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I don't get it, why is metric better?

Hint: Its a tad larger than a cubic yard. In the back of a dump truck you can't tell them apart.

Reply to
Ed Pawlowski
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Leon wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com:

We seem to do alright in that regard. The Roman alphabet has several letters that we don't use, which other languages like German and Icelandic do.

John

Reply to
John McCoy

Nahhhhh, that would just be "a mile, cut the line."

Reply to
-MIKE-

Ed Pawlowski wrote in news:lrmdnULdX_XmYTjKnZ2dnUU7- snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com:

I've found a handy way to estimate from meters to feet is to multiply the number by 3 then divide the number by 3 and add the two results.

So, if you have a measurement of 100 m:

100 * 3 = 300 100 / 3 = 33.333 100 m ~= 333.333 ft 100m = 328.084ft

Not bad at all for something that takes only a few seconds to calculate in your head.

Puckdropper

Reply to
Puckdropper

There is an easy, simple soultion for confusion...adopt "about yay"... :)

Reply to
dadiOH

...

As I showed earlier, it's 9/64"...

9/64*25.4 = 3.571875000...

The other is 7/64"; both are common pilot-hole drill sizes...

Reply to
dpb

That's also a type of forcing but it's more nearly free will as being your choice to continue to play in the game as opposed to being told by a central government that as of tomorrow all road signs (say) will be in km, not miles...that, as we've seen, did _not_ succeed in US owing mostly I think to the above general tendency of American psyche being resistive of direct edict.

Any manufacturing that is exporting anything with compatibility issues has already converted and I posit the hydraulic shop of which you speak wouldn't have lasted for other reasons besides simply non-SAE hose fittings as there are a seemingly unlimited number of those. A link

Reply to
dpb

That's a weak argument, of course; anyone with a slide rule can lay out any ratio he wants, and read the scale straightaway for a factor of 683, 880, 1000... whatever

That's the strong argument: changing units from inch to foot, foot to yard, yard to fathom, fathom to nautical mile, nautical mile to statute mile... is annoying.

Reply to
whit3rd

When the meter was defined, it was a different world, of course. Louis XV ran up debt, Louis XVI tried a number of ways to pay it all off. Notably, one year the king's 'rent collectors' collected their bushels of wheat from farms, using a brand new 'royal bushel' measure which was rather larger than the one used the year before.

The size of the Earth was beyond the power of any king to adjust. They didn't WANT a measure basis that could be fabricated and held up as an example.

Reply to
whit3rd

Ed Pawlowski wrote in news:lrmdnULdX_XmYTjKnZ2dnUU7- snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com:

OK, run down to the store and get me 4/10000 cubic meters of milk, please :-)

John

Reply to
John McCoy

whit3rd wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

Well, that's the French for you, isn't it. They could have done what the English did, and mark a stick and call it the "official" foot...given the impracticality of actually measuring the distance from the pole to the equator, it would have been just as valid (oh wait - that is what the actually did).

John

Reply to
John McCoy

dpb wrote in news:no55dp$4k3$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

Yeah, I read Graham's post before yours.

John

Reply to
John McCoy

dpb wrote in news:no586j$e3p$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

There's a couple of other factors that come into play on that particular example.

One is that, someone who's grown up with a given system developes facility at estimating in that system, so US drivers can estimate distances in miles, and not in km, and so naturally resisted the more "difficult" system.

The other is the random coincidence that highway speed works out to roughly 60mph (this was particularly true when they tried metric roads, since the double-nickle was in effect). Since our time system works on an increment of 60, that's mile-a-minute, and you can easily figure how long it'll take to get somewhere. 100kph doesn't work out that way.

Fortunately, no-one has seriously suggested metric time.

John

Reply to
John McCoy

I can go either way. The only metric I do not like is temperature. SAE temp is more granular than metric.

nb

Reply to
notbob

Yeah!

Reply to
Leon

Hawaiian, 12 letters, IIRC.

Reply to
Leon

Or the rest of the world needs a simple way to measure so that they can function. I use the metric system every time I am in the shop, and I mix it with imperial. But put me in the real world where distances become greater and the sounds of all the resolutions are just too similar, or you get in to huge numbers, or you have to know where to put the decimal point.

Reply to
Leon

I have. :~)

Reply to
Leon

Yeah!

Reply to
Leon

Precisely! Ask several people to estimate the distance to, say, your town centre in miles and you will get widely different answers.

45 years ago, I moved to W. Australia and shortly afterwards the authorities announced "as of next Monday, the Celsius scale will replace Fahrenheit". We soon got used to it. I can no longer think in Fahrenheit terms and if I visit the US and see the weather forecast, I have to convert the temps to Celsius. Graham
Reply to
graham

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