The metric system sucks
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From: Bart Goddard on 4 Feb 2010 08:15 "Cwatters" <colin.wattersNOSPAM(a)TurnersOakNOSPAM.plus.com> wrote in news:RNidnbNg2rtvX_fWnZ2dnUVZ8tqdnZ2d(a)brightview.co.uk: > I was a schoolboy when the UK went metric so I had to learn both. > Metric/SI units are a lot easier to work with. There are fewer > different constants you have to remember. We have to learn both in the US. I was in 6th grade in 1972 and we were using it then. I remain unimpressed. The acrobatics that are done to convince people that metric is easier are silly. First they have you convert meters to centimeters (a calculation nobody ever does) and then they have you add 6 tons 50 pounds 9 ounces to 2 tons 742 pounds 13 ounces (also a calculation nobody does.) It is a fact that in almost all real calculations in English units, one unit is chosen and it is decimated. The only exception I can think of off the top of my head is that carpenters like their denominators to be powers of 2. Otherwise, most people would calculate using number like 15.53 feet. Every bit as easy as the same calculation in the metric system. B. -- Cheerfully resisting change since 1959.
From: jmfbahciv on 4 Feb 2010 08:49 Heidi Graw wrote: > > >> "Andrew Usher" <k_over_hbarc(a)yahoo.com> wrote in message >> news:285479b4-f90d-445b-824a-> >> In that case, there's no benefit from going metric either. >> >> Andrew Usher > > ...and it also means that going metric doesn't necessarily mean > it sucks. Given today's computerization of virtually everything, > if the programming is done right, one just needs to dial in > and the machine will cut to whatever measure it has been > programmed for. If you want an ark using the cubits measure, > dial in, and be done with it. > > Anyway, I don't really care what measure is used. All I want > is something that works and what will weather a storm, etc. > > As for cooking, I use a pinch of this and a pinch of that. > A handful of this or that, add a dollop and a splash... > voila! A Heidi Graw special that can never be repeated > in exactly the same way. LOL... > <grin> Then you don't plan to write a cookbook which will reproduce the same taste and nutrition. Cooking and baking are acts of chemistry. Canning is also chemistry plus a dash of physics and a large dose of microbiology. Personally, I'd rather be in a chem lab than the kitchen. I grew up in the US and cannot think in metric terms so I always have to do a conversion to make guesstimates. For some strange reason, kilometers seem to take "longer" to drive than miles when I drove from Buffalo to Port Huron, Michigan. :-) /BAH
From: jmfbahciv on 4 Feb 2010 08:56 Paul Ciszek wrote: > In article <hkbrpu$e0j$1(a)news-int2.gatech.edu>, > Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18(a)verizon.invalid> wrote: >> On 02/02/2010 11:53 PM, Andrew Usher wrote: >> >>>> How often do you measure stuff in terms of 10^21? >>> Not often, I suppose. But how do you specify, say, the mass of the >>> Earth? >> Why would people use that in everyday usage? > > I happen to be reading this thread in sci.geo.geology, FWIW. > What system do geologists use? There was an argument in sci.physics about 12 years ago w.r.t. which system was preferred in doing physics work. /BAH
From: jmfbahciv on 4 Feb 2010 09:09 Paul Ciszek wrote: > In article <7e4ca67f-208b-48e5-827f-b7380357befd(a)s12g2000yqj.googlegroups.com>, > Andrew Usher <k_over_hbarc(a)yahoo.com> wrote: >> that are officially metric. But so what of the numbers? The US clearly >> has a heck of a lot of power to impose its will on the rest of the >> world. > > But not as much as it thinks it has. > > Sometimes I think it would do the US a world of good if the rest of > the world would stage an "intervention" and stop loaning us money > or selling us oil until we admitted our addiction to both. > That's happening already. It won't help. The key is for people to begin to exercise self-responsibility. I don't think will happen. /BAH
From: J. Clarke on 4 Feb 2010 09:17
Mike Dworetsky wrote: > Aatu Koskensilta wrote: >> "Mike Dworetsky" <platinum198(a)pants.btinternet.com> writes: >> >>> Marshall wrote: >>> >>>> And mad props to Lord Rutherford for it! Of course the USA was the >>>> first country to make it go BOOM, plus we still have that whole >>>> "moon" and "internet" thing going. >>> >>> Using refugee European physicists who all worked in metric units. >>> Most American physics (certainly nuclear physics) was also done in >>> metric, even then, and all of it is done in metric now everywhere, >>> as is nearly all science. Some American engineering is for obscure >>> reasons done in Imperial, hence the Mars probe disaster. >> >> I doubt Marshall was trying to argue against the metric system, or >> for the Imperial system. He was, I take it, simply valiantly >> defending the good name of American and British engineering. >> >>> American engineers invented Darpanet, a communications network for >>> defense purposes that leaked out as Arpanet to civilian applications >>> such as email and ftp; a British scientist at CERN came up with the >>> hypertext protocols that led directly to the internet, a way to use >>> the interconnected network for passing, storing and creating >>> information content quickly and easily. >> >> Well, no. > > I was using the term internet a bit loosely. Would have helped if > you had elaborated. > > Well, technically, what we now call the internet is a system of > interconnected computer systems sharing certain protocols such as IP > and TCP and was around and being used by academics in the 1970s and > 1980s, but it was difficult to send stuff and sometimes it took days > for an email to propagate to the recipient if in another country. > There was Arpanet, NSFnet, Janet, IBMnet (or something like that, I > can't recall its name). And Arpanet won. What is your point? > So in that sense yes the Internet existed before Berners-Lee et al > came up with better ways to create documents that you read on a > terminal screen (with links). Actually that better way wasn't much of an improvement until GUIs became commonplace. > What we used to do was create ftp > sites and people could send or retrieve stuff to and from such sites, > or send each other attachments as text documents. It was clunky and > slow. Might have been clunky but ftp is not slow. > Back then your typical terminal couldn't do images, and the > first browsers pre-Netscape were things like Mosaic using http and > ftp that could embed links in the text. You are aware, are you not that Netscape is based on Mosaic? And that Mosaic is not text-based? > It was a terrific > improvement, at least if you were doing science. By then documents > could be formatted in post-script using TeX and that made it easier > too. Actually when you use TeX you are formatting in TeX--there are translators that let TeX documents be printed on PostScript printers but they aren't any different from any other printer driver. > MS Word didn't come along until later. Actually Word predates the Web by almost a decade, and is roughly contemporary with TeX. TeX was a more capable system by far but also more cumbersome. |