For whatever reason, he's decided that the metric system belongs to the Japanese. Don't ask me to explain that; I'm sure aliens dropped me on the doorstep as an infant.It just goes against the American way of thinking. "We" don't change to what other's are doing, "they" change to accommodate us.Gokul43201 said:
Gokul43201 said:
Evo said:I remember when they put "liters" on the gas pumps. :rofl: Oh yeah, Americans took to that, you can tell by the "gallons" on the pumps nowadays.
Moonbear said:Ooh, maybe the time is right to try that again. Can you imagine all the cars that would line up to get gas at a station with a sign saying 60 cents/liter? Of course it might only last a day before the customers caught on...
JasonRox said:
Integral said:
I was DRIFTING?Integral said:
Oh, dear. 
You didn't drag me anywhere. I was a very willing (even if not too capable) participant.
OK. OK. I'm going... Just waiting for my Nyqiol to hit. Opps. Maybe it has...
Gokul43201 said:
I did a sprinkler piping design for the US government. The job had to be done in metric units, and required siesmic consideration in the design. The problem is that we think in standard units. To convert to metric requires an intermediate step, at least until you master a few units. This is not just true of using the units but in thinking about how you are going to use the units. This is the real difficulty. What I mean is, in the job I did, I had to not only convert the pipe sizes to metric units, but I had to know what the capability of those units was for handling water and that figure had to be metric. It was not an easy project for me, but I know more metric now than I did before.JoshHolloway said:
Yeah, completely illogical measures.. how many inches go into a foot? 12 I believe. I say let's use a system based on counting to 10 to keep life simple.Gokul43201 said:
Monique said:
I remember never getting how to relate fahrenheit to celsius.. so I just decide that 60s is when you wear a jacket, 70s is when you can go out without a jacket, 80s is very light clothes, 90s is stay near an airconditioner..
Were it but for the fact that we have ten fingers, we'd never have become fond of the number 10 in the first place. 12 is a very beautiful number, because it can be easily split into halves, quarters, or thirds, but 10 cannot. It's lamentable that we don't use the metric system in everyday life in the US, but at least there are some advantages to be found. For instance, fahrenheit degrees are smaller than celsius degrees, and therefore more accurate when rounding to integers.Monique said:
Absolutely!Zorodius said:
For a period of time I was doing some high temp furnace design. This, of course, involved finding appropriate insulation material. You cannot believe how many different ways the units for Thermal conductivity are expressed in English units. Fortunately I had a HP28c calculator which had conversions for every unit you can think of in ROM plus the ability to combine them to create your own conversion factors. I have to admit I set up conversions for each of the English units to Metric which was simple and consistent [itex] \frac W {m C} [/itex] IIRC.Artman said:
Moonbear said:
brewnog said:
Zorodius said:
The metric system is used because it provides a standardized and universally accepted method of measurement. This makes it easier for scientists and researchers from different countries to communicate and compare their data.
Metric prefixes are a set of modifiers that are used to change the value of a base unit by a factor of 10. They are used to indicate larger or smaller quantities and make it easier to express measurements in a more concise and consistent way.
Metric prefixes can be difficult to understand because they are not commonly used in everyday life. Most people are more familiar with the imperial system of measurement, which uses different units and prefixes. Additionally, the use of multiple prefixes in the metric system (e.g. milli, kilo, mega) can be confusing if one is not familiar with their meanings and conversions.
A helpful way to remember the metric prefixes is by using the phrase "King Henry Died By Drinking Chocolate Milk". Each letter in this phrase represents the first letter of the prefixes in order of magnitude (kilometer, hectogram, deciliter, etc.). Another tip is to think of the prefixes as moving the decimal point to the right or left, depending on the prefix.
While the metric system is used in most countries around the world, some countries still use their own traditional systems of measurement. However, the use of metric prefixes is widely adopted in the scientific community and is becoming more prevalent in global trade and commerce.