Metrication advocates are at it again

AFAIK, there's nobody in the US who learned metric first. So that's going to take a while.

Metric isn't necessarily SI. Some countries in Europe require that beverages be sold labeled in centiliters (otherwise I've never seen the unit.) And despite the very attractive "megagram", everyone uses "metric tonne" instead. (This is actually changing in some technical journals that have gone on a SI-only bent; some even require authors to say "1 Mm" instead of "1000 km". The slowness in using "megameters" is probably because "Mm" is so easily misinterpreted as "mm". Changing the case of a letter means a factor of a billion...)

If you walk into a butcher's shop or grocery store in much of Germany, they'll be glad to sell you meat by the pfund, even though the receipt will list it in kilograms.

Tim.

That's when the rot set in

Don't buy DAR timber, and my argument stands.

Sorry but where were you in the 70's I suppose all those businesses, out of generosity, absorbed the cost of all the new equipment they had to buy. Of course it was a function of metrification and was called inflation to hide the real reasons.

I'm sure metric stuff made OS by a manufacturer tooled up for metric production is cheaper than tooling up in a country with a population at the time of around 15 million

Costs nothing to change pumps metering accounting etc we'll put the price up to cover this and they'll never notice - well I guess you didn't. And did they bring the prices down after they had recovered costs - dream on!

No 20 million late last year. I don't know about "superior" the scale of production matters. There's export both ways too. We still make stuff for the US market Imperial specs.

No -news items on TV about the first baby of 2004 weighed pounds and ozs.

And a bowler (test cricket) bowls a "yard short of a good length". You obviously live in the city.

8 is still a magic number not 10

Just remember this change would cost you big time $ and jobs.

Glenn

Then the thread is pointless. The market has decided, the 'slowpokes' aren't hurting anyone but themselves.

Jim

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Erm... look at this thread. Consider how many posts have said, flat out, "they can pry inches from my cold, dead hands" in some form or another.

Tim

-- "That's for the courts to decide." - Homer Simpson Website @

Themselves and everyone they work for. Witness the Mars Lander.

Personally I don't really give a damn which system gets used as long as its one or the other. OTOH, I'll conceed that it would be annoying if I have to retool and learn the metric sizes for everything.

Gregm

But Tim, that one cuts both ways. The metrication guys seem to be wasting more productive time posting religious comments about dimensional measurement than the other way around.

We've been around the horn on this many times before, but everybody seems to be talking at cross purposes. As someone who has researched and covered manufacturing around the world for 30 years, here's what I've seen: The US exports more than any other country, so the argument that it's somehow "holding us back" is a hard one to prove. Nobody cares what units an item is manufactured in. It has nothing to do with the product's performance and, in most cases, nothing to do with its cost. I know of no precision manufacturing that uses anything other than decimal units, either of inches or of meters. Nobody cares what the thread pitch of fasteners is in manufacturing, as long as they have the right tools to thread for them and the right fasteners to put in the threaded holes. And so on.

As Jim R. says, wherever metrics provide a definite advantage, we already use metrics. Much of our high-volume manufacturing is done in metrics and has been for years. All of our science is taught in metrics (you're high-school age; have you seen a recent science book that teaches in Imperial units? My son is a high school sophomore and I read his science books. No inches, pounds, gallons, firkins or rundlets can be found in any of them. )

Science is conducted in metrics in the US. So is most engineering. Civil engineers probably have the most legitimate gripe, but, otherwise, there isn't much conversion to worry about.

I'm really curious about who the metricators think is being held back. Held back how? In what practical application?

It's a tempest in a teapot. The bottom line is this: if metrics provide any productivity or cost advantage in a particular industry, that industry will go metric in a heartbeat. Caterpillar was the first big manufacturer to convert in the US, and they did it back in the '70s, because they also were pioneers in globalization.

But for most, there is no financial advantage. Unless and until there is, normal market forces aren't going to change the way things are done. The most likely scenario is that companies will find that their younger employees are more comfortable and more productive with metrics at some point. Then, it will change.

Ed Huntress

Metric was a flawed standard from the get go. The meter was supposed to be equal to one millionth units from the north pole to Paris. But they botched the measurement and the meter is not really a meter, so pick whatever you unit you want wheter it's the meter or the King's foot.

The metric system is popular in the rest of the world because backwards stupid people can't do fractions, especially in third world countries. Also the metric system seems to have a proletarian vibe to it. Since the French helped invent metric, most euro-pee-ons also got on the bootlicking bandwagon, they are so enamored with the French.

