why is the US not Metric

[KL27x]

^This phenonenon is annoying about height in metric. The first "1" is nearly redundant. In feet, you have a pretty high usage of 4, 5, 6, and then finally the 3/7 for the extremes of nature.

Maybe 100 years ago, you could say the same thing about weight in imperial. But then we have people that weigh over 600 lbs, now.   

Regarding government mandatory implementation, I read something interesting about the Dutch. They don't even speak english, but they like the pound. Or "pond." Their government attempted to define the pond as 1 kg. But the Dutch people rejected that. They use the pond as 0.5 kg.

[SilverSolder]

^Several Northern European countries have an informal 500g "pound", now that you mention it.

[KL27x]

It's quicker to say a pound, though.

Quicker to say a half pound than a quarter kilo.
Quicker to say quarter pound than an eight of a kilo. Or 125 grams.

If the rest of the world liked the pound so much, I wouldn't care if America redefined it as 500 grams. I think US civil engineers will be disappointed, though.

It's fine, how it is, though. It's not like you would even care if there's a 10.2% translation error when you ask for a quarter lb of coleslaw at the grocery store deli. If that's too much or little, you might have to go down the nearest gram, next time.

[KL27x]

^God help you, Gabinetex. I can hear your metric purist brethren sharpening their pitchforks. 

I think it would be cooler to ask for "a hector" = 100 grams.

[SilverSolder]

^Several Northern European countries have an informal 500g "pound", now that you mention it.

Yes, it's called the "half-a-kilo".  7 "halfakilos" of potatoes please.
3 and a half "halfakilos" of tomatoes too.

In some places, people might say a pound of butter, meaning 1/2 kilo.  Absolutely not uncommon.

[tooki]

As for the yardstick: tue claim was that you could walk into any hardware store in Europe (i.e. not a specialist industrial tool vendor) and get dual-scale models. I think that’s untrue.

It may depend on the importer for that specific country.. I've personally never seen a metric-only Mitotoyo caliper, analog or digital.

Well, I just showed you Mitutoyo’s own catalog, so now you have seen them...

[Zero999]

It's quicker to say a pound, though.

Quicker to say a half pound than a quarter kilo.
Quicker to say quarter pound than an eight of a kilo. Or 125 grams.

And it's quicker to say a kilo than 2lb. What's your point?

Units are arbitrary.

If you do any precision work in SAE, at least in my experience, you tend to think of it in decimal to thous. I.e. 1/8th steps are 0.125", .250", .375". .500", .625", .750", .875", 1.000"
Each 16th is 62.5 thous. Each 32nd is 31.25 thous, or about 30. But we have digital calipers; if you need this kind of precision, you are not using a tape measure, anyway. There's something "good" about using thousands/ths (000-999's), like metric users have found. And the inch just is the right size for this in common machining and manufacturing. Hundredths of mm would be the closest scale, but you only get 100 of them and they are more than double the resolution (so you only cover 1/25th of the range before adding decimal points (or commas that are in the wrong place); also this resolution is beyond inexpensive calipers, so the accuracy tolerance adds additional baggage.) Using thousandths of cm has its own problems; it seems like no one does that. Size of the unit absolutely matters to the context of what you are doing, IMO.

Look at it like this. If you handed an EE a caliper mechanism with no markings, just the electronics, and no measuring system existed, yet, and you ask him to make the thing show digits on it down to w/e resolution if has, he would have come up with something close to the order of thousandths of an inch. If you asked people to put useful markings on a measuring stick or tape to build things like homes and boats and boxes and baskets, well... that's how the inch evolved. The statute mile is a little weird. But, hey, the Romans built the best roads of their times, and it has worked out so far. They do what they are supposed to.

Well I've always measured in mm for small things or decimals of a mm for tiny things.

