Thanks you, Michael, for the concise summary. I'd like to add to that by saying, the process of conversion is already well in in place here in the World's biggest economy (the real recent that it's taking so long). The last time I looked, almost EVERY item in the grocery store has its label showing its weight or volume in both English (lbs or oz, pts. or fl. oz., for example) and metric (grams, although g and kg are each actually mass and not weight) and mL or cc. By the way, most people can get a handle on grams and kilograms being mass and newtons being weight, but we tend to use only pounds, a unit of weight in the English system. The English unit of mass is the slug, which someone did mention without explanation a few messages back. John R. Peterson
Message: 2 Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2012 00:33:57 -0700 From: Michael Wells <eyeonyouproductions@gmail.com> To: Utah Astronomy <utah-astronomy@mailman.xmission.com> Subject: Re: [Utah-astronomy] OT, metrics -- was Re: Patrick scores again! Message-ID: <CADxGsn7N6hUYSZOrY676wfJ5ygSZXCAfUROE8khigCxCM6VV+g@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Yes I can, because there was a plan in place to do it gradually, not like there was a switch that they were going to throw overnight. People were just being stubborn. I heard as a child adults all over the place talking exactly like you are now. They weren't going to change not because it was hard, or that we already had a system in place, but because they were not going to let anyone "tell" them what to do. This wasn't a foreign government or the UN forcing us, this was our government trying to drag us closer to the 21st century, and we held our threatened to hold our breath until we turned blue.
The SAE system is obsolete, exactly like the 8-Track, the cassette tape, the wax cylinder, the Victrola, the floppy disk and the VHS tape(Won't say video tape because it is still a valid storage format).
As for an example of how it is beneficial, I will once again go back to cooking as an example, because it's an easy one. It shows up all of the time, and everyone encounters it. Recipes constantly call for 1/2 cup of one ingredient, 2 ounces of another, a pint of something else, maybe a gallon of another. You end up all over the place, trying to figure out what is what. Also, when a recipe calls for 2 cups of something, 90% of the people don't know that that is a pint, 2 pints in a quart, and 4 quarts in a gallon. If they've only got measuring cups, that gallon gets pretty tedious and requires a trip to the internet, and a bunch of math. Put it in the metric system, and you have a liter as your standard for liquid measure. 1 deciliter is a tenth of that, a centiliter one hundredth of it. 10 liters is a decaliter, and 1000 liters is a kiloliter.
Here's the wonderful SAE system for length: The base unit is the inch 12 inches in a foot(Anything smaller has to be fractions of an inch) 3 feet in a yard 5,280 feet in a mile How many inches in a mile, without using a calculator, writing it down, or doing the math in your head?
Now the metric system, a nice beautiful base-10 system with all of the same prefixes whether you are measuring volume, distance or weight. The base unit is the meter. 1/100th of that is a centimeter 1,000 meters in a kilometer So, same rules, how many centimeters in a kilometer? 100,000, it's that easy.
SAE for volume: Base unit is an ounce(Anything smaller is fractions of an ounce) 4 ounces is a cup 4 cups in a pint 2 pints in a quart 4 quarts in a gallon Same rules, how many ounces in a gallon?
Metric: Base unit is the liter 1/100th of that is the centiliter 1000 liters is a kiloliter How many centiliters in a kiloliter? 100,000
To sum this up, there is no rhyme nor reason to the SAE system. The metric system is base 10, uses the same prefix, no matter the medium being measured, and can go infinitesimally small or extremely large, and all anyone has to know is where the particular latin prefix falls on the scale.
Yes, it's people being stubborn, and it should have happend years ago. It's ludicrous to still use the SAE system when it actually makes no sense whatsoever. Teaching would be streamlined, and work would be improved. Hell, even when I worked graphic design, we had to print up conversion charts between fractions and decimal equivalents, because 1/64th gets pretty hard to figure out in your head. Doing t all decimally would eliminate that.
On Sat, Dec 8, 2012 at 11:37 PM, Joe Bauman <josephmbauman@yahoo.com> wrote:
Michael, you can't say people not wanting to change miles to kilometers, feet to meters, inches to centimeters, etc., is equivalent to your stepsons refusing to do something just to be contrary. And are you saying we should get in trouble when we stick to our native measurements? Peer pressure from people who don't know what they're takig about -- I don't understand that comment. Please give me a specific example. So here's a challenge: show how the life of an ordinary person -- not a doctor working in nuclear medicine -- would improve if he were forced to switch to a metric system. Would the difficulty be worth any advantage to him? I can easily see the trouble of trying to learn new units, but I certainly don't see any advantage for an ordinary person forced to change. Who's being contrary -- the people who prefer the system they grew up with, or the people who are trying to force difficult, non-beneficial changes on them? Thanks, Joe