why is the US not Metric

[Cerebus]

The metric system was thought out from the ground up for the modern world.

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]

The Romans used base 10 for addition, multiplication and subtraction, and base 12 for division.

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

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 

[bsfeechannel]

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?

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]

Hah, speak of the devil, this is what a friend just posted to Facebook. He and the friend who commented are both millennial Americans:

They will be curators of an open-air museum of antiquated units.

[soldar]

Only if you regard the end of the eighteenth century as "the modern world".

The 18th century is classified as modern history. In fact, late modern history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_time_periods

Modern History – After the post-classical era

    Early Modern Period – The chronological limits of this period are open to debate. It emerges from the Late Middle Ages (c. 1500), demarcated by historians as beginning with the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, in forms such as the Italian Renaissance in the West, the Ming Dynasty in the East, and the rise of the Aztec in the New World. The period ends with the beginning of the Age of Revolutions.

    Late Modern Period – Began approximately in the mid-18th century; notable historical milestones included the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and the Great Divergence

    Contemporary History – History within living memory. It shifts forward with the generations, and today is the span of historic events from approximately 1945 that are immediately relevant to the present time. For example, the Post-Modern movement (Soviet Union and United States, 1973–present)

[Cerebus]

Only if you regard the end of the eighteenth century as "the modern world".

The 18th century is classified as modern history. In fact, late modern history.

The "modern world" and "modern history" aren't the same thing. You can tell because people use different words for them. People don't "fly around the history" or "Write a world of the 100 Year's War".

If your point is to stand, you'll have to go back and change bsfeechannel's  original claim to "The metric system was thought out from the ground up for the modern history" and that would clearly make a nonsense of it.

[soldar]

The "modern world" and "modern history" aren't the same thing. You can tell because people use different words for them. People don't "fly around the history" or "Write a world of the 100 Year's War".

If your point is to stand, you'll have to go back and change bsfeechannel's  original claim to "The metric system was thought out from the ground up for the modern history" and that would clearly make a nonsense of it.

I have no problem with his original quote. To me saying "the metric system was thought from the ground up for the modern world" means it was meant to be a break with the past and focused on the future.

In any case, not worth arguing about.

[Cubdriver]

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?

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.

Why do you have such a huge bug up your ass about the US and the measurement system(s) we currently use?  The reasoning has been explained to you repeatedly (see, for instance, tooki's post above, quoted as part of yours).  Your example is ridiculous - no one is suddenly changing systems - we are continuing to use a system we've been using for many years, while transitioning to metric where doing so makes sense to us.  Is a base ten system fundamentally far more logical?  Yes, it is.  This fact has been acknowledged repeatedly in this thread.  The fact remains that the US is a big country with a large installed base of non-metric things.  It would cost a fortune to change everything over, replace the signs on over four MILLION miles of roads, and get everyone to think in metric units rather than the current system.  At this point, we don't feel that change is worth the cost and effort.  Deal with it.  Somehow, we seem to be doing so.

We get it - in your opinion, everything measurement-wise that is non metric is archaic, sucks, makes no sense, is stupid, <insert additional pejorative(s) of your choice>.  We don't care that you don't like it.  It currently works for us.  If it bothers you that much, feel free not to come here and not to use anything we currently make that isn't based on a metric standard.  Jesus H. Tap-dancing Christ give it a rest already.

-Pat

[Zero999]

Perhaps the title of the thread should be changed to "Why does anyone care the US is not Metric?" I certainly don't. I couldn't care less if anyone uses crappy imperial/customary units, so long as I know what they are i.e. it's a US pint, rather than imperial pint, so I can convert.

[AG6QR]

For those who abhor non-decimal factors in units, why do you put up with our current system of time?  Short of tweaking Earth's orbit, we can't do much about the number of days in the year, but all the subdivisions of a day are entirely up to us to control.   We don't need to follow the Babylonian system of 24, 60, and 60.  We could use centidays and millidays for ordinary timekeeping.  A centiday is 14.4 of our traditional minutes, and a milliday is 1.44 minutes.  Once we made the switch, we'd easily change our habits to make classes, meetings, and TV programs last two to four centidays, cookies bake in one centiday or a bit less, a work day is 33 centidays, etc.