No metric crap in my shop. If I come across a metric bolt it goes in the garbage. Just run a national course tap in the hole and make the world a better place.

incremental

If the engineers and programmers involved with that project were so dim-witted that they didn't recognize the issue, then they have a far bigger problem than measuring in inches.

Would they slip up between Kelvin and degrees Celsius? Would they forget the value for a Newton-meter or a Pascal?

There are LOTS of potential conversion traps besides those between inches and meters, and those are the most obvious ones, which should cause no one any trouble. Stupidity may be a reason to change to metrics for people who weigh rutabagas, but it's the last reason that would make sense for aerospace engineers and computer scientists.

Ed Huntress

Easier said than done. Marketplace rules. For sawn timber, 50mm = 50mm. What's the problem? If your timberyard ("timbermetre"?) can't handle that, then go elsewhere.

Yup. And a metric dozen (10) eggs didn't last as long. And I'm always late with metric time.

In the marketplace, buying, and grizzling about inflation - like everyone else.

And then our Arab friends sneeze and prices *double* overnight. Makes the piddly metrication costs look a bit puny.

Every service station I see has renewed its pumps, what, 5 times since then? Maybe more. These things have a finite lifetime. Who pays for that?

Anecdotes. Gotta love 'em. Would you like me to produce 1000 examples of metric-based news reporting?

More often "just short of a length." Or (and I'm listening to it right now) "...nowhere near line or length."

I should apologise for living where the *vast* majority of taxpayers live? Do you return your welfare cheque if it isn't expressed in £sd ? No?

"Guys"? "guys"?

*Which* part of the country do you live in?

No we're not.

And I restate my original proposal:

...and with that, rest my case.

Jeff

177cm tall, and never mind how many kg.

But converted inches and meters DID cause someone trouble. And those people AREN'T dimwitted. Are you really arguing that it'd be "not that bad" if we kept two unrelated systems of measurements working on a single project?

Everyone agrees that the metric system is internally more coherent than English. And everyone else in the world already uses metric. And yet people argue that we should keep "backward compatibility". It's insane.

The argument that some have presented, that the US already exports a lot of goods so the English system must not be holding us back, is fallacious. There is no way to calculate what our exports or costs would be if we had a) one system of measurement that was b) metric.

Yeah, they call it Cold Turkey because it's about a pleasant as having a 16 pound frozen Butterball jammed up your backside.

Jeff (Whose been off those damn cancer sticks for 8 years now..)

Jeff Wisnia (W1BSV + Brass Rat '57 EE)

"If you can smile when things are going wrong, you've thought of someone to blame it on."

Probably until they are all out of business. Abrasha

I did. Of course, in your eyes that does make me a "nobody". :-)

Abrasha

That story is utter nonsense, because during WW II the British also used the Imperial system and not metric.

And tolerances of machined parts in not dependent upon either system, but rather how they are expressed, and whether it is .001" or .025 mm, it is virtually the same tolerance. Abrasha

Ah Lucas, that reminds me of my old 72 MG Midget, which had Lucas electrical parts. The previous owner, a retired Cadillac mechanic who continued to work on it for me, called Lucas "The prince of darkness"

Never said it was the truth, just a debate over a story.

Your right, it may be virtually the same tolerance, but, if someone holds to a tolerance of .001of an inch and someone else holds to a tolerance of .1of a mm, it can make world of difference.

If the American made engine is held to a tighter tolerance than the British engine, it could very well show up as an increase in horsepower for the machine held to a tighter tolerance.

Greg H.

No. What I want to know is who was the dimwit who allowed a program in Imperial units to get mixed up with a metric project? Was that a highly paid engineer, or a highly paid manager? Who ordered the freaking thing?

There are a lot of US companies who did a lot of economic analyses, from the '60s onward, to see if it made economic sense to convert to metric. Some did because the numbers worked out that way; others did not, because the numbers showed no advantage.

I've spent a lot of time talking about this with the decision makers in a lot of companies over the years. Again, they have seen little or no advantage. And most of those companies own foreign plants that work in metric. That's what turned Caterpillar around -- they were early exponents of global manufacturing, and specializing in capabilities by country -- but the economic advantage has been largely illusory, even for them.

Most of the pro-metrication arguments we've heard have come from people who have no knowledge whatsoever of how these economic effects are measured, let alone what the values are. A lot of scientists, some engineers, and a lot of enthusiasts...people who are utterly clueless, for the most part, about the real costs of operating a manufacturing entity as a whole.