Lincoln Chafee’s presidential platform? America to adopt the metric system, of course.

Washington Post ^ | 06/04/2015 | By Amber Phillips

[Lower Deck]

There was another measure of 21 shillings but I can't recall what that added up to...

A guinea was 21 shillings.

[Buckeye McFrog]

The metric system is straight out of French rationalism. I.e., it’s demonic.

So we'll be headed straight to Hell at five kilometers per hour.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

There you go !

[Eric in the Ozarks]

What was the point of the guinea ?

[RayChuang88]

But it was scientifically valid. Indeed, scientists use the metric system because it’s so highly-useful in scientific research, especially with temperature (0 °C. for water freezing and 100 °C. for water boiling at sea level).

[Cboldt]

So, the international standard for the thread that holds a propellor on an outboard motor - is an inch standard thread! 7/8-18, IIRC.

Lots of metric fasteners nowadays, and I think things generally moving that way. I don;t see any value in coverting our common temperature and distance to metric, but no big downside either.

[hanamizu]

A guinea served the same purpose as the fraction of a cent in gas prices ie. to make things seem cheaper. So if a refrigerator was on sale for 100 guineas your mind would think, “that’s £100” when it was really £105.

The problem with with the metric system, in my opinion, is that its strengths are more for the convience of mathematical conversions instead of the people actually using them. Centigrade temperatures are great unless you live outside of the tropics, then you live with negative numbers for a at least a quarter of a year.

Measuring the height of a horse, you use ‘hands’ of four inches each. Measuring cloth, distance from tip of nose to end of outstretched hand, pretty close to a yard. Measuring line on a boat, distance from one outstretched hand to another—a fathom. Point being traditional measures were based on the human body—something that is handy for most of us. The French revolutionaries wanted to get away from that because the official measurement was based on the king’s body and they had no truck with kings.

[showme_the_Glory]

14mm close to 9/16 socket/wrench. The end

[OLDCU]

Jimmy Carter wanna be.

[Cincinatus]

Finally!! The true leadership that America has been longing for!

[Nowhere Man]

remember back in elementary school (in the mid 70’s) when they tried to get us to learn the metric system.

I remember those paper centimeter strips of various colors and plastic gram blocks.



Remember the Metric Marvels on NBC?

[Nowhere Man]

I remember in the early 1990’s when I worked for a rental truck company, we had a truck come in from Canada and I had to tell them how to convert kilometers into miles so we could figure out the bill.

[Nowhere Man]

I have somewhere on my old reel-to-reel tape deck a Pittsburgh news broadcast from circa 1980 that gave the temperature in both Fahrenheit and Centigrade.

[Moltke]

So, fish is sold by the centigram, only no Canadaians seem to use the term centigram, so they say "100 gram", as in, I want to buy nine 100 grams of fish.

As a centimeter is 1/100 of a meter, so is a centigram 1/100 of a gram, or 10 milligrams. What, do Canadians buy fish by individual scales?

Anyhoo, a base-10 system is already in use e.g. for currency, and anyone not capable of understanding a base-10 system must be an utter moron. The only reason people reject the metric system is out of pure spite that it wasn't invented in the US. Good luck doing any kind of work in science of high-tech without the metric system...

[__rvx86]

I found the metric system to rather confusing—with measurements that spanned multiple dimensions *coughcoughchemistrycoughcough*

It made more sense for STP to be 32 degF @ 14.7 psi than 0 degC @ 101.325 kPa, for example.

Or for that matter, they forced us to learn multidimensional conversions—if I didn’t have to deal with the *units* while performing the calculations, it would have been a lot easier. Why would I need to eliminate units as I divided?

[Dr. Sivana]

You are right about the centigram. I should have said hectogram, which of course nobody uses and nobody remembers. The Imperial system lends itself to fractions, so a third of a foot isn't an impossibility. That system was born of common use, organically, and terms got added and dropped as needed. The Metric system was born of French rationalism and is related by design to arbitrary things.

Having no useful measurement between a gram and a kilogram is a problem. Having no useful length between a centimeter and a meter is also a problem.

In another post I admitted that grams and milligrams are useful in nutritional info and chemistry. We live in a world where different specialties use different (often non-metric) measurements. In the world of horse racing and breeding, hands and furlong are still used. In all sorts of international navigation, nautical miles are standard. BTUs are still used even in the English speaking metric world over joules. Etc. Etc. This is not pure spite, this is "it ain't broke, so don't fix it."

It is not government's job to force us into something that people don't want to use. Save that for the Subjects of Her Majesty.Call that spite if you want. We live in a world where translating various systems of measurement is trivially simple, often transparent. We'll see how Lincoln Chafee does picking up the ball dropped by Jimmy Carter in the '70s.

[GreenHornet]

Perhaps he was influenced by George Carlin, who once wondered if, upon converting to the metric system, we’d be able to smoke a gram of carrots.

[Buckeye McFrog]

On the other hand if we were posting temperatures in Centigrade, all of this global warming baloney might be dead by now.

[Moltke]

I can understand that the Imperial system with its base in multiples of 2 is useful in the narrow confines of the farmers’ market. It fails when relevant mechanical tolerances are no longer 1/32 of an inch but sub-micrometers.

That the Metric system may have been born of French rationalism etc. does not disprove its superiority in the world we live in today.

Ordering a pound (500 grams) or 150 grams etc. of smoked ham at the local deli poses a problem for...no one.

If the people don’t want to change from the Imperial system, so be it. But don’t blame the Metric system for that. As I said before, in currency matters this has already become a no-brainer. No one wants 12 cents to a dime or 16 dimes to a dollar or whatever (it used to be with the British pound sterling). The days where a few pounds sterling were the limit of most people’s financial horizon are long, long gone. And so it goes with a lot of other things too. The Imperial system simply ceases to be useful with very large or very small measures of anything.

[backwoods-engineer]

Gunpowder (double-base and black) and bullet weights are still in grains, which is 1/7000th of a pound.