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No love for metric

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Gallon, inches, foot, miles, pounds & ounces.

And Fahrenheit temperature.

And fractions.

I remember Wall Street traded stock (maybe up to about 1999) in fractions, like 25-5/32 of dollar. This is the mother of weirdness, since dollar and cents are in metric relationship and no one ever saw 5/32 of a dollar.

It's rather not funny. It's sad.
 
I guess it has to do with how you grow up and how you get used to measure things. I can handle conversion from metric to "Imperial" (is it?) and even do some calculations in my head to a reasonable precision.

But I can't seem to manage the conversion into fractions of the inch. And I understand that 4.125" doesn't make much sense. It should read 4 1/4.

What doesn't make much sense is the ratio between inches and feet and yards and miles (and there's two kind of miles for your joy, land and nautical).

The units of measure have been a constant cause of frustration when I worked some empirical loudspeaker model equations. I found some equations in metric form (with constants adjusted for metric parameter values) and some others for inches and ounces and square inches and such. And in most cases the paper or document wasn't clear on the units employed. A mess.
 
It is a mess. I didn't mind converting miles and gallons with my Father, who grew up on Imperial, when we talked about fuel economy, but making the extra calculation to US gallons (as it different to Imperial gallons) is just a pain. I'd rather we all speak in metric. I think the ad exampled by the OP demonstrates his own confusion.

Its thankful in the TT world that we can talk in grams and millimetres, and not in fractions of ounces and inches.
 
Many times I envy the rest of the world (that is solid metric).
Our half ass "conversion" in the US is a pain in the pooper.

Two sets of tools to work on things.
Measuring things and converting to do calculations.
 
After reading the ad, my head really hurts. Working with two different systems is bad enough without have to relearn conversions.
 
There's a logical reason for the inch/foot/span, etc system and it's fundamentally superior than the metric system if without the use of measuring tools.

Martin
 
Many times I envy the rest of the world (that is solid metric).
Our half ass "conversion" in the US is a pain in the pooper.
Click to expand...
So true. Since Japan used the metric system when building the receiver it is only logical that the glass should be cut to metric specs. That is obviously not the case here.
 
Lucky you don't have to use binary, octal, or even hexadecimal numerical systems and the conversions that go along with them.

Martin
 
titanstats said:
Perhaps before people actually had measuring tools, but it's 2014, so...
Click to expand...

You're right, there isn't a place or person on the face of the earth that doesn't own or can afford proper measuring tools, but that wasn't my point. The point to my post was to explain why the inch, foot, span measuring method was used in the first place.
 
The metric system is so much better and easier than the English system. We should have converted years ago. Our scientific world has been on it like forever and it is time the rest of the country got in step. Besides, you will feel like you are going faster when you hit 100 on your speedometer.
 
HTHMAN said:
The metric system is so much better and easier than the English system. We should have converted years ago. Our scientific world has been on it like forever and it is time the rest of the country got in step. Besides, you will feel like you are going faster when you hit 100 on your speedometer.
Click to expand...

I'm a construction worker, we use our hands, arm spans, pace steps, index finger's first segment, etc to measure things all the time to save time, the metric system doesn't support this method at all. Not to mention, we as a country rose to the top of the heap while using this method and the rest of the world using the metric fell far behind. I don't see any urgent need to change.

And as I mentioned in an earlier post, how would the metric system in any way help when using base 2, 8, 16, etc.?
 
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Kingshead said:
And as I mentioned in an earlier post, how would the metric system in any way help when using base 2, 8, 16, etc.?
Click to expand...

That is simply apples to oranges. The metric system is base 10. We use base 2 in computers because it is simply on/off. Base 16 is hexdecimal used for computer graphics. In metric, every thing is in multiples of 10's. Millimeters, centimeters, kilometers etc are easily converted, unlike inches, feet, miles etc. When using metric, weight, temperature, distance etc all directly relate and are so much easier to work with. Maybe we can go back to using the cubit and digit as a standard measure. The only metric standard we have in this country is our money. Thankfully we do not have to figure out pounds, shillings etc.
 
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No small amount of this is related to the tools you own. Here in the US, its a high chance that your precision tools are all calibrated in standard units, so thats what you make things in.
 
HTHMAN said:
That is simply apples to oranges. The metric system is base 10. We use base 2 in computers because it is simply on/off. Base 16 is hexdecimal used for computer graphics. In metric, every thing is in multiples of 10's. Millimeters, centimeters, kilometers etc are easily converted, unlike inches, feet, miles etc. When using metric, weight, temperature, distance etc all directly relate and are so much easier to work with. Maybe we can go back to using the cubit and digit as a standard measure. The only metric standard we have in this country is our money. Thankfully we do not have to figure out pounds, shillings etc.
Click to expand...

Exactly my point, I'm glad you got it, so if we are going to change then lets change everything to binary, it's a digital world anyway right? LOL
 
The metric system is much simpler to use (of course) and there are relationships between volume and weight that we don't have in our system.
For example, a liter of water weighs one kilogram and a cubic meter of water weighs one metric ton.
How much does a quart of water weigh?
How much does a cubic yard of water weigh?
How do you put one foot 5 inches into a computer?
I could go on and on but I'll stop.
 
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