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why is the US not Metric
Cerebus:
--- Quote from: bsfeechannel on November 11, 2019, 01:55:39 pm ---The metric system was thought out from the ground up for the modern world.
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Only if you regard the end of the eighteenth century as "the modern world".
Thinking about it, it's perhaps odd that the US didn't adopt the metric system ab initio. The American war of independence and the adoption of the metric system by France were going on at roughly the same time and France was a formal ally of America. Many aspects of American revolutionary thinking were heavily influenced by 'modern' ideas that were being passed around in Europe at the time. America decimalized its currency (remember that the British Colonial monetary system was a base 12/base 20 system) but didn't follow through with the other aspect and metricate its measures. Curious...
bsfeechannel:
--- Quote from: ciccio on November 11, 2019, 02:34:10 pm ---
--- Quote from: bsfeechannel on November 11, 2019, 01:55:39 pm ---
The Romans used base 10 for addition, multiplication and subtraction, and base 12 for division.
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Never heard this. It's interesting. Can you supply some reference? .
I studied Latin, more than 50 years ago, but I remember that division was done by series subctraction, using the standard notation, which can be assumed "base 10" or "base X"
Best regards
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You're right.
I should have said, the Romans used base 10 for whole numbers and base 12 for fractions.
Gratias tibi ago.
ebclr:
Instead of metric or imperials, everybody must use a binary system and will save a lot of power,, Man's and machines together :-DD
bsfeechannel:
--- Quote from: tooki on November 11, 2019, 01:32:15 am ---You don’t have a country set. Are you American? Or are you in a fundamentally metric country, and only deal with a small amount of Customary? (If the latter, then you’re still within the group of people that don’t really use Customary, and thus aren’t comfortable with it the way someone is who grew up with it.)
I didn’t say that Americans ONLY see costs and risks. As I and others have said repeatedly in this thread: changes do involve costs and risks, and so one will only accept those when the benefits exceed them. At no point did anyone say that Americans see NO benefits. It’s simply that one has to weigh the benefits against the costs and risks. Do I have to spell out this basic logic in any more excruciating detail, or will me typing it out for the tenth time finally break through that noggin? ;)
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Try to think if all of a sudden, instead of expressing capacity in farads, you had different units depending on the order of magnitude for expressing the same thing, each with a nonsensical (albeit "historical") relation to each other and employing different bases for whole numbers and fractions, just because some nation wants to stick to a meaningless tradition.
I think you wouldn't be happy if you now had to do the same for resistance, and that you had to apply different conversion factors depending on the order of magnitude of the resistance and the capacitance to calculate just an RC time constant.
That's what would happen if instead of metric, people opted to use their customary system to define capacitance and resistance.
If you are capable of imagining such a situation you will quickly understand how imperial sucks.
bsfeechannel:
--- Quote from: tooki on November 11, 2019, 02:16:55 am ---Hah, speak of the devil, this is what a friend just posted to Facebook. He and the friend who commented are both millennial Americans:
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They will be curators of an open-air museum of antiquated units.
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