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Location: Northern Ireland and temporarily England
7,668 posts, read 5,263,329 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by oceangaia
It's not a matter of being stubborn or being different, it's a matter of economics. The sheer amount of infrastructure involved would make such a conversion exorbitantly expensive, time-consuming, and painful.
Just changing the roads infrastructure alone would be cost prohibitive. Think of all the signage, distance markers, mile markers, etc. that would need to be replaced not to mention all the vehicles in this country have instrumentation designed for imperial. It's not like our roads infrastructure budget is flush with money to spend. Repairs and upgrades are years behind. Who would want to see huge amounts of money being spent replacing all the miles signage when there are crumbling road surfaces rattling our cars?
For the metric fans, would you support changing our sytem of date and time so that a year was composed of 10 "months" and a month was composed of 10 "days" and a day was composed of 10 "hours"? Why not? Just think how easy it would be to calculate how many there are minutes in 5 years.
+1. It would be the same if they asked us to change the side of road we drive on. It's too late to change these things now with our populations.
Countries should've been doing this in the early 1900's.
It's not a matter of being stubborn or being different, it's a matter of economics. The sheer amount of infrastructure involved would make such a conversion exorbitantly expensive, time-consuming, and painful.
It would, but other countries successfully managed it with worse economic conditions.
It doesn't matter either way though, doesn't have an impact on my life.
The UK only went over to using kilos & grams instead of pounds & ounces within the last 20 years, though this was forced upon the UK by the EU... So I'm sure if something similar was forced upon the US people would just have to change & accept it...
Didn't the Americans **** up an Apollo mission because the measurements were supposed to be in metric, but some clever guy did the calculations in inches instead of cm?
That was a Mars mission that crashed because they got confused.
It's not a matter of being stubborn or being different, it's a matter of economics. The sheer amount of infrastructure involved would make such a conversion exorbitantly expensive, time-consuming, and painful.
Just changing the roads infrastructure alone would be cost prohibitive. Think of all the signage, distance markers, mile markers, etc. that would need to be replaced not to mention all the vehicles in this country have instrumentation designed for imperial. It's not like our roads infrastructure budget is flush with money to spend. Repairs and upgrades are years behind. Who would want to see huge amounts of money being spent replacing all the miles signage when there are crumbling road surfaces rattling our cars?
For the metric fans, would you support changing our sytem of date and time so that a year was composed of 10 "months" and a month was composed of 10 "days" and a day was composed of 10 "hours"? Why not? Just think how easy it would be to calculate how many there are minutes in 5 years.
The whole world still uses the Sumerian duodecimal system for time and navigation because it is the simplest with the minimum number of fractions. 15 degrees an hour means that star moves one degree every 4 minutes. The Sumerians beat the French at a rational measurement system by about 4000 years. Of course, if you like fraction you could always measure time by radians.
Having everything divisible by 10 =/= logical. The other measurements are actually based on measures of the body and the natural world. That is, you can measure without a ruler in many cases. The month is first because when someone asks the date at they haven't been observing holidays lately, they want to know at the very least "Oh it's March ummm... let me check my calender... 15th" (BEWARE THE IDES OF MARCH), they don't care about it being the 15th if they haven't kept track of the month. In order of importance, the month is most crucial (since knowing the date is no good if you are late or early by a month), then the date, then the year (since you are unlikely to need the year except when writing checks).
Don't kid yourself, the metric system has nothing to do with logic, and everything to do with French Revolution meddling. They also wanted to change the name of the months, but that one couldn't be justified long term. Yes the numbers are arbitrary. Life is arbitrary. Get used to it.
The imperial system is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 6 making it better for surveying and actual measurement. The imperial temperature system is far more accurate and allows more range of temperature. Because you know, it does actually matter to an airline whether the plane's wing's are partially frozen, completely frozen, etc.
So, let's talk about the imperial versus metric, with regard to temperature.
You go into a hot theatre in Europe, that they're like "Man, it's 35C in here! Really hot!" Hold up, that temperature is just past 1/3 of the water boiling point in C. So why is it about 95F in the maximum is 212 in F? That means you are leaving out a few fine gradations of temperature there. -20C is actually really -4F. Essentially, you're projecting it way worse than it should be to make a fixed point.
My one and only beef with Fahrenheit is that his scale is that it starts at 32, making the maximum temperature higher than it should be. It's because it's based on salt water.
Quote:
If you’ve ever stopped to ponder why exactly the freezing point on the Fahrenheit scale is set at 32 degrees–a rather arbitrary number, all things considered–you’ll need to ponder all the way back to the 18th century.
