Had a chat with a friend this evening about why one would want to finish
metrication here. Here's a few tidbits for those who don't yet understand why
we'd want to:
Me:
Well, it costs the economy a
fortune each year; everything from
lost space
craft,
duplicates
of so much stuff it's ridiculous,
wasted material due to
mistakes, the
wasted time from doing conversions to wasted business opportunities. Someone once told me of a meeting they had where the choices for
supplier of a part were USA, Germany and Japan. The USA was dropped because
they didn't want to have to deal with non-metric parts in their otherwise
completely metric production.
Then we have health and medicine. Everything is done in metric except for some
patient interactions. Then the doctors/nurses have to convert between the
customary system used by the general public and the metric system used by
everyone else.
Mistakes happen and people end up in ER or die
Not to mention basics like
communication breakdowns between
Americans and the
rest of the world (in both directions).
Friend:
I could see it happening… I could probably even get used to it, if I were
using metric on a daily basis and not just when I have to do a conversion. (It
would be especially nice if I didn't need to do conversions, since they're
annoying and if complicated enough, easy to fuck up.) Who does the timeline
layout, then? The government?
Me:
Usually, the government and industry get together to work it out. The problem
is, conversions are easy to fuck up, even when they're easy. For example,
someone took my height (1.82m) and converted it to ft with a calculator. Came
out as 5.97ft which they wrote down as 5ft 9in. Suddenly I'd lost a lot of
height.
Friend:
They wrote down 5' 9" after seeing you? o.O
Me:
Yeah. :(
So a liter of water is 1kg. 1 cubic centimeter of water is 1 gram. So 1 cubic
meter weighs 1,000kg Which makes it really useful for day to day as well.
Also, you use metric in all sorts of places. How big is a soda or a wine
bottle?
Friend:
Yeah, but they're very specific places. Soda bottles are two liters. Couldn't
tell you off the top of my head how many grams (?) of flour go in a cake, or
how many liters a gas tank holds, or how many centimeters tall I am.
Friend:
I would be using a calculator less for certain. Handy things, decimal places.
Me:
Most of the stuff you mentioned is easy, it's just a matter of getting used to
it (which doesn't take long once you start doing it day to day). What's
bigger, 5/8in or 41/64in?
Friend:
...um
I have no fucking idea.
But it's reminding me of elementary math class, when I would have had to tell
you and show my work.
Me:
Compare that to: 15.875mm vs 16.272mm
Pretty obvious which is bigger.
You can teach metric in about 6 hours. US Customary takes about a year and a
half.
Friend:
It can get more precise without being confusing… that's nice.
Me:
(
teachers? whine about it all the time)
Also, if we used metric all the time, people wouldn't have to
learn it 3 times.
Junior school, high school (if you take science classes) and then again in
university each one is a waste of time that's unnecessary (and lots of kids
give up on science because of it, either through finding the conversions or the
lack of familiarity with metric difficult or because someone made them
anti-metric for some reason).
Friend:
That's an excellent point. I've learned it twice now, but I know I've forgotten
some of it. I do remember being very happy whenever I had to practice
converting from metric to metric. It was so simple and I didn't have to go find
a chart of "1 foot = 12 inches = so many centimeters" Actually, I wonder why we
haven't switched yet, given that imperial annoys the hell out of everyone.
Me:
There's a host of reasons (we'll less than you can count on one hand):
- Some people hate change, even for the better
- Some people see using this system as a national pride thing (we're the USA,
we do it our way and go screw the rest of the world)
- Change can be expensive (but the money is usually made back in a couple of
years).
There's also an odd set of arguments about the customary system being based on
human needs. These are both mostly wrong (a foot bares little resemblance to
your foot) and now long out of date (how often does the length a plow can go in
a day matter to your world?).
GM converted to metric in the
1970's and they did extensive calculations on the cost for a while. They ended up stopping the accounting as it was costing more than the conversion (and post conversion they saved money as they used the change as a
chance to clean up lots of other problems).