Feet and yards are more plausible, as they were derived form measurements of the human body, but a metre is close enough to a yard. I can't see anyone reinventing the inch or cm. They'll probably use something like the width of their thumb or little finger for measuring things like small boxes. For extremely tiny things, a hair's breadth makes sense and is often use to give laypeople a sense of scale of microscopic objects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hair%27s_breadth

Cheap digital calipers where I work have a resolution of 0.01mm or 0.0005". We don't bother with expensive, more accurate calipers, but I've just Googled some which have a resolution of 0.001mm or 0.00005". I haven't seen any which measure in thou. In inch mode, they just tend to show a large number of decimal places, which is more difficult to read.
https://digitalmicrometers.co.uk/collections/digital-calipers/products/30-810-9516-sylvac-s__cal-evo-carbide-and-evo-caliper-0-150mm

I repeat units are arbitrary..

Now, seriously, I confess that I don't really care why (or why not) the US is not metric... what really worries me, what keeps me awake at night, is why US ringbinders have 3 holes...    I mean.. Why? Why? What in the hell is wrong with you people!!

No I don't care either. I just find it amusing that many people seem to care and some Americans also appear to care about what the rest of the world think.

[KL27x]

And it's quicker to say a kilo than 2lb. What's your point?

No it's not. "2 pounds" is 2 syllables. "1 kilo" or "a kilo" is 3 syllables. Maybe in UK, you say "I'll take kilo mashed potatoes?"

Wife to her hubby: No, dummy. Not that. We need the "5 pound bag." You've done this how many times? And you act like you've never been shopping before.

Thusly, the American wife can include more insults with the same breath while communicating weights.

"Five ten" (5'10") is easier to say than "one sixty" (160 cm) (And that's a nice case; could be "one seventy seven"; no one is seventy feet tall)

Not to mention, I don't see how you can say "quarter kilo" without sounding like there's a bag of French penises in your mouth.
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Cheap digital calipers where I work have a resolution of 0.01mm or 0.0005".

True, they display it. But they are not that accurate. Mine display 0.01mm, but they are only accurate to within 0.02mm.

I've just Googled some which have a resolution of 0.001mm

That's great. (They aren't that accurate, but hey, it shows numbers). And if you were working on something in that range, it would be great. For my uses, the range between 1 thous and 1 inch is more useful than 1 thousandth of a mm up to 1mm. 1 thous is the smallest unit I can reasonably give a crap about, in 99.99% of what I do. And it's also the smallest distance I can accurately measure, personally. (When I need more precision, I will have to buy new equipment. And when I measure the thickness of paint for a living, I might find thousandths of mm's are perfect).

Anything beyond that type of precision, the calipers is not very useful, anyway, no matter how many digits it will show.
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Units are arbitrary.

Yes, they are arbitrary. But no, that doesn't mean that any size unit is equally convenient for any given purpose. Refer back to how people like to buy stuff in pounds at the grocery store, even in the Netherlands. And not just because it's easier to say, but also due to the size of the unit; remember, they defied their government's attempt to make the pond = 1kg.

Same reason why no one here knows what the heck a rod is. (Except for bsfeechannel and v6kzgo). But to the worker that ever measured in it, it was more or less exactly right. You could say it is an "ad hoc" unit for a specific purpose. Like the blue line on your butter is 25 grams.

Another example is Russia's ATC. 100 feet is a good space for a flight level. This is pure chance, obviously. But Russia changed to feet partly because of compatability with neighbors, but also because this increased the air traffic they can handle by 50% more. They previously used 50m per flight level. That just happens to be larger than necessary, at least today. And 30m (or 33.3333333m)  doesn't work as nice in our base ten number system. In the year 3000, maybe flight levels can be 10m, and metric will be more convenient in this aspect, of course. It's just chance, in this particular case. 

But in the case of a tape measure or ruler, we can say that this evolved for the particular use case, and inches won (over the digit). If you like your tape measure to go 1-10 and than wrap around back to 1, and squint to read the little cumulative number, then cm are better for a tape measure. Some people might prefer inches, except for the fact that they think the world would end and they'd never be able to calculate 3 dimensional space in liters in their head ( oh no!). 

BTW, fun fact. The average density of SEAwater is 64 lbs per cubic foot. Or 8 pounds per 6" cubed. Or 1 pound per 3" cubed.
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I repeat units are arbitrary...

