Why Won't America Use The Metric System?

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Anybody ever read Celsius 233?

The U.S. once attempted to switch to the metric system. This is why some freeway signs list distances in both miles and kilometers. One problem was, however, that the metric system was very unpopular with teachers. Another problem was the fact that, unlike other disciplines of science in the U.S. which do use the metric system, civil and mechanical engineers in the U.S., who design all of the buildings and machinery, had been using the English system. So everything in the U.S. is literally built on the basis of inches, feet and pounds.

In some instances, the English system is more intuitive, in my opinion. It's easier to estimate feet than centimeters, and in terms of temperature, the farenheight units seem to be more consistent with the temperature change sensitivity of the human body. A perceivable change in temperature will often correlate with a change of 1 degree F, and the decades work nicely with comfort perception. 60's is cold to cool. 70's is comfortable to warm. 80's is warm to hot. 90's is too hot to be happy, and 100+ is too hot to notice if it gets hotter. But a mere 5 degrees C is a huge jump.

I can't speak for a whole nation or for other people, but I can share my personal feelings as a person of a certain age.

I can't get my head around metric. I didn't grow up with it.

I grew up in the UK during the time before we changed to metric. We used to use Fahrenheit, inches, yards, miles, ounces, etc just like the US does. I grew up learning that as my system.

Then "joining" the "EU" forced the UK to adopt metric.

This was now taking place full-speed during a time when I happened to emigrate to the US!

Meaning I never got to have to learn metric or convert in my head.

And Celcius? f**k it. I CANNOT work with Celcius.

By which I mean when you tell me it's a certain degree Celcius out there I DON'T KNOW WHAT THAT'S SUPPOSED TO FEEL LIKE.

If you tell me what it is in Fahrenheit, I grew up with that and lived with that until I was 46. I know instantly how hot, cold, warm or cool and what to wear.

I can't wrap my head around a similar "knowing" for Celcius, and frankly I DON'T WANT TO.

I'm nearer to death now anyway, so f**k learning a whole new system.

Seriously, f**k metric.

When it's in the 30's Celsius, it's hot outside!

When it's in the 20's Celsius, it's pretty nice.

When it's in the 10's Celsius, it can be nippy.

When it's between 0-10, it's cold. A typical English winter.

Below Zero: cold.....especially when there's wind.

Because America is a civilized country.

We are in the era of nanometre technologies working in cute fractions is redundant. There is an argument for base 60 and base 20. There is nothing stopping you from using maths. However when it comes to standards and tolerance that is a different question. You still use decimal points with your imperial units when fractions become impractical which means you are using divisions of 10.

The majority of imperial standard units are now defined by metric official definitions for a reason.

"There's nothing stopping you from using maths." Oh yes there is, I've been severely math challenged my whole life and it ain't getting better, lol. I cannot do mental math for TOFFEE. I don't want to have to do mental arithmetic every time I want to figure out what some effing Brit just announced is the temperature of tomorrow's weather.

And I actually struggle with grams and kilograms. I can't get it into my head what they ARE. I can't retain the memory. I have to calculate shipping in metric on the Royal Mail website, entering what my kitchen scales say but I don't understand my kitchen scales (they're not digital but a needle on a dial). I constantly mix up what I'm dealing with, with all those zeros and decimal points.

Seriously, I'm 55, I did not grow up knowing metric and I'm f****d now and it's not getting any better. There is no point in trying. I don't like it and. . .. je refuse. . .

I have a digital temperature gauge with a sensor out the window, that tells you what it's like outside. You can set it to Celcius or Fahrenheit. I have mine set to Fahrenheit because that thing is now the ONLY way I know what I need to wear outside.

Hey, maybe that should be their new name. They should change the name of their country from the United States of America to the Special Snowflakes of America. Perfect!

Not only do they refuse to use the metric system, but they still call the season of autumn "fall". That really annoys me too, as does their general distrust of anything that has anything at all to do with governments/government departments, their refusal to seriously examine their own, rather bloody, history (everything is always someone else's fault, never theirs), the belief they are somehow "exceptional" (no, you're not), and their complete unfamiliarity with the concept of humility. You are NOT God's chosen people, you don't have a special "manifest destiny" to fulfil.

One final thing. What you people call football isn't. You never use your feet to actually kick the damn thing, and you're always holding conferences on the field every five seconds. What you folks call "soccer" is the real thing. And baseball sucks. Cricket is better (not that I actually watch it, but when the two are compared cricket really is better, objectively speaking).

One OTHER thing. "American English" isn't English. Please inform Bill Gates. You do NOT spell the word colour as "color", flavour as "flavor" and so on. That's just wrong. Do NOT substitute 's' in words for 'z' (ex. civiliZation).

Okay, that's all. Carry on.

