I really get tired of converting from inches to metric.

According to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's online The World Factbook (2016), the only countries that have not adopted the metric system are Myanmar (also known as Burma), Liberia and the United States.
Is there some reason for this? Two lazy to change? To dumb to learn a new system?

Two sets of wrenches, two sets of sockets...

Things are sold in US measurements but when you actually measure them they are in metric dimensions. Water in plastic containers...16.9 FL or 1.05 PT or 500 mL.

Irritating!!

Billy

Totally understand your frustration, Billy.

Australia converted from imperial to metric in the 1970's. We have never looked back. I have to admit I am still surprised that countries that have not converted include where you are.

BTW: I am totally conversant in either system, I have and continually use many machine tools including micrometers and calipers that are imperial, but know which system I definitely prefer.

Some photos below of my engineering designs and development, all designed / manufactured in-house by me, and the last one is me using an imperial micrometer - just so you know I can use one

Billy I totally agree. I worked for 39 years in R&D where the metric system was used. It is such an easy system to learn and use. I'm all for changing over to the metric system.

I've been upset about my "measurement" for years.....

Turning 70 soon? Can't guarantee an improvement, sorry

When I was in grade school in the early 1970s, they did start us on the path of learning the metric system. That lasted a few years then it just seemed to drop from curriculums. I haven't Googled enough to find the reasons at the time.

Well...there are certain times when I actually prefer imperial measurements. I also run CNC machines and I find it a little easer to think in thousandths of an inch. I also have no issue machining metric.

I understand it cost money to convert to the metric system and I also understand the metric system does not lend itself to the use of fractions...but this is a world we now live in based on standards.

My irritation is not about any specific system, it is about standards. The same goes for language. I can think in French but I have to translate from English to Spanish in my head.
I enjoy speaking Spanish with my friends here in Miami but I get irritated when I go to the drug store and need to have a technical conversation. Speak in the damn language of your money...lol

I am not asking for a universal language but I want to conduct business in the common language of the country with certain exceptions. What language do you think a South Korean pilot talks to the tower in at a airport in Paris, France?

We do not have an official language in the United States. And contrary to popular belief we are not the center of the known universe...lol

Billy

Isn't that English?

Yes Matt, it is English by international agreement. I have not looked at the history of aircraft communications. I would assume we started out with no standards and perhaps French may have been used at one time. I say that because French was the universal language of diplomacy for many years.

Billy

EDIT: After a quick look I don't see any other language other than English every having been used. In fact the FAA only came into being in 1956. Large numbers of international flights are pretty recent in history. Did Lindbergh even have a radio?

In Canada we adopted the metric system many years ago, and I have learned it of necessity.
In the beginning it seemed like it would be strictly enforced (don't know how) and the switch seemed to be complete. I remember seeing an architectural metric house plan. The standard measurement was millimetres! YUP, can you imagine?

An 8' x 12' room = ~2438mm x 3658mm.
Do you think carpenters at the time welcomed that change? lol

Since then it seems like the "laws" have slipped a little.
You can still buy a 2x4 at the lumber yard and items are sometimes advertised by the pound.
I pity the school kids here nowadays. They have to learn the metric system only to run across these anomalies.

It's a good thing the dollar was already divided into 100.
And that's my 2¢ (CDN).

LLOYD S

Presumably because that's what Wilbur and Orville spoke

I've been relegated to duct tape and tongue depressors for YEARS, Trev...

It's all falling apart at once here!! Paid closer attention to my hair this morning after my shower than I usually do and it is really getting gray. Seems like with every wash the gray is more pronounced. Aftermarket knee, surgically squeegeed right eye, to be followed by the same process on the left one next month. Diabetes. PTSD. And of course that other thing...

As then 75 year old news reporter Billy Noonan originally said back in the year I was born, if I had known I was going to live this long I would have taken better care of myself when I was young.

Yet with all of Europe being metric, soccer fields still have a 6 yard box in front of the goal.

And they are 1.5 x 3.5!!

The United States Congress passed the Metric Conversion Act in 1975. It was part of many energy saving measures adopted during that time period.

The Act proposed a ten year plan to convert the US from Imperial to Metric measurements. One of the most visible examples of change was speed limit signs displayed speed limits in both miles per hour and kilometers per hour. Another highly visible example is vehicle speedometers display both mph and kph.

Unfortunately, our politicians made conversion voluntary. Since the initial push the conversion has stalled.

I can't say I can use these tools well...but



I do know how to use this one and their big brothers.



I guess I could give you directions to my house in gcode...a joke for Trevor...lol

Billy

Here in the UK we have a mix of metric and imperial, but strangely it all seems to work OK.
The currency is now metric (since 1971) but personal measurements are feet and inches or pounds and ounces.
Distances are in miles and we drink beer in pints. Petrol (gas) is in litres and you can buy milk in litres or pints.
Occasionally you can still find a bolt which has a Whitworth thread, but that's another story and one for those who have an old British motorbike.

