Re: [PSUBS-MAILIST] New to PSUB (measurement units)

To: personal_submersibles@psubs.org

Subject: Re: [PSUBS-MAILIST] New to PSUB (measurement units)

From: Bob Duncan <katsurencho@yahoo.com>

Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2003 13:27:43 -0700 (PDT)

In-Reply-To: <46FB3B8B-03EE-11D8-BAD8-003065778534@wcta.net>

I lived in Asia a long time, and the Metric system is much easier to use. It's just a matter of getting acustom to using it. Automobiles of U.S. manuf. are mixed metric and SAE. It's a headache.

There is no real common ground in the U.S. system of measurement. It came from the old English. After the revoluationary war. The U.S. had to have their feet and inches different than British feet and inches. Arbitrary numbers were used to set the standard, and it's a complicated mess as far as i'm concerned. Then when you measure inches in some things it's fractions, but mechanical things are measured in .10 or .010 inch. What a headache, when i left my tenth of an inch tape measure at home, but i have my 1/16 tape measure here!!!

bob

David Buchner <buchner@wcta.net> wrote:

Uh-oh, here comes the feet vs. meters topic again...

On Sunday, October 19, 2003, at 07:09 PM, NeophyteSG@aol.com wrote:
> Agreed. From an engineering calculations standpoint, I prefer using
> metric though conceptually I have to convert it back to inches, feet,
> pounds (or more accurately "slugs"). The numbers and units just
> crunch easier in metric. From a practical standpoint, sometimes you
> just don't have that option.

I used to be a big, gung-ho, advocate of forcing a big switch to SI.
You know: because it just "makes so much more sense" and is "more
scientific." Also because it was more "PC" as in "the rest of the
industrialized world has converted, why won't the US?" It just turned
out to be impractical for me, because here everything is still sold and
described in inches, feet, miles, etc.

I've had a new thought on this, which seems simple and obvious now but
hadn't occurred to me before. And that's that, for people who use math
and measurement all the time, a system of units constitutes almost a
language -- and expecting somebody to change their system just because
"everyone else is using this other one," is equivalent (in a sense) to
insisting that everybody should ditch the language they grew up with,
and switch to Esperanto.

Besides: I read a great line in a science fiction story, about being
distrustful of anybody designing anything important, who would get hung
up trying to divide by 12.

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