Says it all, really.
From a reader, on the "America is bad at science because we don't use metric" argument: pic.twitter.com/5Q1aNXlhXk
— Jim Geraghty (@jimgeraghty) June 4, 2015
Although admittedly a lot of this is about needling the people who get incredibly over-excited about being needled about their love of the metric system. And, honestly? Base ten isn’t that great a system for day-to-day stuff: base twelve works a good deal better, in terms of dividing things up evenly.
The metric system is not humanocentric it was introduced by space aliens as part of there long term pre-invasion preparations. After all we won’t be the first species they’ve conquered.:)
To quote the guy with the hair on History Channel, “I’m not saying it was aliens,… but it was aliens.” 🙂
well, the French, so quite possibly …
Remember those questions that were biased towards the metric system? I’ve come up with my own. One example:
Two men are drinking shots. The first is drinking 1oz shots, the second is drinking 30ml shots. Which one will be able to figure out how much they have drank after 3 shots? 7 shots? 13 shots?
If you are using weight ounce rather than volume, it may depend on the density and toxicity of the liquid.
Not if they’re drinking the same stuff.
Looks like an ounce mass could be 28.3 or 31.1 grams. Unless one wants to use metric ounces at 25 or 100 grams.
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Thirty milliliters is thirty cubic centimeters.
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Ethyl alcohol is .789 g/cc and water is about 1 g/cc at stp. Assuming linear interpolation is valid (I forget and dunno), one avoirdupois ounce of around sixty proof is about the same as thirty cc.
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Mercury is around 13.5 g/cc. At two to three cc per ounce, the volume shot will be more than tens times greater. (Maybe drop the density a little with appropriate additives to get the speed of toxicity where that dosage difference matters. I dunno if physically possible.)
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Vee Foam High-X seems to claim .001 g/cc. Here the mass shot is about a thousand times the volume. Again, that sort of dosage probably requires some help to get the toxicity right. However, foam in general should have the compositional flexibility to make this physically possible.
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If they are drinking water, both can count. If they are drinking VX, probably neither can count.
The metric system is useful for some specialized things, but those are things that most people don’t do.
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For most things humans do, it’s an obstruction, not an aid.
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I think intellectual insecurity is at the heart of it.
Scientists and doctors are smart people.
Scientists and doctors use the metric system.
Therefore, smart people use the metric system.
Look at me, I’m smart,I just created a syllogism!
Heh. I tend to think the opposite ..
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Yes, scientists and doctors use the metric system because much of science and medicine deals in very small quantities, which metric is better at.
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Joey and Janey Sixpack, though, benefit from the mental math of converting feet to inches to yards, or gallons to ounces to cups to teaspoons ..
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This is similar to how Joey and Janey are also better off learning the polyglot pidgin that is American English with all it’s exceptions – i before e except whenever the words originated in France or Spain ..
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Makes for more mentally flexible, mentally *capable* people.
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Mew
the thing is that the window where something like the metric system is really useful is when you’re doing a lot of math by hand or with simple calculating machines. Once you’ve got reasonably programmable tools, you really don’t care about constants.
Or 16. Lots of divisors.
But using both isn’t hard. a couple of conversion factors, wtf?
There is the left, and there are the innumerate that imagine conversion is a challenge.
Engineering and Science are, strictly speaking, different disciplines. You are speaking of what American Engineering has done.
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American Engineering is apparently still fairly dominant. Folks with one of their professional organizations tell me that their standards are used around the world.
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Insofar as American science is concerned, a lot of its problems are fraud, groupthink, and a public whose understanding of it is heavily influenced by magical thinking. These have nothing to do with units.
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I imagine that most practicing engineers see the cost of using conversion factors as trivial compared to the cost in changing over documentation, tooling, and hardware in the field. We have loads of stuff like elevators made with standard parts. Dropping the capability for standard would mean replacing these, or letting them become inoperable. Possibly only the innumerate would imagine the cost is insignificant.
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Since your wife is an engineer and a scientist, I may not be telling you anything.
The funny thing is, the idea that the metric system makes science easy is fairly laughable, on a historical basis. To explain what I mean, first I have to ask the question, ‘which metric system?’
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What, you didn’t know there were multiple metric systems?
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See, in physics there are a handful of equations that basically describe how everything works in electromagnetism, Maxwell’s equations. And if you take second year physics in college today, the way they’re taught, they have a bunch of really ugly constants in them. But there used to be a different system, with different units, where all those constants go away, they’re all set to 1. Read any old space opera, where they talk about ergs of power? That’s those units. In the early 1900s, there was a disagreement between scientists and engineers, and to make a long story short – the engineers won.
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The scientists did pursue a rearguard action – physics textbooks up through the 70s continued to used the older units in many cases, because it really does make the science easier. I own copies of several of them. But I don’t know of any currently in use today that still do. Science lost.
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As an aside, they could have gone even farther – they could have chosen a unit of length and a unit of time such that the speed of light constant was equal to 1 as well – if you do that, the relativity equations of Einstein simplify quite a bit as well. Consider just the one everyone knows – e=mc**2 – if the speed of light is 1, then that simplifies to e=m. Energy equals mass. Very simple, and very easy to understand.
Industry is mostly metric anyway, but frankly the mental agility involved in juggling back and forth is excellent training.
hahaha