At the end of the day, I think it's just what you get used to.

ROG.

As Rog said, here in the UK we seem to use either. Personally I tend to use metric for everything except temperature. Centigrade is all well and good but Fahrenheit just feels warmer to me.

I am quite happy in the UK using either - most of my tape measures have both. but the rope cutter on the prop shaft of my boat is an american design and needs an 11/64ths allen key. metric or imperial that's extremely strange!

Here was the event that caused the irritation about the system of measurement yesterday.

I needed 3MM solder but some but not all solder sold in the United States is sold in imperial measurements.

Who can convert 3MM to inches in their head? 3MM = 0.1811 Who can convert 0.1811 to MM in their head.

3 divided by 25.4 = 0.1811

0.1811 X 25.4 = 2.99974 or round up to 3

I want to buy a damn roll of solder not do math conversion formulas or ask the internet to do the conversion.

I want to buy it in English and I don't want to need to remember it is called soldado in Spanish.

This would have someone else issue to solve in the past because I would have ask for it in person or on the phone. I rarely buy anything in person or on the phone any longer.

Billy

Just learn and remember the fractions

3.2mm = 1/8th inch (approx)

6.4mm = 1/4 inch (approx)

12.7mm = 1/2 inch

25.4mm = 1 inch (exactly)

That's how I do it. But I also know both systems intimately so rarely need to think about "how much would that be..."

I use the Edison technique. I keep trying wrenches, sockets, allen keys, etc until I find one that fits.

LOL! Love that signature.....

Yes, I under the concept. I find fractions pretty useless to begin with unless we are talking about very approximant measurements. A half a pie, half crazy. They have more relevance in machining, 1/2 inch but I prefer .500

The speed signs here are in MPH. The speedometer is designed to be read in MPH and yes there are some small numbers in kilometers.

I can think in miles, nautical miles, and kilometers. I have my GPS in my car set to display in kilometers because 700 meters is easier to understand than .435 miles or 87/200 and of course that would be displayed as 1/2 miles but in fact the GPS would never display that distance of 700 meters in miles to begin with.

I know visually what 13MM looks like, more or less the same as 1/2 inch. I know what 300 meters looks like, about from my house to the end of the street.

Part of my frustration is most likely related to constantly having to speak and listen in both English and Spanish and really never knowing when I must use one or the other.

I program my GPS to speak to me in French just to keep the language in my head and because I get tired of both English and Spanish...lol

I also am pretty conversant in both systems. Where it becomes problematic is when precision is needed. That requires precise conversion.

I cook in conventional USA terms...1/2 cup, two teaspoons ect. How much less trouble to have learned that in grams and milliliters.

I will vote for the metric system every time.

Billy

I remember when MLB first added 2 Canadian teams and the distance down the foul lines was metric. Toronto had 99.97 metres written on the wall in left and right. I wrote to MLB and asked them why, if Toronto said 99.97 metres that teams in the USA did not say 330 feet 7 inches. Why not round off?

Though it's still a travesty that pitchers don't bat in the American League but they do in the National League...

I would prefer that the USA gets off the Imperial system and goes completely metric.

Both systems have their pros and cons, but the majority of the rest of the world is metric, so it would be much easier if we joined the world community.

And Pianobilly, I agree that decimals are better than fractions for making calculations. Two of the only common things better expressed as a fraction are 1/3 and 2/3 :-)

Notes

And 3/4, 4/4, and 6/8....

FWIW, those still need to use the tempo map to be correct.
But I did get the reference (music) so I smiled.
Go ahead and do the below tempo map in fractions <grin>

As Trev said earlier, we went metric in the 1970s, but we still use a lot of "descriptive" terminology, such as "He's very tall, well over six feet"
Or "the surf was big today ... well over 10 foot waves."
There's two funny things I remember at the start of the introduction to the metric system.
The first was a politician trying to "sell" the metric system, who said "It may be difficult at first, but stick with it. If you try to forget the imperial system, and think metric, inch by inch we'll get there."

And another person said "This is too hard ..... they should have waited until all of the old people died before introducing it."

In the worthless trivia category, the reason for 12 in the Imperial system is to avoid having to deal with fractions.

That is, 12 can be evenly divided by 2, 3, 4 and 6. When you're building stuff, you don't want rounding errors to cause problems, so dealing with integers is just simpler.

Same logic with a 12 hour clock, and 360 degrees. Only with degrees, you basically get to divide by 5 without a fractional result as well.

I'm all for avoiding fractions.

Good points.