It isn't just the "Brits" though. It's the WHOLE WORLD you're up against. You cannot possibly win.



Well, you know what the prefix 'kilo' means don't you? It means one thousand, so a kilogramme is 1,000 grammes.



A little formula to help you: C = 5(F - 32)/9.

We all occasionally have to do things we don't like. You'll get used to it.



One of the few good things to come out of the E.U., and yes, the U.K. DID join voluntarily, so you don't need to use inverted commas when discussing it.



Well, first of all, you could start by learning to spell Celsius correctly. You don't want to wrap your head around it? Well, you don't have a choice! The world has adopted, or is in the process of adopting, it. It coheres with the S.I. units of measurement that are now universally used in science (since 1960) and, to be quite frank, Fahrenheit is just silly, outdated, and illogical (and I can say all of this even though I also was born in England when they still used those daft imperial units).

leaves fall in autumn.

calling it "fall" is not an american invention. you can thank the brits.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kickoff_( ... n_football)



how is it wrong if there are no rules?

english is by far the biggest language with no official regulatory body. (besides consensus and reputation)

it's just chauvinism.

australia went metric in about 1973. i was reading at about 4 years old, and my main interests were technical books and encyclopedias, so much of my conceptual knowledge is in imperial and i still, to this day convert some metric measurements mentally to easily gauge a notion of quantity.

so i read that blue whales were up to 100 ft long, and i knew the average ceiling height of floors in buildings is 8 ft and therefore each story is about 10 ft high (2 ft of floor concrete for the floor above).
i then looked at ten story buildings and thought "if a blue whale was standing up next to it, it would be the same height.

wow!

i then conceived the length of 747 planes in the same manner, and the height of tsunami's etc.
my fathers speedometer in his powerful V8 car was in M.P.H, and i always had an accurate idea of how fast speeds were in M.P.H.

so when i hear speed measurements expressed in KPH, i always convert it to M.P.H to conceive of it.

so if i read that sports car has a top speed of 280 KPH, if i convert it to 175 M.P.H, then i realize that it is fast.


but i know celsius as my original concept of temperature, so i always convert fahrenheit to celsius to imagine it.

i am glad that 1 metric tonne is similar to 1 imperial ton.

that lets me easily conceive the result of many questions i may ask myself.

the metric system is vastly more efficient than the imperial system in that everything is related to water and is decimal in its relationship, where as hideous conversions are necessary to relate different dimensional systems with imperial which is binary (mostly).
the imperial system is arbitrary in some ways. temperature is 31F for water sublimation to ice (32 to preserve in an ice state), 212F is the boiling point. so there is 180 increments in the scale from freezing to boiling. that is too fine to define conceptually a temperature. i would put a baby in a bath at 32C, but not at 40C.


so 1 cubic centimeter filled with water will weigh 1 gram. so 1 cubic meter of water weighs 1 metric tonne.
one can easily conceive of answers to useless but interesting questions.
so 1 cubic kilometer of water will easily be calculable to be 1 billion tonnes in mass. it is also equal to 1 trillion litres and 1 trillion kilograms etc.

so if the volume of space inside the empire state building was filled with water, that water would weigh 1,047,723 tonnes....etc...etc.
it is not possible to mentally conceive of that if one in converting cubic yards to fluid ounces. like 1 cubic yard = 25852.7 fluid ounces ...blah blah...

i can see the sense in the imperial system however as it is based around factors of 360.
1 directional degree.

it would be a nightmare of magnetic and directional degrees were decimalized.

360 is quite special number in that is evenly divisible by a large number of factors... 1,2,3,4,5,6,8, 9,10,12,15,18,20,24,30,36,40,45,60,72,90,120 and 180.

so to bracket the world into 360 degrees of longitude and to divide each of those divisions by 60 results in 21,800 which is the circumference of the world in nautical miles.

anyway whatever.

Tricky the British. They use metric apart from inches for body parts,feet for height & braking distances, miles for journeys, pounds for fruit & veg, stones & pounds for body weight. Farenheit for reporting high temperatures (but celcius for low or change).

It's almost themed - natural is imperial, man made is metric.

Well, you can narrow it down a bit by remembering kilograms have nothing to do with telegrams.

For those complaining about conversions...Google has a free easy to use unit converter, no math required. In this era no one should complain about the math required for conversion, it's right at your fingertips and all it takes is a little effort.

As I've said before, one place where metric absolutely is standard in the US is in professional kitchens, as it makes scaling recipes up or down much simpler, since quickly calculating fractions or multiples of a kilo is far less cumbersome than doing so with pounds and ounces. In fact, the first thing I do when I'm adapting a recipe from a home cookbook for restaurant use is to weigh out all the ingredients in metric, so I can easily scale the recipe to commercial quantities without resorting to a calculator and scratchpad.