Quick: if an engine rotates at 2000rpm, how many revolutions does it make in an hour?  A day?  If the same engine rotates at 3000 revs/milliday, you immediately know it completes 30,000 revs/centiday, or 3,000,000 revs/day. 

Converting meters/sec into km/hour is not necessarily intuitive to most people, but converting m/microday into km/centiday is just moving the decimal.

So why don't we make the switch?

We'd have to replace all clocks.  We'd have to get used to thinking in centidays and millidays.  Camera shutter speeds, frequencies on our radio dials, frame rates of movie cameras, the standard pitch of musical instruments, baud rates of serial data transfer, and our AC power grid are a few of the random things we tie to the second.  We measure pulse, respiration, and the speed of rotating machinery using the minute.  Our system of time zones and the speed limits on our highway are tied to the hour.

There's no doubt in my mind that, after we transitioned to metric time, a lot of math involving times would become much simpler for humans to deal with.  I also have no doubt that many of those who grew up with our present system of hours:minutes:seconds would have difficulty adjusting to decimal time. And the retooling that would be required would be horrendous, as would the synchronization of such things as airline schedules and teleconference timings during the transition.  I'm confident I will not live to see the adoption of metric time, and I suspect my (as yet unborn) grandchildren won't, either.  Because we're unwilling to make the change and suffer the cost ourselves, we're condemning future generations to suffer through the difficulties of the current system until such time as they take it upon themselves to adopt a sensible set of measurements.

If you understand why the world still uses hours:minutes:seconds, you understand why the US is still using pounds and feet.  The arguments for the status quo versus decimalization of measurements are the same in both cases, at least qualitatively.  The relative magnitudes of the costs may be somewhat different of course.

[wasyoungonce]

Worked with metric and imperial on military aircraft.  Yes of course many fasteners are proprietary like DUZ etc but its such a pain using the US imperial compared to the metric.

Speaking to the FSRs...they know its mad but explained no matter how much better metric is for everyone, including scientific notation and standards,  its just...well..they don't collectively care nor will they ever change.  Indeed they cannot understand why other countries adopted metric.  Then places like UK..metric and imperial...really that's mad!

But like world voltage standards....it ain't going to happen!

[Tepe]

There's no doubt in my mind that, after we transitioned to metric time, a lot of math involving times would become much simpler for humans to deal with.

The ten day weeks would probably not prove to be immensely popular...

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

1 milliday = 86.4 seconds
1 hour = 41.666666667 millidays
1 minute = 0.6944444444 millidays
1 second = 11.5740740740 µdays

[tooki]

Remember Swatch Internet Time? Yeah, people just flocked to it! :p

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time



P.S. They really need to make a memberberry emoji.

[Tepe]

1 milliday = 86.4 seconds
1 hour = 41.666666667 millidays
1 minute = 0.6944444444 millidays
1 second = 11.5740740740 µdays

1 day = 10 hours = 1,000 minutes = 100,000 seconds

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

1 milliday = 86.4 seconds
1 hour = 41.666666667 millidays
1 minute = 0.6944444444 millidays
1 second = 11.5740740740 µdays

1 day = 10 hours = 1,000 minutes = 100,000 seconds

  Good idea! Let's call 0.864 seconds a second from now on! What could possibly go wrong?

[Tepe]

1 day = 10 hours = 1,000 minutes = 100,000 seconds

  Good idea! Let's call 0.864 seconds a second from now on! What could possibly go wrong?

That system was introduced by decree in France in 1793. For some odd reason it didn't catch on   

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

1 day = 10 hours = 1,000 minutes = 100,000 seconds

Good idea! Let's call 0.864 seconds a second from now on! What could possibly go wrong?

That system was introduced by decree in France in 1793. For some odd reason it didn't catch on   

Vive la Révolution française ! They did quite a bunch of silly things there, then.

[Tepe]

1 day = 10 hours = 1,000 minutes = 100,000 seconds

Good idea! Let's call 0.864 seconds a second from now on! What could possibly go wrong?

That system was introduced by decree in France in 1793. For some odd reason it didn't catch on   

Vive la Révolution française ! They did quite a bunch of silly things there, then.

Like the metric system? 
Btw, this decimal time system predates the metric system.