Naturally. Please inform bsfeechannel of this. He thinks the speed of light is based on the meter.

[Zero999]

And it's quicker to say a kilo than 2lb. What's your point?

No it's not. "2 pounds" is 2 syllables. "1 kilo" or "a kilo" is 3 syllables.

Fair point, but words are also arbitrary. For some reason metric units are two syllables rather than one,  probably because they originate from another language, but some people are so lazy with their speech.

Cheap digital calipers where I work have a resolution of 0.01mm or 0.0005".

True, they display it. But they are not that accurate. Mine display 0.01mm, but they are only accurate to within 0.02mm.

Yes, that's true, but the extra digit can be useful for comparative purposes and as a check the instrument is working properly.

I've just Googled some which have a resolution of 0.001mm

That's great. (They aren't that accurate, but hey, it shows numbers). And if you were working on something in that range, it would be great. For my uses, the range between 1 thous and 1 inch is more useful than 1 thousandth of a mm up to 1mm. 1 thous is the smallest unit I can reasonably give a crap about, in 99.99% of what I do. And it's also the smallest distance I can accurately measure, personally. (When I need more precision, I will have to buy new equipment. And when I measure the thickness of paint for a living, I might find thousandths of mm's are perfect).

Anything beyond that type of precision, the calipers is not very useful, anyway, no matter how many digits it will show.

Don't forget, others have different requirements.

BTW, fun fact. The average density of SEAwater is 64 lbs per cubic foot. Or 8 pounds per 6" cubed. Or 1 pound per 3" cubed.

And the density of freshwater is simply 1kg per 1000cm³. Much easier to remember and work out. Sea water is a little denser, but for many applications, that doesn't matter.

I repeat units are arbitrary...

Naturally. Please inform bsfeechannel of this. He thinks the speed of light is based on the meter.

Yes and I could go back and counter all the examples you've posted with ones showing how metric units are often more convenient, but there's no point, because it depends on the situation. I could also go on about the advantage of being able to scale by 10 in metric, but you already know about that and that point has been beaten to death.  An interesting thing is, there's a movement to get rid of cm and just use prefixes which represent multiples of three to the power of 10, so 1μm, 1mm, 1km etc. but cm is a convenient unit for many applications and chemists often use dm because 1dm³ = 1 litre.

[tooki]

I have never seen a combination one in a hardware store anywhere outside of the Americas (as of now, meaning Europe and Thailand). Whether measuring tapes, foldable yardsticks, office rulers, or analog calipers, micrometers, etc, it’s metric-only by default.

I've never seen an analog caliper being metric only.  I have 5 different in my workshop, all with inches on the top.
Like this one;
(Attachment Link)

Tape measures with dual scales are also readily available here in Denmark.
https://www.hoffmann-group.com/DK/da/hodk/M%C3%A5lev%C3%A6rkt%C3%B8j/Linealer%2C-vaterpas/B%C3%A5ndm%C3%A5l-mm--tommeafl%C3%A6sning/p/462014

I can not really understand tires though. Their width is in millimeters, and the diameter is in inches. How weird is that?
The only full metric tire I know of, was fitted to Citroën CX.

FWIW, I was at a big consumer hardware store yesterday, and while all the calipers were dual-unit (all el-cheapo), not a single one of the rulers, tape measures, yardsticks, etc had anything but metric on them.

[KL27x]

Don't forget, others have different requirements.

I know this. When I measure the thickness of paint, I will use micrometers. In America we have a choice, and industries are free to use what they want. Most of the industries that will have a real benefit from metric have already changed. The point about differing requirements is supporting the use of w/e system/units you find better in any given context. It does not help the case to change everything to metric.

An interesting thing is, there's a movement to get rid of cm and just use prefixes which represent multiples of three to the power of 10, so 1μm, 1mm, 1km etc.

