9 results in infinite decimals...



A base 12 measure, however, can be evenly divided by 2, 3, 4, 6.

Further.... A circle has 360 degrees... that is a multiple of 12. ( the reason we have 24 hours in a day- also a multiple of 12)

Base 12 measure makes such things as gearing systems far easier to actually design and fabricate.

The question is not why 3 countries DON'T use the metric system... the question is why the idiots who sought to replace standard with something more sensible picked a base 10 system... ( cause they had 10 fingers? that's a good reason!)

They should have picked base 12.

Standard measure makes more visceral sense than the entirely arbitrary units of the metric system.

A yard is a man's stride... a foot, the length of his foot, an inch the width of his thumb... ( hence the term- rule of thumb)
A cup what you can hold in your cupped hand, an ounce is a sip....

And Fahrenheit makes far more sense than basing our temperature scale on the arbitrary freezing a boiling points of water... which we, as human beings, have no real relation to.
No human can tell the difference between 80 and 100 degrees celsius...

The Fahrenheit scale, however, set zero at the coldest day of the year and 100 at the hottest day of the year in the German town Fahrenheit lived in.


Therefore, the Fahrenheit scale is based upon HUMAN experience of temperature, rather than a lab experiment.

Man is the measure of all things... it makes sense that we use measures that relate to our experience.

jacknapier

Well said, Phil!

Um... anyone interested in Call of Cthulhu larp?

HazelGod

In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about Hope.

Dragonfly20

Why the hell NOT??

Jovial

Don't you need to be smarter to use imperial units? If metric is easier, then any idiot can use it.

And it's not illegal to use the metric system in the USA. We are free to use whichever system we want in day-to-day life.

That's what I was going to say.
There are competing versions of how he came up with the scale.