Archimedes
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since when does "the whole world round" refer to the United States?
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Lincoln Chafee: The US should convert to metric units
- Thread starter lpetrich
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beero1000
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Don't be pedantic. The approximate weight/volume relationship is the same no matter where you are - geographically differing units are irrelevant, and focusing on the rhyme in a mnemonic really misses the point...
barbos
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Google says within 3%
3 is a few, but barely.
bilby
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Stuff that. If the approximate weight/volume relationship was the same no matter where you were, then geographically differing units would be rendered IMPOSSIBLE. But they aren't, because it isn't. That's not pedantry - but it is a very good reason why the whole confusing mess of 'traditional' units needs to be scrapped, and replaced with SI.
bilby
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since when does "the whole world round" refer to the United States?
I believe this is the law in the state of Texas.
barbos
Contributor
In any case, english/imperial systems are highly inconvenient and inconsistent and US will eventually go metric.
Speaking of campaign promises, I wonder if some candidate would ever run on promise to make english spelling phonetic
I heard it takes a lot of time to teach US kids to read. Never had such problem in Russia.
Of course that means no spelling Bee in Russia.
Speaking of campaign promises, I wonder if some candidate would ever run on promise to make english spelling phonetic
I heard it takes a lot of time to teach US kids to read. Never had such problem in Russia.
Of course that means no spelling Bee in Russia.
beero1000
Veteran Member
No one is arguing that they shouldn't.
I'm just saying it's really pedantic to insist that the American saying "a pint is a pound the whole world round" as a quick mnemonic intends anything but "a United States liquid pint weighs approximately a pound-force, everywhere on the planet Earth".
I guess I could say it's off by a lot more than 25% by taking a liquid pint of mercury or its weight at the core, etc but like I said - don't be pedantic.
bilby
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Seriously, how far removed from reality do you have to be to post the instruction "don't be pedantic" on an Internet discussion board? Particularly THIS Internet discussion board?
beero1000
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lpetrich
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A blank stare is not an argument.
No, that it can be interpreted as a trade barrier. It seems that I've found a trade barrier that right-wingers can like.
Bomb#20
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Neither is "Your beliefs aren't what I thought."
Are you proposing the General Motors theory of trade barriers*? If the U.S. government makes it illegal for Germans to sell metric wrenches here, that's a trade barrier. If Americans won't buy metric wrenches from Germans because they don't fit our bolts, that is not a trade barrier.
Incidentally, what does "right-winger" mean? "Person who disagrees with lpetrich"?
(* "Wait, you guys drive on the left?")
The only reason the U.S.A. has not switched to metric is because they didn't do it first, and they want to be seen as the leaders. If they switch to it now, they admit how backwards they are
The are not inconvenient to people who have grown up with them.
It is inconvenient to have to learn a whole different system and no particular benefit for most.
I work in an industry (natural gas) where producers measure the commodity in thousand of cubic feet (Mcf) (uless they are oil producers who sometimes speak of it in barrels of oil equivalent - BOE) and sell it to pipeline companies and gas marketers in millions of btu's (MMBTU) who then sell it to utilities who almost completely gratuitously market it to their customers in "dekatherms", unless those customers are in Canada where they like to buy and sell "gigajoules" and produce "cubic meters". Then, if you really want to get crazy you can make it into a liquid (LNG) and sell it locally as gallons or get a permit for export to places like Japan who buy it by the "tons" although I think it's technically actually "tonnes".
Even though there are people out there who prefer to think of this one commodity in terms of Mcfs, MMbtus, BOE, dekatherms, gigajoules, cubic meters, gallons or tonnes they manage to trade it amongst themselves with little difficulty. But if you were paying close attention you might have noticed I did slip in one "trade barrier" in that paragraph that could slow you down: get a permit for export
beero1000
Veteran Member
They are inconvenient, familiarity with the inconvenient system and ignorance of the better system does not change that.
I live with the system and it causes me approximately 0.0 decigiveashits of inconvenience on a daily basis.
SimpleDon
Veteran Member
It is illegal in the US to sell steel dimensioned in metric units. You can't sell a 100 mm round for example.
This is an intentional trade barrier.
You are conflating volume, mass, energy and thermal units. People buy natural gas for the energy it contains, joules or BTUs, to heat something, therms, calories or BTUs again. Natural gas varies in its specific heat, the amount of energy per mass unit, lbm or kilogram and the volume depends on the pressure and temperature of the mass of the gas.
Just because you don't see any advantages to converting to the metric system for most of the people in the US doesn't mean that aren't any. I remember times when you have been wrong.
The biggest advantage to the metric system is that it is a decimal system. It doesn't require calculations in fractions.
In countries that use the metric system fractions become an interesting concept, not something that has to be studied in detail how to add, subtract, multiply and divide. Because the US uses the standard system our students spend an year more studying the manipulation of fractions than students in a country that uses the metric system. This is a year that is lost in the education of American students, a year that metric countries put to use studying calculus, statistics, etc. It is the lost year that puts American students behind everyone else in the world in STEM.
You won't find many American students that say that learning how to manipulate fractions was their favorite part of their studies in math. Most will tell you that it was when they started to seriously dislike math.
Metric units are fundamental units, base units, meter, kilograms and seconds or derived from the base units as coherent units, using the equations f = ma, E = f × d, P = E/t for force, energy and power, using mass, acceleration, distance and time. They are considered coherent because unlike the standard system you don't have to use unit correcting constants to define them.
barbos
Contributor
I have a question for you, how long did it take you to learn to read?
beero1000
Veteran Member
Even 0.01 decigiveashits per person per day, 365 days per year for 325 million people is a shit ton of giveashits.
barbos
Contributor
Losing a space probe was a pretty big inconvenience for NASA.
And having got less fuel in the airliner due to the incorrect conversion was a big inconvenience for passengers when they were watching themselves gliding in the plane
And having got less fuel in the airliner due to the incorrect conversion was a big inconvenience for passengers when they were watching themselves gliding in the plane