Vulgar Fractions and Decimal Fractions never worry me. I can us them all. Yep. I can use feet and inches too, no question.

But since moving to a decimal system here a long time ago, the terms:
- 12 pounds and 6 and a half ounces,
- Nine and three quarter U.S. gallons,
- Seventeen feet, five and three sixteenths of an inch measurements
are,
well,
well,
so unnecessarily complicated - when there is already a much easier method that has been around for such a long time.

And yes, I also already know that that 1 mile = 5,280 feet or 1,760 yards

But, using metric, I don't have to remember that 16 ounces = 1 pound. 14 pounds = 1 stone or that 2000lb = 1 'short' ton.

I only have to know that
- 1000mm = 1 metre,
- 1000 metres = 1km.
- 1000 grams = 1 kgm.
- 1000 kgm = 1 metric tonne.

Just so, so much easier.

14 pounds = one stone...lol At least I don't have to deal with that one...lol

We do have equally arcane measurement systems.

Horses are measured in hands because they didn't have standard measuring tools in ancient societies, so they commonly used hands to measure horses; this tradition continues to the present. One hand is considered 4 inches, so a 15 hand horse is 60 inches tall.

And while we are talking about not having the proper tools. I would like for Ben Franklin to just disappear into the dust of history. Electrons flow from negative to positive not the other way around like all schematics show. Call conventional flow! I call conventional BS!!!

Billy

Well, yes, but I think we need to cut them some slack. After all, they were inventing the future. Fine tuning it took a little longer .

Engineers and technicians are trained different theories regarding the flow of electricity. One theory addresses electron movement while the other theory looks at electron hole movement. When an electron moves left to right then the electron hole moves right to left.

It's just as confusing as trying to determine who won the calculator war, Hewlett Packard (HP) with their Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) or Texas Instruments (TI) with their Standard Algebraic Notation (SAN). Engineers typically were trained to use RPN while technicians SAN. We may strive to be a classless society but mankind always finds a way to classify people.

And how heavy does a person have to get before they move from "stone" to "rock"? And then "boulder"?

But you have to admit that both RPN and TI beat using a slide rule! You young guns can look up slide rule

I still have mine. Don't use it much, though.

I have both calculators. I use the HP for mortgage and interest calculations and the TI for engineering calculations. Actually nowadays there are so many calculators on the internet I use them as much as anything. We also have programs designed for highly specific calculations such as structural engineering.

There are all sorts of terms of measurement that are slowly going away. Feet, yards, fathoms, leagues are rapidly being replaced by meters.

An even with the best of systems many measurements are difficult at best to conceptualize. How small is a nanometer? How far is a parsec? You can not see a nanometer because it is smaller that a wave length of light.

One parsec is defined as the distance at which an arc of length one astronomical unit subtends an angle of one second of an arc .

1 parsec = 3.08 x 1016m. Say what??? OK if you say so...lol

Billy

A couple of stories about Metric/Imperial confusion.

1. I saw this on a TV programme about 20 years ago.

In the 1800s an American millionaire acquired architects plans for a French style chateau and commissioned American contractors to build it on land he had bought in the US. Unfortunately the contractors thought the measurements were inches but were actually centimetres. The resulting chateau was 2.5 times bigger than intended.

2. I came across this one while reading a biography of the actor David Niven.

He had a residence in the south of France and employed a local firm to construct a swimming pool in the grounds. His hand written instructions were in feet which they thought were metres, so the pool was about 40+ feet at the deep end.

Vintage

Remember some of the old terminologies ?
Apart from feet & inches we had rods, roods, furlongs, fathoms, chains, leagues, knots, perch, gill, grain, drachm, hundredweight .... the list goes on.

I have a deed describing a road as a right-of-way three rods wide. It’s maintained by the town and I’m always having to explain it’s 49.5 feet.

This measurements problem has been an issue for a very long time. Here is a short excerpt from Mac Tutor. https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/HistTopics/Measurement/

"It is not surprising that the earliest mathematics which comes down to us is concerned with problems about weights and measures for this indeed must have been one of the earliest reasons to develop the subject. Egyptian papyri, for example, contain methods for solving equations which arise from problems about weights and measures.

A later civilisation whose weights and measures had a wide influence was that of the Babylonians around 1700 BC. Their basic unit of length was, like the Egyptians, the cubit. The Babylonian cubit (530 mm), however, was very slightly longer than the Egyptian cubit (524 mm). The Babylonian cubit was divided into 30 kus which is interesting since the kus must have been about a finger's breadth but the fraction 1 /30 is one which is also closely connected to the Babylonian base 60 number system. A Babylonian foot was 2 /3 of a Babylonian cubit."

So without the internet, how did Babylonians convert to Egyptian cubits?...lol

Billy