Cuz it causes confusion and more opportunity to make mistakes. In Australia's construction industry, only mm's are used and cm's shall be written down and stated NOWHERE, ever. But how are the tape measures marked? Like I said before, hundredths of mm would be pretty convenient for machining, other than the fact they are hundredths and not thousandths. But no one makes a caliper that goes by centimeters or where you can change units or decimal places. Sure, the foot and yard and inch are separated by weird ratios, but they are a fairly reasonable way to get reasonably useful unit sizes to relate. And you can use decimal or tenths or hundredths or thousands of any of these units to get different ranges; e.g. in civil engineering, they use feet in the US. They don't need stinking inches for anything this large scale; they used tenths of feet. But tenths of meters would be too big.

And the density of freshwater is simply 1kg per 1000cm3... but cm is a convenient unit for many applications and chemists often use dm because 1dm3 = 1 litre.

Keep on playing that one string banjo. Talk about beating a dead horse. 

Yes and I could go back and counter all the examples you've posted with ones showing how metric units are often more convenient, but there's no point, because it depends on the situation.

There IS a point. Bring it. I'm sure you have dozens of examples where the size of the metric units is useful or convenient for something in particular. Crochet? Sewing? Baking is one you hear about... Since I have never baked, I will give metric (or the scale?) a win for baking. Even if you used a scale, certainly oz could be too big and grains too small for home-scaled baking, without using a lot of extra digits. I can see that.

So your list would be a lot more useful than repeating the same crap over and over. Maybe you put metric roads on your list, like bsfeechannel; let's hear the reasoning, though. What else you have? We know physics and chemsitry. I have added baking and measuring the thickness of paint. You can carry on from there, surely dozens of things in daily life. Go.

Is ok if Americans use yards for football? Then why not miles for driving? Then why not pounds for the deli mac n cheese? Then why not inches for machining and fabrication? Why not let people use what they want? You think the smart guy doing chemistry should dictate how the majority should do all other things? Because "cubic decimeters = liters!" You guys are so proud of yourselves that you have chosen to think and use metric for all things. Americans are not impressed with these mental superpowers. It's much more impressive to be able to use both as dictated by the task. And even to make up ad hoc units were they are useful. Cuz... the world doesn't fit together like metric Lego blocks, no matter how much standardization we have. If you go big enough in scale, the spherical shape of the world comes into play, so surveying feet? Who cares? And that is only America's "problem."

Merry 10 days of metric Christmas!

[coppercone2]

i like how a inch ruler looks like even with machinists graduations but a metric ruler looks unpleasant. its simply too busy.

perhaps if you took a centimeter, made it 2.5 times longer, and divided it by 10 it would work as a hack to get the tenths system going. not sure how critical 8ths are. but the centimeter is defiantly too short to be useful. I kind of wonder if we would get more done if the inch was run on a 1/6th system rather then 1/8 because 1/8 is still too much to renember

when people measure things in centimeters or millimeters I feel like there is hyperinflation going. you need a whole wheel barrow full of numbers to define something the size of your hand.


usually when you mess up a fraction things account for that, for instance in welding or woodworking you can usually bend something or add a shim etc, so you don't need to worry too much about the fraction. when you get into the decimal points things go haywire IMO. it will make people go crazy. maybe if we make everyone a cyborg so they can define a little error bar to add near a number then metric will work

[coppercone2]

and for cooking you use spoons. not sure what ingredients are even standardized in flavor enough to warrant that kind of precision. the natural ingredients vary anyway, so there no reason to reinvent the wheel. maybe precise bread manufacture


is flour and yeast even stable enough? all the stable ingredients besides salt and soda are bad for you anyway..

not sure if you should be weighing spices because.. their volume is important as quality assurance. it means its not caked up or ancient or ground too fine etc. volumetric is better. maybe I dont want the airfloat spice dredge from the bottom of the container to even make it into a meal.. when you pour something into a teaspoon or scoop it, you get used to how it feels and looks and behaves and pours and its a sign of standard quality.. the scale will lie to you

[Tepe]

Billions of people cope just fine with centimeters and millimeters without being cyborgs.

