14 August 2023

Lest I Be Misunderstood

In the metric vs standard debate, my position is really "pick one and stick to it."

It's the zealots who piss me off.

All of the units were arbitrarily picked.

Literally pulled out of their creator's asses.

Metric tried to put a scientific veneer on it, but it's still picking a point from a pile of points and moving outward from there.

Both come from trying to systematize measurements and both come from the late 18th centuries.

Standard consolidated the weights and measures already in place which were related only in the names of the units.

Metric created new units.

But you zealots can stop fighting.

Of note: I notice a lot of pro-metric people still use the standard units here in America.  You'd think a true zealot would be using the metric system in every encounter to make their point.

I have also noticed that the metric system is almost always imposed on a people, they don't seem to adopt it on their own.  That it's being resisted so strongly in America is our inbred inborn resistance to such top-down impositions.

1 comment:

  1. Metric would be a lot more compelling if some of their units in practice didn't just suck. The main one being temperatures. While for scientific calculations centigrade is perfectly fine... and dealing with freezing being 32F and boiling being 212F, etc, can be annoying and frustrating... The degrees C units are just not fine grained enough. Degrees F are small enough you can tell the difference easily between a few degrees difference in temperature. Degrees C... each one is basically twice as big a difference. And for weight/mass measures, grams and kilograms aren't as convenient in a lot of ways as ounces and pounds. Perhaps a lot of that is just familiarity... but there's a reason why even in countries that have ostensibly been on the metric system for more than decades people still fall back to using Imperial units. Even some countries that weren't actually part of the Empire.
    -swj

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