| General > General Technical Chat |
| why is the US not Metric |
| << < (271/291) > >> |
| petert:
--- Quote from: austfox on October 25, 2019, 11:28:21 am --- --- Quote from: jonovid on October 25, 2019, 10:24:21 am ---here in Australia everything is Metric, like most of the world. --- End quote --- Except for tyre pressure (psi) and to a lesser extent food energy (calories). Note the electronic tyre pumps at service stations, which default to psi, but are required by law to have a metric (kPa) toggle switch (which I have never seen anyone use). Most food packaging is in kJ, but it seems a lot of media commentators still like to use calories. --- End quote --- Same really in Germany and France, energy (calories) contained in food never really progressed to the new units. Also while bar for pressure is easily scaled to Pascal, the switch still hasn't been made. |
| petert:
--- Quote from: Ranayna on October 25, 2019, 04:10:06 pm ---Harddisk and screen sizes are the current examples, floppy disk sizes where a thing in the past. --- End quote --- 3.5 inch floppy disk is really 90 mm, but was renamed so to satisfy the customs of thr US American market. (Similar for other floppy sizes.) Screen sizes were in inches for the same reason: influence of the American companies/market. German brands tended to use cm, predominantly. --- Quote from: Ranayna on October 25, 2019, 04:10:06 pm ---Similar story with horsepower for cars. --- End quote --- That's the only example in this list where an old unit is still used because of customs/impedance to change in Germany. |
| Simon:
I personally do hots per mm. If it's 6 dpmm like a 27" 4k monitor that's good enough for me :) |
| DBecker:
--- Quote from: petert on February 25, 2020, 12:07:01 pm --- --- Quote from: Ranayna on October 25, 2019, 04:10:06 pm ---Harddisk and screen sizes are the current examples, floppy disk sizes where a thing in the past. --- End quote --- 3.5 inch floppy disk is really 90 mm, but was renamed so to satisfy the customs of thr US American market. (Similar for other floppy sizes.) --- End quote --- The 8 inch and 5.25 inch floppy were developed in the U.S. The development happened in Silicon Valley starting in 1967, so every dimension would have been imperial. The 3.5 inch floppy format was largely developed by Sony in Japan. While it used most of the electronics of the earlier formats, the physical construction was newly developed and thus largely metric (with the exception of the mounting details and the name). |
| rstofer:
FWIW, I am not anti-metric, I use it all the time. And, yes, I did some time in school; I'm not a drop-out. MSEE to be exact! So, yes, I know the system and I know how to use it and I agree it has some nice features and I even agree it would be a better system. But we're not going to change! What I am against is a) changing the basis for our entire country and b) the whining and sniveling of people trying to coerce a change. We aren't going to change our base units, ever, and foreigners are not going to impact our decision. This entire debate is meaningless because the person in the street doesn't care about units, doesn't understand metric and could care less about the subject. Not changing is just a form of inertia. Remember physics? You need a force to overcome inertia and there simply isn't enough force for changing units. Newton's First Law, remember? A body at rest tends to stay at rest and all that... Now, you can claim that my views are radical but populist would be more accurate. If we wanted to change, we would have done it when Sputnik launched and we felt under technological pressure. But we didn't. And we won't. We were riding a post-war high right up until October 4, 1957 when, all of a sudden, we were challenged. We kicked the educational system up a couple of notches. Twelve years later we were walking on the Moon. You do realize that France isn't highly regarded by the average Joe on the streets, right? As soon as Joe finds out the standards are kept in Paris, the game is over. Maybe if the standards were moved to Sweden the change would have better odds of happening. Everybody loves Sweden! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-French_sentiment_in_the_United_States Wait another 25 years and see if things have changed. My guess is no but something could happen to overcome the inertia. I don't know what it would be. If Sputnik didn't do it, I don't know what will. The topic isn't "is metric better", arguably it is. The topic is whether the US will change and my view is that it never will. I could be wrong... And we're still the only country to walk on the Moon. |
| Navigation |
| Message Index |
| Next page |
| Previous page |