[coppercone2]

Billions of people cope just fine with centimeters and millimeters without being cyborgs.

they cope yes

[Zero999]

Billions of people cope just fine with centimeters and millimeters without being cyborgs.

they cope yes

And I'm sure there are billions who prefer centimetres and millimetres, over inches. Most imperial rulers are divided up into ¹/₁₆ of an inch, which is too big for me. Some rulers are divided up into ¹/₃₂ of an inch which is a bit smaller than a millimetre and is a bit too small.

[unitedatoms]

Fun fact. The original definition of kilometer is one centigrad of earth equator. One grad is Pi/200. Earth equator was assumed to be 40000 kilometers.

One can verify this by counting fractional grad notches all over the edge of earth disk.

[ebastler]

Fun fact. The original definition of kilometer is one centigrad of earth equator. One grad is Pi/200. Earth equator was assumed to be 40000 kilometers.

Not quite. The chosen reference was a meridian, i.e. a line which is orthogonal to the equator, running from the North pole to the South pole. For convenience, and since this definition was proposed by the French Academy of Sciences, the meridian through Paris was selected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre#Meridional_definition

Not sure whether centigrads figured in the discussion -- were they already a thing in 1790? I understand that a quarter of the meridian was chosen as the length reference (North pole to equator via Paris), and the meter defined as being the 10-millionth part of that distance.

Edit: Seems that the "centrigrade" or "gradian" scale indeed stems from France and the time of the French revolution as well. So it's quite plausible that the new (back then) definition of the meter and the proposed 400-grad scale were connected.

[KL27x]

^ It would appear that someone in France wanted to make everything into 10's and 100's.

If that had caught on, we would be making right angles of 100 degrees/grads (a hectodegree?). Triangles would have 200 degrees/grads. Circles and polygons would add up to 400 degrees/grads.

A 45 degree angle would be 50. Considering the ubiquity of 30 and 60 degree angles in design and engineering and construction, these would now be 33.333 and 66.667 degrees.

An about-face or complete change in viewpoint/stance would be doing "a 200."    
In this base ten utopia, "K" and "100" could be applied and used to mean every other thing imaginable.

Zero999:

And I'm sure there are billions who prefer centimetres and millimetres, over inches. Most imperial rulers are divided up into 1/16 of an inch, which is too big for me. Some rulers are divided up into 1/32 of an inch which is a bit smaller than a millimetre and is a bit too small.

That's funny, because in metric, the unit sizes make jumps by 10x, rather than 2x when dividing an inch into 2^-1 fractions. So if you like to use some unit that is say, about 3x as big as a centimeter, you might as well use the word inch. If you wanted something about a third the length of a meter, you might as well use a foot. Since they are already well defined. Esp if your country, which is the size of the entire EU, already uses them, consistently, as is the case for the US.

Edit: I respect your preference for a tape measure marking every 39.4 thous as being better than 31.25 thou or 62.5 thous, but it seems a tad curious and arbitrary unless you include the fact it is part of the larger system of metric.

Interesting thought I discovered out of this thread. Of the native english speaking world, the US, alone, counts for near 3/4 of that figure. 2 billion people speak English. 400 million speak it as their first or lone language. About 300 million of these folks live in the US. The majority of english speakers around the world perhaps don't have much exposure to imperial units other than through media. Living in it is a different perspective, and it isn't even a thing to notice. Metric is just as useful to Americans, even if we don't feel an urgent need to buy butter in grams or to drive in km/h.

Centimeters. Made by man in order to divide a circle into 400 degree. And so we can have these beauties:
https://www.123rf.com/photo_97469762_yellow-metric-measuring-tape-isolated-on-white-background.html

So if you are ok with stopping short on the grand Belgian plan and leaving 360 degrees in a circle, that's kinda how Americans feel about changing road signs and our daily parlance to metric. Yeah, that sounds nice. Just not for us.

[bsfeechannel]

Well, the holidays are over. I hope you have had an awesome Metric Christmas and New Year's Day.

I had the Metrickest Christmas anyone could desire. At the dinner our host served this wine called Km. 0.



Here's a picture of the actual bottle back label.