It was then, in the 1720s, that Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit was ironing out zero point for his temperature scale. The coldest temperature that Fahrenheit could produce in his laboratory was the result of mixing ice, water, and ammonia chloride to make a frigid slurry. This measurement became the zero-point for the scale. The second point of reference was the temperature of water when chilled to the point that ice began to form–pure water forming ice was assigned to 32 degrees. Fahrenheit later assigned 212 degrees as the value for boiling water because the 180 degree difference between the two is 180 degrees because 180 can be easily and evenly divided by a variety of numbers.
After a long period of metrification starting in the 1960s, the only countries that still use Fahrenheit for conventional measurements are the United States, Belize, and the British territory of the Cayman Islands.
Ideally, -20C "twenty below" would be -36F (meaning you should not be outside). 0F would be typical water freeze temperature. 180F would be typical water boil temperature. The typical conversion of Celsius to Fahrenheit would then be a nice even easy to calculate 9:5 ratio, meaning that "really hot 35C" actually is a hot day of 63 (water temperature for pools always bugged me because the area felt really hot, but the water was supposedly 80, but felt cold to the touch until 95), while if the temperature is 100F you should be in some sort of shelter (132F old). In terms of conversion, in terms of temperature to human feel, in terms of general utility this seems like a better system. Please please please some scientists start using it, so we can drop this salt water nonsense.
Last edited by bulmabriefs144; 08-13-2015 at 05:25 PM..
I'm a scientist, so I use the metric system when I need to calculate something or in the lab. Making a 1M solution? My scale is going to be in grams. Temperature isn't measured in degrees Celsius or degrees Fahrenheit, though, as Kelvin is the unit where temperature actually works correctly for calculations. In other cases eV is acceptable, as well.
As for measuring air temperature (i.e. the weather), the Celsius scale is not as useful as Fahrenheit. To paraphrase a graphic I've seen floating around
Fahrenheit
0 = really cold 100 = really hot
Celsius
0 = cold 100 = dead
Kelvin
0 = dead 100 = dead
From the point of view of a physicist, there's little advantage to quoting air temperature in Celsius. That it's metric means that people can feel superior for using it, but almost any useful calculation involving temperature involves looking up one or more constants or material properties (kB, cP, etc.), totally negating the usefulness of being in the metric system.
For measuring water temperature, of course, Celsius makes more sense.
Having everything divisible by 10 =/= logical. The other measurements are actually based on measures of the body and the natural world. That is, you can measure without a ruler in many cases. The month is first because when someone asks the date at they haven't been observing holidays lately, they want to know at the very least "Oh it's March ummm... let me check my calender... 15th" (BEWARE THE IDES OF MARCH), they don't care about it being the 15th if they haven't kept track of the month. In order of importance, the month is most crucial (since knowing the date is no good if you are late or early by a month), then the date, then the year (since you are unlikely to need the year except when writing checks).
Don't kid yourself, the metric system has nothing to do with logic, and everything to do with French Revolution meddling. They also wanted to change the name of the months, but that one couldn't be justified long term. Yes the numbers are arbitrary. Life is arbitrary. Get used to it.
The imperial system is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 6 making it better for surveying and actual measurement. The imperial temperature system is far more accurate and allows more range of temperature. Because you know, it does actually matter to an airline whether the plane's wing's are partially frozen, completely frozen, etc.
So, let's talk about the imperial versus metric, with regard to temperature.
You go into a hot theatre in Europe, that they're like "Man, it's 35C in here! Really hot!" Hold up, that temperature is just past 1/3 of the water boiling point in C. So why is it about 95F in the maximum is 212 in F? That means you are leaving out a few fine gradations of temperature there. -20C is actually really -4F. Essentially, you're projecting it way worse than it should be to make a fixed point.
My one and only beef with Fahrenheit is that his scale is that it starts at 32, making the maximum temperature higher than it should be. It's because it's based on salt water.
Ideally, -20C "twenty below" would be -36F (meaning you should not be outside). 0F would be typical water freeze temperature. 180F would be typical water boil temperature. The typical conversion of Celsius to Fahrenheit would then be a nice even easy to calculate 9:5 ratio, meaning that "really hot 35C" actually is a hot day of 63 (water temperature for pools always bugged me because the area felt really hot, but the water was supposedly 80, but felt cold to the touch until 95), while if the temperature is 100F you should be in some sort of shelter (132F old). In terms of conversion, in terms of temperature to human feel, in terms of general utility this seems like a better system. Please please please some scientists start using it, so we can drop this salt water nonsense.
I'll be honest, I can't recall ever anyone asking me what month it is. Seriously? Just about everyone on any given day knows the month. What they sometimes forget is the day, certainly not the month. I'm not buying that one.
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