edp773

Which metric system would you like for your wrench sizes? American made bolts use wrench sizes, 10,13,15, and 18 mm. in general. Bolts from overseas generally use wrench sizes 10, 12, 14, and 17 mm.
Isn't life fun?

eubi

You know, Kyle90 is only 15, and I think he's pretty articulate.

Get off your golden thrones and give him a break, for crying out loud.

He's not a troll.

sestivers

The fact that I don't have to ever use a calculator with metric is what makes it superior. Only a savant autistic can do that with the SAE system. Remember how much "fun" it was to add fractions together when you were in 3rd grade, what with the common denominator conversion and all that? It's a complete waste of time for manufacturers to verify they did all the units right before they build something.

Eggplant Jeff

Wow, I had no idea I was a savant autistic. Steve, you must have had a hard time learning arithmetic or something... I do all sorts of measurements and conversions in "standard" without ever using a calculator.

sestivers

If you can convert a mile to inches without a calculator, or even remember how many yards are in a mile you are truly more "special" than I could have ever imagined.

p.s. My job required me to make crucial decisions in seconds without time for a calculator or even any time to pause for a second to concentrate. It requires rote memorization of thumbrules to get around the ludicrosity of the conversions between English units to do so.

Totoro

I suppose you'd like to go back to the old English money too.

From an old English school book:

What's a third of a pound?
- Six shillings and eightpence, sir (6/8d).

How many pence in three shillings?
- Thirty-six, sir.

Add fourpence and tuppence ha'penny and sevenpence three farthings. How much change do you have from half-a crown?

Olebiker

If the imperial system was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me. Now, where did I put that cubit stick?

Eggplant Jeff

5280 * 12 = 63360 off the top of my head . Not super tough... Plus that's a totally arbitrary thing to whine about, never once in my life have I needed to convert a distance in miles into a distance in inches. And I bet you've never needed to convert kilometers to centimeters.

joeprim

The point is it teaches you to convert that way. That's why it's fun. I don't know what a savant autistic is, but if you say so I guess I am one.

Joe

Cycliste

The main reason why the metric system was invented is because the unit of inch was not standard across the country (France that is, up to 1791). You could buy X inch (or yards) of fabric at a market and the same X length at a different market a few miles apart and end up with two totally different size of items.

Somehow the British managed to standardize the emperial system while the French opted for a new one, more uniform across the measurements of length, area, weight, volume.

Today, the world has two systems with essentially Britain and US using the emperial one and metric for most of the rest of the world.

Some countries even use a mix, like Ireland and I also think Canada (not sure, yes/no?).

Works for me.

Anyone wants to start a thread on Celsuis vs Farenheit ?

CdCf

Or Kelvin...

phinney

Both systems are arbitrary and there are no doubt two so the French could be different from the British. I like the English system much better for temperature because the way temperature is normally reported in whole degrees the English system has better resolution. Same for the metric system when measuring bicycle speed. It's a shame it all didn't all get standardized on one system long ago though.

CdCf

Resolution in temperature?
So, is it really that important for you to know the air temp to half a °C?
Can you honestly tell the difference between 21.5°C and 22°C?

UmneyDurak

Sure how much you want to bet on that?

KingTermite 

I'll take metric any day.....been wishing we'd switch since I was in 5th (~1980) grade when they taught us the metric system.

classic1

Just you Americans wait until they bring in the metric time system.

SoonerBent

We are slowly, quietly switching. You can't work on an American car now without both SAE and metric tools. Used to be mostly SAE and you'd run into a metric bolt once in a while. Now it's the other way around. The only American made thing I own that I need only my SAE tools for is the Harley.

And I'm going to have to learn to convert distances faster in my head or the metric distances on OLN are going to drive me crazy during the next Tour.

SS

jfmckenna

Since 1983 the meter is defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum in exactly 1⁄299,792,458th of a second. So the speed of light is now 299,792,458 meters per second. The cool thing about this is that the time it takes light to travel between two points is no longer indicative of the speed of light but rather the distance between the two points. The meter is based on something real and tangable. I like that. I also like doing base 10 math. Its easier.

But English system is good for things like carpentry where a quarter foot is 4 inches. You get nice round numbers. As aposed to a quater decimeter for example.

classic1

What about the metre?

HiYoSilver

Degrees C seems better than Degrees F because you can feel the difference in each incremental change. Unfortunately most weather guages/reports give you a choice between the two systems, so it's harder to equate a number to a degree of body coldness or heat.

jfmckenna

It's actually both if you speak American

sestivers

Ok, so how do you define one second then? Just curious. Maybe that's the one I thought was based on some radioactive isotope.

KingTermite 

Yes....your memory was good.

Standard Second
A relatively invariant amount of time. There are usually 60 standard seconds to the standard minute, 60 standard minutes to the standard hour, and 24 standard hours to the standard day. The length of a standard second is derived from the decay time of cesium atoms. It is close to, but not identical with, the length of time measured by a solar second. By international agreement, a standard second is "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium atom." (Did you really want to know that?)


From here: https://www.greyware.com/software/dom...racy/terms.asp

jfmckenna

It is based on the cycles of radiation in two isotopes of Cesium or something like that. But also one second is the amount of time it takes light to travel 299,792,458 meters. How this correlates to the radioactivity and Cesium I don't know.

KingTermite 

Actually....I wonder if this could change though.

I read in some scientific journal a few years ago that they had determined that the speed of light had changed slightly and they thought maybe it wasn't a constant like they thought it was. They suspected that it may be related to the expansion of the universe or some factor like that.