General > General Technical Chat
why is the US not Metric
Simon:
--- Quote from: james_s on October 29, 2019, 12:47:07 am ---I'm surprised people wouldn't have a rough idea of what feet is. For all the crap Americans get for supposedly not knowing other units, I think most of us have a pretty good idea of what a meter is. It's close enough to say it's about 3 feet.
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Divide by 3 and subtract 10% as 3 feet are 915mm
tooki:
--- Quote from: bsfeechannel on October 28, 2019, 11:51:57 pm ---
--- Quote from: tooki on October 28, 2019, 06:33:27 pm ---Oh yeah, I just remembered another US unit that's used worldwide: the foot, in aviation. Flight levels are practically always* in feet, because having a consistent system is far more important than which system it is. Switching would likely lead to some crashes during the transition period. With there being essentially no advantage to switching, the risks involved in switching just don't make sense, which is probably why aviation has stuck with feet, despite ICAO recommending a switch to metric since 1979.
(Given the altitudes in question, the unit used is essentially totally arbitrary, since one's "feel" for a unit in everyday life can't translate to the huge altitudes involved. And the actual amounts don't really matter, insofar as it's air traffic control telling a pilot what flight level to use.)
*Except China, Mongolia, North Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Russia actually used to use metric flight levels, but in 2017, actually switched from meters to feet.
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But in countries where metric is already the "customary" system, when addressing the passengers, the pilot converts the altitude to meters, because no one has absolutely any clue what 27.000 feet means.
That goes for seat screens: speeds in kilometers per hour and altitude in meters.
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As someone who flies in both USA and Europe a few times a year, I can’t say I agree with this. They rarely ever announce the altitude anymore anyway, in any unit, since an interested passenger can turn on the map on the IFE, which on older ones cycles between feet and meters for altitude, and between knots, mph, and kph, and on newer ones allows the passenger to select the units.
tooki:
--- Quote from: boffin on October 29, 2019, 01:50:53 am ---
--- Quote from: james_s on October 29, 2019, 12:47:07 am ---I'm surprised people wouldn't have a rough idea of what feet is. For all the crap Americans get for supposedly not knowing other units, I think most of us have a pretty good idea of what a meter is. It's close enough to say it's about 3 feet.
--- End quote ---
I'd guess that more people from Europe would understand "33,000 feet", than Americans would understand "10,000 metres"
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Ah, more anti-American prejudices...
As an American living in Europe, I can say with a million percent certainty that Europeans know vastly less about US customary units than Americans know about metric. (As in, the average European knows literally nothing about customary units. Which makes sense, since they aren’t taught them in school.)
Americans are taught metric in school (even if customary units are used more), so we grow up with an inkling of what metric units are. We at least know that a meter is very broadly speaking about the same general length as a yard (3 feet). We have a pretty good feel for what mm and cm are: American rulers invariably have inches on one side and cm/mm on the other. (Oddly, measuring tapes do not.) Analog thermometers have both scales, as did traditional analog speedometers in cars. Americans are passively exposed to metric on a daily basis in all areas of life. Europeans (and presumably other non-North and South Americans) simply aren’t ever exposed to US customary units except in very specific circumstances that most people do not encounter on a regular basis.
So no, people from Europe wouldn’t know what to make of 33,000 feet. An American might be able to say “hmmm, that’s about 6 miles”, a European will have no clue that it’s 10km.
tooki:
--- Quote from: VK3DRB on October 29, 2019, 06:05:06 am ---
--- Quote from: tooki on October 27, 2019, 05:48:42 pm ---
--- Quote from: VK3DRB on October 27, 2019, 12:50:26 am ---Besides the Altium grid lines "standard" being a dog's breakfast, many Chinese PCB manufacturers only specify their capability dimensions in imperial measurements (eg: minimum track width 7mils, rather than 0.18mm). This is only to appease US engineers who cannot fathom (sorry, 1.8288m) the metric system |O (Just kidding, sort of!).
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I assure you, it's nothing but smug US haters telling you that Americans can't understand metric. It's been taught in schools for 50+ years now, and American engineers are absolutely, definitely, 100% going to be able to handle millimeters just fine.
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Loosen up. Read: I was joking!
--- End quote ---
No thanks, I respectfully decline to “loosen up”. You said “half joking”, aka not actually joking.
As an American abroad, I get shit from everyone: Americans in USA calling me “eurotrash” (I’m not), British people smugly declaring that Americans don’t speak English (we do), locals complaining about foreigners, and everyone ragging on us about metric. (And until Brexit and AfD showed Europeans that xenophobic right wing paranoia is on their doorstep, we also got Europeans attacking us for our dumb politicians that I, like nearly all Americans abroad, decidedly did not vote for.) I’m tired of it, so I call people out on it, mmkay?
SerieZ:
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