[CatalinaWOW]

For those who abhor non-decimal factors in units, why do you put up with our current system of time?  Short of tweaking Earth's orbit, we can't do much about the number of days in the year, but all the subdivisions of a day are entirely up to us to control.   We don't need to follow the Babylonian system of 24, 60, and 60.  We could use centidays and millidays for ordinary timekeeping.  A centiday is 14.4 of our traditional minutes, and a milliday is 1.44 minutes.  Once we made the switch, we'd easily change our habits to make classes, meetings, and TV programs last two to four centidays, cookies bake in one centiday or a bit less, a work day is 33 centidays, etc.

Quick: if an engine rotates at 2000rpm, how many revolutions does it make in an hour?  A day?  If the same engine rotates at 3000 revs/milliday, you immediately know it completes 30,000 revs/centiday, or 3,000,000 revs/day. 

Converting meters/sec into km/hour is not necessarily intuitive to most people, but converting m/microday into km/centiday is just moving the decimal.

So why don't we make the switch?

We'd have to replace all clocks.  We'd have to get used to thinking in centidays and millidays.  Camera shutter speeds, frequencies on our radio dials, frame rates of movie cameras, the standard pitch of musical instruments, baud rates of serial data transfer, and our AC power grid are a few of the random things we tie to the second.  We measure pulse, respiration, and the speed of rotating machinery using the minute.  Our system of time zones and the speed limits on our highway are tied to the hour.

There's no doubt in my mind that, after we transitioned to metric time, a lot of math involving times would become much simpler for humans to deal with.  I also have no doubt that many of those who grew up with our present system of hours:minutes:seconds would have difficulty adjusting to decimal time. And the retooling that would be required would be horrendous, as would the synchronization of such things as airline schedules and teleconference timings during the transition.  I'm confident I will not live to see the adoption of metric time, and I suspect my (as yet unborn) grandchildren won't, either.  Because we're unwilling to make the change and suffer the cost ourselves, we're condemning future generations to suffer through the difficulties of the current system until such time as they take it upon themselves to adopt a sensible set of measurements.

If you understand why the world still uses hours:minutes:seconds, you understand why the US is still using pounds and feet.  The arguments for the status quo versus decimalization of measurements are the same in both cases, at least qualitatively.  The relative magnitudes of the costs may be somewhat different of course.

Don't forget that the "fundamental" units of the metric system would change also.  Watts, amps, Farads and the like.

I will repeat.  America is adopting the metric system.  At our own pace.  I purchased the photographed ruler in 1973 or 1974.  It was one of the times we were pushing harder on metric.  Gasoline was even sold in liters in maybe a fifth of the pumps.  That particular foray failed largely because of the association with the OPEC embargo and many pricing games that were played as many vendors used a switch to metric volumes to disguise large price hikes.  I would say metric penetration was a few percent at that time.  My personal guess is that it is currently around fifty percent.  A linear extrapolation probably wouldn't be far off, so another forty to fifty years.

[Zero999]

For those who abhor non-decimal factors in units, why do you put up with our current system of time?  Short of tweaking Earth's orbit, we can't do much about the number of days in the year, but all the subdivisions of a day are entirely up to us to control.   We don't need to follow the Babylonian system of 24, 60, and 60.  We could use centidays and millidays for ordinary timekeeping.  A centiday is 14.4 of our traditional minutes, and a milliday is 1.44 minutes.  Once we made the switch, we'd easily change our habits to make classes, meetings, and TV programs last two to four centidays, cookies bake in one centiday or a bit less, a work day is 33 centidays, etc.

Yes time is annoying, but we're stuck with the current definition of the second, which is an SI unit and there are 86.4ks per day, whatever we do. As mentioned above, if we change the second, we have to alter all of the other SI units which depend on it, such as capacitance.

As I said before, it's not so much the different bases which make imperial/customary difficult, but the fact that mass, length, volume are totally different systems. Metric is all one standard international system, with everything being multiples of powers of 10.

Example: we have a cuboid shaped fish tank, 4ft 6in long, 18in wide and 15in high. Calculate how many US gallons of water required to fill it to fill it to a depth of 1ft. I wouldn't have a clue how to figure it out using purely customary units. I'd just convert everything to metric:

An inch = 2.54cm and there are 12 of them in a foot.
l = (4*12+6)*2.54 = 137.16cm
w = 18*2.54 = 45.72cm
d = 12*2.54 = 30.48cm

A litre is 1000cm³
v = 137.16*45.72*30.48 = 191139cm³ = 191.1L

A US pint is 0.473L and there are 8 of them to the gallon.
191.1/0.473 = 404pt
404/8 = 50.5 so the answer is 50 gallons and 4 pints.

