| General > General Technical Chat |
| why is the US not Metric |
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| KL27x:
Well, to him it's "common sense" and "economy of scale." It's basically everywhere and everything. (So he can't come up with a single example.) I watched the History Guy's video. It was pretty interesting. But I watched the last 10 minutes pissed off about the bushel example. Of course a bushel of one crop is a different weight from another. The bushel is a unit of volume, duh. |
| Cubdriver:
That was my immediate thought as well - different densities will result in different weights. |
| KL27x:
The Roman system was a bit more sensible than the American Customary version in volume. Per wikipedia, the congius is 1/8th of a cubic foot. So it was exactly 6" cubed. Just a tad smaller than our gallon at 6.136" cubed. (Of course, the inches are different; per wikipedia, the Roman inch was probably a bit smaller than the modern; Sumerian inch a tad larger than.) But then they naturally went ahead and divided that into sixths to make the sextarius. Maybe sextarius just sounded cool, or maybe it's because this makes 48 sextarius to 1 cubic foot, which is pretty close to 50. Or maybe a sextarius was just the right size for a wine bottle. |
| bsfeechannel:
--- Quote from: Cubdriver on November 30, 2019, 04:38:58 am --- --- Quote from: KL27x on November 30, 2019, 03:18:39 am ---bsfeechannel: --- Quote ---As it has been pointed out repeatedly along this thread, for the common citizen the exact system of units is irrelevant as long as it is standard. --- End quote --- --- End quote --- Exactly. He still hasn't presented a good argument to change highway signage in the U. S. --- End quote --- Yes, I have. The whole economy profits from the reduction of the amount of redundant units to measure the same thing. --- Quote ---What we have works and is a standard. --- End quote --- What everybody had before metric worked and was a standard, but it was inefficient and had to be phased out. --- Quote ---I'm not seeing economic forces pressuring us to change road signs. --- End quote --- But they're there. |
| bsfeechannel:
--- Quote from: KL27x on November 30, 2019, 05:54:53 am ---The Roman system was a bit more sensible than the American Customary version in volume. --- End quote --- Using the same reasoning you'll start to see that the metric system is a lot more sensible than whatever the American Customary can offer. |
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