General > General Technical Chat
why is the US not Metric
bsfeechannel:
--- Quote from: CatalinaWOW on January 12, 2020, 09:59:16 pm ---While it may be true that the Imperial system has no volts or watts or whatever
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To be fair there were various attempts to define the ohm in terms of imperial or customary units. All of them were abandoned after the British Association for the Advancement of Science appointed Maxwell and Lord Kelvin to devise a unit that was of convenient size, part of a complete system for electrical measurements, coherent with the units for energy, stable, reproducible and based on the French metrical system.
:phew: Maxwell and Kelvin saved us. If it weren't for these two we'd be wallowing in the mire of the imperial system.
But I'm starting to see a pattern here. What the UK does with their units, the US does. So I think I found a definite solution to the imperial problem in the US: metricate the UK and the US will follow suit.
--- Quote ---as has been repeated over and over, America is metric. From the 1800s. So we do use those units. And have for as long as any other metric country. America uses what we call the standard system, which has some units that are identical to Imperial units (feet and miles) and some that resemble Imperial units (gallons and others).
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Unfortunately no one outside the US (and I suspect not many inside) falls for that kind of spin doctoring when reality shows the blatant opposite. You can say that the US is in a slow process of metrication, but it's very far from getting there.
bsfeechannel:
The Jacobs calculator was cool, but it was only useful for me to calculate the wire dimensions. Below 93 °C the temperature field shows "COLD". That's a bit nonsense. What if I want to build an egg incubator where the temperature must be between 37 and 39 °C? I needed to know the temperature rise above ambient, which shouldn't be more than 1 °C, so that I could assess if the change in resistance would be significant. I then turned my attention to this calculator. Very considerate of them to let us input metric units, but again look at the myriad of units. Meter and millimeter only would be OK.
It'd be also preferable to use °C, which is a derived SI unit, but K, which is a base unit, is alright. (Nothing that adding 273.15 to
°C can't solve). The results are all metric but for one detail: the intruding "Resistance Per Feet": a useless unit for those who come to the site not willing to have their calculations contaminated by imperial.
I can't obviously complain about easycalc or the Jacobs calculator. They're free and I'm thankful they exist. But they show how the use of imperial turns the interface messy.
CatalinaWOW:
Bsfees, you may not have enough time in the US to understand this, but your last comment demands this:
Dear sweet baby. Your trials are beyond understanding. So sad that you have to deal with the world contaminated by non-metric things.
SilverSolder:
The subject of metrification came up at a party I was at recently... first time I've ever heard anyone discuss it "live" in the US. I was just overhearing it, not participating in it. The general attitude was, "Yeah, we all learned it in school, but the implementation project eventually failed." There was a sense of lament. These people did feel that Metric was more "modern". The conversation then moved on to more lament about 30 lost years in space research and the recent Boeing failures.
I got the sense that many Americans know/feel intuitively that several balls have been dropped in recent history and that it's about time to pick them up.
Zero999:
--- Quote from: forrestc on January 12, 2020, 11:33:01 pm ---
--- Quote from: Zero999 on January 12, 2020, 08:57:44 am ---360 is better because having more factors than 400, so 1/3 of a turn or 120 degrees can be expressed without using a fraction.
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This allows me to bring up a point that I've been going to make for a while.
In some cases decimal based systems aren't very convenient when translating a measurement to the real world. It's pretty easy to divide a line segment in half through various methods, including the quite accurate method from classical geometry using a compass and a straight edge. Dividing it into 10 equal pieces is a fair bit more involved.
On a circle, dividing a circle into 6 or 12 (or 24) equal pieces is relatively straightforward as well, but 10 is quite a bit more difficult.
It would not surprise me to find that this is the root cause of why inches are generally expressed as whole numbers and fractions where the divisor is a power of two. And why there are 12 or 24 hours in a day.
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Yes, this is probably true. A base 12 numbering system would be better than base 10 in many ways.
The main reason why metric is better than imperial/customary, isn't really to do with base 10 (although that does help a lot), but the fact the whole system was designed from the ground up, with all units being defined from one another.
The SI unit for angles is the radian, which makes calculations much easier, although expressing common angles such as 90° is a pain because π is an irrational number, which generates lots of decimal places. More often than not the angle is expressed as a fraction of π, so you'll see θ = π/2, rather than θ = 15.70796, although if you're going to so that, you might as well use half-turns, but fractions of π are more widespread and well understood.
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