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why is the US not Metric

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soldar:
I think Troy grains were mostly grown in the UK.

The customary Spanish yard (vara) was a bit shorter at 836 mm.
while the traditional Spanish pound (libra) was a bit larger at 460 gr.

Interestingly, in China when they adopted the decimal metric system they redefined the local "pound" as 500gr and when you go to buy groceries all prices are marked per half kilo and not per kilo.

America could do that. Define the "new pound" as 500 gr and continue to use "pounds".  Same thing with the yard, etc.


bsfeechannel:
This kind of adaptation was done all over the world. You find sewage pipes in 25, 50, 100, 150mm. What are those? The old 1, 2, 4 and 6 inches.

I have two oscilloscope CRTs. One is a Toshiba 130BHB31 and the other is an El-Menco 5DEP1. 130mm, 5 inches. They are electrically and dimensionally equivalent.

When I was a kid we used to have 30cm rulers. Just shy of 1 foot. My Faber-Castell 52/82 slide rule has numbers spaced on the L scale by 2.5 cm. A standard door is 2.10m x 90cm = 7 x 3 feet. Pine wood planks can be found in 30 x 60, 90, 120, 150 or 180 cm, respectively 1 x 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 feet.

The world saw metric and didn't blink twice.

EDIT: 150 mm is equivalent to 6 inches, not 5 as I had previously written.

CatalinaWOW:

--- Quote from: bsfeechannel on November 06, 2019, 12:25:24 am ---This kind of adaptation was done all over the world. You find sewage pipes in 25, 50, 100, 150mm. What are those? The old 1, 2, 4 and 5 inches.

I have two oscilloscope CRTs. One is a Toshiba 130BHB31 and the other is an El-Menco 5DEP1. 130mm, 5 inches. They are electrically and dimensionally equivalent.

When I was a kid we used to have 30cm rulers. Just shy of 1 foot. My Faber-Castell 52/82 slide rule has numbers spaced on the L scale by 2.5 cm. A standard door is 2.10m x 90cm = 7 x 3 feet. Pine wood planks can be found in 30 x 60, 90, 120, 150 or 180 cm, respectively 1 x 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 feet.

The world saw metric and didn't blink twice.

--- End quote ---

Sort of agree.  The world saw metric, and some two hundred years later most of the world has adopted it. Sort of.   So perhaps by the time a quarter of a millenium has passed the whole world will be there.

The real question is why the rest of the world cares how the US goes about its business.  To the extent of making stuff up.  Like blueskulls algorithm for computing the window dimensions.  A quick check tells me it is technically correct, but it isn't the way a traditional unit person would do this.  Most would convert the feet to inches,  or add 48 (4x12) to the remainder inches.  Even you metric people can handle that math.  They would ignore the sixteenth of an inch, just as most would not sweat a fraction of a millimeter, particularly in a framed window that will very likely vary from top to bottom by several millimeters (1/4 of an inch).  So now the problem is to remove 3/8 from each side, or 3/4 from the total dimension.  Wham you are done, and the calculations are trivially more difficult than in metric units. 

It is worthwhile reading the Wikipedia (English) article on metrification.  It may surprise many how far down the road the US is, and how widely traditional units survive in many "metric" countries.  It is also worth looking at the widely referenced Mars Climate Orbiter fiasco from a slightly different point of view.  The US specifies metric for military and space applications.  The NASA contract specified metric.  But one supplier illegally supplied traditional data.  Of course this probably wouldn't have happened if the the US was 100 percent metric and had been since the data on the motor involved was originally collected.  But it also wouldn't have happened if a dimensional check had been performed.  A wise step even in completely metric countries, because cm are not interchangeable with meters, and because weird stuff happens.  I have seen torques expressed (in countries that have been metric for over a century) in dyne-cm (not SI but metric), and gm-cm.  These two are interchangeable only if you don't care about an order of magnitude.  Blaming it solely on the use of traditional units leaves you exposed to other forms of stupidity.

mansaxel:

--- Quote from: CatalinaWOW on November 06, 2019, 03:31:39 am --- A wise step even in completely metric countries, because cm are not interchangeable with meters, and because weird stuff happens. 

--- End quote ---

That is a matter of multiplication by 10 (an appropriate number of times), which, yes of course, needs to be done correctly. But it is also trivial, which "thou to inches is times 1000, feet to inches is times 12, feet to yards is times 3, yards to miles is 1760" is not, in comparison.  While it is true, on each side of the fence, we are more used to our own method, moving decimal points is always going to be easier a priori than remembering a non-linear sequence of multipliers.  And then we've not started talking about relations between length, volume and weight, because there it is outright silly.

wraper:

--- Quote from: KL27x on November 04, 2019, 08:21:20 pm ---America didn't choose imperial. We were handed it by the Brits. I wouldn't say we actively choose to keep it. We just don't have incentive to change it officially/completely. We already took the knee to the rest of the world by changing all of our units of measurement to be defined by global (metric) standard. Why should anyone in another country care, beyond that?

--- End quote ---
Because you are exporting this shit. Both in hardware and IP. Those effing imperial screws used in some equipment I service are driving me nuts.

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