And a nice review about it.

It has this name because the producers', Familia Irurtia (Irurtia Family), vineyard is located at the origin of the Rio de la Plata (Plata River). In fact the front label exhibits a map with their location (golden little circle at the left of "Cabernet Sauvignon") showing the river and its tributaries in black, part of Argentina in gray, and Uruguay in white.

I recommend this wine to anyone who resists metrication. All the 750 ml of it.

[Cubdriver]

I know that km stands for 'kilometer'.  What is Km?  Shame they couldn't have used the CORRECT metric prefix...

-Pat

[CatalinaWOW]

There are many fine wines made in California, Oregon and other states of the US.  Virtually all of it is sold in 750 ml bottles.  Except for those that are sold in 375 ml bottles or 1.5 liter bottles, or horror of horrors, multi-liter bags in a box.  Some of those wines have won best in the world awards.

Too bad bfees cannot enjoy any of them since they will travel on mile marked roads on their way out of the country.

[SkyMaster]

...
Now, seriously, I confess that I don't really care why (or why not) the US is not metric... what really worries me, what keeps me awake at night, is why US ringbinders have 3 holes...    I mean.. Why? Why? What in the hell is wrong with you people!!

Canada became officially 100% metric in 1978. Our ring binders have 3 rings. Standard paper sheet is 8.5 inches x 11 inches.

I had a job where I had to travel the world and get LARGE documents printed in Canada and shipped to the customer, while I was at the customer place. It seems that only United States and Canada use the proper 3 rings binder and the correct 8.5 inches x 11 inches paper sheet. Everybody else is using 4 rings binder and paper that is not wide enough and too long. Why? What in the hell is wrong with you people!! 

 

[SkyMaster]

...
But do you find it curious that French Canada is mostly metric-only? But english-speaking Canada still largely uses imperial in daily life to this day? At least this is what internet research suggests. Admittedly, I haven't been to Canada in many years.

...

I haven't been in Canada in a couple decades. My personal experience with watching Youtube:
AvE, Matthias Wandel are two of the only Canadians I "know." They both use inches to describe and communicate distances. Quite unapologetically, I would say. Neil from Pask Makes is Australian, and he usually states things in metric and imperial conversion. But he will also sometimes use just imperial. "3/4" plywood," for instance. It's probably just easier to say. There are tons more examples. John Heisz is another Candian that could care less about centimeters. I have never seen english speaking canadian use metric, casually...

Matthias was one of my inspirations and teachers in learning to build (complex machines with moving parts and requiring high accuracy) with my own hands. As previously stated, I tried both sides of the tape measure before I settled on inches, and I am sure he and others influenced this decision. Now, I didn't take shop classes. I took science classes. I had learned only metric in school. So you could say I learned inches from a Canadian. 
...

In Canada, the usage of some imperial unit is not limited to English speaking Canadians. I live in the province of Quebec, my first tongue is French, and inches and pound are still casually being used in Quebec. People height and weight are often expressed using imperial units. I do woodworking using exclusively imperial units. Wood comes in 8 foot length (and 10, 12 etc), plywood sheets are 4 x 8, etc.

Canada is officially all metric, but grocery store still display the price in $ per pound, in large characters, but at the counter the price is charged per kilograms. The fact that it makes the price appears lower is probably influencing this practice, but still, anybody who is 41 years old, or less, was officially only exposed to metric units all is life.

 

[bsfeechannel]

I know that km stands for 'kilometer'.  What is Km?  Shame they couldn't have used the CORRECT metric prefix...

-Pat

It is not 0 km. It is Km. 0.

In metricated countries like Uruguay they use the word kilómetro to mean what in imperial countries would be the function of a milepost.

So it is the abbreviation of the Spanish word kilómetro, not the symbol km.

Kilómetro cero (kilometer zero), km. 0, is the first, uh, "milepost" placed at the origin and, by extension, all the stretch until kilómetro uno (kilometer one), km. 1, which is the "milepost", or "milestone" placed at the end of the first kilometer and so on and so forth.