USMA: Going the Extra Kilometer For Metrication 909
EagleHasLanded writes "The U.S. Metric Association has been advocating for metrication since 1916 – without much success. In the mid-1970s, the U.S. government passed the Metric Conversion Act, but now it seems the time for complete conversion has come and gone. Or could U.S. educators and health & safety advocates put this issue back on Congress' radar screen?"
Re:US Metrication (Score:4, Interesting)
Or perhaps certain campaign sponsors have spoken many times...
gradual transition; average people (Score:5, Interesting)
Ths slashdot summary doesn't seem to be based closely on the linked articles:
but now it seems the time for complete conversion has come and gone.
The linked articles don't discuss a "cold turkey" government-mandated switch to metric (which was never a realistic possibility given the nature of American culture and politics). They discuss incremental government-mandated measures. Some of these measures have already been carried out: requiring food labeling to be in both US and metric. Some have been stalled legislatively: eliminating the US units from food labeling.
It would be great if we could get road signs to be switched over to dual units. E.g., congress could pass a law saying that on the interstate system, any time an old sign is replaced with a new one, it has to have dual units.
These incremental measures would be incredibly easy, and would require no new taxes or increase in government regulation (just changes to existing regulations). That's why it's so pathetic that the pace of implementing these measures has been so slow.
I teach physics at a community college. My students are a bell curve, extending from folks who are very bright and will transfer to elite four-year schools, all the way down to people who really shouldn't be in college. The bottom half of this bell curve is probably pretty representative of the population of the US.
Some characteristics of people in this range: (1) They tend not to understand at the conceptual level what the operations of multiplication and division are about. (2) They tend not to have any habit of checking whether their answers make sense in order of magnitude. (3) When they learn some new mathematical concept, they memorize it as a rote procedure, and therefore when they don't use it for a month, they forget it completely.
My students are mostly science majors, so they end up developing some facility with the metric system, but it's an uphill climb. For most people, what happens is that they learn the metric system in grade school, and then they never use it in everyday life, so they forget it completely and utterly.
Gasoline prices in liters at the pumps (Score:4, Interesting)
When they tried pricing gasoline in liters at the pump in the 70's, folks were convinced that it was just a big scam to jack up the prices. They were probably right. And in the 70's we were going through the OPEC crisis, as well. That didn't help.
The same thing happened in Europe with the introduction of the Euro. Folks perceived everything as being more expensive.
If these folks want the metric system in the US to succeed, they had better think up a good solution for this problem.
stupid observation... (Score:5, Interesting)
I had to equip my shop, and among other things picked up a set of socket wrenches, in both SAE and metric sizes. One thing I noticed, though, was that the socket drives were all in English measurements (1/4", 3/8", 1/2", 3/4") and that there were no metric-drive sets around anywhere. Just curious, are there any metric drive standards in Europe, and why haven't they found their way to the US? I'd expect at least some metric size sets from China to sneak in...
Bizarre metric spotting in US (Score:4, Interesting)
A few years ago I was driving on a road somewhere south of Raleigh NC (route 1 somewhere between Raleigh and Southern Pines ) and my jaw dropped when I noticed a short stretch of the road had distances marked in km. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason as to why this one bit of road in the middle of nowhere was marked that way.
Re:Long Live Roman measurements (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't worry, they're safe. Many American sports cars are using suspension technology [wikipedia.org] that was developped by the Romans.
Re:That's nearly one hectoyear! (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:0.001km = 0.01hm = 1m = 10dm = 100cm = 1000mm (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Gasoline prices in liters at the pumps (Score:4, Interesting)
It was not just a perception, things actually got a lot more expensive. For example, in Germany, the conversion rate was 1.95 DM to 1 Euro, but nominal prices remained approximately the same. Something that used to cost 5 DM suddenly cost 5 Euro. Of course, it was a 100% price hike. That's why they call Euro "Teuro", short for "Expensivo."
U.S Military mostly metric (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Boggle (Score:5, Interesting)
Good point.
I come across this when calculating how much fuel to put in an aeroplane - the bowser dispenses litres, I need to know what that is in pounds for the weight and balance calculation, and the fuel burn (and thus how much fuel I need) is specified in the POH in gallons per hour ... ... but these are indeed American gallons, not Imperial ones, and getting that sort of thing wrong can kill people.
Re:Bizarre metric spotting in US (Score:2, Interesting)
Was there a factory nearby? I seem to recall stories of states trying to lure foreign manufacturers (automobile mostly) with gimmicks like metric mileage markers. Of course, they wouldn't redo all the signs in the state, only the ones between the airport and the proposed factory site.
Re:Boggle (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What's the point? (Score:3, Interesting)
I use miles-per-hour and miles as a measurement of driving distance.
I use gallons for gas and milk.
milliliters for other liquid measurements (since it's on the bottles, and easy enough to read)
Inches for building things out of wood. 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, and 1/16 are good tolerances in construction.
F for temperature (because 98.6 isn't any worse than 37.0)
The reason there's no motivation to change is because everyone gets along well enough with the systems we have. It's cool you can do conversions from grams of water to liters in your head, but when was the last time you had to do that?
And when I do science, I use metric. No prob.
Time for hard metrication (Score:4, Interesting)
The US should have a push for "hard metrication", which means using metric-sized components, to improve exports to the rest of the world. The military and auto industries are already metric. Electronics is mixed; newer components are metric pitch, but there's still a lot of 0.100 pin spacing around. Construction is still mostly inch. This is more important than the units consumers use.
(I restore old Teletype machines from the 1920s, which use inch fasteners, but fine thread; 6-40 instead of 6-32. Those are rare today. Gun parts suppliers still have them, but the selection of lengths and head styles is limited, so matching old parts is tough. On occasion I've had to buy long bolts, cut off the threaded part, and thread the base part myself. Despite this antique stuff, there's no reason that the US should not be routinely using metric screws for almost everything. Outside the US, getting non-metric screws is hard.)
Re:Boggle (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:That's nearly one hectoyear! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:0.001km = 0.01hm = 1m = 10dm = 100cm = 1000mm (Score:4, Interesting)
Here in Australia everything is in milllimetres in construction, to the point where if somebody asks you how deep you want that concrete slab and you answer "1254" then that is understood to be 1.254 metres of concrete.