How much does does the water in the tank weigh, under standard conditions?
A litre of water near enough weighs 1kg, so 191.1kg. Oh, then answer needs to be in pounds and ounces?
1lb = 0.454kg
191.1/0.454 = 420.925lb
There are 16 ounces per pound:
0.925*16 = 14.8oz
So 420lb 14.8oz but 421lb is close enough.

I hope I've got that right!

There are conversions from cubic inches to pints and the density of a pint of water, but why bother? It's much easier just to memorise the imperial to metric conversions, which will come in handy sooner or later anyway.

[SiliconWizard]

1 day = 10 hours = 1,000 minutes = 100,000 seconds

  Good idea! Let's call 0.864 seconds a second from now on! What could possibly go wrong?

That system was introduced by decree in France in 1793. For some odd reason it didn't catch on   

For the story of the decimal time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time

[bsfeechannel]

Why do you have such a huge bug up your ass about the US and the measurement system(s) we currently use?  The reasoning has been explained to you repeatedly (see, for instance, tooki's post above, quoted as part of yours).  Your example is ridiculous - no one is suddenly changing systems - we are continuing to use a system we've been using for many years, while transitioning to metric where doing so makes sense to us.  Is a base ten system fundamentally far more logical?  Yes, it is.  This fact has been acknowledged repeatedly in this thread.  The fact remains that the US is a big country with a large installed base of non-metric things.  It would cost a fortune to change everything over, replace the signs on over four MILLION miles of roads, and get everyone to think in metric units rather than the current system.  At this point, we don't feel that change is worth the cost and effort.  Deal with it.  Somehow, we seem to be doing so.

We get it - in your opinion, everything measurement-wise that is non metric is archaic, sucks, makes no sense, is stupid, <insert additional pejorative(s) of your choice>.  We don't care that you don't like it.  It currently works for us. 

The explanation that it costs a fortune to change is not convincing. If the US were an impoverished country, full of starving children, I'd agree with that argument.

But the fact is that the rest of the world converted to metric, proving that it is not so expensive, much less difficult, as the US claim.

If it bothers you that much, feel free not to come here and not to use anything we currently make that isn't based on a metric standard.

Too late.

Jesus H. Tap-dancing Christ give it a rest already.

-Pat

The day we all agree will be the end of this forum.

[bsfeechannel]

Yeah, I agree. Americans can be pretty stubborn, but they are usually pragmatic people. So if they don't do it, there's a good pragmatic reason. It's probably still not worth it at the moment. As many have said, the US has migrated, or at least embraced the metric system in an increasing number of domains. They still don't see the point of making a complete switch, which would cost a lot, and would probably make americans feel like they are forced to embrace something that's not theirs, feel like they are losing ground somehow, which I can understand. If they eventually get there, that'll be very gradually.

As long as they are not forcing others to use their own system, it's all good. It's their business. We can mind our own. (Americans here are of course more legitimate to be opiniated about it one way or the other.) It's not like it's really hindering any work with US companies these days - that works fairly well all in all.

I do think it may have an impact as to how americans, I mean the average joe, perceives science (as science uses the metric system) compared to other countries that are metric, and it could be an interesting topic to elaborate on. But that's just a question/discussion, and again, nothing but their own business in the end.

The true reason perhaps lies elsewhere. In their heads they must have a specific unit for certain kinds of measurement.

Even if they decided to ditch all the myriad length units they have, for instance, but stick to imperial and settle with the yard (the closest to 1 m) they'd be uncomfortable with 1kyd, 1myd, 1µyd, 1nyd.

For them, metric is yet another set of units for specific measurements. So, furniture? Inches. Living room? Feet. The distance between two towns? Miles. A football field? Yards. Wavelength? Meters.

The use of different units is from a time where people used whatever reference they had at hand. So the ancient Romans used fingers, palms, feet and the stretch of their legs as they walked (also known as pace and normally counted by the thousands) to measure length.

Eventually those units were standardized and their relation fixed already in the ancient world.

But we live in an industrial age where that kind expedient is a cumbersome predicament. It doesn't make any sense to maintain several units for the same dimension.

So the one who manages to explain that in a way they can understand will win their hearts.