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| pdenisowski:
--- Quote from: TimFox on November 14, 2023, 06:41:04 pm ---Once again, an ignorant comment from a foreigner about American weights and measures. 1. The United States went officially metric in 1959 (but forgot to tell anyone). --- End quote --- But the real push came when (President Gerald) Ford signed the Metric Conversion Act in 1975. We spent hours and hours in school being "re-educated" on how to use the metric system and they even had "educational" animated commercials during Saturday morning TV cartoons, e.g. After a few years, they eventually gave up. :) |
| Zero999:
I do find it odd the way the US has still been somewhat reluctant to change to metric units, in terms of everyday usage. I suppose peope prefer to stick with what they know and it's often not worth the trouble. The UK hasn't completely changed to metric either. Milk is still sold by he imperial pint and road signs are in miles and yards. I can't see it changing any time soon, as it's even easier to convert than ever. Digital speedo's in cars can easilly be configured to work in either unit and it's easy to lookup the conversion online. I still remember the most common converstions to three significant figures: a pint is 568ml (imperial) or 473ml (US), a pound = 454g, an inch = 25.4mm, a mile = 1.61km, which I still find useful. |
| tooki:
--- Quote from: Zero999 on November 16, 2023, 11:17:08 am ---I do find it odd the way the US has still been somewhat reluctant to change to metric units, in terms of everyday usage. I suppose peope prefer to stick with what they know and it's often not worth the trouble. --- End quote --- That’s the thing: for many applications the units of measurement are functionally irrelevant. For example, whether it’s a 16 fl oz soda bottle or a 500ml bottle: it’s the “I want a 1-2 serving bottle of coke” size. And indeed, the big soda bottles (the “to share at the table at home” size) in USA have been 2 liters (and the less common 1 and 3 liter sizes) for as long as I’ve been alive (>40 years). The small bottles have started transitioning to 500ml in recent years. I suspect some of the delay is simply the cost of retooling all the bottling plants (and the rest of the supply chain). The cost of retooling packaging lines is why beer canned in Hawaii uses a type of can that’s been obsolete on the mainland for decades: Hawaii’s only can maker makes the old style, and I guess the cost of refitting a factory in Hawaii is much higher than on the mainland, so they just kept it. Similarly, think of how aviation still uses feet for altitude in almost all countries: it’s a functionally abstract unit. No pilot actually needs to know what the feet mean as such; the important thing is maintaining the correct flight level (hundreds of feet), sink rate (feet/min), and then they get a feel for “100 feet means I’m about to touch down”. There’s no benefit in a unit that’s familiar from other contexts, like meters on land. The effort to remake all the aviation maps and stuff in meters, and the risk of confusion during the transition period aren’t justified by the essentially zero benefit from switching. |
| Siwastaja:
--- Quote from: TimFox on November 14, 2023, 06:54:55 pm ---That makes the US customary gallon a binary unit, since 1 US gallon = 8 US pints weighs approximately 8 lb. I tried to convince some Japanese co-workers that the inch was more modern than the centimeter, since inches are usually divided into binary and hexadecimal fractions, e.g. 16ths. --- End quote --- I love to point this out to some people who do programming stuff but irrationally hate the US measurement system. Maybe the biggest hurdle in "your" system is the mixture of base-2, base-10 and base-12 systems; for example inches often divide in binary fractions, but on the other hand 12 inches is foot; if this was 16 inches instead, it would be just perfect system for us computer-minded. Then again stuff like milli-inches aka mils, base-10, is thrown into mix. The base unit is not problem, and binary fractions are not problem either, just... different, sometimes better sometimes worse. But it's the mixture of bases which makes the whole system a bit awkward for us outsiders. |
| TimFox:
The ancient Mesopotamian mathematicians, whose notation was difficult for fractions, used base-60 notation, since it has more prime factors (2, 3, and 5). Decimal has only two: 2 and 5. Hexadecimal has only one: 2. Sexagesimal lives on in angular degrees and clocks; do not confuse it with hexadecimal (base 16). https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/the-joy-of-sexagesimal-floating-point-arithmetic/ |
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